Fugitive Ways of Knowing and Desires for Living: UndocuAsian Diasporas as Methodologies

• In Event: “Looking Back, Looking Forward:” Envisioning Asian Diasporas as Methodologies for “Thriving Futures”

Abstract

Undocumented Asians (undocuAsians)--despite being part of the fastest-growing undocumented population--remain a minority within a minority, often rendered invisible in immigration discourse and Asian American studies (Ramakrishnan & Shah, 2017). Occupying the unique intersection of racialized illegality and diasporic displacement, undocuAsian individuals face a dual liminality: racially presumed to be “model minorities,” yet legally excluded and criminalized by the state (Dao, 2017; Enriquez, 2019). Amid the current intensification of immigrant surveillance and deportation, where Asians represent the second-largest group in ICE raids, it is urgent to center the long-overlooked experiences of this community.

This study draws on a year-long critical ethnography conducted in Los Angeles with 77 undocuAsian young adults to theorize Asian diasporas as methodologies. Rather than treating diaspora as a background or identity marker, I approach it as a mode of knowing, moving, and being--one shaped by migration, racialization, illegibility, and imagination (Madison, 2020; Solórzano, 1998). UndocuAsian students are not merely subjects of state violence or institutional neglect but also epistemic agents, knowledge producers whose lives challenge dominant frameworks of citizenship, education, and belonging (Rodriguez, 2020; Santa Ramirez, 2020).

I engage in fugitivity as a critical analytic lens that foregrounds life in the shadow, the underground, and the margins. Following Moten and Harney (2013), fugitivity is not only flight from capture, but a way of being that refuses incorporation, surveillance, and legibility. What if undocumented youth are not only resisting state violence, but also cultivating alternative life-worlds, affective communities, and ethical relations? What can we learn from the ways they survive, strategize, and root themselves otherwise? Fugitivity also aligns with Eve Tuck’s (2009) desire-based framework, which emphasizes the complexity, contradiction, and self-determination of marginalized lives. Desire accounts for trauma and struggles, but also for imagination, joy, care, and world-making. A fugitive approach, therefore, is about not only romanticizing escape, but also illuminating how undocumented Asian students’ detour and delay help reimagine educational and life pathways amidst constant threat and exclusion. Fugitivity helps us understand the temporal and spatial politics of undocumented life: how students navigate legal violence and deportability (De Genova, 2002), systemic exclusion from labor and education, and the everyday erosion of personhood through surveillance, policies, and media representation (Menjívar & Abrego, 2012). Yet undocuAsian students refuse erasure, form communities of care, engage in strategic opacity, and develop relational practices that defy the state’s terms of recognition.

Ultimately, this study positions undocuAsian students as theorists of diasporas, fugitivity, and desire. Their daily practices--whether of silence, refusal, or radical dreaming--constitute a fugitive politics that is both a critique of exclusion and an assertion of being. By theorizing with and through their lives, I argue for an undocuAsian methodology that reimagines what it means to know, to move, and to live otherwise. As undocuAsian student I stated, “I am grateful despite all the chaos and challenges; choosing to stay grounded and hopeful in simple pleasures life has to offer… and I will not let the government take away my dreams, roots, or joy.

Author

• Siyue Lena Wang, University of California - Los Angeles