Organizing While Undocumented

Immigrant Youth's Political Activism under the Law

Kevin Escudero

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781479885534
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

An inspiring look inside immigrant youth’s political activism in perilous times

Undocumented immigrants in the United States who engage in social activism do so at great risk: the threat of deportation. In Organizing While Undocumented, Kevin Escudero shows why and how—despite this risk—many of them bravely continue to fight on the front lines for their rights.

Drawing on more than five years of research, including interviews with undocumented youth organizers, Escudero focuses on the movement’s epicenters—San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City—to explain the impressive political success of the undocumented immigrant community. He shows how their identities as undocumented immigrants, but also as queer individuals, people of color, and women, connect their efforts to broader social justice struggles today.

A timely, worthwhile read, Organizing While Undocumented gives us a look at inspiring triumphs, as well as the inevitable perils, of political activism in precarious times.

1

The Identity Mobilization Model

Strategic Uses of an Intersectional Movement Identity

Acknowledging the central importance of undocumented immigrant activists’ intersectional lived experiences, this book foregrounds a discussion of undocumented youth’s multiple social and legal identities as a primary basis on which social movement strategies employed in their political activism are developed.1 In fact, like David, whose narrative opened the introduction, many of the activists I interacted with across this book’s three sites—San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City—emphasized the importance of an intersectional identity as part of their organizing. Drawing on the lived experiences of undocumented immigrant activists and scholarship of intersectional theorists, this book argues that the cultivation of an intersectional movement identity is a tool that organizers have used to (1) affirm heterogeneity among movement participants and (2) assist in the formation of coalitions with members of other similarly situated groups.2 The following chapters also demonstrate how through the deployment of these movement strategies, activists have connected their personal lived experiences with a critique of the broader structures that have produced such marginalization.

Intersectionality in the contemporary immigrant rights movement has played an important role in furthering the activism of undocumented immigrant youth, both as a lens for examining the marginalization that organizers have faced and as a framework for understanding how shared oppression can lead to coalition and solidarity building.3 An understanding of the intersectional nature of a movement participant’s personal identity helps lay the foundation for an examination of how oppression on a personal level often has its roots in interconnected, overlapping systems of structural inequality. Through working to forge coalitions with members of similarly situated groups, movement participants can often begin their political activism with a desire to improve their personal and community plight, and, in the process, come to see with greater clarity the interconnected nature of the marginalization they and others face, resulting in a structural critique of the status quo.

Scholars have explored intersectional identity frameworks primarily in terms of the emergence of post-1960s identity-based social movements, often referred to as “new social movements.”4 Movements in this period that employed an intersectional approach included LGBTQ, civil rights, women’s liberation, and community of color mobilizations.5 Social science research on these movements and their use of an intersectional framework has focused primarily on activists’ emphasis on complicating “single-issue” depictions of their movements. Yet, as the Identity Mobilization Model demonstrates, it is important and necessary to examine participants’ strategic and intentional use of such an approach to complicate the agenda of their particular movement and to build coalitions with members of other similarly situated groups.6

First articulated by black feminist scholar-activists, the concept of intersectionality originated in the lived experiences of individuals who theorized directly from their daily lives and collective community experiences.7 More recently, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, thinkers such as legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw have worked to operationalize the term and incorporate the framework into mainstream academic discourse. As sociologists Dorothy Roberts and Sujatha Jesudason explain, intersectionality can be understood as providing a framework that “enables us to analyze how structures of privilege and disadvantage, such as gender, race, and class, interact in the lives of all people, depending on their particular identities and social positions.”8 Intersectionality thus functions as a key framework for understanding how oppression manifests in the daily lives of marginalized community members and provides a useful rubric for understanding how community members draw on their personal manifestations of inequality and connect them to broader efforts to counteract the structural nature of inequality. This structural inequality is rooted in unequal power relations between members of different groups and these groups’ relationship to the state.

