Transformations of the undocumented youth movement and radical egalitarian citizenship

Abstract

In the past decade, a movement of undocumented migrant youth has emerged in the United States to struggle against their criminalization and discrimination. Whereas it was first described as a movement of ‘Dreamers,’ portrayed as hardworking students and cultural Americans who deserve rights despite their illegalized status, the direction of undocumented organizing shifted and moved beyond the Dreamer narrative. Based on fieldwork in California, I argue that the transforming movement of undocumented youth has the potential to emerge as a counter-hegemonic project, in that they reject discourses that reproduce the criminalization of undocumented migrants, which enables a division of the undocumented community into the ‘good immigrant’ versus the ‘bad immigrant.’ Moreover, they move beyond a narrowly defined struggle for legislative reform and citizenship status by organizing undocumented communities in regard to intersectional power structures. In their political struggles they negotiated formal, national-cultural and meritocratic citizenship. Referring to debates on radical democracy and insurgent citizenship, I describe this political practice as radical egalitarian citizenship.

Keywords:

• Undocumented youth
• migration struggles
• Dreamer
• citizenship
• deportation

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all the undocumented organizers who gave me the opportunity to take part in their movement and I would like to thank especially the persons who I had the chance to interview: Aiko, Alex, Anthony, Edna, Erick, Esperanza, Gina, Janeth, Jonathan, Luis O., Luis S., Marcela, Marlene, Seth, Sofia, and Yessica. Furthermore, I would like to thank Chris Tilly, Kent Wong and their colleagues at the UCLA IRLE, where I presented and published a first draft of this paper (IRLE Dialogues, 17 February 2015, UCLA, Los Angeles, published as ‘Beyond the dreamer narrative – undocumented youth organizing against criminalization and deportations in California’, December 2015), as well as Ana Muñiz, Philipp Ratfisch, Maurice Stierl, Kim Rygiel, Ilker Ataç, and the anonymous reviewer for their comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

1. Passages from the interviews are quoted with real first or full names as well as with pseudonyms, depending on the preference of the interviewees. Although anonymity is an important principle, I seek to credit the intellectual work of the interviewed organizers as far as possible by using various naming strategies (Seif 2014, 116; Unzueta Carrasco and Seif 2014, 281–282).