“Undocumented and unafraid”? Challenging the bureaucratic paradigm

ABSTRACT

Among immigrant rights activists, journalists, and scholars the term “undocumented” has gained support as an alternative to the criminalizing and dehumanizing “illegal.” By contrast, this essay critiques so-called DREAMers' articulation of an “undocumented” subjectivity, arguing that the term, invoking a Weberian bureaucracy, undermines activists' cooptive intent and subversive agenda. To be undocumented in what Robert Hariman calls “a polity of offices,” which privileges the written text, is to be both unintelligible and powerless. These constraints, however, may be circumvented by the use of web-text for mobilization, recruitment, and networking. Informed by Gregory Ulmer's notion of “electracy,” I posit web-text as transitional, potentially capable of contesting the authority of the bureaucracy.

KEYWORDS:

• immigration
• DREAM
• bureaucracy
• rhetorical style
• electracy

Acknowledgment

The author thanks Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies editor Rob DeChaine for his thoughtful advice and encouragement throughout the review process and the two anonymous reviewers for their instructive suggestions.

Notes

1. “Drop the I-Word,” Colorlines. accessed January 11, 2014, http://colorlines.com/droptheiword/

2. Jose Antonio Vargas, “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant,” New York Times Magazine, June 22, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/magazine/my-life-as-an-undocumented-immigrant.html?_r=5&pagewanted=1&.

3. Paul Colford, “‘Illegal Immigrant’ No More,” The Definitive Source, April 2, 2013, http://blog.ap.org/2013/04/02/illegal-immigrant-no-more/.

4. Peter Nyers, “Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement,” Third World Quarterly 24 (2003): 1069–1093. Regarding the global power of migration documents, see John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

5. Robert Hariman, Political Style (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 148.

6. Ibid., 156.

7. Gabriela Madera, Angelo A. Mathay, Armin M. Najafi, et al., ed., Underground Undergrads: UCLA Undocumented Immigrant Students Speak Out (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education, 2008); Kent Wong, Janna Shadduck-Hernández, Fabiola Inzunza, et al., ed., Undocumented and Unafraid: Tam Tran, Cinthya Felix, and the Immigrant Youth Movement (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education, 2012).

8. Vanessa B. Beasley, ed., Who Belongs in America? Presidents, Rhetoric, and Immigration(College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006).

9. Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California's Proposition 187 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002), 14.

10. Anne Demo, “Sovereignty Discourse and Contemporary Immigration Politics,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 291–311.

11. Emily Ironside and Lisa M. Corrigan, “Constituting Enemies Through Fear: The Rhetoric of Exclusionary Nationalism in the Control of ‘Un-American’ Immigrant Populations,” in The Rhetorics of US Immigration: Identity, Community, Otherness, ed. E. Johanna Hartelius (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2015), 158.

12. Lisa A. Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons, Illegal Aliens, and Competing Narratives of Immigration,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2003): 367.

13. Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders,” 373.

14. Ibid., 373.

15. J. David Cisneros, “Contaminated Communities: The Metaphor of ‘Immigrant as Pollutant’ in Media Representations of Immigration,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 11 (2008): 593.

16. Karma R. Chávez, “Counter-Public Enclaves and Understanding the Function of Rhetoric in Social Movement Coalition-Building,” Communication Quarterly 59 (2011): 1–18; Fernando P. Delgado, “Chicano Ideology Revisited: Rap Music and the (Re)articulation of Chicanismo,” Western Journal of Communication 62 (1998): 95–113; Lisa A. Flores, “Creating Discursive Space through a Rhetoric of Difference: Chicana Feminists Craft a Homeland,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (1996): 142–56.

17. Claudia A. Anguiano, “Dropping the ‘I-Word’: A Critical Examination of Contemporary Immigration Labels,” in The Rhetorics of US Immigration: Identity, Community, Otherness, ed. E. Johanna Hartelius (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2015.

18. Michelle A. Holling and Bernadette Marie Calafell, “Identities on Stage and Staging Identities: ChicanoBrujo Performances as Emancipatory practices,” Text and Performance Quarterly 27 (2007): 61.

19. Ibid., 65.

20. Bernadette Marie Calafell, “Disrupting the Dichotomy: ‘Yo Soy Chicana/o?’ in the New Latina/o South,” Communication Review 7 (2004): 200.

21. Bernadette Marie Calafell and Fernando P. Delgado, “Reading Latina/o Images: Interrogating Americanos,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21 (2004): 2.

22. Lisa A. Flores and Mary Ann Villarreal, “Mobilizing for National Inclusion: The Discursivity of Whiteness among Texas Mexicans’ Arguments for Desegregation,” in Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier, ed. D. Robert DeChaine (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012).

