Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States
Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States takes readers on a journey through the history of the rise of undocumented youth social movements in the United States in the twenty-first century. The book follows the documentation trail of undocumented youth activists spanning over two decades of organizing. Each chapter carefully analyzes key organizing strategies used by undocumented youth to produce direct forms of activism that expose and critique repressive forms of state control and violence. This inquiry is particularly generative in relation to how immigrant bodies are erased, contained, and imagined as “aliens” or “illegal.”
Rafael A. Martínez, an undocu-scholar, intricately weaves his lived experience into this deeply insightful exploration. Martínez’s interdisciplinary approach will engage scholars and readers alike, resonating with disciplines such as history, American studies, Chicana and Chicano studies, and borderlands studies.
Illegalized shows that undocumented youth and their activism represent a disruption to the social imaginary of the U.S. nation-state and its figurative and physical borders. It invites readers to explore how undocumented youth activists changed the way immigrant rights are discussed in the United States today.
Bio
Rafael A. Martínez is an assistant professor of southwest borderlands in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University. At ASU, he teaches courses on the American Southwest, Arizona history, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and transborder Chicano literature. Martínez is also a program faculty for the MA narrative studies program and co-director of ASU's Latinx Oral History Lab in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts.
Martínez's work focuses on immigration, migration, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands studies and the American Southwest to demonstrate how communities along the Mexico-U.S. border contribute to the social, political and economic fabric of the U.S.
Through the Latinx Oral History Lab, Martínez is engaged in public projects that seek to connect academic work with community development. As such, he has focused considerable efforts in exploring the historical contributions of Latinx and ethnic communities in Phoenix's East Valley. In 2023, Rafael completed a project, Querencia: Voices from Chandler's Latinx Barrios, where he collected the oral histories of Latinx community members across Chandler's historical barrios and contemporary immigrant neighborhoods. The project's success culminated in an exhibit and digital archive of the oral histories with the Chandler Museum.
Praise for this book
The methodology of undocumenting activism is an important one for scholars of immigration and social movements. This book does important work undocumenting what undocumented youth activists did, why they did it, and what it means for all of us in the Americas.
Karma R. Chávez Author of The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance
Rafael Martínez’s Illegalized offers a powerfully written, methodically researched, and compellingly argued contribution to the growing literature on immigrant youth’s activism. Martínez compellingly tells the story of multiple undocumented youth movements through a focus on the question of how one might utilize academic approaches to document a movement led by those who are undocumented. A much-needed and immensely timely addition, Illegalized is a must-read for scholars, activists, and scholar-activists alike.
Kevin Escudero Author of Organizing While Undocumented: Immigrant Youth’s Poli
