The deportability continuum as activist research

Dreamers on the deportability continuum

When I suggested the title Los Otros Dreamers for the book of first-person testimonio and photography that I co-produced with photographer, Nin Solis, our project contributed to the naming of a social and cultural phenomenon that had no name. The phrase was born in my apartment among a small group of deported and “self-deported” young people and Mexican activists when we decided to create a Facebook group in 2012. I love the phrase for its Spanglish, its legible reference to the United States from the aftermath of deportation, and the power of otredad:los otros speaking out from the tragic physical and emotional “othering” of forced removal. The use of the titular “otro” refers to the “otro lado” of the US–Mexico border and to the multiple registers of exclusion from normative and legislative uses of the political term “Dreamer,” a label that has been constructed to never apply to young people living but not born in the United States who also have criminal records or who did not finish high school (Anderson and Solis, 2014). The phrase proved to become even more provocative and malleable than we anticipated.

Since 2014, the “los Otros Dreamers” designation has been used in Mexican and US press and public imagination to reference the growing number of young people who were born in Mexico, raised in the United States, and are now back in Mexico due to forced removal as state policy and/or as economic necessity (Caldwell, 2017; Carcamo, 2016; Vargas, 2017). The term took on a life of its own. In Mexico, the phrase has most often been used to speak of a sanitized, politically convenient importation of the term “Dreamer” as code for the immigrants who are “more desirable” in Mexican cities and to Mexican and international business. They are young adults, they speak fluent English, they grew up in US contexts, and they often have completed high school, partial college, or college degrees. This overly simplistic use of the qualifier “otro Dreamer”—one which does not take into account the complexities of the lives of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients and ostensible Dreamers in their US contexts (Gonzales, 2016), let alone capture their diverse experiences and challenges post-return/deportation—skews the realities of a generation of youth caught in the crucible of immigration control, racial profiling, and neoliberal economic policies (Anderson, 2017). It is a dangerous misperception that has inspired populist backlash in Mexico against deported and returning young adults who can be perceived as receiving preferential treatment over their peers who grew up in Mexico. On the other hand, the term has also informed federal policy programs in Mexico that have focused on a very narrow segment of the returning population (college-educated, English-speaking, DACA-protected), one that is substantially less susceptible to the mechanisms of deportability than their peers and family members.

However, in spite of this ever-present probability of co-optation that Fredric Jameson (1991) identifies as a pervasive mechanism for maintaining the status quo in late capitalism, I learned a lot from the scalability of the keywords, “los Otros Dreamers.” We inspired initial dialogue with heterogeneous actors across borders, and a partial but potent awareness of a social reality that had been silenced on both sides of the border and across political spectrums. For example, we were invited to present the book at the University of California–Fullerton. One of the organizers of the event is a student activist and DACA-recipient. He helped wrangle the funding to invite Maggie Loredo, who contributed to the book and who until that time was living in exile in Mexico. That invitation provided the support for her application for a B1/B2 visa. In conversation after the event, the young man shared with us that he had read only half the book, reading only the stories of (semi-)voluntary return and skipping over the first-person accounts of deportation. It was too difficult to read about the realities of that which he most feared could happen to him or his family members. On the other hand, simultaneously, we were also receiving emails and Facebook messages from young people and the parents of young people who wanted to know more about the realities of return to Mexico. Even in the brief era of declining deportations and undisputed DACA protection during the final years of President Obama’s term, some were in deportation proceedings and most young people were trying to avoid them.

Furthermore, in the midst of the growing public interest in the book and its title, we prioritized the creation of opportunities for the co-articulation of demands for change. We framed the book as a tool for solidarity, an action as much as a product. This conceptualization of a book as direct action began with the book launch. With funding from a transnational Kickstarter campaign, Iniciativa Ciudad de México (the international office of the city government dedicated to serving Mexico City natives abroad), and the US–Mexico Foundation, the book featured 26 first-person narratives of deportation and return. Along with contributors Daniel Arenas, Maru Ponce, and others, we scrambled for additional funding to bring 21 of the 26 contributors to Mexico City for the book inauguration on 27 September 2014. Although most expected Nin Solis and I to show up and present the book alone, we co-presented with a diverse group of over 20 young people.

