“I think at this point I’m willing to do anything for the DREAM Act.” (Cassandra, August 2, 2010)
If NLD youth in Rocktown are inclusively sequestered into particular social spaces, and particular “ways of being and belonging” (Levitt and Glick-Schiller 2004) then local expressions of DREAM Activism can be argued to have capitalized on the inclusion in order to disrupt sequestration. In this chapter, I review the organization of
the local DREAM Activist Virginia chapter, primarily through the work of Cassandra Ibarra, demonstrating how she and others leveraged the social capital they gained through institutionalized processes of inclusion towards their own goals – in this case, national-level advocacy for passage of the DREAM Act – and against the political and legal sequestration they still continue to experience.
To reiterate briefly, the DREAM Act was a proposed piece of legislation (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) first introduced in Congress in 2001, revised and resubmitted various times over the years, and defeated by a six-vote margin in December of 2010. The DREAM Act would have provided a path to legal residency and possible eventual citizenship for undocumented young people fulfilling certain criteria: 1) they arrived in the United States prior to age 16, 2) they lived in the United States for a minimum of five years, 3) they demonstrate having good moral character (by having no criminal record), and 4) they have or will soon have completed at least two years of higher education or military service (Nicholls 2013, field notes April 8, 2010). Those who would stand to benefit from passage of the bill are known as
DREAMers.
Building on Nicholls (2013), my analysis centers on the DREAM Activists’
deployment of discourse as a primary means for instigating social action and social change locally. I am most interested in how the national-level discourses are echoed at the local level, both replicated and subverted. The primary frames Nicholls finds in the discourses deployed in promotion of the DREAM Act are national symbols,
exceptionalism, and innocence. Symbols like the US flag and even catch-phrases like
“hard-working” evoke US identity to promote the idea of DREAMers as loyal Americans; presenting DREAMers as exceptionally meritorious argues for their
exemption from penalty for immigration infractions, as does emphasis on their innocence as minors brought to the United States without agency in the decision. All of these elements of the “master frame” for DREAMer discourse align with hegemonic nativist discourses, which accounts to a great extent for the bipartisan appeal of the DREAM Act.
Even though activism for the passage of the DREAM Act can be seen as grassroots organizing at its finest, public DREAM Act discourse itself is not necessarily revolutionary, as in many ways it capitulates to dominant narratives of individual
achievement. Yet DREAM Act discourses avoid the deficit narrative, and what stands out to me in the case of the Rocktown DREAMers is the agility with which they adapt the master frame to local particularities, most notably incorporating varied forms of carefully tailored religious discourse.
The Ascendancy of DREAM Activist Virginia
Cassandra Ibarra’s narrative is textbook DREAMer material (Gonzalez 2011) . Brought to the US at the age of six, she did not know she was undocumented until she
started looking for work and internship opportunities during high school. The
implications of her status hit home when her peers began to apply to colleges. Although Cassandra was a straight-A student with perfect attendance, who kept a portfolio of all her awards and certificates beginning in elementary school, she hit a brick wall at that point: “I went to speak with a counselor, and he didn’t know how to help me…because he’d never worked with someone in my situation… I qualified for a lot of scholarships, I just couldn’t get them” (interview October 8, 2009). Nonetheless, she was accepted at SAU, which assisted her with private scholarships (although these only covered about half her costs, and she was forced to use all her savings and other resources to cover the rest) from where she graduated in 3.5 years with a social work degree, as a
first-generation college graduate.
When Cassandra learned about the DREAM Act, she immediately knew that the passage of this bill could change her entire future. In the fall of 2009 she founded the DREAM Activist Virginia chapter, and for the past five years has taken an active
leadership role in working for passage of the DREAM Act, liaising with organizers at the national level (interview, August 2, 2010).
As Cassandra described her approach to organizing and developing strategies to foment change, I noticed the role of social networks in her process – especially networks she linked to in college. Her first step after learning about the DREAM Act was to contact Mohammed Abdullahi, one of the early leaders of the student movement. She recounts:
Mo told me, “you need to organize,” and I was like, “I don’t know what to do,”
and he was like, “Look, send out an e-mail to all the people you think are
supportive of this, and set up a time and a place, and say “we’re going to have this meeting.” And so that’s what I did… and so those first people who came there
have actually just kept coming…and the actual first people that came to the meeting have spread the word, and so that’s how it started, by an e-mail…for those who really care and have the time, they just kept coming (interview, August 2, 2010).
