UndocU:
Reimagining Institutions, Advocacy, and Belonging
with
Undocumented Students and Mixed Status Families
Friday May 3rd, 2019 at CSU, Long Beach
About the Conference
Recent efforts to dismantle the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and to enhance immigration enforcement have left the future uncertain for many immigrant and undocumented youth. The Pew Research Center estimates that the LA-Long Beach-Anaheim metro area has 89,900 DACA recipients, the largest number of DACA recipients of any major metro area in the country. While DACA was only ever a temporary solution, scholars have demonstrated that DACA recipients made significant economic and social gains thanks to the stability and safety that the program provided (Cebulko and Silver 2016; Huber et al. 2014; Wong et al. 2017). With the future of DACA and immigration reform uncertain, what are the prospects for DACA recipients, their families and the communities where they live?
Beyond DACA recipients, California is also home to large numbers of mixed-status families, where some members may be undocumented while others have various types of temporary legal status or citizenship. Indeed, 12% of Californians live with an undocumented family member. DACA recipients and their families are deeply integrated into the fabric of U.S. communities and contribute to the political, social, economic, and cultural life of our country. Media framing, application requirements, and public opinion illustrate that these young people are deserving individuals who are American, except on paper.
In honor of the 4th anniversary of the opening of the Dream Success Center at California State University, Long Beach in Spring 2019, and drawing on our geographic strength as a location with a robust and active immigrant youth population, we invite papers, presentations, roundtables, performances, and art installations for a one-day conference focused on research with and in support of undocumented students, their families, and communities. We particularly value presentations that are interdisciplinary and that bring together students, faculty, community members, and activists.
Proposals might address themes of policing and surveillance, undocumented student experiences and campus support systems, youth resilience and activism, or how people make meaning and create lives in uncertain and violent legal contexts, local initiatives to support mixed-status families. Others might consider what these recent changes mean for local communities, for university and college campuses.
The conference will be anchored by a keynote talk by Dr. Roberto Gonzales, author of Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America (2015, UC Press).