For several among them, it was the first time they met others who had also experienced the trauma of deportation or the alienation of return. During the same weekend that 43 students were disappeared in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero and 23 young people with DACA visited Mexico via Advanced Parole on the first of several government-sponsored trips, deported and returned young adults convened for the first time as “los Otros Dreamers” (Délano Alonso, 2018; EFE News Agency, 2014). The book presentation overflowed the room, defying expectation as the bursting audience included migrantólogos (academics who study migration), immigration advocates, a handful of the immigration movement leaders in Mexico with Advanced Parole, people who had heard about the book on the news, and contributors’ family members. It was an auspicious beginning.

However, my theoretical investment in cultural and cerebral modes of “othering,” informed by reading Fredric Jameson (1991), Julia Kristeva (1982), Edward Said (1978), and other postmodern/postcolonial theorists, was lost in translation when the concept was embraced by the political contingencies and popular perceptions of the day. Many of the contributors, who have been active in the book’s creation, dissemination, and value-production, and who participated in the book launch in 2014, have increasingly distanced themselves from the term. I suspect that the multiple ways that the book and its title grapple with a cross-border, racialized criminalization of youth continues to be a part of academic conversations when and where Los Otros Dreamers is taught, but the title proved limited and misguided as a tool to advance immigrant rights.

Of course, if left to my own resources, I would likely still be pushing the term as far as it could go under the implicit market-driven, Twitter-infused demands of impact-driven research. After all, the idea is to get heard. In addition, for all the intellectual reasons above, I still value the term. And time and again, I have stubbornly defended it as “strategic” to my colleagues and friends who grew up undocumented. But as we have intuitively but doggedly engaged in the hard work of creative contestation, the work of listening and making mistakes and offending one another and sticking around to learn and repair, I humbly acknowledge that I finally get it (Donohue, 2018). The term “dreamer,” for those who are confined by the legal and personal pain of exile, has become a linguistic marker for the multiple, violent exclusions that they and their families are experiencing firsthand. No scholarly adjective can qualify that loss. No success in the public sphere can justify it. And with that belated a-ha moment comes more. One of the foundational pillars of the deportation regime in a liberal democracy that ostensibly respects civil and human rights is the potential for discretion from it.

Since the early 20th century, the act of deportation as a legalized state power has been justified by the potential for discretion. Describing the legal history of the “making and unmaking of illegal aliens” in the United States, Mae Ngai (2004) details the rise of the “legal critique of deportation policy” in the 1930s when “a belief for the need for discretionary authority in the emerging regulatory state” arose (p. 78). Just a few years after the state power to deport was codified under the 1921 and 1924 Immigration Acts, the construction of a fluid, always-contested, always racially inflected deportability continuum followed. Then as now, “the contradiction between [national] sovereignty and individual rights was resolved only to the extent that the power of administrative discretion made narrow exceptions of the sovereign rule” (p. 90). Today, the possibility of legal discretion—in the form of Stays of Removal, Temporary Protected Status (TPS), and DACA—justifies the deportation of the “criminal” and provides the precedent to absolve the state from accusations of prejudiced expulsion. The Trump-Sessions immigration enforcement policies are challenging this sacred and liberal lynchpin of “discretionary procedure” in favor of an explicit policy of ethnicity-based detention and deportation, although the “exercise of administrative discretion [has] served to racialize the specter of the illegal alien” since its inception in the early 20th century (p. 90). Deportees in Mexico who spent formative years in the United States understand the tragic and racist blind spots of the liberal and progressive dependence upon discretion firsthand.

