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Undocumented Activism and Education in the United States

Mon, March 6, 11:30am to 1:00pm, Sheraton Atlanta, Floor: 3, Grand Ballroom D&E (South Tower)

Proposal

During this current U.S. electoral cycle, there has been a lot of attention drawn to the fact that there is a large undocumented community working, living, and participating in the United States. While congress and many politicians use the undocumented community to score points with other constituencies, within the community there are a number of activists and community members who work hard to discuss, organize, and exercise their civic powers in a multitude of ways.

Why does this happen? How does this happen? When we consider that most minoritized communities are experiencing a drop in civic participation (Levinson, 2012), how do these activists find the voice, power, and resources to make their voices and agenda heard? In a series of interviews with undocumented activists, I explored their motivations, sense of civic participation, and human rights. The two theories that frame this work are Latino Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) and Theories of Civic Empowerment. LatCrit is informed by the work done in Critical Race Theory and seeks to go beyond the black/white binary of race and also engage issues of citizenship, language, accent, ethnicity, and language. For this study and inquiry, LatCrit provides a framework to see, frame, and analyze these participants’ experiences in a new way that can provide important insights into the work that these activists are doing.

Bernal (2002) and Raible and Irizarry (2015) define LatCrit as going beyond some of the tenets of traditional CritRace as described by Delgado and Stefancic (2012). These include (but are not limited to) pushing beyond white and black racial binaries, the inclusion of intersectionality and social justice, and placing experiential knowledge in an interdisciplinary context. These interviews follow this description and in so doing I hope to keep the struggles of these activists at the heart of this work. Including LatCrit in this study makes it possible to address the different issues that divide people from their power. The theory of Civic empowerment, as described by Levinson (2012), seeks to discuss ways that civic engagement is (dis)encouraged in schools, curriculum, and classrooms. Also through these interviews, these activists challenge and discuss the ways that schools have failed to promote a robust conception of civic action and how non-school spaces have stepped in to answer this need.

Can schools learn to create a more robust sense of civic participation and duty? How does this look in the curriculum and content decisions that schools make and can make? In this study undocumented activists push through these assumptions and make their voices heard, challenging how civic action can work and be powered in our society.

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