Struggling with success Emotion, experience, and subjectivity in the undocumented youth movement in Los Angeles

Based on longitudinal ethnographic research (2011–2018) in Los Angeles, this dissertation seeks to understand the political success of the undocumented youth movement in the United States. It conceptualizes that political success in two divergent ways. On the one hand, the movement’s political success consists of undocumented youths successfully mobilizing around the assimilationist narrative and collective identity of the Dreamers, thereby becoming legitimate political actors in mainstream American politics, accomplishing concrete political wins, and experiencing upward social mobility. On the other hand, the movement’s political success consists of offering undocumented youth emotionally intensive rituals and counter-hegemonic resources that aid them in going through an emotional and cognitive transformation and liberation process in which their subjectivities are reconstituted, their shame is turned into pride, and they are able to experience their political agency as “undocumented and unafraid.”
This dissertation then looks at the consequences of that political success and argues that it also has a darker side, as it came at the cost of an increase in immigration enforcement and the further criminalization (detention and deportation) of undocumented immigrants. This led to a strong critique within the immigrant rights movement concerning the divisiveness of the Dreamer narrative and eventually to the subsequent deconstruction of the Dreamers’ collective identity. This resulted in undocumented youths experiencing feelings of guilt and no longer wanting to be identified as Dreamers. It also led to more inclusive and radical organizing strategies, with undocumented youths now mobilizing for all 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.