“Under my Name”: Bureaucratic Brokering and Intergenerational Resource Access in Mixed-Status Latine Families

• In Event: Latinx Immigrant Detention, Deportation, and the Carceral State

Abstract

This study examines the bureaucratic brokering within mixed-status Latina/o families, emphasizing the reciprocal dynamics of resource acquisition between adult citizen children and their undocumented parents. In the context of mixed-status families, bureaucratic brokering involves both undocumented parents and their U.S. citizen children leveraging their respective positions – legal, social, or familial – to overcome structural barriers tied to citizenship, documentation, and eligibility. In a society where access to essential resources is both vital and governed by complex bureaucratic systems with strict citizenship-based eligibility, mixed-status families navigate a profoundly different reality, one in which they need each other to overcome obstacles imposed by institutional barriers. Specifically, the study illuminates how bureaucratic design and documentation requirements restrict access. This research explores how undocumented parents depend on their adult citizen children to access titled assets, including property deeds, vehicle ownership, and business licenses, which are often legally held in the children’s names. This research investigates strategies families employ to overcome systemic barriers and examines how these interdependencies shape family relationships, identity negotiations, and perceptions of legality. By shedding light on these resource-based interventions, this research illuminates the hidden labor and emotional toll carried by adult citizen children and their undocumented parents in navigating restrictive institutional frameworks contributing to sociological understandings of mobility, citizenship, family, illegality, and bureaucracy. In the process, the research reveals how these dynamics perpetuate inequalities and redistribute the burdens of illegality within mixed-status families.

Author

• Jaqueline Mendez, Texas A&M University-College Station