Making Moves In/With/Against the University: The Development of a Politicized Voice in Immigrant Student Organizing

• In Event: Past the Town/Gown Divide: Toward Migrant Justice of Farmworkers and Students

Abstract

Over the past decade undocumented immigrant youth across the country have engaged in the immigrant rights movement by sharing their personal stories in public spaces to engage, educate and advocate for immigration and education reform. As the immigrant rights movement was gaining momentum, many university representatives across the country also developed their own form of public scripts to advocate on behalf and participate in creating institutional resources to support undocumented students. The lawsuit, Regents of the University of California v. The United States Department of Homeland Security, on grounds of the unlawful repeal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival program, is one of the latest examples of these ongoing public scripts of student advocacy by a higher education institution.

This presentation examines how institutions and political narratives in social movements are co-constituted. I draw from my dissertation research where I investigate the ways in which universities have been reconfigured by the immigrant student movement and how institutional response has simultaneously shaped strategies and political narratives in the movement. I do this by examining the immigrant student movement at the University of California from 2000 to 2015, which offers a site to explore neoliberal logics in the development and institutionalization of immigrant incorporation. My project draws from post-1960s historical and political contexts where affirmative action, civil rights and immigration policy came together in the reorganization of US higher education's institutional relationship to minority subjects.

In bringing together this year's conference theme of "emergency and emergence", this presentation will investigate the ongoing negotiations between student organizers' political strategies and institutional power, response, and coercion to political narratives that are circulated in the pro-immigrant rights agendas. I will discuss the ways in which student organizers have negotiated these ongoing power dynamics. I aim to engage the audience in a critical dialogue about the potential and challenges minoritized subjects organizing in institutions under a state of political emergency are facing. I will lead the audience to think of ways we can hold ourselves accountable to doing anti-capitalist, feminist, anti-racist work in institutions that are designed to challenge these very foundations.

Author

• Chantiri Duran Resendiz, University of California, Los Angeles