Critically Accommodating “Illegality”: Anticipatory Losses within Mixed-Status Immigrant Families

Abstract

“Illegality” presents multidimensional barriers resulting in diverse losses. Using autoethnography, I outline the similarities among my interlocking experiences of managing the threat of forced family separation resulting from deportation and death. I reflect on feeling “illegality’s” losses within social service offices, classrooms, jails, and hospitals while growing up in a mixed-status family. Employing an anticipatory loss lens, I suggest that through experiencing “illegality” my parents gained experiential knowledge that facilitated their critical accommodation of legal barriers and surveillance. My discussion captures “illegality’s” multiple impacts on families not separated by deportation, yet who are nonetheless living with loss.

Keywords:

• Anticipatory loss
• autoethnography
• deportation
• Illegality
• separation

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

Acknowledgments

This story was fostered and developed in community. Jocabet, Dimna, Greisa, and Max encouraged me to write our story unapologetically. I am grateful to Dr. Sara Green, who fueled this project’s every step and affirmed my voice. Drs Elizabeth Aranda and Maggie Kusenbach’s constructive and thoughtful feedback affirmed my writing. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers who believed in my work and strengthened my paper with their feedback.

Notes

1 In addition to allowing me to share parts of our story, my sisters permitted me to use their names. Elia, Greisa, and Jocabet have publicly come out as ‘undocumented, unapologetic, and unafraid.’

2 I strategically leave out specifics of this process to protect my father and sisters. For a richer picture of my family, see https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2016/03/24/10-years-after-joining-350000-people-protest-in-dallas-local-family-still-pushes-for-immigrant-rights/

3 The term, ‘illegal’ remains prevalent in immigration policy’s lexicon due, in part, to law enforcement actors who deploy it to racialize and extinguish Black and brown bodies. Thus, my usage of “illegality” is intimately difficult. To be clear, my use of the framework is not to advocate for the it’s memorialization. Yet, I take it up using quotation marks to actively reengage with a framework prevalent in migration studies and to recognize all the ways such work is being done.

4 For a review of the impacts of deportation on deportees and their families see Dreby (2015).

5 UndocuBlack, a multigenerational network of presently and formerly undocumented Black people, provides a guide for mental wellness specialists found here https://undocublack.org/guide. United We Dream, the largest and fastest-growing immigrant youth-led organization in the nation, provides toolkits for educators, researchers, and counselors which can be found at https://unitedwedream.org/tools/toolkits/

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Girsea Martínez Rosas

Girsea Martínez Rosas is the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants. Presently, she is also a McKnight Doctoral Fellow and doctoral candidate at the University of South Florida. Broadly, her qualitative work centers on the lived experiences of undocumented immigrants and mixed-status families of color drawing on the sociology of race and ethnicity, immigration, and emotions. An ethnography with undocumented Americans coming of age in Florida, her dissertation explores how embodied markers of race and performed aspects of ethnicity interact with legal status to shape belonging.