October 10, 2024
Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States by Rafael A. Martínez, takes readers on a journey through the history of the rise of undocumented youth social movements in the United States in the twenty-first century. The book follows the documentation trail of undocumented youth activists spanning over two decades of organizing. Each chapter carefully analyzes key organizing strategies used by undocumented youth to produce direct forms of activism that expose and critique repressive forms of state control and violence. This inquiry is particularly generative in relation to how immigrant bodies are erased, contained, and imagined as “aliens” or “illegal.”
Rafael A. Martínez, an undocu-scholar, intricately weaves his lived experience into this deeply insightful exploration. Martínez’s interdisciplinary approach will engage scholars and readers alike, resonating with disciplines such as history, American studies, Chicana and Chicano studies, and borderlands studies. Illegalized shows that undocumented youth and their activism represent a disruption to the social imaginary of the U.S. nation-state and its figurative and physical borders. It invites readers to explore how undocumented youth activists changed the way immigrant rights are discussed in the United States today. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.
On May 1, 2006, on International Workers’ Day, undocumented communities across the United States came out of the shadows in the millions to demand immigration reform and to protest anti-immigrant legislation proposed at the federal level. Five months earlier, in December 2005, H.R. 4437, dubbed the “Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005,” aimed like many other predecessors to militarize the borderlands as a direct response to the 9/11 attacks just four years earlier. However, this new piece of proposed federal legislation attempted to move the borderlands to the interior of the country by funding and extending programs to detect, detain, and deport undocumented immigrants. Undocumented communities, mixed-status families, and allies recognized that if this piece of legislation passed, it could set in motion a witch-hunt atmosphere. Ethnic and multilingual radio stations became the vehicle by which people mobilized to spread word in households, car rides, and community spaces about massive public marches happening across major cities in the United States. Urban centers like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Las Vegas, Dallas, and Phoenix witnessed a wave of white T-shirts on diverse bodies waving multinational flags in a phenomenon many journalists described as “The Giant Awakens.”
May in Los Angeles features a bright, full-bodied sun shining across the concrete jungle. The skyscrapers cast a much-needed man-made shade for the millions of people who had taken over the streets of downtown Los Angeles by noontime. I remember exiting the Metro Blue Line station in downtown Los Angeles to what felt like the hum from a beehive coming from every direction. The energy from the crowd was contagious and motivating, but simultaneously disorienting and chaotic. Up to this point, as with many other fellow undocumented community members, my activism had been relegated to the shadows of traditional forms of civic engagement. Historically, immigrant communities were told by society and even long-standing activist organizations to not call attention to themselves, as their undocumented status placed them in a precarious position. However, the May Day immigrant rights marches, which became widely known and recognized as an annual event after 2006, flipped the narrative of undocumented immigrants remaining in the shadows and set in motion new possibilities outside of civic-engagement modes of organizing.
In the course of my education, in terms of my identity and politics as an undocumented scholar, I have come to value the ability to look back at pivotal moments in the history of undocumented youth social movements that have changed the ways in which immigrant communities are discussed in society and allowed people to see undocumented communities as knowledge producers. Situating my own positionality as an undocu-scholar—that is, someone who identifies as undocumented and as a scholar—is important in this research on undocumented youth activists. I define undocu-scholars as individuals who are conducting research, writing, documenting, producing artwork, and developing public projects based on the lived experiences of being undocumented or formerly undocumented. As such, the history that I am charting in my research represents my experience in the United States as an immigrant with no status for the majority of my life, and recently with protection under DACA that opened the doors to pursuing a career in academia. Thus, my positionality is a central component in the analysis I perform in my research and case studies.
Like other undocumented youth of my time in the mid–2000s, for me the May Day peaceful marches represented new possibilities in mobilizing for immigrant rights. For generations undocumented youth were subjugated to a vision of model citizens who were deemed worthy to the extent that they had potential in educational realms and could assimilate into American values. Politicians had begun categorizing undocumented youth as “DREAMers,” positioning them in terms of a future that was promised or always deferred. Young people were seen for the future prospects they could offer the state. So the offering of a pathway to inclusion rested on the expected deliverables that made them desirable in the first place. However, DREAMers only constituted a small percentage of the larger undocumented immigrant population.
Undocumented youth activists began creating local, state, and national organizations a few years after the 2006/7 May Day marches with the aim of changing the discourse around immigrant rights in the United States. In doing so, these activists realized that it was not enough to fight for the incorporation of a small minority, and that they needed to exchange the cultural capital gained from the visibility of the DREAMer movement at the national level for the ability to advocate for the larger undocumented immigrant population. The beginning of the twenty-first century, when undocumented youth movements grew to prominence, also coincided with high numbers of detentions in the interior of the country, an increase in deportation numbers, and the separation of mixed-status families across borders. Undocumented youth would address the issues of detention, deportation, and family separation head-on in direct forms of activism. This book captures some of the stories of activism that changed how immigrant rights are discussed in the United States.
Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States departs from the idea of undocumented youth movements as a single linear, homogeneous, or united movement. Instead, the case studies in the book characterize undocumented youth movements (UYMs) as a series of movements that are heterogeneous, diverse, and often contradictory, or that have frictions and limitations. Additionally, UYMs never occurred in a linear progression, as history rarely occurs in a continuum; rather, I argue that the case studies in the book are events that represent assemblages of organizational performances and showcase important ruptures related to the U.S. immigration system and its treatment of undocumented immigrants. One such rupture is the disruption and interrogation of the “DREAMer” identity or narrative. Another rupture is represented by an illegalized framework, which allows for the exploration of case studies in which undocumented youth activists take their activism to sites often kept in the shadows by the U.S. state. This book takes an (un)documenting approach—that is, it builds an archive that documents the activism of undocumented immigrant populations who resist violent forms of repression such as detention, deportation, and family separation. Assembling (un) documents represents social imaginaries in which undocumented youth organizers offer a discourse alternative to that of official U.S. immigration systems of policing and control.