I appreciate Dr. Yalidy Matos’s review of Engage and Evade. One of the synergies between our books is our shared interest in how ordinary people make sense of their place in society—and in the consequences that various attitudes and behaviors can play in reproducing inequality. Still, we study this dynamic differently: Matos by foregrounding white Americans’ expressed opinions on immigration politics, and me by foregrounding how undocumented Latino immigrants with young children perceive and respond to the institutional forms of surveillance they endure every day (with an eye toward the impact such action has on their membership). Some of these differences are reflected in Matos’s comments on Engage and Evade.

First, Matos asks whether using the phrase “selective engagement”—rather than mobilizing “engagement” and “evasion” as contrasting terms—better describes undocumented immigrants’ interactions with institutions that surveil them. I heartily agree and strived to develop my theoretical framework to make this same point about existing research. As I noted, undocumented immigrants exhibit a “selective engagement with the institutions that surveil [them], sometimes interacting with them and sometimes avoiding them depending on the type of institutional surveillance encountered and the social roles and responsibilities most salient in an encounter” (20; emphasis in original). This is why, in describing how undocumented immigrants make a life in the United States, I conceptualize engagement and evasion as “two sides of the same coin.”

Second, Matos encourages greater consideration of the complexity of Latinidad. In particular, she asks whether a more intersectional analysis of undocumented Latino immigrants’ race, sexuality, or both would have altered the book’s interpretations and conclusions. Unfortunately, such heterogeneity was not present among my interview respondents. They used “Latino” as both their ethnic and racial category; no one in the study identified as Black or Afro-Latino or Indigenous. No one I interviewed identified as queer either; in part, this reflected the conditions under which study recruitment took place. As outlined in the book’s methodological appendix, the study recruited interviewees based on the presence of children between the ages of three and eight in the household. Recruitment began in 2013, two years before the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and expanded the immigration system’s consideration of “family” to encompass non-heteronormative families. I cannot say for sure, but I speculate that undocumented Latino immigrants who are Black or members of a sexual minority with young children would experience the dynamics I outline even more acutely—especially with respect to street-level bureaucrats’ racialized, classed, and fundamentally heteronormative perceptions of undocumented immigrants’ morality and caregiving. Future work would certainly benefit from exploring these intracategorical comparisons based on undocumented Latino immigrants’ race, sexuality, or both.

Finally, Matos questions whether the book would have benefited from greater problematization of undocumented immigrants’ perceptions of morality. I regularly describe in the book my own discomfort about some of my respondents’ moral claims, including when discussing Ricardo, a respondent whom Matos mentions. As I saw it, Ricardo’s moral criticisms “reproduced some of the same stereotypes that politicians, immigration officials, and the media use to justify greater restrictions on [undocumented immigrants’] lives” (78). And in the conclusions to chapters 2 and 3, I show how my respondents’ perceptions of morality emerged in and through interaction with street-level bureaucrats, who regulate undocumented immigrants’ access to material and symbolic resources. Undocumented immigrants’ perceptions of morality in the study, therefore, reflect their beliefs about these bureaucrats’ expectations of immigrants. Ultimately, as elaborated in chapter 4 and in the book’s standalone conclusion, undocumented immigrants’ efforts to meet these perceived expectations rarely shield them from deportation or facilitate their legalization.

Overall, whether from the perspective of relatively empowered white Americans (as in Matos’s book) or relatively disempowered undocumented Latino immigrants (as in Engage and Evade), I take away from this dialogue the importance of attending to how ordinary groups of people at particular social positions, and in defined social contexts, perceive and respond to state power in dynamic ways.