Roberts and Jesudason have importantly applied intersectional frameworks to social movement activism and in doing so have stressed intersectionality’s role in facilitating coalition-building efforts between members of marginalized communities. Describing this aspect of intersectional activism, they explain that this coalition building is accomplished by “acknowledging the lived experiences and power differentials that keep [groups] apart” and “enabl[ing] discussions among groups that illuminate their similarities and values.”9 The connection of intersectional frameworks to solidarity and coalition building is indicative of the type of social movement mobilization that this book captures and uses as evidence for the creation of the Identity Mobilization Model.10 Similarly, in her work on the black queer community, political scientist Cathy Cohen underscores the importance of interrogating the meanings of identity categories as part of broader efforts to bring about a radical and transformative movement agenda.11 Cohen finds that both a critical analysis of a group’s identity and the heterogeneity within that identity category serve as critical starting points for conversations on how to redistribute power. Through this process, Cohen advocates remaking of identity categories as a means of redistributing and reorienting power. As she writes: “We need not base our politics in the dissolution of all categories and communities, but we need instead to work toward the destabilization and remaking of our identities. Difference, in and of itself—even that difference designated through named categories—is not the problem. . . . The reconceptualization not only of the content of identity categories, but the intersectional nature of identities themselves, must become part of our political practice.”12 Collectively, these scholars’ insights point to the critical importance of an intersectional identity on the individual level, the potential for an intersectional identity to facilitate coalition building, and the opportunity for coalition building and movement organizing to work to destabilize and reconfigure these very identity categories that brought community members together in the first place.

Building on these foundational theoretical approaches, the Identity Mobilization Model functions as a road map to the organization of the following three ethnographic chapters, each of which explains how a subgroup in the immigrant rights movement utilizes an intersectional movement identity to cultivate an intersectional collective identity to overcome legal and political barriers to activism. In the process, undocumented immigrant activists not only have named and affirmed the importance of utilizing an intersectional frame when advancing their movement but also have used the oppositional consciousness that such an approach facilitates to build coalitions with members of other similarly situated groups. Through this process activists named, critiqued, and worked to counteract the oppressive power structures that lead to their marginalized identities.

The Identity Mobilization Model Framework

The Identity Mobilization Model illustrates the coming together of a diverse set of individuals and the simultaneous forging of a collective identity that affirms difference while at the same time facilitating the formation of a united front.13 In engaging in this research, I noticed that the individuals I worked with were a group of activists who saw identity as an important reason for their participation in political organizing and identify as activists. Through these shared positionings and entry into the movement vis-à-vis social movement organizations, these activists, who enacted the strategies outlined in this model, ultimately ended up working across movement organizations and identity subgroups to create a multifaceted, intersectional collective identity.

As undocumented youth have operationalized the use of their intersectional identities, they have also worked to refashion how a collective identity can function for a social movement. Collective identity is a theoretical framework that emerged from the need to more closely examine the factors affecting how individuals mobilize and the circumstances that have facilitated such action.14 For members of marginalized groups, collective identity is a critical tool for establishing a successful social movement and ensuring its longevity. At the same time, multiple levels of marginalization often exist among members of a marginalized group.15 Drawing on the activism of undocumented immigrant youth, the Identity Mobilization Model illustrates how a broader approach to examining the form collective identities take and their uses by social movement participants can open new avenues for understanding the structure and dynamics of political mobilization.16

Some social movement scholars have argued that movements with weak or diffuse collective identities are unable to achieve buy-in from potential participants and are therefore less successful in changing the status quo.17 This book argues that an affirmation of movement participants’ multiple social identities can in fact be an asset.18 Moreover, while scholars have importantly made the case that the formation of a movement’s collective identity is central to the process of ensuring cohesion and building momentum to advance the movement’s cause, further discussion is needed regarding the role of intersectional movement identities as part of such organizing efforts.19 The model also works to counteract the critique of identity-based movements that they are short-lived and that once a movem...