Resisting Policies and Practices of Exclusion: Undocu/DACAmented Youth Build Collective Belonging

• In Event: Destabilizing the Ideal Neoliberal Subject: An Examination of Educational Institutions, White Supremacy, and Meritocracy

Abstract

In 2012, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) executive action emphasized that hard-working young people who were in school, recently graduated, or in the military deserved to belong to the United States. However, DACA did not offer undocumented youth with permanent belonging; it only provided temporary protections and limited rights (Negron-Gonzales et al., 2015) and since 2017, DACA has been hanging in the balance as the Trump administration has sought to eliminate it. This paper illuminates how even after the implementation of DACA, undocumented and DACAmented youth continued to navigate policies and practices of exclusion in education, particularly in new Latino diaspora states like Wisconsin. Even when DACA pushed youth towards embodying the neoliberal framings of deserving immigrants (Patel, 2015), and meritocratic ideals of schooling, undocu/DACAmented youth in this study demonstrated resistance through their critical understandings of these dominant narratives. By building and participating in a community-based space, these youth created counternarratives to the “deserving” immigrant trope and engaged in action against proposed anti-immigrant policies.

This paper employs a critical race theoretical analysis, particularly drawing on the LatCrit concept of racist nativism to analyze the exclusionary policies that affect the lives of undocu/DACAmented students. Racist nativism “creates a way to understand anti-Latina and Latino racism as more than just perceptions and beliefs about a particular group of people, but also as a systematic effort to maintain white supremacy” (Perez Huber, 2016, p. 243). In this paper, I draw on interviews with 10 undocu/DACAmented youth and 5 youth from mixed status families as well as 18 months of participant observations with La Colectiva, a community-based youth program in Wisconsin.

Findings in this paper show how undocu/DACAmented students navigated practices and policies of exclusion at multiple levels within the educational system. For instance, in the state of Wisconsin, undocu/DACAmented students are not eligible for in-state tuition or state financial aid. This policy of exclusion at the higher education level was steeped in racist nativist narratives that define who is and is not a state resident. Undocu/DACAmented youth often navigated their path to higher education on their own as most counselors were unaware of the barriers that undocu/DACAmented students faced in applying to college. Youth also spoke to how schools perpetuate exclusion through practices, such as tracked classes, a predominantly White teaching staff and a White-centered curriculum. In contrast, to previous research that has shown that undocumented students in honors/advanced courses tend to have access to more support (Gonzales, 2015), I found that for undocumented students in predominantly White schools this was not the case as they felt alienated in these classes.

This paper adds to the growing research on undocumented/DACAmented youth by illuminating the experiences of undocu/DACAmented youth that do not live in traditional gateway states, which have been more supportive of undocumented communities. I show how these youth in Wisconsin navigate exclusion, interrogate neoliberal narratives of deservingness and meritocracy, and ultimately create collective spaces of belonging on their own terms.

Author

• Julissa Ventura, Marquette University