Susan J. Terrio is Professor Emerita of Anthropology and French Studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of Whose Child am I? Unaccompanied, Undocumented Children in U.S. Immigration Custody and the co-editor of Illegal Encounters: The Effect of Detention and Deportation in the Lives of Young People.
"""Deft storytelling, seasoned legal and anthropological understanding, and an unflinching moral compass—these are some of the attributes that make Susan Terrio’s probing study of Central American women’s forced migration to the United States such a valuable addition to the literature on this searing, contemporary issue."" -- Jacqueline Bhabha, author of Can We Solve the Migration Crisis? ""Clear, vivid, and emotionally impactful. . . . The stories featured are diverse, usefully selected, and revealing. The quality of fieldwork is clear; this sort of intimacy represents a real accomplishment in ethnography."" -- Josiah Heyman, The University of Texas at El Paso ""Terrio does a beautiful job of articulating the experiences of the undocumented Central American women whose stories are woven throughout the book. . . . Playing with the metaphor of the mouth of the shark, she leads us through their experiences as they run from the shark, are swallowed and spit out by the shark, and escape with devastating bruises. . . . Though they escape physically from the shark that is the violence in Central America, it follows them through their complicated, difficult transnational relationships with family members. Their stories, and Terrio’s narratives, depict intergenerational histories of abuse and agency, of harm and decision making within the limited bounds available to these women and their children."" -- Marjorie Zatz, University of California, Merced"