During the first decade of the 2000s, the life stories of undocumented youth began to emerge in the media as a form of political activism, rhetorically crafted to move politicians to pass a DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) that would have provided a path to eventual legalization for young people who had either entered the United States illegally with their parents or had overstayed legal visas and fallen out of status. Such stories shared some common elements and patterns. Chief among these was a focus on the United States as “home”—the nation of memory, experience, culture, and deep loyalty (Caminero-Santangelo, Documenting ). Undocumented youth—they came to call themselves DREAMers—emphasized in their stories that they saw themselves as fully American, although this emphasis came at the expense of discussing continuing transnational ties or affinities with a culture of origin (Caminero-Santangelo, Documenting and “DREAMers”).
Another standard narrative trope involved the meritorious, deserving immigrant who was pursuing the “American Dream.” The stories that gained the most media attention were the stories of high-achieving individuals. As Roberto G. Gonzales explains in his book Lives in Limbo ,
In the early stages of advocacy for undocumented students, educators, legislators, and lobbyists tried to paint a portrait of undocumented students that would appeal to all who love the American dream. . . . [Advocates] depicted undocumented youth as innocent of the ‘criminal’ decision to break US laws by crossing the border. . . . Images of valedictorians, class presidents, and model citizens . . . multiplied in the media. (26-27)
Indeed, politicians who supported the DREAM Act argued that “we” shouldn’t punish the children for the crimes of the parents; some DREAM narratives and creative work echoed and reinforced this sentiment (see, for instance, “Undocumented and Unafraid” 2011; Kalma, “The Undocumented”). These representations painted undocumented youth as “good” immigrants who had high potential to contribute to their communities and to the economy—as opposed to the trope of the “bad” immigrant who “takes things from us” (jobs, social services) without contributing meaningfully (Honig 74, 96).
With the implementation of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, instituted as a stop-gap measure in the failure of DREAM Act passage) in 2012 under President Barack Obama, DREAMer storytelling as activism died down. While DACA was not a DREAM Act—not law but policy—it apparently gave young undocumented people enough of a sense of security that pressure to pass a DREAM Act was relieved. But with DACA, some alternative DREAMer narratives began, also, to emerge. DREAMers began to note that the term “DREAMer” as a synonym for all young people without legal status was highly exclusionary. The “good immigrant” narrative was itself problematic:
Increasingly, immigrant integration proposals and legislation have exacerbated divisions between high achievers and other undocumented youth, rewarding the meritorious with an easier pathway to access while leaving others further behind. . . . By framing the issue around school, they moved the discussion away from immigrant rights to one that distinguishes “worthy” immigrants from “unworthy ones,” “innocent” and “deserving” immigrants from felons and gang members. (Gonzales 26-27)
Most significantly, some challenges to the “deserving immigrant” narrative began to be posed by DREAMers themselves.
One challenge was to the assumptions of high academic performance that “representative” DREAM narratives implicitly advanced. Every DREAM Act proposal since 2001 (but prior to 2017) had required at least two years of attendance at an institution of higher education, or two years of service in the military, in order to be eligible to complete the path to legalization as a permanent resident. This proposal left out of the equation—until the 2017 version—students who did not go to college (which was, in any case, priced out of reach for many because of the lack of eligibility for any form of federal financial aid); it made the “dream” unattainable for those students who never graduated from high school. (In 2014, the dropout rate for all Latinx high school students reached a new low of 12%, but in 2000, it was 32% [Krogstad].) Emerging voices began to point out that, by using academic credentials (or military service) as a condition of legalization, the DREAM Act was exclusionary in more ways than just its focus on youth. (The 2017 version of proposed DREAM Act legislation offered a work/employment route as an alternative to higher education or the military.) Further, a most often unremarked aspect of both DACA and the Dream Act had to do with “good moral character” (in the words of the 2010 DREAM Act proposal). While this criterion may seem completely logical on its face, some scholars and critics, as well as undocumented youth themselves, began to point out that teenagers often engage in risky behaviors (speeding, light shoplifting, underage drinking, or drug use) that do not necessarily reveal anything enduring about moral character and do not make these young people less worthy of a path to residency in the country in which they were raised (see Golash-Boza).
