ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the construction of Central American youth based on the epistemologies of the South (ES). Following the central premise of the ES, this chapter aims to engage with knowledges based on the groups that have experienced injustices and oppressions rooted in struggles against capitalism, coloniality, and patriarchy. Additionally, we explore the oppression and injustice specific to youth and young people and the challenges that force them to search for safety through the migration process. Youth are customarily positioned as the absent subject, and this chapter aims to convert them into the present subjects as a form of validating their knowledge and experiences. This book’s analysis is based on the premise of coloniality and the need to engage in decoloniality work. Decoloniality, as explored in this chapter, is the ways of knowing, thinking, and doing that resist the different hierarchies and the matrix of power based on race, gender, and class. Migration studies continue to be heavily influenced by Euro-North American points of view; thus, this chapter aims to provincialize this way of knowing. It includes knowledges that allow us to interpret the Central American youth migration experiences rooted in ways of knowing that have traditionally been marginalized. This chapter analysis will be based on a review of the literature of the ES, existing standards of knowing, and will reconstruct Eurocentric concepts such as youth and migration.
