permanent resident, the citizen, and the criminal “alien.” As parents and families live their lives amid these agencies, their individual actions and decisions are congealed and solidified, frozen into the operative agency categories. Not only do these categories work to reduce an individual to a single frame, but they also haunt the individual in the future. Despite their future actions, traces remain and color the way institutions interact with them and shape their path forward from the initial incident that pulled them into the agency’s gaze. The existence and implementation of these categories compels parents to contend with interpretations of their actions within these categories, since parents are rarely in a position to contest their categorization. These categorization processes also enable institutional authorities to understand their own decisions as simply applying the appropriate, ostensibly objective label to a parent based on an institutional definition. Thus categories of “fit” or “unfit,” “good” or “bad,” trump other designations such as “under-resourced” or “impoverished” that are not codified within the child welfare system and might undermine clear categories of “good” or “bad” parenting. In this sense, categorization practices serve as a mode of cultural production in which “bad” parents come into existence through institutional processes and discourses.11
In this approach, I take inspiration from Bowker and Star, whose work Sorting Things Out (1999) offers a comprehensive analysis of the politics of categorization and the ways that categories are experienced as natural even while they operate as potent sites of political and social struggle.12 For Bowker and Star, classification systems, while understood to be a necessary feature of social interaction, can never be merely descriptive. These classifications are productive of hierarchies of value, serving as key technologies for excluding certain subjects while framing others as normative and natural. As such, I ask how the interactions between social workers and families might facilitate the equation of illegality with “unfit” parenting or translate instances of involuntary deportation into the institutional category of “child abandonment.”
Although the interactions I detail throughout this book are not always across languages, they are always across hierarchies of power and authority. Legal actors, social workers, and parents enact their relationships through language, among other modes of exchange and communication. Their employment, or reworking, of one another’s terms and ways of speaking serve to construct, reproduce, and occasionally undermine the power relations that mark the terrain of child welfare. My approach to translation, as I detail below, is thus not limited to cross-border or cross-language exchanges. Rather, I engage translation as a practice through which boundaries of citizenship, worthiness, and belonging are produced and reinforced, and as a framework for understanding complex interactions among myriad institutional authorities and the families entangled with the child welfare system.
I employ the concept of translation not only to make sense of how categories operate but also to make sense of the inter-institutional engagement that occurs at the juncture of the multitude of organizations that constitute the child welfare system. As legal organizations, government institutions, and nonprofit agencies come together, they do so through their own sets of agency protocols, employing the jargon, acronyms, and legalese that constitute their users as members of particular institutions. Terms such as “biomom” or “TPR’d” (shorthand for saying that someone’s parental rights were terminated, as in “We TPR’d her”) serve to demarcate the expert from the nonexpert.13 Yet while these terms may be employed across institutions, they have different meanings for different actors, and figure into their daily practices in varied ways.
Translational processes give shape to interactions, where an ongoing and strategic struggle for “imperfect equivalences” (Clifford 1997) is, in a sense, a defining characteristic of engagement among differently situated people. As such, the mode of translation, as I employ it, attends to how meaning is constituted through movement across contexts and how a single referent takes on different meanings and facilitates different actions and interpretations in such contexts as a family’s home, a social worker’s file, or a courtroom exchange. Following Brenneis (2004), who considers translational processes in the institutional context of funding agencies, I explore the way “key terms and phrases move and circulate across various domains and of how their meanings and prescriptive implications are transformed and negotiated in new settings” (582).14 I examine not only the processes through which the messy lives of individuals are translated into concrete legal categories but also how modes of translation and analogy-making enable engagement among disparate agencies and actors. The language through which these institutions interact enables the various agencies that constitute the child welfare system to come together, facilitating exchanges among individuals who use overlapping terms and referents, such as “unfit parent” or “best interest of the child,” but with vastly different meanings. These exchanges necessarily engage asymmetrical power relations, as the usage of these terms by different agencies and actors—judges, lawyers, social workers, and family members—carries different degrees of weight.
Organization of the Book
The book begins with an exploration of the politics of worthiness and the boundaries of belonging, with a focus on the political relationship between the United States and Mexico in the context of anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation. Chapter 1, “Worthy” Migrants, is built around an examination of the cases of two children, both born in Tijuana and entangled in child welfare agencies on both sides of the border. This chapter charts how the boundaries of citizenship and state responsibilities for minors are carved out through narratives, advocacy work, and institutional processes that make only some children legible as deserving of state protection.
Chapter 2, Belonging and Exclusion, takes a historical perspective to consider the separation of Latina/o children and families alongside other histories of child removal in the United States, each of which illuminates historical concerns about race, citizenship, and normative family forms that continue to inform the present. I foreground an examination of the “best interest” principle, a legal framework that has been mobilized to justify the removal of children from a number of marginalized communities and is currently deployed in U.S. immigration and dependency courtrooms to justify the separation of children from parents who are categorized as “deportable.” This chapter examines the discretionary decision-making processes through which circumstances of poverty and other forms of structural violence are translated into institutional categories of “fit” and “unfit” parents through the framework of “best interest.”
The processes that position some families as “unfit” are complicated by the gaps and overlaps between immigration enforcement and child welfare policy. Chapter 3, Working the Gap, turns to the dual sets of obstacles and opportunities that arise at the juncture of these two overlapping legal systems. Through an exploration of the way child welfare and immigration enforcement systems each affect the other while proceeding on parallel tracks, I explore two main sets of outcomes. The first set involves problematic interactions between these two systems—court negotiations, documentary practices, and legal constraints—that create profound obstacles to family reunification for those caught up simultaneously in both systems, regardless of the intent of individual social workers, lawyers, advocates, and judges. The second set of outcomes concerns the production of possibilities for creative maneuvering, whereby legal advocates work within the gap between the two systems, using unexpected avenues to pursue citizenship and reunification strategies that do not, at first glance, appear to be within the realm of the intent of the law. I emphasize the translational processes through which immigration enforcement actions, such as detention and deportation, become reworked into child welfare categories of “unfit” parents. This chapter considers the ways the impact of legal systems exceeds their official mandate as discrete systems interact with each other in unexpected and unintended ways. In the case of child welfare and immigration enforcement, these interactions increase the precariousness and vulnerability