The life narratives that DREAMers had disseminated leading up to DACA’s implementation in 2012 (Underground Undergrads , Papers ) had, by and large, reinforced the “good immigrant” narrative and been told in sound-bites (short prose narratives) rather than fully fleshed-out stories of a complicated life. But some life narratives by so-called DREAMers also began to emerge in the DACA era, and these significantly complicated and challenged the stock DREAMer narrative by presenting their prior selves as less than always “meritorious” or “innocent.” Stories also drew a far more complicated picture of “place”; while, ironically, earlier DREAMer narratives, in their insistence on the right to stay, emphasized staying put (in the United States), some of the more recent narratives attend not just to a singular emplacement but to a multiplicity of places, marking mobility (either between the US and the country of origin or among sites in the US) and a continuous crossing of geographical and psychological borders as an expanded experience of place.
Perhaps the two most prominent book-length life narratives of undocumented youth in the new millennium are Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (2015) by Dan-el Padilla Peralta and The Distance Between Us (2012) by novelist Reyna Grande. Notably, both of these authors were eventually able to fully legalize their status, making them the exception rather than the norm among DREAMers and giving them the safety and security to publish their stories without fear of deportation. Both narratives trace a path from poverty to a prestigious education and “success” as defined by US norms; thus, in some ways, both retrace the narrative pattern of the “good immigrant” who makes a substantial contribution to society, as well as of the “meritorious” DREAMers who “deserve” to be legalized because they have proven themselves to excel academically. In other ways, however, both life stories resist these narrative patterns, eschewing notions of “innocence” in favor of more fully fleshed-out individuals with agency over their own lives. Further, both narratives complicate static notions of bounded place (e.g., a US with borders that must be crossed to be “entered” and that therefore exists apart from other places); instead, emplacement in the US becomes a matter of links to multiple “places” and to entangled networks of belonging, exclusion, and movement. Place is encoded in the body, and the body leaves its traces in places.
Doreen Massey, in her introduction to the book Space, Place, and Gender proposes that if we imagine our understanding of space as always of necessity “formed out of social relations at all scales,” then place can be conceived of as
a particular articulation of those relations, a particular moment in those networks of social relations and understandings . . . . [Place] includes relations which stretch beyond [the geographical place itself] . . . . [T]he particularity of any place is, in these terms, constructed not by placing boundaries around it . . . but precisely (in part) through the specificity of the mix of links and interconnections to that “beyond.” (5)
This understanding of place is a useful lens for reading the full-length life narratives of undocumented youth, who understand “place” precisely in these terms—always as constituted through their relations to other places. Thus, as we will see, the meanings of “el otro lado” (the United States) and Mexico for Reyna Grande are inextricable from the economic and social forces which draw her parents north and leave her behind, deeply imbricated in a larger network of relations of labor, capital, and cultural representations that link the United States and Mexico closely together. And the meanings of places for Dan-el Padilla Peralta are even more finely grained, taking account of economic and social distinctions between the different places he inhabits within the United States (homeless shelter, tenement, elite private school, ivy league college) and even to the geographical routes by which he physically moves from one place to another.
“El Otro Lado”
Grande’s life story begins with what, for the young child protagonist, amounts to an abandonment: her parents migrate north to the United States in order to raise the family’s standard of living and send money back to Mexico. As I have written elsewhere (“DREAMers”), this initial act of migration casts the United States in a far different light than it appears in most previous undocumented narratives, where the United States still potentially offers some version of “the American Dream.” Rather, in young Reyna’s mind, the US is linked to the Mexican folklore bogeywoman figure of “La Llorona” (the crying woman). This figure, widely known in Mexican culture, is a woman who weeps through the night—often near rivers—in search of her lost children and is also threatening and scary to young children who are told the story by their parents to warn them from straying too far at night because she will take children to replace her own. But in author Grande’s retelling, “La Llorona” is reimagined as the United States, and in a reversal, it is scary because it “takes away parents, not children”; “What I knew back then was that El Otro Lado [“The Other Side”] had already taken my father away. What I knew was that prayers didn’t work, because if they did, El Otro Lado wouldn’t be taking my mother away, too” (3-4). Reyna’s early imaginings about the United States already suggests that the meanings of place are a product of complex social relations, since the initial meaning of the United States for the young Reyna is derived not from US culture but from Mexican culture. It is through the myth of La Llorona that Reyna understands and processes the dynamics of migration.
