Digital Desahogo: Creating Infrastructures of Care for Guatemalan Youth Wound-Release

Abstract

Under escalating authoritarian immigration enforcement, Guatemalan immigrant youths in southeastern Massachusetts face compounding traumas that silence their voices and threaten their socioemotional well-being. This article examines Caminos de Esperanza (CdE), a community-engaged co-creative digital testimonio project grounded in Critical Youth Participatory Action Research (CYPAR) and Chicana/Latina Feminist Methodologies during which eleven Guatemalan young people created digital multi-media testimonios to counter majoritarian narratives about immigrant youth. Drawing on the concept of desahogo and Cabnal's cuerpo-territorio framework, we theorize Digital Desahogo as a four-stage pedagogical and healing praxis through which CdE youth co-creators identified, surfaced, tended to, and released complex internalized wounds using digital tools. We argue that Digital Desahogo is both a praxis through which the creation of digital counternarratives facilitates embodied emotional release and new conocimientos. Critically, we demonstrate and emphasize that this healing process required a robust infrastructure of care built on trauma-informed facilitation, physical safety, and intentional anti-surveillance measures including aliases, open-source software, encrypted connections, and metadata removal to protect youths from the very digital systems that enabled their storytelling. We end by raising urgent questions about ethical digital humanities practices under authoritarianism.