This chapter examines the representation of unaccompanied minors fleeing Central America (namely Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador) in U.S. online national news sources over a one-year period and compares this to the way these children talk about their own perceptions of migration and their motivation for moving. Data collection consisted of online news reports on unaccompanied minors from Central America in the United States as well as interviews with children collected from the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and other humanitarian organizations. Multimodal critical discourse analysis reveals a qualitative difference in discourse (e.g., use of metaphor, metonymy, deixis and visual elements) that varies depending on whether the sources are media reports or personal accounts from the children themselves.
Agar, Michael H.1996. The Professional Stranger, 2nd ed. San Diego: Academic Press.
Antony, Mary Grace, and Ryan J. Thomas. January 25, 2016. “‘Stop Sending your Kids Across the Border.’ Discursively Constructing the Unaccompanied Youth Migrant.”Journal of International and Intercultural Communication. Retrieved from:
02/10/2016
Catalano, Theresa, and Linda R. Waugh. 2013. “The Ideologies Behind Crime Reports of Latinos and Wall Street/CEOs: A Critical Analysis of Metonymy in Text and Image.” Critical Discourse Studies 10 (4): 406–426. .
Catalano, Theresa. 2014. “The Roma and Wall Street/CEOs: Linguistic Construction of Identity in U.S. and Canadian Crime Reports.” International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice.
Catalano, Theresa. 2016. Talking about Global Migration: Implications for Language Teaching. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Catalano, Theresa. 2017. “When Children are Water: Representation of Central American Migrant Children in Public Discourse and Implications for Educators.” Journal of Latinos and Education, 1–19. .
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2004. Corpus approaches to critical metaphor analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Chouliaraki Lilie & Fairclough Norman. (eds.). 1999. Discourse in late modernity: Rethinking critical discourse analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Corchado, Alfredo. 2014. “Putting brakes on a dream.” The Dallas Morning News. Retrieved from: [URL] 02/10/2016
Fairclough, Norman. 2015. Language and Power 3rd Edition. London: Routledge.
Fairclough, Norman, Jane Mulderrig, and Ruth Wodak. 2011. “Critical discourse analysis.” In Discourse studies, ed. by Teun A. van Dijk, 357–378. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Garin, Emily, Jan Beise, Lucia Hug, and Danzhen You.September 7, 2016. “Uprooted: the Growing Crisis for Refugee and Migrant Children.” UNICEF. Retrieved from: [URL] 07/09/2016.
Geertz, Clifford. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford University Press.
Gordon, Ian. March 19, 2017. “Inside Trump’s Border Crackdown on Women and Kids.” Mother Jones. Retrieved from: [URL] 02/10/2016
Grant, Barry Kieth (Ed.). 2012. Film Genre Reader IV. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Heidbrink, Lauren. 2014. Migrant youth, transnational families, and the state: Care and contested interests. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hiskey, Jonathan T., Abby Córdova, Diana Orcés, and Mary Fran Malone. February 1, 2016. “Understanding the Central American Refugee Crisis: Why They are Fleeing and How U.S. Policies are Failing to Deter them.” American Immigration Council. Retrieved from: [URL] 02/10/2016
Holpuch, Amanda. July 26, 2016. “US Partners with Costa Rica to Protect Central American Refugees.” The Guardian. Retrieved from [URL] 02/10/2016
Horowitz, Jason. September 20, 2016. “Donald Trump Jr’s Skittles Tweet Fits a Pattern.” The New York Times. Retrieved from: [URL] 02/10/2016
“In-Country Refugee/Parole Processing for Minors in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala Central American Minors – CAM).” July 26, 2016. Retrieved from: [URL] 02/10/2016
Kövecses, Zoltan. 2015. Where Metaphors Come from: Reconsidering Context in Metaphor. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
Krzyzanowski, Michal. 2011. Ethnography and critical discourse analysis: Towards a problem-oriented research dialogue. Critical Discourse Studies 8(4): 231–238.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lind, Dara. July 29, 2014. “14 Facts that Help Explain America’s Child-Migrant Crisis.” Vox. Retrieved from: [URL] 02/10/2016
Linthicum, Kate. February 1, 2017. “Also Barred by Trump's Executive Order: These Heavily Vetted Kids from Central America.” Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from: [URL] 25/03/2017
Machin, David, and Andrea Mayr. 2012. How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal Introduction. London: Sage.
