Central American kids on #youthday

It’s hard to pick up a newspaper these days without reading about “undocumented” children from Guatemala, “unaccompanied” kids from Honduras, or “illegal” minors from El Salvador.

But before any of these children were assigned some miserable qualifier — a modern day scarlet letter to signify their marginalization from society — they were all just kids, with no negative modifiers attached.

So in celebration of International Youth Day and the kids of Central America, I dug into my photo archive from a decade-plus of living there and found these images:

A girl in San Salvador, El Salvador (photo/ Tim Rogers)

A family in Guatemala City, Guatemala (photo/ Tim Rogers)

A girl in Sambo Creek, Honduras (photo/ Tim Rogers)

Girl in Bluefields, Nicaragua

Girls in Tikal, Guatemala