23. Lisa A. Flores and Marouf A. Hasian, Jr., “Returning to Aztlán and La Raza: Political Communication and the Vernacular Construction of Chicano/a Nationalism,” in International and Intercultural Communication, Annual Volume XX: Politics, Communication, and Culture, ed. A. Gonzalez and D. V. Tanno (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997), 186–203; Richard D. Pineda and Stacey K. Sowards, “Flag Waving as Visual Argument: 2006 Immigration Demonstrations and Cultural Citizenship,” Argumentation and Advocacy 43 (2007): 164–74.

24. Claudia A. Anguiano and Karma R. Chávez, “DREAMers’ Discourse: Young Latino/a Immigrants and the Naturalization of the American Dream,” in Latina/o Discourse in Vernacular Spaces: Somos de Una Voz?, ed. Michelle A. Holling and Bernadette M. Calafell (Lanham, MD: Lexington: 2011), 81–99.

25. Ibid., 98.

26. Karma Chávez, Queer Migration Politics(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 80–81. See also Karma R. Chávez, “Border (In)Securities: Normative and Differential Belonging in LGBTQ and Immigrant Rights Discourse,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7 (2010): 136–55.

27. Chávez, Queer Migration, 90.

28. Ibid., 95.

29. Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, “The Critique of Vernacular Discourse,” Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 20–46.

30. Michelle A. Holling, “Forming Oppositional Social Concord to California's Proposition 187 and Squelching Social Discord in the Vernacular Space of CHICLE,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (2006): 203.

31. Beth Baker-Cristales, “Mediated Resistance: The Construction of Neoliberal Citizenship in the Immigrant Rights Movement,” Latino Studies 7 (2009): 60–82. My project aligns with Baker-Cristales’ regarding the uptake of rhetorical tactics that are counterproductive to the construction and circulation of politically efficacious subjectivities. She emphasizes the tactics of news media and immigrants’ internalization of hegemony's identity-possibilities. My focus, by contrast, is on activists' attempts at cooptation or reinvention of certain vocabularies as terms of empowerment. For additional discussion of vernacular immigration rhetorics' liability to reproduce official ideology, compromising their potential for resistance, see Calafell and Delgado, “Reading Latina/o Images.” Further, the aforementioned work by Anguiano and Chávez argues that DREAMers' advocacy, replicating hegemonic ideals like the “American Dream” and its main topoi of hard work, individualism, education, and assimilation must not be considered purely counterhegemonic; rather, they suggest, it is a performance of subjectification under the theme of citizenship.

32. For discussions of immigrants' rhetorical negotiations of (cultural) citizenship, see works cited above and Josue David Cisneros, “Looking ‘Illegal’: Affect, Rhetoric, and Performativity in Arizona's Senate Bill 1070,” in DeChaine, Border Rhetorics, 133–50; Toby Miller, “The Ragpicker-Citizen,” in DeChaine, Border Rhetorics, 213–26. See also page 15 of this essay, and endnotes 87–90.

33. Gregory L. Ulmer, Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy (New York: Longman, 2003), 51.

34. Hariman, Political Style, 148.

35. Max Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 3, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), 971.

36. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), 181–82.

37. Hariman, Political Style, 142.

38. Ibid., 148, 150.

39. Ibid., 168; Weber, Economy, vol. 1, 217–18.

40. Weber, Economy, vol. 3, 957.

41. Ibid., 957, original emphasis.

42. Hariman, Political Style, 157.

43. Ibid., 159.

44. Ibid., 167.

45. The special issue of Rhetoric and Public Affairs 11 (2008) on the “democratic style,” wherein guest editor Jeremy Engels's introductory essay references Hariman's typology, includes few mentions of the bureaucratic style.

46. Hariman, Political Style, 4.

47. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962), x, 143.

48. Ibid., 11; see also 37.

49. Hariman, Political Style, 329, n3.

50. Ibid., 157.

51. Ibid., 142.

52. Jeanne Batalova and Margie McHugh, “DREAM vs. Reality: An Analysis of Potential DREAM Act Beneficiaries,” Insight: National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy (Migration Policy Institute, July 2010): 1. accessed January 11, 2014, http://www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/DREAM-Insight-July2010.pdf

53. From this point, I use the term undocumented without quotation marks. Because my objective is to critique the term's implications, using the term to identify a set of rhetorical agents—indeed using the term as the agents do—is fraught. I use it in the analysis not as an uncritical adoption of the agents' self-labelling, but because alternative terms are misleading: “students” overemphasizes academic identity over civic; “immigrants” does not distinguish the rhetors whose texts I analyze from immigrants with legal status.

