Undocumented, unafraid and unapologetic: Re-articulatory practices and migrant youth “illegality”

Abstract

The lives of undocumented youth are fundamentally characterized by the legal and social contradiction that arises from growing up in the United States yet facing barriers to full participation in US society. As such, the production of migrant youth “illegality” is marked by both distinct forms of regulation and exclusion as well as a sustained connection to institutions central to US society. In this article, I bring 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with undocumented Latino youth activists in California into conversation with Stuart Hall’s notion of (re-)articulation in order to identify three articulatory practices among undocumented youth – brokering illegality, staking a claim to “citizen” participation and breaching the code of silence. I argue that the tension between their juridical identities as undocumented migrants and their subjective identities as US-raised children has served as a catalyst to political action among undocumented youth activists in California.