We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States is a collection of empirical and theoretical writings about a range of life experiences of undocumented immigrants. For example, Gabrielle Cabrera, a PhD student in anthropology at Rutgers University, explores the university as a space of neoliberal logic in which the undocumented-student experience is commodified, packaged, and displayed as a marketable aspect of multiculturalism and diversity. Audrey Silvester, a doctoral candidate, critiques the limited depictions of undocumented trans women of color, arguing that by centering the white trans experience, the depictions of the lives of undocumented trans women of color miss the beauty, violence, and even joy of their everyday lives. Other topics in the volume include vulnerability in the era of Trump, parenting while undocumented and queer, and navigating unrealistic expectations of academic success.

Editors Leisy Abrego and Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales bring together Cabrera, Silvester, and eight other authors to create a volume that forcefully addresses limitations in the research on undocumented immigrants and aggressively counters the reductive framings of undocumented life so often seen as necessary for political advancement. Notably, all of the ten chapter contributors are themselves undocumented (or recently undocumented), and use their writing to “speak back to the burgeoning body of literature” (1) that has for so long treated them as objects of inquiry while systematically reducing their avenues for input and critique. The undocumented authors of each chapter thus theorize about their own experiences or those of others in their communities, countering homogenized presentations of themselves with descriptions of lives characterized by joys, triumphs, failures, insecurities, fear, rebellion, and self-advocacy.

By describing and theorizing the experiences of undocumented queer parents, trans women of color, failing students, and even undocumented immigrants who are no longer undocumented because of marriage, the authors carefully deconstruct the well-established image of immigrants rooted in heteronormativity, manual labor, work ethic, and high achivement. In its place, they weave a tapestry of narratives and counternarratives, stories with loose ends, that are complicated, incomplete, and evolving, and more accurately mirror real life and the complexity of humanity.

This volume also admonishes a common trap into which far too many well-intentioned advocates and researchers fall in pursuit of political advancement. Advocates and researchers alike often work toward political progress by pushing dichotomous, reductive narratives of undocumented immigrants aimed at assuaging anti-immigrant politicians. There are certainly many examples of this, but the one that has likely garnered the most critique and analysis is that after which the book is titled: the “DREAMer.” As Abrego and Negrón-Gonzalez describe, the immigrant “DREAMer,” a term taken from the Developmental Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act that sought protection from deportation for certain categories of undocumented immigrants, leveraged an image of a young, “innocent” undocumented immigrant, brought to the US through no choice of their own, and “American” in all ways besides their paperwork. This narrative, the authors argue, threw the parents of undocumented children under the metaphorical bus, suggesting that they, not the innocent children, were the real “criminals.” This book is a systematic deconstruction of these reductive dichotomizations and rigid categorizations, and argues that, even for political progress, they can be dehumanizing and exclusionary.

Lastly, this volume also steps outside the context of immigration to comment on how research itself is conducted. Researchers interested in issues of equity and social justice frequently gear their work toward understanding systems of oppression – both the mechanisms of oppression and the communities most impacted by it. But often the authors stitching these stories together and drawing the larger, theoretical meaning out of their composite are not members of the communities about which they are writing. What would a research agenda look like when those who live these stories are also their tellers and their theorizers? How can the next generation of research include not only the active foregrounding of lives made systematically invisible, but also the active backpedaling of the privileged researcher to center a different storyteller altogether? But Abrego, Negrón-Gonzales, and the authors of this book do not simply say that those in positions of privilege should step back in order to make space for the authors closer to the experiences about which they write as some sort of act of generosity. Instead, this act is both a needed and a valuable effort toward equitable representation in the academy and, because of the richness and insight in the resulting theory, a move toward creating research of the highest caliber.