Unpacking Legality Through La Facultad and Cultural Citizenship: Critical and Legal Consciousness Formation for Politicized Latinx Undocumented Youth Activists

Abstract

ABSTRACTOver the last ten years, there has been an increasingly growing body of scholarship devoted to undocumented college students in higher education. Prior scholarship has focused on how undocumented students negotiate their political and civic identity within the undocumented youth movement. However, immigration research within higher education has not addressed how undocumented students come to understand their legal consciousness. I intersect legal consciousness with Anzaldúa's (1987) la facultad/nepantla and cultural citizenship theory (Rosaldo, 1987) to frame the process of how politicized Latinx undocumented students come to hone their critical legal consciousness within the context of higher education and social activism. Using data from 39 individual interviews with 13 undocumented student activists who self-identified as “undocumented and unafraid,” the findings reveal four forms of navigation for how undocumented students come to understand their legal consciousness as they negotiate colonized spaces: (a) reconfiguring legality though migration and family experiences; (b) negotiating contexts and disclosure; (c) critical enactment of cultural citizenship; and (d) disrupting and reclaiming colonized spaces.