And so, I move along the above-described feedback loop, or perhaps the image of a spiral becomes more appropriate, as my research questions and concerns are now even more informed and inflected by the opinions, commentaries, and suggestions of my day-to-day colleagues, who are formerly undocumented immigrants now living in Mexico City. On any given day, we may sit down to write a strategic plan, coordinate an event with deportees, or review our efforts to meet recently deported persons as they arrive in Mexico City. My research questions around the “deportability continuum” and the preemptive power of discretion evolve in conversation and relationship with them. I suspect that many scholars working in tenure-track or other university-based positions have also invested time and effort into long-term, honest, and open relationships with their peers on the frontlines of a borderlands constructed by the inequalities that divide us, but this kind of intellectual work is rarely rendered visible and valuable as a significant element of intellectual rigor and ethical inquiry.

Furthermore, the “deportability continuum” has reverberations of scale-able communicative power, akin to the potent phrasing of “los Otros Dreamers” in 2014. It is a new term of engagement that I am following and deconstructing and reconstructing in multiple contexts. Where are those with DACA status on the deportability continuum? What lessons might we learn from the discretionary powers of DACA when placed along a continuum, in relationship to legal permanent residency, US citizenship, undocumented status, the already deported? There are other words that have influenced my scholarship, words that have a certain cache in my academic formation but have been less useful to me as an activist-scholar, words such as “transnationalism” or “the costs/benefits of migration” or “return migrants.” These phrases’ explanatory power is significant and useful, and I still use them often. However, they do not inspire my primary research investments because they do not resonate beyond academic conversations with interlocutors who are living on the frontlines of inequality and creative contestation of the status quo.

Mapping a deportability continuum across borders

Framing deportation as just one element of the broader and more far-reaching consequences of “deportability” forces us to connect the act of removal—sustained by a legal assumption of the state’s sovereign right to detain and remove a person from within its international boundaries—to the much more widespread social, cultural, economic, and political consequences of immigration enforcement that are based upon fear and control (De Genova, 2010). For example, whereas deportation enacts exile across an international boundary, deportability restricts mobility across interstate and municipal boundaries. Checkpoints and counties with active collusion between local law enforcement and federal immigration officers increasingly limit or prevent undocumented immigrants’ movement to the grocery store or to a child’s college graduation, particularly for those whose skin tone or linguistic accent are constructed as “risks” under racist and nativist enforcement practices. By mapping the concept of “deportability” on to a continuum, the complexity and breadth of this mechanism of social control reaches all the way to our conceptualizations and constructions of citizenship, as a supposed “legal protection” from the threat of deportation.

In the undergraduate course I taught at Duke in Spring 2018, titled “Immigrants in Exile: The Transnational Realities of Deportation,” the concept of the “deportability continuum” became one of the most provocative ideas that we returned to again and again to better understand the lived consequences of the expanding deportation regime in the United States and beyond. We charted a “deportability continuum” on the white board alongside extant immigration law and the evolving announcements of new immigration management measures: from the 1996 Illegal Immigrant Reform and Responsibility Act (IIRRA), the Patriot Act, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, to the termination of DACA, the rapid-fire termination of TPS for several countries, and Trump’s ongoing immigration and refugee-related Executive Orders.

On one end, we wrote “US Citizen” and moved progressively along the supposed protections from deportation constructed by US law and policy. We talked about the multiple ways that US citizens are rendered “de facto deportable” along this continuum: as the children of undocumented immigrants, as the children of Brown or Black immigrants without regularized status, as the siblings or spouses of vulnerable immigrants. We charted the vulnerability of legal permanent residents under the 1996 law and how it has been selectively enforced via racial profiling and historical/local contingencies, listening to YouTube videos uploaded by Black men of Dominican and Haitian origin who were retroactively deported from New York City post-9/11 for criminal sentences served in the 1980s and 1990s (Keyss, 2015). We charted several examples of deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in spite of a semi-authorized presence by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) while a person is in the process of applying for a visa. We talked about where we might map ourselves on this continuum when US citizenship coupled with Whiter skin and/or European American descent renders one “safer” or “more privileged” than naturalized US citizens and US citizens with non-European ethnic identities and/or socially constructed appearance.