Repeatedly throughout her childhood and in her parents’ absence, Reyna internalizes the lesson that the United States has drawn her parents away and that it therefore must hold more appeal for them than their own children do. All things “American,” by logical extension, are to be preferred to things Mexican: “El Otro Lado is a beautiful place. Every street is paved with concrete. You don’t see any dirt roads there. No mosquitoes sucking the blood out of you . . . . There’s no trash in the streets like here in Mexico. Trucks there pick up the trash every week” (Grande 45). Eventually, this one-upmanship of the US over Mexico includes her own siblings, who are born in the United States. Early in the memoir, Reyna’s young friend Élida warns her and her sister Mago, “Your mother is not coming back for you . . . . Now that she’s got a job and is making dollars, she won’t want to come back, believe me.” Mago responds, “Speak for yourself. It’s your mother who’s not coming back . . . . Doesn’t she have another child, over there in El Otro Lado?” (24-25). But this taunt comes back to bite Mago and Reyna when their own mother announces, from the United States, that she, too, is pregnant. Reyna wonders, “Why would she come back to Mexico . . . when she could stay on that side of the border and give birth to an American Citizen?” (33). The unspoken assumption is clearly that an American Citizen child is preferable to a Mexican Citizen child.
This impulse and preference works its way into Reyna’s psyche as well, but always in an anxiety-ridden fashion, since Reyna has to learn to look down at her Mexican home and culture. This is a lesson her Tía Emperatriz reinforces:
“From what I’ve heard, El Otro Lado is a very beautiful place. But here . . . ” She waved her hand for me to look outside the cab window. I know now what she had wanted me to see back then: the banks of the canal lined with trash and debris floating in the water, the crumbling adobe houses, the shacks made of sticks . . . . But what I saw back then I saw through the eyes of a child . . . velvety mountains around us, the clear blue sky, the beautiful jacaranda trees covered in purple flowers . . . . “Don’t you think there’s beauty here, too?” I asked Tía Emperatriz. (Grande 64-65)
The beauty endemic to Mexico is something that Reyna must be taught to unsee, in favor of the imagined beauty of the US. Even the young Reyna, who still sees the beauty of her birthplace, internalizes the “lesson” that the US is better, that it is the desired destination. When her younger brother Carlos plays in a car and pretends to drive, asking “Where are we off to today?” Reyna’s automatic response is, “To El Otro Lado” (Grande 31).
It is within this highly ambivalent framework that young Reyna begs her father to take her and her siblings back with him to the United States. (By this point, Reyna’s parents’ marriage has fallen apart.) Even Reyna’s deliberations about how she and her siblings—including her American-born sister Betty—will manage the trip north provokes her inculcated sense of Mexican inferiority and resentment of the US: “Betty could fly back . . . since she was a U.S. citizen. For a brief moment, I felt the familiar jealousy I’d felt when I had first heard of my American sister. Being born in the U.S. was a privilege I wished I had had. That way, I wouldn’t need to sneak across the border like a thief” (Grande 150). Reyna’s conflicted emotions about the United States, as the desirable and enviable destination to which she does not fully have access and simultaneously as the monstrous thief of her own parents, vastly complicate simplistic narratives of aspiration to a reductive “American Dream.”
But Grande’s narrative also challenges the construction of the DREAMers as having “no choice,” since it is Reyna herself who pushes an initially unwilling father: “Papi, you have to take me back to El Otro Lado with you” (149). Reyna’s father reluctantly brings her to the United States; she subsequently has cause to remind herself of this decision when life with her abusive father fails to live up to the “Dream”: “I begged him to bring me. I got what I wanted, after all. How could I complain now, simply because things weren’t all that we had hoped for?” (256). Reyna’s agency, even as a child, in the decision to come north poses a significant wrinkle to the story pattern in which undocumented youth are represented as unwilling or unknowing participants in their own migration.
