Rethinking Intergenerational Trauma, an article about forced migration and violence

¿How do forced Central American migrants and their children make sense of violence’s aftereffects, and how do those aftereffects shape their lives? The “Rethinking Intergenerational Trauma” article explores this question through oral histories with twenty-one people of Salvadorian, Guatemalan, Honduran, and Nicaraguan backgrounds who were born in Canada or arrived at a young age. The interdisciplinary author team includes Giovanni Hernandez-Carranza, Morgan Poteet, Juan Carlos Jimenez, and Veronica Escobar Olivo.

The authors use a coloniality lens and a community-based approach to understand how people interpret family histories of violence in the present, and how those interpretations shape relationships and identity. They utilize a narrative analysis of in-depth interviews because the approach “centers participants' voices and emphasizes the co-creation of knowledge."

The article also shows how dominant Western psychological frameworks can narrow how people explain harm and coping. As the authors note, “participants relied on Eurocentric ideas of ‘trauma’ to understand violence’s aftereffects,” which can lead to “individualization, psychologization, and pathologization” of struggles that also have social and historical roots. The discussion points instead toward decolonial community organizing and non-Western ways of healing that reconnect people with community ties, cultural knowledge, and shared meaning-making.