Diary of an undocumented dreamer. Undocumented vignettes from a pre-American life and the heterogeneity of American life (original) (raw)
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Although Arizona's now-notorious anti-immigration bill SB 1070 and the plethora of copycat legislation bills in several other states, 1 as well as the recent failures to pass any form of the DREAM Act at a national level, 2 have kept a spotlight on issues of undocumented immigration in national debates, the voices of the undocumented themselves have onlyly begun to register in this scene. 3 Indeed, it is arguable that there is no population more silenced in the face of debates that most directly affect them than the undocumented. As journalist David Bacon has observed in Illegal People, "Those who live with globalization's consequences are not at the table, and their voices are generally excluded" (viii). In his introduction to Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, editor Peter Orner echoes these concerns: "We hear a lot about these people in the media. We hear they are responsible for crime. We hear they take our jobs, our benefi ts. We hear they refuse to speak English. But how often do we hear from them?" (7). To speak and be heard, in ways that will not immediately invite the most serious of repercussions (e.g., detention and deportation), is a challenge that unauthorized immigrants face in ways that other populations with a direct stake in US legislative battles do not. Yet, personal stories-oral history, life writing, "witness" testimonyplay an important, perhaps even a vital role in advocacy and human rights struggles, as a body of scholarship of the last decade suggests (e.g., Schaffer and Smith; Dawes; Nance; Beverley). Thus the question of how undocumented stories might participate in the public sphere where immigration policy and legislation are debated becomes increasingly urgent. In this essay, I consider Orner's oral history collection Underground America, a rhetorically fascinating, multi-voiced text that purports to make
Dreaming the Sueño Americano: Latino Narratives of the American Dream
This paper focuses on the ways in which lived experiences affect the rendering of an individual's American Dream by following Salomé—a Latino woman—as she narrates her life in Guatemala and in the USA. It also highlights the emotional dynamics established between researcher and participant, as well as the challenges of remembering, retelling, and retelling traumatic past experiences. With this paper, I aim to bring to light the individual experience as valuable, and to contest the homogeneity of mass media Latino portrayals, revealing how they may function to erase her particularity.
Living “Illegally”: On the Phenomenology of an Undocumented Immigrant
Clinical Social Work Journal, 2017
They married when my mom was seventeen and my dad in his early 1920s. Throughout my childhood, my dad worked as a mechanic and mom as a teacher. Not long after my youngest brother was born, my parents realized the challenges our family faced as Catholic-Palestinians living in northern Israel. As with most parents, they wanted my brothers and me to have access to education and a brighter future than they each had. Moving would mean a stronger assurance that we would not experience the same type of poverty and struggle they had experienced throughout their lives. As one can image, the decision was not an easy; it meant leaving everything and everyone we knew behind. It meant risking one form of safety for another. It also meant embarking on a new identity as "stranger," because, after all, to leave home is to become the stranger. Yet despite the hard decision, on July 4, 1990, our family landed in the United States. I was eight years old at the time. When we arrived, my dad found a job as a mechanic and my mom stayed home to navigate our new unfamiliar home. The only English words I knew when we came to the United States were "yes," "no," and the numbers one through ten. In fact, I remember well just nodding and smiling when any of my new classmates asked me any questions. And, 26 years later, my parents still remind me that our family came to the US with only one hundred dollars. Having arrived with only temporary visitors' VISAs, which we overstayed after six months, my parents made great attempts to become "legal." They spent countless dollars on attorneys who offered false hope and stole their money only to leave our family wondering if we would have the chance to stop living under the shadows and fear of deportation. Beginning at the age of eight, I did not understand what our legal status meant. The only thing I knew was that our status was a secret and we were never to mention that fact to anyone, ever. While we were met with Abstract This article is a phenomenological exploration and description of particular aspects of living as an undocumented immigrant. In lieu of a political or economic approach to describe the undocumented immigrant experience, the phenomenological method I utilize allows for a more intimate exchange. What follows, then, is a necessarily detailed and subjective-albeit partial-exploration of my lived conscious experience: making sense of fixed limitations, the need to substantiate my worthiness, the embodiment of perpetual and pervasive fear, as well as my exploration of free will and the question of agency. I explore the traumatic embodied experience and my growing capacity to tolerate dysregulated arousal states long after a legal change of status as well offer practice implications for those working with undocumented immigrants.
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2021
In this essay, Gerardo R. L opez, a non-undocumented immigrant scholar, who has done extensive research with undocumented immigrant communities, has a conversation with Alonso R. Reyna Rivarola, an undocumented immigrant scholar with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), who writes and researches issues of how undocumented immigrant students experience schooling from a critical situated stance. Their conversation explores a range of topics that interrogate the problematic nature of researching the self/other, while simultaneously examining the broader purpose(s) of research in the academy.