On the other end of the continuum, we wrote, “Deported with a lifetime bar.” We followed the deportability continuum across the international boundary into the aftermath of deportation. If a person reenters the United States without authorization after having been deported, he or she faces automatic criminal proceedings for a felony that can result in imprisonment for no more than 2 years. Under the 1996 IIRRA, there is a spectrum of automatic bars that limit access to multiple forms of legal reentry in the aftermath of deportation and return, including temporary or non-immigrant visas. The IIRRA created automatic bars for “illegal presence” that prohibit reentry to the United States for 3 years based on over 180 days of unauthorized presence, 10 years for over 365 days, and up to life for deportations due to aggravated felonies. The bars are also automatically applied to men and women who left the United States voluntarily in order to complete an immigration visa process, to accompany a deported family member, or to move to another country for any number of reasons. One does not have to actually experience deportation in order to experience the consequences of it: family separation, trauma, obstacles to integration, and exile via mobility bars. And at the far end of the current deportability continuum, mostly Brown and Black young men are living in exile from the United States with a lifetime bar for crimes that would have resulted in 1- to 5-year prison terms for their US citizen peers.

Thus, the US deportability continuum is so expansive that its reach includes US citizens and legal permanent residents within US territory as well as voluntary returns or “self-deportation” to countries of origin. The deportability continuum is most often used as a fundamentally nation-centric concept because the norms and threat of deportability are constructed and contained by physical residency, legally recognized or not, within national boundaries. In fact, one would assume that on the other side of a militarized international border, back in a country of origin with birthright citizenship, one is no longer “deportable,” right? Wrong.

There are isolated but concrete instances of the Mexican National Institute of Migration detaining and deporting Mexican citizens based on racial and linguistic profiling. Persons with Mexican birth certificates but of indigenous origin, African origin, with linguistic markers of Central American Spanish, and Mexican citizen children of migrants in transit have all been subject to the expanding deportability continuum under the US-backed Plan Frontera Sur. Otros Dreams en Acción (ODA), the organization I co-founded in 2015 with Maggie Loredo, recently supported a young man who was born in Mexico, whose mother was from Belize, and whose wife and children were from Honduras. He told of us of being detained in a Mexican immigration detention center the previous year for 1 month until his aunt in Florida sent a US $1000 bribe to the agent in order to insist on a more effective search for his Mexican identity number (Clave Única de Registro de Población or CURP), an online search which ODA completed in less than an hour. Although I do not have the time or space to do so here, the Plan Frontera Sur, signed by former President Enrique Peña Nieto in 2014, also begs a mapping of a transnational deportability continuum wherein US–Mexican joint policies of migration management and control have extended far beyond national geographic boundaries (Varela, 2018).

Although there are many important differences, in Mexico, as in the United States, both the threat of deportation and the aftermath of deportation expose the mythic and fractured realities of liberal national and legally codified definitions of birthright and naturalized citizenship (and the above-mentioned inadequate reliance on discretion to navigate such fractures). The deportability continuum directly engages the fluid dialectics, and the fragile fictions, of national citizenship. In Migration Borders Freedom, a monograph that takes seriously the seemingly “utopian possibility of achieving a world in which we all possess freedom of migration,” Harald Bauder (2016) begins by pointing out that “freedom emerges when social and political practices engage and transform the conditions that have produced unfreedom” (p. 10). The “deportability continuum” is one of the most pervasive and normalized conditions of unfreedom across modern nation-states. Extending the analysis and exposure of deportability and its consequences across borders is one of many ways to begin to engage, disrupt, and transform the economic, political, and sociocultural norms that underpin popular justifications “to completely seal borders” at all costs (Bauder, 2016: 5). And, of course, as Bauder, following Hannah Arendt points out, “freedom is achieved through action … through transformative social and political practice,” practices such as setting out on foot to cross international borders in order to keep one’s children safe; or insisting to be heard, and to be allowed to return, after having been expelled from a national territory (and imaginary); or establishing equitable collaborations and coalitions across borders with those directly affected by laws and policies that enforce borders in order to establish artificial silos of natural and economic resources while restricting access to freedom of movement (Bauder, 2016: 7).