The people she named from that original e-mail list included sympathetic representatives of a number of institutions that she had connected with since her teens – high school teachers; university professors; and activists from ConnectingPeople Immigrant Resource Center, where she had completed her undergraduate practicum for social work. Others were her peers – young adult Latina and Latino students and workers who were either in similar situations, or had been undocumented at one time and so remained sympathetic to DREAM-eligible youth since they saw how narrowly (and seemingly randomly) they had escaped the same fate.
What interests me about Cassandra’s strategy was the role that certain institutions had played both in facilitating the emergence of these networks, as well as enabling Cassandra to connect to them – a process that had the potential to contribute towards broader structural changes through legislative advocacy. When SAU created their Local Latino Scholarship Fund in the early 2000s, they institutionalized a process for inclusion based in deeply held theological – not political – beliefs, offering half-tuition to a limited number of undocumented students every year. According to one admissions staff person (Gavin Janssen, personal communication April 18, 2011), additional steps have been implemented at SAU in order to facilitate inclusion of NLD youth; primarily, this
involves hiring a bilingual admissions counselor specifically designated to relate to local NLD youth. This admissions staff-person carries out a “specialized” marketing strategy for recruiting NLD youth that includes building relationships with ESL teachers and liaisons at local high schools, organizing and attending events geared specifically towards
local NLD students (e.g. financial aid night for NLD high school students, field trips to SAU for native speakers of Spanish, other visits to local high schools). Janssen
acknowledges the limitations or difficulties inherent in overcoming significant financial hurdles in particular for undocumented students, as well as the challenges for forging strong connections with the larger campus community for students who primarily
commute; however, he perceives a palpable impact on the campus in terms of the number of NLD students now attending, and in the connection of the campus community to their local context.
Considering Janssen’s positionality as admissions counselor at SAU, his portrayal of NLD inclusion on campus bears some unpacking. Simply increasing the numbers of NLD students does not guarantee their social incorporation in the student body. As Raquel Sandoval said of the local community college, “we go there, but we’re not a part of it” (interview, August 19, 2010). The targeted recruitment of NLD students does not necessarily undo oppressive systems and structures that sequester them. At the same time, SAU’s proactive approach to NLD recruitment and scholarship support did open social spaces to NLD youth that they might not have otherwise accessed. And Cassandra was able to draw on precisely these connections – to faculty, staff, other graduates, and to current students – in mobilizing the Virginia DREAM Activist organization.
It is also worth expounding a bit on the role of ConnectingPeople Immigrant Resource Center as a nexus for support of NLD families and youth. Founded in 2000, ConnectingPeople was formed by several Mennonite churches in Rocktown, with some additional funding from the Virginia Mennonite mission board. Given a very broad mandate – to support new immigrants in whatever ways possible – ConnectingPeople
organized several different areas of support, which eventually included paralegal help with applications to regularize immigration status. Apart from the Diocese of Richmond, this was the only non-profit offering paralegal help for NLD families in the Valley, at no cost. In addition, several ConnectingPeople policies further institutionalized processes of inclusion: board membership had to include a majority of newcomers; and the executive director created volunteer, practicum, and internship opportunities specifically for NLD college students. Cassandra Ibarra, now a board member, completed her social work degree practicum requirements at ConnectingPeople, where she was able to connect further with immigrant-advocacy networks in the area.
While ConnectingPeople is the only faith-based organization specifically working with and for refugees and immigrants in the Rocktown-Pine area, there is a long tradition in the United States of faith-based advocacy work and solidarity with marginalized people, such as the sanctuary movement of the 1980s wherein churches from a variety of denominations sheltered Central American refugees (Chinchilla et al 2009). Given the frequency in which the Bible is referenced on the opinion pages of the local paper, it is fair to say that Rocktown is a fairly religious and predominantly Christian community.
However, there is no easy way to generalize about the local communities of faith beyond this statement. Whereas the progressive Unitarian Universalists strongly supported DREAM Activist Virginia’s organizing, many locals spoke publicly from a religious point of view to oppose immigration reform and the presence of undocumented immigrants by staunchly proclaiming that “a law is a law…the Bible says to obey the law” (Mitchell 2007). On the other hand, Mennonites frequently quoted the biblical injunction to welcome the stranger, or the foreigner in our midst (Deuteronomy 10:19) as
is more closely examined further on in this chapter. Across the ideological spectrum, religious discourse is prevalent in the Valley, albeit deployed in multivocal and sometimes contradictory ways.
