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  • A Collective Lens for the Public Writing Classroom: Undocumented Student Organizing
  • Glenn Hutchinson (bio)

I am an undocumented immigrant. This month, I and nine other undocumented young people were arrested in Charlotte, N.C., after staging a sit-in that stopped traffic at a busy downtown intersection.

Our goal is education, not deportation, for undocumented students.

Ours is a movement that started in Arizona and then spread to California, Georgia, and North Carolina. This movement is not going away.

Although President Obama has promised change, his administration is deporting people at a faster rate than the Bush administration did.

We are tired of waiting for change. We are tired of seeing families torn apart. So we took action.

When my family moved here, I was 4 years old, and my brother was 2. When we got older, we realized that going to college and living as everyone else does would be difficult. I graduated from college, but my brother hasn’t been able to complete his education.

In many states, including mine, more anti-immigration laws are being passed.

So we spent three days in jail to challenge a system that has deported nearly a million people in the last three years. We were willing to be sent to a federal detention center, but because of all the publicity surrounding our protest, we were released. I guess officials want to pretend nothing happened.

Although we still face criminal charges, the government has dropped our deportation orders. This, however, prevents us from challenging our immigration status and applying for work permits. Despite our academic accomplishments, community involvement, and all our hard work, we have been left in limbo again.

Some say we are not Americans. But our civil disobedience shows how much we love this country and how American we are. Like the activists of the civil rights movement, we are standing up for our ideals, and we are willing to sacrifice.

We want to be citizens. We want opportunities, not deportations.

—Angelica Velazquillo, “An Undocumented Immigrant Speaks Out” 1 [End Page 118]

In the op-ed above, published in the Philadelphia Inquirer and syndicated through the Progressive Media Project in newspapers across the country, Angelica discusses why she and nine other undocumented young people decided to practice civil disobedience in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 6, 2011. She places her op-ed in the context of movements across the country challenging the record number of deportations made by the Obama administration. In these movements, students have blocked intersections, and they have been arrested, so that they can be heard and so that they can change an immigration system. Throughout the United States, they have organized for classroom access, in-state tuition, and the end to deportations. They have formed intersectional alliances with other groups advocating for social justice issues like a living wage, the rights of farmworkers, and an end to the school-to-prison pipeline. Angelica includes part of her own personal story and links civil disobedience to something very American as she writes, “Like the activists of the civil rights movement, we are standing up for our ideals, and we are willing to sacrifice.” By confronting a system that questions their right to live in the United States, these students’ activism questions the “legitimacy” of unjust laws (Negrón-Gonzales, “Undocumented Youth Activism” 99). The protest Angelica contributed to connected to others around the country that escalated into the next summer, putting pressure on President Obama to sign DACA before the 2012 election.

Student organizing in the immigrant rights movement can give a new lens for the public writing classroom, where students write for a specific audience outside of academia. The perspectives of student organizers can help transform writing assignments like petitions, op-eds, digital writing, social media, and other community-based/public writing assignments for the course. This kind of writing can help form publics for short-term campaigns and for long-term community organizing. In essence, their collective work as rhetors can make it possible for them to enter a public discourse that tries to exclude them, and they can form a more inclusive public sphere. It may be argued that such rhetorical activism requires...

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