A post-deportation continuum and community organizing

The deportability continuum is a new vocabulary word heard around “Poch@ House,” a multicultural safe space in Mexico City that was established by ODA in January 2018. The term helps to name the complexities of life as Poch@s in Mexico, some who still identify as Latinxs. Becoming Latinx while growing up or studying in the United States does not protect one from deportability or deportation, and in many cases, one’s self-identification as Latinx results in becoming less legible and less accepted as “Mexican” once back in Mexico. Many have written about the cultural alienation in the aftermath of deportation wherein US-based identities can become assets and/or liabilities in birthplace countries such as Mexico, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, or El Salvador (Boehm, 2016; Brotherton and Barrios, 2011; Coutin, 2007; Golash-Boza, 2015), and the creation and naming of Poch@ House is no exception.

In colloquial Mexican Spanish, “pocho” or “pocha” refers to a person of Mexican descent who has become “US Americanized” as evidenced in English-language fluency, accented Spanish, clothing, and other Mexican stereotypes of the “gringo.” Many deportees and returnees have been called “pocho/a” in a derogatory or critical context, implying that they are less than Mexican and/or in need of correction in order to assimilate in Mexico. After a 2-month process of focus groups and online surveys of deported and returned young adults who identify as bicultural, the ODA community decided to name the new cultural space “Poch@ House.” The term represents an active “appreciation, celebration, and revindication of a new hybrid and multiple culture in Mexico, one of Spanglish, of exile, of being from here and from there” (Otros Dreams en Acción, 2018).

At Poch@ House, we are collectively and individually conscientious of our place on and our relationship to the current construction of an expanding deportability continuum across the Americas. In the aftermath of deportation, the “deportability continuum” concept sheds light on the profound legal and sociocultural overlap between “self-deportation” and deportation, as well as differentiated obstacles for survival and well-being post-deportation/return in Mexico, and around the globe. In Poch@ House and the larger virtual community around it, conversations are happening around these similarities and differences.

Discussion around the construction of a “deportability continuum” in the United States has led us to some surprising discoveries. The distinctions between the experience of detention and deportation versus having made the decision to move to Mexico, even under very difficult circumstances, are profound and multiple. Those who have experienced detention and forced removal at the hands of US immigration agents struggle with Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome and the despair of exile in ways that those who made the difficult decision to avoid deportation often do not, at least not to the same extent. This has been a very human point of division among a nascent social movement for the recognition of the rights of the deported and returned in Mexico and the United States. Who speaks for whom? How to voice the pain and suffering of one deportation, let alone thousands? The “deportability continuum” is a concept that allows people affected differently by state violence, including those with US citizenship as described above, to see ourselves in differentiated relationship to one another under policies that affect a much broader and more diverse swath of immigrant and citizen populations than perceived.

We also talk about mobility privilege among our community on a continuum ranging from temporary non-immigrant visas to a US passport. The right to mobility across borders is distinct from the right to stay, to belong, in a country. Part of the collateral damage of undocumented status or extended waits in order to obtain authorized status in a country is the restriction of movement across international, and in many cases, even internal state borders. Family separation has been a reality for generations of mixed-status families in the United States as the costly consequences of travel back and forth between the destination country and the country of origin leads to the difficult calculus of economic and political safety over sharing a home and community (Abrego, 2014). With the Trump cancellation of DACA, access to apply for Advanced Parole was also rescinded, returning thousands of youth to a state of exile from their countries of origin (Letter from Congress Coalition Advocating for Restoration of Dreamers’ Advanced Parole, 2018). And increasingly, as described above, due to the automatic bars for applying for a non-immigrant or immigrant visa under the 1996 IIRRA, the legal effects of deportability extend far beyond a deportation or a semi-voluntary return. Among those who have semi-voluntarily returned, and even among those who have been deported, there are those who have B1/B2 non-immigrant visa to travel back and forth between their two countries. Similar to protections from deportation, the granting of a visa depends upon policies of untransparent and unappealable discretion by individual officers of the US embassies and consulates abroad. In Poch@ House, the inverse of the deportability continuum is a mobility continuum that we are in the process of mapping.