Reyna Grande’s story in many ways concludes by paralleling the model narrative of the meritorious DREAMer: she graduates from the University of California, Santa Cruz, goes on to earn an MFA, becomes a published novelist (who meets other famous Latina novelists including Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, and Helena María Viramontes)—and, along the way, becomes a US citizen, a legalization of status that is today unavailable to the vast majority of undocumented youth living in the United States. In some ways, the language of Grande’s memoir echoes and reinforces the cliché of the deserving immigrant: “I had gotten this far, despite everything. Now, all I had to do was focus on why I was there—to make my dreams a reality” (Grande 318). Nonetheless, the American Dream plotline does not convey the complexity of the places that hold significance for Grande, and in which she feels rooted.
While the immigrant version of the American Dream hypothesizes an imagined immigrant who leaves every tie and loyalty behind to “make good” in the US, Grande clearly continues to feel a strong psychological attachment to the places of her childhood. On the one hand, her responses to place mark her distance from where she grew up, as becomes evident when she and her sister return to Mexico for a visit: “I knew that I had been in the U.S. for too long when the sight of my grandmother’s shack, with its bamboo sticks, corrugated metal roof, and tar-soaked cardboard, shocked me. Had I really lived in this place? ” And yet, her powerful visceral responses to places and the ways in which they have changed simultaneously confirm that she had lived there, and that she is still fundamentally attached to these sites. Reyna notes with sadness the way the places she knew have changed:
. . . a year before, the Mexican government had privatized the railroad system, and the service to Iguala was suspended. There were no more passengers coming through every day. There were no more vendors who sold their wares and food. . . . I turned to look at the train station, feeling my eyes burn with tears. It was no longer one of the most important places in Iguala. Now, it was just a relic, an open wound . . . . [Today’s children] would never hear the whistle of the evening train or taste the wonderful chicken quesadillas that Mago had once sold at the train station. (Grande 277)
Although the place as Reyna knew it has changed almost beyond recognition, she is still able to vividly conjure all the senses she attached to the place, in such a way that not only her memory but also her body recalls the place; thereby she is (re)emplaced. While Reyna’s older sister Mago “[tries] to erase Mexico completely” from the traces of her life, Reyna violently resists this impulse: “I didn’t know why I was so angry at my sister. How could she just sever the ties that bind us to this place [?] . . . How could I stop myself from feeling sad that Mago no longer cared about Mexico, that she didn’t think of this place as special because it was once our home?” (Grande 282). To recall Massey, Iguala for Reyna signifies not just a geographically bounded locale, but “a particular articulation of . . . [social] relations, a particular moment in those networks of social relations and understandings . . . . [Place] includes relations which stretch beyond” the specific location to insert it into a complicated network of all the places Reyna has, to that point, experienced. Reyna understands through her body the ways in which her homeland continues to be a formative part of her.
“Beyond Resurrection, Beyond Harlem”
From the beginning of his memoir Undocumented , Dan-el Padilla Peralta, too, displays a heightened awareness of place. In his case, this is not the home country, the Dominican Republic (which he left at age four), but very specific places to which he belongs within the United States and where he is “emplaced.” His prologue begins with a description of place: “Every weekday morning of my high school years, I left my apartment building in Spanish Harlem and took the subway or bus to Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where I attended private school” (Padilla Peralta 1). Pictures of Dan-el and other family members, strewn throughout the memoir, are most often labeled by place: “Yando on the playground slides, Jackson Heights, Queens, spring 1993” (21); “Dan-el attired in his finest while Jeff looks on, the Bradhurst apartment, fall 1995” (78); “Yando and Dan-el dancing at the Princeton Senior Prom, spring 2006” (189). The specificity of place locates concretely what Dan-el has called the “contradictions” of his life; he belongs in a multitude of different places that do not fit easily next to each other. Though he longs to go “Beyond Resurrection” (his family church) and “beyond Harlem” (97) both in a literal sense and in a more metaphorical one, “beyond” does not mean to “leave behind.”