54. Ibid., 107.

55. Ibid., 97.

56. Hariman, Political Style, 149.

57. Weber, Economy, vol. 3, 975.

58. Hariman, Political Style, 143.

59. Weber, Economy, vol. 3, 992.

60. David Kaufer and Robert Hariman, “Discriminating Political Styles as Genres: A Corpus Study Exploring Hariman's Theory of Political Style,” Text and Talk 28 (2008): 482.

61. Hariman, Political Style, 146.

62. Ibid., 149.

63. Ibid., 38.

64. Ibid., 168–69.

65. Ibid., 173.

66. Ibid., 142.

67. Weber, Economy, vol. 3, 987–388. See also Weber's characterization of the modern bureaucracy as “escape-proof,” 1401.

68. Hariman, Political Style, 147.

69. “Mission Statement,” Dream Activist. accessed January 22, 2014, http://www.dreamactivist.org/about/

70. “Tell a Friend,” Dream Activist. accessed January 22, 2014, http://action.dreamactivist.org/tell/

71. “Tips and Tricks to Sharing Your Story,” Dream Activist. accessed January 22, 2014, http://action.dreamactivist.org/story/

72. “Tips and Tricks to Sharing Your Story,” Dream Activist. accessed January 22, 2014, http://action.dreamactivist.org/story/

73. On the authorlessness of web-text, see for example Richard Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 19; Barbara Warnick, “Rhetorical Criticism of Public Discourse on the Internet: Theoretical Implications,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 28 (1998): 79; Barbara Warnick, “Looking to the Future: Electronic Texts and the Deepening Interface,” Technical Communication Quarterly 14 (2005): 327–33; Barbara Warnick, Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2007), 12, 35.

74. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Eszter Hargittai and Gina Walejko, “The Participation Divide: Content Creation and Sharing in the Digital Age,” Information, Communication & Society 11 (2008): 239–56; Ralph Schroeder and Matthijs den Besten, “Literary Sleuths Online: E-research Collaboration on the Pynchon Wiki,” Information, Communication and Society 11 (2008): 167–87.

75. Robert Glenn Howard, “The Vernacular Web of Participatory Media,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25 (2008): 490–513. Howard's analysis of the participatory potential of web-text in relation to traditional institutional authority informs my project particularly on the issue of power ambiguities.

76. “The Team,” Dream Activist. accessed January 22, 2014, http://www.dreamactivist.org/about/who-we-are/

77. “Testimonials,” Dream Activist. accessed January 22, 2014, http://www.dreamactivist.org/about/testimonials/

78. Gregory L. Ulmer, Electronic Monuments (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xii.

79. Gregory Ulmer and Talan Memmott, “Toward Electracy: A Conversation with Gregory Ulmer,” BeeHive Archive 3 (December 2000). accessed January 22, 2014, http://beehive.temporalimage.com/content_maps/34a.html

80. Ibid.

81. Ibid.

82. Ulmer, Internet Invention, 2. Anguiano and Chavez's analysis of how immigrant activism online enacts the patchwork quality of vernacular rhetoric makes a similar point, “DREAMers’ Discourse,” 84. The patchwork metaphor illustrates the pastiche through which the activists may negotiate the power of the document in the formulation of online advocacy.

83. Ulmer, Internet Invention, 105; see also 51.

84. Hinda Seif, “‘Wise Up!’ Undocumented Latino Youth, Mexican–American Legislators, and the Struggle for Higher Education Access,” Latino Studies 2 (2004): 223.

85. Hinda Seif, “‘Unapologetic and Unafraid’: Immigrant Youth Come Out from the Shadows,” New Directions for Child & Adolescent Development 134 (2011): 69.

86. René Galindo, “Undocumented & Unafraid: The DREAM Act 5 and the Public Disclosure of Undocumented Status as a Political Act,” Urban Review (2012): 592. The stasis point of Galindo's thesis and mine is the potency of narrative within a bureaucratic paradigm. Without questioning the students' courage to which Galindo repeatedly returns, I challenge the political and rhetorical efficacy of the undocumented subjectivity, that is, the mutuality of agency and subjectivity that his essay assumed a priori.

87. Josue David Cisneros, The Border Crossed Us (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014), 90.

88. Ibid., 84.

89. Ibid., 84.

90. Nicholas De Genova, “The Queer Politics of Migration: Reflections on ‘Illegality’ and Incorrigibility,” Studies in Social Justice 4 (2010): 101–26. See page 4 and endnote 26 for Chávez's analysis of queer and immigrant “coming out” rhetorics.