Musolff, Andrea. 2012. “The Study of Metaphor as Part of Critical Discourse Analysis.” Critical Discourse Studies 9(3): 301–310.
Musolff, Andreas. 2016. Political Metaphor Analysis: Discourse and Scenarios. London: Bloomsbury.
Petersoo, Pille. 2007. “Reconsidering Otherness: Constructing Estonian Identity.” Nations and Nationalism 13 (1): 117–133.
Portero-Muñoz, Carmen. 2011. “Noun-noun Euphemisms in the Language of the Global Financial Crisis.” Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 33 (2): 137–157.
Robles, Frances, and Kirk Semple. 2017. “Trump’s New Ban Leaves Few Spots for Refugees, Even the Hunted.” The New York Times, 7 March 2017; Retrieved from: [URL] 25/03/2017
Santa Ana, Otto. 1999. “Like an Animal I was Treated: Anti-immigrant Metaphor in US Public Discourse.” Discourse and Society. 10: 191–224.
Santa Ana, Otto. 2002. Brown tide rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary U.S. Public Discourse. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Santa Ana, Otto. 2013. Juan in a Hundred: The Representation of Latinos on Network News. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Santa Ana, Otto. 2016. "The Cowboy and the Goddess: Television News Mythmaking about Immigrants." Discourse & Society 27 (1): 95–117.
Steen, Gerard J., Aletta G. Dorst, Berenike J. Herrmann, Anna A. Kaal, Tina Krennmayr, and Trijntje Pasma. 2010. A Method for Linguistic Metaphor Identification. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Stinchcomb, Dennis, and Hershberg, Eric. 2014. “Unaccompanied Migrant Children from Central America: Context, Causes, and Responses.” Center for Latin American and Latino Studies. CLALS working paper 7: 1–39.
Strom, Megan, and Emily Alcock. 2017. "Floods, waves, and surges: the representation of Latin@ immigrant children in the United States mainstream media." Critical Discourse Studies 14, (4): 440-457.
van Leeuwen, Theo. 2008. Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press.
Waugh, Linda R., Catalano, Theresa, Al Masaeed, Khaled, Hong Do Tom, and Renigar, Paul. 2015. “Critical Discourse Analysis: History, Approaches, Relation to Pragmatics, Critique, Trends and New Directions.” In Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and Society, ed. by Capone, Alessandro, and Mey, Jacob, 71–136. Berlin: Springer Verlag.
Westcott, Lucy. September 6, 2016. “Number of Unaccompanied Child Refugees has Tripled since 2014: U.N.” Newsweek. Retrieved from: [URL] 02/10/2016
Cited by (7)
Cited by seven other publications
De Backer, Laurence, Renata Enghels & Patrick Goethals
2023. Metaphor analysis meets lexical strings: finetuning the metaphor identification procedure for quantitative semantic analyses. Frontiers in Psychology 14
Fitzsimmons-Doolan, Shannon
2023. Twenty-first century ideological discourses about US migrant education that transcend registers. Corpora 18:2 ► pp. 143 ff.
2022. More than just an immigrant: The semantic patterns of (im)migrant/predicate-pairings in news stories about Mexican and Central American (im)migrants to the USA. A corpus-assisted discourse study. Discourse & Communication 16:3 ► pp. 285 ff.
Zhao, Kai
2021. Book review: Theresa Catalano and Linda R Waugh, Critical Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse Studies and Beyond. Discourse Studies 23:4 ► pp. 566 ff.
Catalano, Theresa & Linda R. Waugh
2020. Critiques of CDA/CDS and Responses. In Critical Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse Studies and Beyond [Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, 26], ► pp. 219 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 august 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.