"Children Do Not Migrate—They Flee": Striking Photos From Poverty-Ravaged Guatemala
"Children Do Not Migrate—They Flee": Striking Photos From Poverty-Ravaged Guatemala
Photographer Katie Orlinsky captures the conditions driving the exodus to the United States.
— Photos by Katie Orlinsky; Text by Ian Gordon
| Wed Feb. 18, 2015 9:53 AM EST
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A child arrives at a government-run child migrant shelter in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, after being deported from Mexico.
Katie Orlinsky for Too Young to Wed, in collaboration with Humanity United.
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In October 2013, I traveled to Guatemala's western highlands to report on the surge of children migrating from Central America to the United States. The largely indigenous region was more or less unchanged from when I'd lived in a village near the Guatemala-Mexico border in 2006, or when I'd returned to do graduate work there in 2009: It was poor, susceptible to natural disasters, and full of families with relatives living in the United States.
Photographer Katie Orlinsky visited many of the same places that I did, and her evocative work from Guatemala City and Quetzaltenango, the unofficial capital of the highlands, illuminates the poverty that continues to push children and families north. Recent data suggests that while far fewer Hondurans and Salvadorans have been arriving at the US border, the number of Guatemalans has dipped only slightly. As one Guatemalan migrant shelter official told Orlinsky, "Children do not migrate—they flee."
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A young boy gathers wood in Quetzaltenango. The area has one of the highest levels of child migration in the country.
Many of the children are economic refugees. In addition, a large population of Guatemalans from the area are already
living in the United States and Mexico.
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Paula (right) does not go to school and instead works washing clothing with female family members in the town of Los
Duraznales.
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More:
http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/02/child-migrants-guatemala-photos-katie-orlinsky
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