writing+theory_pedlt3

After starting writing the "people" section, it began blending into all of the other categories. I hope this is still helpful!

I first met Juan, Gaby, Felipe, and Carlos in St. Augustine, Florida early in 2010. They were only a few weeks into their five-month walk from Miami, where they all lived and had been active in the undocumented youth movement, to Washington, DC. They undertook this long and risky journey, as they explained to anyone along the way that would listen, to begin a real dialogue about what it means to be an undocumented immigrant in the United States, and to press for both the DREAM Act and an end to the separation of families that the enforcement of immigration laws. When Juan their plans, perhaps a month or so before they set off on their journey, I was extremely skeptical. It seemed not only extremely dangerous idea, but also something that could quickly fall apart or be completely ignored without difficult logistical work setting up events in towns where one had no contacts, generating media coverage, and finding shelter and resources on a shoe-string budget.

Yet, they more Juan talked about this, the more I was convinced. They were far more organized than I expected, and they had no shortage of allies to help them along the way. More importantly, they were operating with a strong theory of change based in the stunted and othering narratives of the immigration debate, the need to break the connection between immigration status and fear, and the importance of storytelling to a movement that has always been so inextricably connected to the narratives of permanently deferred aspirations.

I watched Juan, Gaby, Felipe, and Carlos work with local organizations celebrating Martin Luther King Day, and connect the work of the civil rights movement to their own. I saw them engage with sometimes rather hostile passers-by in St. Augustine’s, sometimes for almost an hour, and speak about their own experiences and undocumented students brought to the united states as children. This individual outreach may not have been the most effective form of canvassing, but I think it did add up to something more useful than softening the opinions of a few “anti-immigrants.”

It was, on one hand, a kind of ethnographic engagement. They truly listening and attempting to understand the narratives that their interlocutors had absorbed, and even the difficult life histories that rarely had much to do with immigrants, but which generated the anxieties, paranoia, and scapegoating that led to an unexamined xenophobic worldview. One man they talked to, for example, was devastated that his wife had died without receiving the healthcare that, perhaps, could have saved her. He did not connect her lack of access to healthcare with the perversity of a private and employer-based health care system in a society that could, if much of the rest of the world is any guide, have actually saved money by moving to a single-payer system. Instead, he understood the problem as undocumented immigrants clogging the hospitals and cheating the system.

On the other hand, these long discussions were also a way to hone the stories that they told—telling one’s own story, especially when one must do it day after day, is an art that must be cultivated. More importantly, they were exercising their ability to forge an affective connection with strangers that could short-circuit, or at least gum up, the perverse discursive infrastructures that so quickly identify, say, Gaby—a gifted student who was brought to the U.S. from Ecuador as a seven year old girl; who dreamed of and was working towards a calling as a music therapists for the autistic; whose home had been raided by ICE agents who detained her parents, perhaps, some suspected, because of her outspoken activism on behalf of undocumented youth—as an “illegal.”

To confess so much, especially in the face skeptical and sometimes hateful strangers, was not just a kind of moral imperative, but also a strategic and political practice that was at the heart of the Trail of DREAMs. It was one part of the rather intense work that the undocumented youth movement in that moment to redefine and truly occupy this subject position that was, as far as the little and likely shoddy history of the term I have been able to find, first defined by others, and in relation to eligibility requirements in legislation. DREAMers were now not just undocumented, but also unafraid. This courage was a direct inversion of the “deportability” and “illegalization” that so often position undocumented immigrants in the strange position of being physically and socially present—and constantly seen as a moral and economic threat—while being forced “into the shadows” in terms of full citizenship and visibility to ICE agents. This redefinition was manifested by adopting civil disobedience as a tactic, stressing the importance of “coming out of the shadows,” and challenging the institutional actors with which they were allied in order to take control of their own movement. The political subject under construction is one, to use Ranciere’s terms, that helps to rupture the “order of the police”—the consensual distribution of roles, functions, and spaces—around undocumented immigration.