Deportability and deportation also map onto a highly diversified and intersectional experience of birthright citizenship upon “return” to Mexico. In addition to the limited instances of the deportation of Mexican citizens, deportees and returnees experience vulnerability and the ability to exercise their rights as national citizens on a range that is directly affected by the conditions of removal, race, gender, age, class, family support, and educational attainment. For many, the first of many surprises has been the discovery that they are “undocumented” in their birth country also. The requirements to obtain a birth certificate, an electoral identification card (known as the “INE”, the most commonly accepted form of ID in Mexico), or a Mexican passport are multiple, onerous, and, in some cases, impossible to meet for recent deportees and returnees. Similarly, US citizen children who move to Mexico with their parents can find themselves “undocumented” due to the ignorance of Mexican government officials and the costly process to obtain a certificate of national identity as binational Mexicans, which is their right under the Mexican constitution. The supposed binaries of citizen:immigrant and documented:undocumented are legal fictions that actually operate on an intersectional continuum of vulnerability and privilege. The intersectional continuum also breaks down common notions of national identity and belonging post-deportation.

The other day, in the hall just outside of Poch@ House, I was talking about the Dominican Republican and Cambodian deportees with a Mexican deportee who grew up in New York City. We were discussing how many have more in common with one another than with peers in their countries of origin: a deportation diaspora. He exclaimed, “I get goosebumps just thinking about that” (personal communication, 15 December 2018). We are collectively and strategically articulating this new Latinx diaspora, people who came to identify as Latinx in the United States now navigating the aftermath of deportation and return in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Ecuador, Brazil, and Mexico. Many have mentioned that they remain in touch via Facebook and email with each other after spending long periods together in US detention centers. In conversations with potential allies and funders, we are asking whether it is appropriate to continue to define the Latinx community within US borders. Does one stop being Latinx when forced to leave Los Angeles or New York or Chicago? What role does Latinx identity-affiliation play in the deportability continuum within and beyond the United States?

Perhaps the realities of the lived experiences of forced migration, of transnational access to the protections and norms of citizenship, and of deportability/deportation have not been subject to widespread academic exploration because there has not always been a clear, direct connection to viable public policy change. As Oliver Bakewell (2008) describes in the context of Europe-based refugee studies, “the limited scope of research … is framed around policy categories and concerns, often in an attempt to ensure that the findings are relevant and serve to improve the very distressing circumstances associated with forced migration” (p. 433). The push for immigration reform in the United States and the unexamined reliance on discretion from deportation under the Obama Administration in the United States served to obscure the realities of deportation and return of hundreds of thousands of individuals and families between 2008 and 2016. Under the Trump Administration, the State’s legal and enforcement apparatus for detention and deportation built up since the Clinton Administration has been authorized to operate without the discretionary lynchpin under a liberal nationalist regime. In the US context, policy change in favor of undocumented and already-deported mixed-status families seems even further from viable debate in government chambers. And in the Mexican context, particularly given the regional crisis of an exodus from the violence and corruption in Central America countries, the complexities of concrete policy change that improves the lives of migrants are daunting.

Conceptualizing a transnational deportability continuum, as well as associated notions of a mobility and citizenship continuums, might help us begin to theorize the structural crises as well as the systemic reforms that must go beyond the limited scope of policy viability. We urgently need to co-create transnational critiques and transformational demands with those who are directly affected by discriminatory and violent public policies. The research must first and foremost remain relevant to the viability for improvement of lived experiences and individual/community well-being across borders. This has implications for our keywords, our methodologies, our subjects of research, and our own positionality as scholars and teachers.

