Sueños and Moments of Togetherness: Activism by Undocumented Students Seeks Disruption Through Education

• In Event: Anti-Oppressive Social Studies: Pursuing Justice Through an Ethic of Incommensurability

Abstract

At its heart, a good social studies education will help students refine their ability to see the world and understand their place in it better and with more complexity (Ross, 2017). The Deep South has been a place of transformation for the past few decades as immigrants from all over the world have settled in the area (Odem & Lacy, 2009; Weise, 2015). Despite this history, these groups and their children remain seen as “new” arrivals (Monreal & Author, forthcoming), and it is not surprising to see immigrants gather and build community. It was in the heart of the New South, Georgia specifically, that LUCHA, an group founded to support undocumented immigrants in northeast Georgia, organized an event for locals to come together and learn about the struggles, achievements, and activism of the immigrant community in the region. This activism pushed against the common misconceptions of immigrants as drains and unable to adapt to life here (Portes & Salas, 2015). It also pushed against political rhetoric and policies and policing against them (Monreal & Author, forthcoming; Portes & Salas, 2015; Rodriquez & Monreal, 2017). In 2018, the South was the site of one of some of the biggest ICE raids in the nation (Hauslohner, 2019), gubernatorial candidates in Georgia created elaborate political theatrical props around ICE raids (Cummings, 2018), and policies across several states that banned undocumented immigrants from entering institutions of higher education (Goodrich, 2016). Here, LUCHA sought to create an educative space, through Sueños, that would teach non-immigrants about their struggles and create a new narrative about what immigrants, not just from Latin America, offer to the nation and the South. Through art, speeches, and food, the youth organizers made their claims about belonging here, but they also disrupted many of these damaging narratives. Building community across differences in a hostile environment is no easy feat as the rhetoric and precariousness of undocumented people only grows. This paper will recount how Sueños’s youth organizers, who are proud of their Latin American heritage, crafted and curated a space to not only teach us about the struggles of the undocumented community, but help us imagine a future, where borders have changed and the community. The speeches highlighted the conflicts of living with “undocumented”ness in the family, the art that expresses the complexity of borders, and the space that not only downplayed the policies set up to divide us, but united us through community building. Tuck and Yang (2018)’s concept of an ethic of incommensurability provides a useful framework for breaking down how these limits work in space and how advocacy works across these different barriers and when change occurs and often one person at a time. Even as political success comes, sharing space provides the foundation to building change. Delving into how the youth-led LUCHA designed and curated their spaces, exposes how you cannot only engage in the questions of citizenship and world view, but they can lead the charge in reading the world and redefining it for themselves to take on those challenges as they see them.

Author

• Jesus Tirado, Auburn University