Double-Edged Roots: Two Advance-Parole ‘Dacamented’ Mexican Women Visiting Their Country of Birth

Abstract

This article explores the experience of two young migrant women protected under DACA visiting Mexico within the advance parole program in 2017. It builds on qualitative research fieldwork conducted in Mexico and the US in 2018. This article discusses how they reconnected with their country of birth, after living caged in the US as children and teenagers and reinforced their sense of belonging to the US. This paper stresses their different experiences depending on the age of emigration, because of the memories that the young people may have endured of family and places.  As other studies have documented, the short stay helped the young women understand the reasons that led their parents to emigrate and reinforced a sense of belonging to the US as they underpin their identification with Mexico, and it also helped build direct ties with their kinship. The paper concludes with the idea of double-edged roots to the ancestral homeland, because as the short visit to Mexico reinforces the idea that although Mexico is the country in which they do embrace an emotional kinship, it is not the country in which they feel embedded to achieve their life, their promised land is the US.