“Make Holy the Bare Life”

Abstract

This article examines thevivencias en la vida cotidiana(everyday lived experiences) of undocumented youth activists in theusaat the intersection where dislocated “bare lives” encounter the hegemonic sovereign power of the nation-state (Agamben 1998). As nearly 2.1 million undocumented immigrant youth in the United States face the precarious reality of “learning to be illegal” (Gonzales 2011) and the threat of “deportability” (De Genova and Peutz 2010), a growing movement of undocumented youth fight for the dignity and liberation of their community while the light of their activism illuminates the majority who remain in the shadows. Based on three years of ethnographic research and action within the undocumented youth activist movement, this article utilizes a dialogical framework through collaborative and participatory based research methods to examine the theological dimensions of “illegal” and “bare” lives on the margins lived between the borders of citizenship and human dignity, between nation-states and the kingdom of God. The research and writing are grounded in a methodological and theological praxis with the marginalized, embodied most poignantly in the co-authors collaborative work and friendship.