Nothing is easy: educational striving and migration deferral in Guatemala.

This paper ethnographically explores how indigenous Guatemalan youth come to desire non-migration despite local social-geographical contexts of extensive mobility. The 2014 the emergence of a 'crisis' of youth migration at the U.S. Southern border drew attention to the deep and longer-term reality of untenable conditions in the countries young people are fleeing. While significant scholarship has been dedicated to exploring the causes and conditions propelling youth migration, the experiences of young people en route, their reception in destination countries, and concerns over youth return and reintegration, little attention has been paid to young people who, in contexts of extensive migration, strive to remain in their communities of origin. This paper disrupts the mobility bias in migration studies and attends to the local and historically situated forces through which migratory contexts are heterogeneously experienced and engaged. In so doing, this research provides ethnographic material to demonstrate how desired immobility emerges in an overwhelmingly mobile context, illustrates the social, historical and structural fields that engage youth (im)mobilities, and argues for the analytic relevance of striving as a means by which desire is enacted (in this case the desire to stay put). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]