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This talk will share narratives and data pulled from a long-term case study on resistance to land displacement and state sanctioned violence in Honduras. Argenal has spent the last eight years accompaining communities in the Bajo Aguan region in their struggle to defend their rivers and land from a large scale mining project. The original research sought to explore the root causes of migration from the region, only to find that many of the narratives circulating in the United States, poverty and gang violence, were quite incomplete. Through a methodology coined activist accompaniment as research (Arriaga Hernandez and Argenal 2023), Argenal will share the ways that communities are resisting both the narratives around criminality and violence and resisting the push to migrate. This research offers counter-narratives to the dominant framings around im/migration to the United States from the region, and seeks to offer new ways of understanding identity for Central American youth.

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