Interrogating Vulnerability and Agency in Undocumented Student Organizing

• In Event: The Complexity of Latinx Identity

Abstract

The neo-liberalization of higher education along with the economic precarity, racialized targeting, and gendered hostilities that characterizes the sociopolitical context of the United States, requires a critical interrogation of inclusion as it pertains to the political experiences and formation of undocumented/DACAmented student activists. Who is included (or excluded) is often predicated on the intersections of multiple modes of subordination including race, class, gender, and status. How bodies and beings are “read” -- as vulnerable, threatening or agentic -- holds consequences for how the nation-state and its institutions, such as Universities, engage with active political subjects, specifically undocumented/DACAmented student activists.

In this paper, we examine undocumented/DACAmented student organizing in the silicon valley, paying particular attention to how race, gender, class, and status impact the mobilization and inclusion of immigrant and undocumented youth on college campuses. Through a critical ethnographic case study of undocumented/DACAmented student organizing, we interrogate narratives of inclusion and vulnerability, along with supporting policies and practices that both enable and dis-empower student mobilization. In particular, our examination highlights the various states of vulnerability that students face, from the state as well as the university, and how they navigate this terrain to form their own spaces and places of resistance.

Author

• Anna Sampaio, Santa Clara University