Dan-el is hyper-aware of his movement among the different spaces that mark his life—describing, for instance, the route that his family takes, literally, to travel from the homeless shelter to their new low-income tenement apartment building on Bradhurst Avenue: “We rode the subway from Bushwick into Manhattan, switched to the red line at Fulton Street, and rode the 3 train to 148th Street in Harlem. . . . At the corner of 149th and Eighth, as we waited for the light to change, I looked around and noticed an abandoned building on my right. Up and down Eighth, up and down 149th, I saw boarded-up apartment buildings” (Padilla Peralta 54). The route that Dan-el takes is not just a description of geographic place (as on a map) but of socio-economic place: Dan-el takes note of the surroundings of his new apartment and the impoverishment and lack of economic investment that they suggest, and these signs “locate” him. Later, he is once again hyper-aware of the social meanings of his route back and forth between his tenement building and Collegiate, the private school he attends thanks to a scholarship, as he describes his battles with his mother over wearing his school uniform: “I didn’t want to wear my blazer and tie on the walk to and from the subway every morning. . . . I wanted to shout, “I WILL GET JUMPED if I walk around Bradhurst in a blazer and tie!” (107). Dan-el understands that the different contexts will interpret and receive his school uniform attire quite differently; whereas in one place they signal his belonging, in the other they potentially mark him as an outsider and a target. Further, he is aware that even though he is undocumented, he paradoxically in some ways has access to more of these spaces—more mobility—than many of the children he grew up with: “I had my safe white-boy school, my safe white-boy friends, my safe Upper West Side. For my Resurrection friends, on the other hand, Harlem was the world. They had to live there, go to school there, grow up there” (151). Though he lacks “papeles ” (papers), in his day-to-day existence, he can move fairly easily from one location to another, thanks to the “luck” (as he puts it) that gave him a mentor who helped him navigate the process of getting scholarships to attend elite schools, as well as to his academic abilities that grant him institutional access to those schools. For others who do not have this combination of luck and ability, but who share his poverty, the spaces in which they can move freely are more confined.
In the end, Dan-el’s argument about why he belongs in the US is, in large part, a spatial one. In a direct challenge to the anti-immigration “account” in which “immigrant invaders . . . are bodies to be rounded up, detained, and deported by the full apparatus of the surveillance state,” Dan-el notes the ways in which he is embedded in specific American landscapes and inseparable from them:
Every time I walk around New York, I think of how it is mine not only because I was raised there but also because my traces are all over its landscape. . . . On a street in Queens, I cut my foot as a seven-year-old and bled on the pavement . . . . On a street on the Upper West Side, my pranking eight-grade classmates wrote my home phone number in hardening concrete. . . So I lay claim to New York City as my city because my life has been staged on it, because I am embedded in it. (Padilla Peralta 298)
The specifics of place are important to Padilla Peralta because the physical space is marked by his existence—thus place, socially constructed and with social meanings, includes him. This argument enriches and deepens the standard refrain of shorter, more abbreviated DREAMer narratives that they belong here.
Dan-el’s life narrative also complicates the standard “meritorious DREAMer” story by showing us a more fully fleshed-out individual than this storyline suggests in isolation—one who certainly had accomplishments but could also potentially have been excluded from qualification for a DREAM Act based on the stupidities of young teenagers who don’t know any better. Dan-el’s intelligence and studiousness earn him spots and scholarships to a prestigious private high school, then to Princeton, then to Oxford for graduate school—in this way, like Reyna, he conforms to the storyline of academic achievement. But Dan-el extends this narrative; he is not just a student getting good grades. As he notes in his prologue, “It was so played out, this whole hood-boy-in-richy-rich-school saga; my story was just a variation on a familiar theme” (Padilla Peralta 4). It is a stock narrative, however, that he actively resists.
