“Stuck In‐Between”: Placing the Underdocumented Youth Movement in Georgia

Abstract

AbstractThis paper draws on participant‐observation and a series of focus group interviews with TPS and DACA youth in Northeast Georgia to understand youth activism emerging from their positionality of being “stuck in‐between”. “Stuck in‐between” captures the liminal legal status of DACA and TPS, denotes the feeling of “stuckness” in mixed‐status multigenerational families, and foregrounds the profound ways in which place and race intersect with legal, social, and ideological practices of inclusion/exclusion. Underdocumented youth form multiracial coalitions, guided by Black geographies of the region, to challenge imperial borders that criminalise and (re)produce categories of vulnerability. This place in‐between shapes underdocumented youth understanding of the world, informed by, rather than in competition with, Black radical visions of themselves and of the place of the US South.