Each morning, Amelia Ixcoy gets up at the crack of dawn to put on her apron and start kneading flour, before hoisting trays filled with balls of dough balls into the bakery furnace. The work is hot and fast-paced, a race against time to bake enough loaves before El Palmar, a town in the Guatemalan highlands, wakes up.

For Ixcoy, the business is more than a source of income—it’s a way to keep her family together. Until three years ago, she lived in fear that her daughter Rosa, looking for work after college, would join the hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans who migrate to the US each year in search of economic opportunities.