This article presents a case study that examines how undocumented youth reject notions that, as students, they are more deserving of state-granted rights (e.g., citizenship, but also temporary rights through DACA). It highlights the use of what I call undocumented pedagogy as a form of everyday activism for greater immigrant rights. This…

This article explores how non citizens, primarily members of the 1.5-generation, experience and rhetorically contest deservingness. We argue that deservingness is constructed through multiple sources including the media, immigrant rights movements, and the law, resulting in a binary of good/bad migrants that does not fully capture the lived…

Rhetoric, policy, and debate about immigration and immigrants are saturated with the trope of deservingness. In nation/states built on stratification, deservingness acts as a discourse of racialization, narrating across racially minoritized groups to re-instantiate the benefits for the racially majoritized. In this theoretical essay, I draw from…

This article contributes to the literature on undocumented youth activism and citizenship by assessing undocumented youth's challenges to a growing regime of migration control in the US. It uses Doug McAdam's tactical interaction as an analytical lens to explore two consecutive high-risk campaigns, ICE infiltrations and expulsion/re-entry. In this…

This conceptual article addresses the need for educators to interrupt status-quo silences surrounding the role of immigration status in schools--an issue that disproportionately impacts Latina/os. In this article we: (a) articulate the need for teacher education to address the impact of undocumented status in school settings; (b) present…