As Nicholls points out (2013:164) , in NLD reception areas there are generally few pre-existing or well-established advocacy networks or organizations, especially in comparison to other parts of the country with long histories of Diaspora community-based work, and the support of faith-community-based organizations certainly helped the Rocktown DREAMers. The proximity of Rocktown to Washington DC did create opportunities for young people from the Valley to travel fairly easily to important events in the capital, including marches, protests, and DREAM Act voting. In addition, the Rocktown
DREAMers benefitted from the support of the advocacy network that developed during the Hispanic Services Council years, even though the HSC was in decline at the time when the DREAMers began organizing. But the role of institutions that created and funded processes of inclusion for NLD youth is significant, particularly in the sense that they did so without prescription. As far as I can tell, nobody at SAU advocated for a Local Latino scholarship fund so that NLD youths would organize their own lobbying action for immigration reform; but in creating that fund, space was opened for Cassandra and others like her to earn a university education, which eventually led to NLD SAU graduates and their allies working together to advocate for precisely that end. What this might suggest for advocates, activists, and allies in other areas is that creating spaces (without prescription) for NLD youth to participate fully, actualize their potential, and organize, is an effective way to catalyze social change.
DREAMer Discourses
In the summer of 2010, Cassandra stood in front of Virginia Governor Tom MacDonnell at a Town Hall meeting wearing her dark blue graduation cap, stated her achievements, and then dropped her verbal bomb that “I am undocumented.” His response to her (after a moment of stunned silence) was to say, “you are exceptional”
(field notes, August 26, 2010). Implied in this statement was not acceptance that her exceptionalism merited exemption from current immigration law and policies, but that as an exception to the “rule” of undeserving and essentially criminal “illegal” immigrants, she could safely be dismissed. Policies, in other words, should not be created or shaped based on the exceptions. Yet the logic of much DREAM Act discourse, especially early in the movement, is precisely that as a group DREAMers are exceptional (in the sense of being high-achieving, the “deserving poor”), and therefore as a group should be
exempted from the penalties prescribed by law for them and others sharing their legal immigration status. In its own way, however, this whole argument validates much of the US nationalist rhetoric, invoking the self-made “good ethnic” who, through hard work and determination, pulls himself up by his proverbial bootstraps. As discussed in Chapter 1, this achievement-oriented narrative plays into “culture of poverty,” modernization, and deficit explanations for socio-economic stratifications – and yet it is also precisely why DREAM Act discourse is so powerful, and has such bipartisal appeal.
Nicholls’ 2013 study reviews how the DREAM Activist movement shifted in tactics and rhetoric, outlining some of the internal debates and conflicting opinions within the group as they developed over time. Nicholls argues that DREAMers have positioned themselves within broader national debates on immigration by exploiting a “niche
opening” for students, based on a logic of merit and exceptionalism. Yet, as he delineates,
this very logic of merit for some creates ruptures for others: “the rhetoric of the
‘deserving immigrant’ is enacted in real legal categories, resulting in the unequal distribution of rights and privileges” (16) and access to legal status.
In this section, I review Nicholl’s main argument, and provide instances of local DREAM Activist rhetoric that both support and complicate or nuance his argument.
Nicholls identifies the essential elements of the “Master Frame” on which DREAM Activist discourse is typically constructed: national symbols, exceptionalism, and innocence. The most often deployed national symbols of the United States include the US flag (or some configuration of the Stars and Stripes), the American Eagle, the Lady Liberty, or the Capitol building, along with the ever ubiquitous graduation cap and gown symbolizing the educational aspirations of the DREAMers. Buzzwords that tap into a specific and ideological rhetoric of American identity often include fairness, hard work, and self-determination (51) as almost mythological values evoking a specific sense or profile of American-ness. National-level organizers explicitly discourage DREAMers from displaying any symbols evoking their nations of origin, even the presumably safe symbols of multiculturalism such as cuisine, dance, or native dress.
The graduation cap and gown in particular stand out as the premier symbols of the DREAMer project, interpretable as promoting a kind of conformity to nationalist ideals, yet also appropriated specifically by undocumented youth to highlight the injustice of their exclusion from the nation and the nation’s higher education system. At the same time, however, their argument for inclusion is predicated again on the “good ethnic”
framework, which sidelines those who for one reason or another might not fit the “ideal type.”