In one episode, he describes planning a shoplifting of headphones and other music paraphernalia from Tower Records with his friends from Resurrection Church. Even though, by this point in his career, he is attending Collegiate School and planning to apply to ivy league universities, he is the planner and organizer of the shoplifting endeavor, taking the “blame” retrospectively squarely upon himself: “I’d been fucking stupid to get caught up in this mess in the first place” (Padilla Peralta 155). But, although this incident would seem to place Dan-el within the “bad immigrant” model, this single experiment with crime hardly rules out Dan-el’s potential for contribution to society, as his later accomplishments indicate; rather, it is much more in line with the countless numbers of citizen teenagers who do stupid (and illegal) things in their youth, when the awareness of consequences is not yet fully developed, and go on to be accomplished adults.
As Dan-el notes in his epilogue, he has been forced “to confront the stories that could and would be told about me if I did not take charge of their telling. . . . I had and have no intention of ever being only a Dominican, or a minority, or an undocumented immigrant, or a Spanish Harlem resident; or a Collegiate man, a Princeton man, an Oxford man” (Padilla Peralta 294-95). Dominant racist and anti-immigrant stereotypes shape the “stories that could and would be told” about the first four categories such that they easily fit within the “bad immigrant” mold; conversely, equally reductive stereotypes about the last three categories fit them within the story of a “good immigrant” or meritorious DREAMer. Dan-el’s retrospective narrative, as well as his crafting of the “plot” of his memoir, insists on his intersectionality—he is not any one of these things but all of them, even though they might complicate the stories told for strategic political purposes.
Conclusion: The Gilded Cage
On September 5, 2017, President Donald Trump—who had been elected the previous November with a campaign platform that included the deportation of all undocumented immigrants—announced the end of DACA. One documentary compilation of the stories of DREAMers from San Francisco State University, posted to YouTube in December 2016, bears witness to the tremendous fears of students who already had some sense of the changes in immigration policy and enforcement that were soon to come (“Undocumented and Unafraid ‘In Loving Memory’”). While an earlier era of DREAMer testimonies available on YouTube and in anthologies spoke of what it was like as teenagers to live in the shadows, the emerging post-DACA era testimonies might well prove to be notably different. DREAMers who became eligible for DACA when it was implemented in 2012 have had the experience of not needing to live entirely underground lives. The suddenness of change in policy, which threatens to drive DREAMers back into the shadows, has also stimulated a striking new production of testimonies about the psychological effects of living in a post-DACA era.
Recently, stories have also emerged in the media of DREAMers who returned to their home countries—either through deportation, or through voluntary relocation. While some of these stories attest to a sense of displacement and disorientation in their “home” country, some also bear witness, retrospectively, to the severe restrictions in the United States that stymied fulfillment. One of these stories is of Orlando Lopez, who came to the US at age three and grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, but was deported back to Mexico when he was twenty-four years old (after being released from prison, where criminal activity had landed him as a teenager). He is now married and supervises over eighty employees in Mexico. He says, “Being deported was the best thing that’s happened to me. . . . The rhythm of the life I was living, I would have been a statistic. . . . Being here in Mexico, I found my wife and we have a beautiful baby daughter together—those are huge blessings.” To DREAMers still in the US, he has this message to pass on: “Though your cage may be gilded, it doesn’t stop being a prison. . . . In Mexico, at least you’d be free” (Blanco). Narratives of DREAMers in this new post-DACA age are likely continue to complicate and contest both prevailing stereotypes about undocumented immigrants and the paradigmatic DREAMer narratives, shaped for strategic political purposes, that circulated in the first decade of the new millennium.
Works Cited
Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. Documenting the Undocumented: Latino/a Narrative and Social Justice in the Era of Operation Gatekeeper . U of Florida P, 2016.
__________. “DREAMers: Youth and Migration / American DREAMers and Mexico.” Modern Mexican Culture , edited by Stuart A. Day, U of Arizona P, 2017.
Doreen, Massey, editor. Space, Place, and Gender . Polity P, 1994.
Gonzales, Roberto G. Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America . U of California P, 2015.
Grande, Reyna. The Distance Between Us . Washington Square P, 2012.
Honig, Bonnie. Democracy and the Foreigner . Princeton UP, 2001.
Kalma. “The Undocumented.” Papers: Stories by Undocumented Youth , edited by José Manuel, et al. Graham Street Productions, 2012, p. 34.
Padilla Peralta, Dan-el. Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League . Penguin, 2015.