Migrant Futures: Waiting, Hope, and Fieldwork in the San Joaquin Valley
Creators: name: Cabrera, Gabrielle
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2024

description: Citizenship, bestowed with a mythical quality, does not necessarily transform everyday lives of undocumented migrants. Yet the promise of citizenship often seems worth waiting for and it remains an aspiration where dreams and hopes of the future are projected. Among my undocumented interlocutors, day-to-day desires such as housing, working with dignity, and raising children sustain their hopes despite the struggles of life without papers. This dissertation explores how waiting for citizenship and immigration reform challenges dominant narratives of hope and future-making in everyday life for undocumented migrants across different generations: youth in college without DACA, working DACAmented young adults, and undocumented parents, fieldworkers, and community organizers. The life chances of without DACA, who I refer to as the “Post-DACA generation” is constrained compared young adults who received DACA during the Obama era. The dissertation explores the betrayal experienced by the post-DACA generation, especially those who attended university, the so called American “great equalizer.” In addition, I explore experiences of undocumented mothers and grandmothers, who must balance their domestic life and familial responsibilities with their desire for community activism, as well as the aspirations they impart onto the future generation. Their understanding of life, citizenship and the future in the United States is different than the broader migrant youth population. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate the complexity of undocumented life and delineate how to ascribe value to undocumented life without solely reifying trauma, victimhood, and deservingness vis-à-vis resilience. Undocumented migrants aspire, refute, and strategically use the language of moral and legal legibility to further claims their claims for US citizenship. The dissertation considers their “ordinary” aspirations about the future. Building on Berlant’s (2011) Cruel Optimism, I argue that citizenship suspends and catalyzes people’s social actions and self-fashioning. Through ethnographic interviews, participant-observation, and life histories, I analyze the temporal orientations undocumented migrants feel and experience (such as the wait for citizenship, feeling stuck, and ideals of futures) as they live years without papers. The future—whatever that may be for my interlocutors and waiting are primary themes for framing the lived experience, self-embodiment, and narratives of undocumented migrants. I ethnographically demonstrate how undocumented people live as they encounter the realities of waiting and living a life without papers. Hope was often used to describe their aspirations, dreams, and their desires for a good life, despite the fraught tensions and consideration that citizenship may not be the panacea to the structural condition that haunts undocumented life such as detainment, deportation, and uncertainty. My dissertation contributes to the growing body of scholarship on migration and temporality; the different experiences and life chances of undocumented migrants across various generations from youth without DACA, young adults with DACA, and the older parent-grandparent generation; the importance of field work in the Central Valley for sustaining people’s everyday realities, yet not enough to symbolize the “better life” they migrated for. Finally, the dissertation argues against the public perception of migrants as lacking agency or only seen between the divisive poles of criminality and innocence.