Abstract
This essay analyzes how undocumented 1.5 generation activists respond to, disrupt and challenge state definitions of citizenship and belonging. The authors look at the work of the Immigrant Youth Justice League (IYJL), an immigrant rights group led by undocumented organizers in Chicago, with a focus on how they frame responses to federal deportation policies and deportations. This activism takes place in the context of a movement led by undocumented 1.5 generation youth whose tactics have included first-person testimony and civil disobedience. This is significant because they place the undocumented body at the forefront of the national dialog on immigration. Through interviews with members of the organization, analysis of first-hand documents and one author’s experience as an IYJL co-founder, we find that young undocumented activists increasingly fight for people who do not fit the nation-state’s parameters for accessing citizenship or relief from deportation. The state regulates access to citizenship, rights and deportation based on moral and hegemonic frameworks, systematic prejudices and socio-economic conditions. When young undocumented activists challenge these frames, they disrupt the power of the nation-state to make these determinations, and expand the debate about and boundaries of citizenship.
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Notes
The “I” and “we” in this piece refers to the first author, Tania Unzueta Carrasco, and her network of undocumented 1.5 generation immigrants and immigrant rights organizers. The second author of this piece is Hinda Seif, a US-born scholar who conducted research on and observed the organizing activities of 1.5 generation activists from greater Chicago from 2010 through 2013, with a focus on IYJL. Seif has assisted with writing this piece, with a focus on history and theory.
I have been part of several conversations among undocumented academics and organizers about being used as subjects of theory, without getting credit for their ideas when their names are not included. Although I was unable to include their real identities due to Internal Review Board Guidelines, I would like to acknowledge the intellectual contribution of Reyna Wences, Rigo Padilla, Ireri Unzueta Carrasco, Lulu Martinez, Cindy Agustin and Alaa Mukahhal to this manuscript, as well as those who did not want their names published.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the members of the Immigrant Youth Justice League for allowing us into their process and space, as well as organizers from around the country who also have influenced and shaped the fight against deportations and for the rights of immigrants. In addition, we are grateful to the faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Latin American and Latino Studies Program for their unwavering support.
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Unzueta Carrasco, T., Seif, H. Disrupting the dream: Undocumented youth reframe citizenship and deportability through anti-deportation activism. Lat Stud 12, 279–299 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2014.21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2014.21