During the past two decades, migration scholars have traced the vast web of local, state, and federal policies that have targeted immigrants for exclusion and deportation from the United States. This nuanced body of work has illuminated the extraordinary costs that punitive policies have exacted on the lives of noncitizens. Yet, far from being powerless victims relegated to live “in the shadows,” undocumented immigrants have fought back, often at great risk to themselves and their families.
Kevin Escudero examines the experiences of highly educated Asian and Latinx undocumented youth in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City in the 2010s. He attributes their activism, in part, to the fact that they have spent most of their lives in the United States and have been politicized within the US education system. Young undocumented people well versed in the nation's lofty ideals are keenly aware of the rights and privileges of citizenship denied to them. And they're unwilling to accept the status quo.
Escudero, who teaches in the Department of American Studies at Brown University, conducted extensive ethnographic research and 51 in-depth interviews for the book, which engages with interdisciplinary scholarship on migrant illegality, social movements, and intersectionality. Heterogeneity strengthens movements, according to Escudero, and participants’ racial and gender identities, sexual orientations, and legal statuses can help forge coalitions across groups. He develops this argument through what he calls the “Identity Mobilization Model.” The model consists of three strategies—“community knowledge-sharing practices,” “the strategic leveraging of an intersectional identity,” and “high-stakes allyship”—and offers insights into contemporary youth-led political organizing.
After describing the Identity Mobilization Model in the introduction and in a theoretical chapter, Escudero provides examples of how it works in practice. A chapter on undocumented Asian youth, who represent 13 percent of all undocumented immigrants, discusses how they have made visible their community and challenged the model- minority myth. Escudero also analyzes his own participation in a civil disobedience action as a “caretaker” for an Asian undocumented activist.
Chapter 3 explores how activists who identify as both undocumented and queer, or undocuqueer, have shaped the immigrant rights movement by forming alliances with and borrowing tactics from the LGBTQ movement. Since 2010, they have organized “coming-out” rallies during which people publicly disclose their legal status and share testimonies about what it is like to be undocumented. As one organizer explains, they use their stories as “a political tool for change” (86).
The fourth chapter focuses on “formerly undocumented immigrant women of color,” whose ongoing activism highlights the blurry line between “directly affected individuals” and allies. They engage in care work and provide mentorship to younger generations, while also processing their own “transition to legality.” Escudero makes an important contribution by showing that “the effects of being denied access to legal status in the United States are cumulative and endure even after individuals have adjusted their immigration status” (106).
Escudero's book is both personal and political. He cites his own background as the child of a Bolivian immigrant father and Southeast Asian refugee mother as a key motivating factor for his research. He also expresses a commitment to scholar activism and approaches his work as a partnership with the community. Though Escudero emphasizes the essential role allies play, he centers the voices and experiences of undocumented organizers. “It is vital to support the work of these directly affected activists,” he argues, “and to allow them to take the lead in the creation of a future in which the structures that perpetuate inequity can be dismantled and the self-determination of community members can be fully realized” (143).
