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Underground Undergrads: UCLA Undocumented Immigrant Students Speak Out
In March 2006 I had just accepted a job as an Assistant Professor of English at UCLA as a specialist in Chicano Literature. From my home in Pennsylvania I watched the televised protests against Representative James Sensenbrenner’s (R-WI) draconian immigration [End Page 69] bill (HR 4437) as hundreds of thousands of protestors took to the streets around the country. I could not wait to get to Los Angeles to teach and learn with the future leaders of the revolution. It was a romantic picture. The reality is equally inspiring, if slightly more complicated. My first quarter teaching at UCLA, a brilliant and passionate student named Mario Escobar took my seminar on Chicana/o literature and globalization. He came to my office hours one day to talk about Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, which we were reading for class. He was moved by her description of the border as “una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (Anzaldúa 3). It reminded him, he said, of the dead, dismembered bodies he saw stacked along the Honduran border while serving as a child soldier during El Salvador’s civil war. I stared at him in silence, thinking, “Wow, I am really out of my depth—what can I possibly teach this person about la frontera?”
Mario, who took a rubber bullet during the Los Angeles protests, was just recently granted asylum in the United States and is featured, along with seven other UCLA students, in the new book Underground Undergrads: UCLA Undocumented Students Speak Out. The book is published by UCLA’s Center for Labor Research and Education and grew out of a class the center offers called “Immigrant Rights, Labor, and Higher Education.” The documented and undocumented students in the class conducted interviews, researched legal history and community resources, and collected visual and verbal art for the book. It is a powerful and moving testament to the lived experience of immigration today and reflects the growing student movement around immigration and educational access.
Underground Undergrads is organized in three parts: Legislation, Speaking Out, and Taking Action. The first covers the history of immigration legislation since 1980 with a particular focus on the California and Federal DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Acts, which, at the Federal level, provides a path to legalization for undocumented students. The second section offers in-depth, personal views on how eight undocumented students made their paths to UCLA and how they grapple with the dearth of options available to them upon graduation. The third section describes IDEAS (Improving Dreams, Equality, Access and Success), a student support group for undocumented students at UCLA, and includes a number of other resources for readers looking to learn more and get involved in the immigrants’ rights struggle.
Besides serving as a resource for political action, this book is a useful research and teaching tool. Though one wishes for more depth in the legislation section—a broader historical overview and a more consistent effort at placing California legislation in a Federal context, for example—the section does offer a comprehensive schematic history and allows us as readers to find our bearings in a complex field, a real benefit to undergraduates in a variety of disciplines. Underground Undergrads’ real strength, though, lies in the personal narratives which are both powerful and compelling. These can be used as standalone texts to illuminate historical or sociological analyses, as a complement to fictional narratives of immigration or political conflicts abroad, or in courses on oral histories and memoir (some are first [End Page 70] person narratives and some are told to a third party).
But Underground Undergrads’ appeal transcends its use value. Everybody should read this book: students, educators, legislators, commentators. Anyone who has ever called the undocumented lazy or criminal, or felt that the immigrant’s struggle was irrelevant to their own, will be hard-pressed to defend those claims against these testimonies of hope and perseverance.
Underground Undergrads: UCLA Undocumented Immigrant Students Speak Out is in paperback for $10 and available only from CLRE at http://www.labor.ucla.edu/publications/books/underground.html .
Marissa López is an Assistant Professor of English at UCLA. She is affiliated faculty with Chicana/o Studies and sits on the Faculty Advisory Committee of the Chicana/o Studies Research Center. López is also a member of the MLA’s Committee on the Literature of the People of Color of the United States and Canada, which is charged with promoting research on literature by people of color and developing institutional guidelines concerning faculty, graduate students, and curricula. She is currently working on a book about Chicana/o literature and globalization that reads race in Chicana/o literature as a product of hemispheric economic tension beginning in the nineteenth-century. She can be reached at mklopez@ucla.edu.
