The University of Arizona Press
Date: Wednesday, April 23, 2025
Time: 2-4 p.m., PDT
Where: CSU Dominguez Hills, University Library 5th floor, 1000 E. Victoria St., Carson, CA
Rafael Martínez will speak on the history and impact of undocumented student movements at his alma mater, California State University, Dominguez Hills. Martínez is author of Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States. He is an assistant professor in the Southwest Borderlands Initiative at Arizona State University whose work focuses on immigrant rights, mixed-status families, and Latinx cultural and historical productions in the Southwest borderlands.
The event is free and open to the public and sponsored by the CSUDH Departments of Sociology and Health & Well-being.
About the book:
Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States 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.”
