Abstract
Keywords
Lives in Limbo offers an honest, eye-opening perspective on immigration issues often missing from mainstream diplomatic discourse. This book discloses the realities of 150 undocumented young adults in the Los Angeles County area, how they grew up, and how their undocumented statuses unknowingly guided their futures, irrespective of hard work and educational attainment. A timely topic, this book is particularly significant during our country’s current state of volatile sociopolitical temperament. What sets this book apart from others is that it unveils the opposite in what has historically translated to the concept of the ‘American Dream’: hard work and a strong educational foundation equates to long-term success. However, this translation of success may or may not be attainable for undocumented youth, no matter their hard work, educational achievements, or even the implementation of progressive state policies aimed to assist in the transition of undocumented persons into adulthood.
The author masterfully portrays 150 undocumented young adults and the unchartered and ambiguous life course trajectories they face. He sheds light on the band-aid placed on the systemic issues that arise in our educational system by allowing undocumented migrants to function and integrate into K-12 public schools but offering no tools to navigate life as adults. Gonzales further discusses that having an undocumented status simultaneously confounds with their minority status, forcing them into a unique cultural ecosystem that pushes them to work harder and supersede the successes of their parents yet not allowing them to create an identity of their own, mainly one in which they can be free of deportation fears. The Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy offsets some of the other obstacles that impede undocumented youths’ transitions to adulthood, but it does little to curtail fears of deportation that resurface every two years, bringing into question the many factors that undocumented persons must navigate and negotiate: quality of life, social identity, capital, and networks. Methodologically rigorous, through patience and time the author was able to successfully gain entry into a vulnerable population. Individual, qualitative snapshots of the lives of these undocumented youth shed much light on unknown puzzle pieces. However, for this country, what the final immigration picture will show remains an ongoing, bipartisan pain point.
A major strength of the work is that the author poignantly shows the negative life impact on undocumented youth by an obvious lack of investment in the formulation of a social identity. Even for those who have lived in this country their entire lives and been shaped by American ideologies, their undocumented statuses impede them from identifying with their communities and building social capital and networks that can catapult them to further successes. When the author begins to discuss study participants, he captivates the audience with real life context upfront; readers are instantly invested in the participants’ stories. To Americans who need not worry about immigration status, their imperceptible daily struggles and barriers are heartbreaking. As the importance of policy and American immigration history are necessary as the foundation of the work, the entire first portion of the book would have been more captivating if discussed in conjunction with the participants’ struggles themselves, not as a separate portion to commence the work. A major advantage of ethnography is that you can align the human with the data. Of note, Gonzales did not circumvent an extremely significant conclusion: the immigration end goal. One of the more apparent immigration issues is that federal and state governments are trying to ameliorate tangential immigration problems, by creating policies that only minimally and temporally fix issues, but the argument does not have a clear goal to work towards. You cannot advocate for better policies when the endpoints do not match up on a bipartisan level. If not, the cyclic unrest of undocumented immigrations will be just that: never-ending. It would be interesting to see how Gonzales will further his work with undocumented youth as they maneuver policies from the DACA era and into the Trump administration.
Qualitative studies and personal ethnographic accounts such as those captured by the author’s fieldwork are imperative because they truly grasp the current immigration landscape being shaped by a small in-set of policy makers who may or may not fully understand the extent to which their rules govern an individual’s day to day. Because in the pursuit of the ‘American Dream’ and to be afforded the ‘perks’ of accumulated cultural and social capital, citizens must put forth educational effort by reaching basic milestones and engaging within the cultures for which they live; those are the risks for undocumented persons. Gonzales’s work highlights the cultural and economical dangers of maintaining piecemeal immigration policies and how they affect the country, not just the individual.