Activist research and the creative redistribution of resources

As the United States’ robust immigration control apparatus is unleashed in the service of an ad hoc White supremacist project to violently reverse the demographic trends that predict the United States as a “White minority” country before 2050, activist research resourced via Latinx Studies—vocabularies, concepts, and funding—is ever more urgent and necessary. In addition to my scholarly investments in the power of certain ideas and terms to draw connection and build community without erasing inequality, violence, and difference, the linked exchange of concrete resources with higher education institutions for activist research cannot be underestimated. The application for B1/B2 visas, mentioned above, in order to present Los Otros Dreamers was supported with fully funded invitations to contributors to present the book at several universities in the United States. A few of those who applied were able to obtain a non-resident visa that recognized their right to travel back and forth between their two countries and, in addition to providing the university community the opportunity to learn directly from them, many were then able to reunite with families on the US side of the border before returning to Mexico. Many of those who applied were denied a visa, in circumstances that were not transparent and often arbitrary, but then participated in the event via Internet. Their participation served to expose the hypocrisy and injustice of laws that punish immigrants for trying to comply with the law and then continue to penalize people for years after deportation. These events were only possible with the financial support of departmental funds for guest speakers redirected for maximum impact. Latinx Studies is one example of the insurgent, postcolonial, revisionist disciplinary spaces that assume the interruption and re-articulation of access to the university’s resourced spaces, and the Otros Dreamers book tour is one example of that work happening in the margins.

Thus, as an activist researcher, I have a vested interest in increased and widespread collaborations between activists and those working within academic institutions. Higher education not only provides spaces to amplify marginalized and silenced voices, but it also provides the funding to do so. We can creatively channel funding to directly affected persons and communities who are willing to converse and dialogue with academics and students, by inviting those who are experts in the margins as paid speakers and writers. We can create mechanisms for sharing research resources such as access to research engines and journals behind paywalls. We can conscientiously negotiate the resources available in terms of translocal efforts to redistribute wealth to persons and communities marked by historically entrenched exclusionary practices.

In a “Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University”—a report by Imagining America, a national consortium of more than 100 colleges and universities dedicated to public scholarship in the arts and humanities—Carol Schneider, then President of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, describes this approach as a horizontal figure eight, or an infinity loop, wherein

the left-side loop represents a scholarly community of practice—the academic field—with its own questions, debates, validation procedures, communication practices, and so on. The right-side loop represents scholarly work with the public—with community partners, in collaborative problem-solving groups, through projects that connect knowledge with choices and action. … Left-loop work ought to be informed and enriched by work in the right-side loop, and vice versa. Travel back and forth should be both expected and rewarded … (Ellison and Eatman, 2008: x)

I have pursued engaged scholarship for social justice as a hybrid scholar not working within the demands of the “right-side loop” of tenure-track employment, a choice that has had its costs and benefits. However, I have maintained important connections with communicative practices and colleagues in institutions of higher education, and therefore, I have been able to move in and out of university settings to get resourced, personally and collectively, and to share resources, individually and in community. With a big learning curve along the way, I have been able to use my privileges—not only my racialized Whiteness and access to a US passport but also the cultural capital and powerful skillset of a doctoral degree—strategically. This movement back and forth has enriched, pushed, and deepened my worldview, my community of peers, and my research.

In the process of co-creating, publishing, and distributing Los Otros Dreamers, I learned firsthand about the challenges of research across structural and historical inequalities and systems of oppression that are maintained and managed via international borders and the immigration control apparatus. The results have been diverse, multiple, at times overwhelming, and co-created in community: a book of ethnographic testimonies and photos, three scholarly articles, public talks, media interviews, a binational family, permanent residency in my second country, an overflowing inbox of emails from people who are inspired by and interested in this work, a non-profit organization, and a cultural space for bicultural exiles.

In this essay, at this difficult time for so many immigrant families, I have shared some of what I have learned from doing activist research as a kind of “cultural dynamics.” Many of us with advanced training in specific disciplines feel called to imagine and invite cross-contamination of knowledge-creation, knowledge-dissemination, and knowledge-resources while holding ourselves to rigorous ethical standards of responsibility and the right use of power and privilege. It is a path that requires humility, the ability to learn from one’s mistakes, a practice of compassionate listening, a willingness to not speak up at times, and the courage to lay down ideas and projects in favor of other riskier opportunities. I lift up the example of the “deportability continuum,” one among many potent terms, that activist researchers might translate beyond its significant but limited academic contexts to broader impact and influence. This is one path from my experience and perspective, but by no means the only one. Thank goodness there are as many paths as there are people walking them.