Legal Status as Social Identity: Toward a Conceptual Model of Legal Consciousness

• In Event: 46.037 - Toward Justice: Role of Policy in Shaping Contexts, Praxis, and Higher Education Access for Undocumented Students

Abstract

Over the last ten years there has been a limited but increasingly growing body of scholarship devoted to undocumented college students in higher education. The research acknowledges that most undocumented students experience college with very limited financial aid resources and institutional support, high resiliency for academic persistence, and a heightened amount of stress levels due to navigating and negotiating their legal status and future outlook. Scholars have also looked at how civic engagement for undocumented student has fostered high academic success, self-esteem, and motivation to succeed. Yet, immigration research within higher education has not adequately addressed how undocumented students make meaning of their legal status. This paper builds upon existing social identity development literature combined with research on critical consciousness, to examine the process of how undocumented students “come out” and make meaning regarding their legal status within the context of higher education and social activism. Using data from 39 individual interviews with 13 undocumented student activists who self-identified as “undocumented and unafraid”, the findings suggest that participants’ legal consciousness was heightened by their social activism and exposure to critically conscious peers. This work also proposes a conceptual framework which consists of four different dimensions of how undocumented students come to understand their legal consciousness through: (a) migration frame of reference, (b) living in and out of the shadow, (c) coming out as undocumented and unafraid developing a heightened, (d) critical awareness of legal consciousness, and (e) (re) construction of legal consciousness. Each of these dimensions possesses traits and characteristics that are shaped or informed by institutional, social, and political contexts. Finally, this research examines how undocumented student activists with critical legal consciousness interpret and interrogate public policies such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and tuition equity.

Author

• Susana Maria Munoz, Colorado State University - Fort Collins