About the talk:
In this talk, Casavantes Bradford will discuss her new book, Suffer the Little Children: Child Migration and the Geopolitics of Compassion in the United States, which traces the history of the U.S. government's response to unaccompanied child migration, from the European children who fled the perils of World War II to the Central American children arriving at the U.S southern border today. Although U.S. policy in this area has evolved over time, growing from a series of ad hoc and limited wartime initiatives into a more broadly conceived set of programs that claim universal humanitarian goals, Casavantes Bradford argues that decisions about which endangered minors are allowed entry to the United States continues to be driven by a “geopolitics of compassion” that imagines unaccompanied migrant children as tools of political statecraft rather than individual rights- bearing subjects.

About the speaker:
Anita Casavantes Bradford is a professor of history and Chicano/Latino studies at the University of California Irvine. A scholar of immigration, race and ethnicity, foreign relations, critical refugee studies, and childhood, her new book, Suffer the Little Children: Child Migration and the Geopolitics of Compassion in the United States, was released by University of North Carolina Press in June 2022; it is the first comprehensive historical analysis of unaccompanied child migration to the United States from 1930 to present day. Her previous book, The Revolution is for the Children: The Politics of Childhood in Havana
and Miami, 1959-1962, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2014. She has also published numerous essays in scholarly journals including Diplomatic History, Journal of American Ethnic History, Latin American Research Review, Cuban Studies, U.S. Catholic Historian, and the Journal of the Society for History of Children and Youth.