“Pedagogy FOR the Oppressed: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Students at Delaware State University 2016-Present”

• In Event: Minorías y grupos marginalizados en educación

Abstract

This essay’s title, a play on Paulo Freire’s seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, focuses on the experiences of DACA residents to attend universities in the historical context of the Latin American diaspora of the 20th and 21st century. Generally, this essay focuses on their efforts to achieve full civil and human rights in the United States. Approximately 1,000,000 residents of the United States face deportation under Donald Trump’s 2017 order to end DACA. This potential mass deportation however, is not without historical precedent. President Franklin Roosevelt deported approximately 1.5 million Mexican and Mexican Americans between 1929 and 1933. In both cases, xenophobia, nativism and racism were fundamental elements of executive immigration policy. This immigration study considers the efforts of DACA students to achieve full civil rights in the context of higher education, focusing on Delaware State University (DSU) an Historically Black College and University (HBCU) (one of approximately 70 universities accepting DACA). DACA students attending DSU exemplifies the subaltern experience (in this case former slaves and undocumented immigrants) as they demand access to a pedagogy that is historically, the privileged domain of “native citizens.”
In 2016, DSU admitted its first cohort of DACA students. Today, approximately 150 DACA students attend DSU funded by the Dream.us fund. These students, and other DACA residents face a tenuous future under the Trump administration. Still, as this paper demonstrates through personal accounts, DACA students at DSU are active agents in the immigration debate specifically, and in American civil rights struggle more broadly.

Author

• Niklas Robinson, Delaware State University