Legal Passing: Changing Bodies, Behaviors, and Minds

• In Event: 1240 - Law and Culture

Abstract

Restrictive state and local immigration laws clearly constrain daily life and cause social suffering among the undocumented residents they target. Yet most of these immigrants are not paralyzed within hostile destinations. In this paper (which is a book chapter of a manuscript), I develop the concept of legal passing to show how undocumented Mexicans in locales with anti-immigrant laws go about everyday life—traveling to work, ferrying children to and from school, and buying groceries. By taking on the characteristics associated with the cultural mainstream and avoiding those associated with Mexicans, rurality, and undocumented status, these immigrants engage in legal passing to mask their “illegality” and circumvent detection. Over time, legal passing becomes embodied as adaptations to the dominant majority culture, and the practice of emulating US-born Americans becomes belief. As a concept, legal passing draws from the literature on racial passing while introducing the crossing of invisible boundaries—immigration status—that is at once apart from and intimately tied to questions of culture, ethnicity, and race.

Author

• Angela S. Garcia, University of Chicago