Undocumented: Recommended Books

Features the stories of undocumented mothers who reunite with their children in the US years after fleeing violence at home Facing escalating chaos and violence in their home countries, many Central American mothers have found that a desperate flight to the north was their only choice. Many left their children behind in order to spare them the hardships of the journey. If they made it across the border without getting locked up or deported, they entered a country increasingly unwilling to recognize claims of asylum.

A funny and poignant memoir about how as a teenager, TV writer Rafael Agustin (Jane The Virgin) accidentally discovered he was undocumented and how that revelation turned everything he thought he knew about himself and his family upside down.

A young poet tells the inspiring story of his migration from El Salvador to the United States at the age of nine in this "gripping memoir" (NPR) of bravery, hope, and finding family.

In the first picture book written by a DACA Dreamer, Areli Morales tells her own powerful and vibrant immigration story.

One of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard reveals the hidden lives of her fellow undocumented Americans in this deeply personal and groundbreaking portrait of a nation.

Provides practical help for undoing the deficit perspective that is frequently applied to Latinx bilingual students. Offers lessons with a decolonized bilingual sustaining pedagogy approach: a culturally sustaining topic having to do with language practices, literacies, and power texts that show different ways we engage with language practices translanguaging (using all of one's linguistic repertoire, this includes different features of named languages such as Spanish and English) as the way bilingual students communicate, the way we teach, and the way we strive for social justice.

In June 2018, Donald Trump's most notorious decision as president had secretly been in effect for months before most Americans became aware of the astonishing inhumanity being perpetrated by their own government--the deliberate separation of migrant parents and children at U.S. border facilities. Jacob Soboroff was among the first journalists to expose this reality after seeing firsthand the living conditions of the children in custody.

In Socially Undocumented, Reed-Sandoval challenges the "legalistic understanding" by arguing that being socially undocumented is to possess a real, visible, and embodied social identity that does not always track one's legal status.

Told through heart-wrenching testimonies, photographs, and artwork of refugees fleeing their homelands, Desperately Seeking Asylum describes firsthand accounts of the harrowing and dangerous journey immigrants are willing to endure knowing that they might not even make it onto US soil. Desperately Seeking Asylum prioritizes the testimonies of refugee families and unaccompanied children who are seeking asylum in the United States from Central America, primarily Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.

Legal Passing offers a nuanced look at how the lives of undocumented Mexicans in the US are constantly shaped by federal, state, and local immigration laws. Angela S. García compares restrictive and accommodating immigration measures in various cities and states to show that place-based inclusion and exclusion unfold in seemingly contradictory ways.

For most of America's history, we simply did not lock people up for migrating here. Yet over the last thirty years, the federal and state governments have increasingly tapped their powers to incarcerate people accused of violating immigration laws. As a result, almost 400,000 people annually now spend some time locked up pending the result of a civil or criminal immigration proceeding. In Migrating to Prison, leading scholar Cesar Cuauhtemoc Garcia Hernandez takes a hard look at the immigration prison system's origins, how it currently operates, and why.

They are a mass migration of thousands, yet each one travels alone.Solito, Solita, ("Alone, Alone"), is a Voice of Witness collection of oral histories that tell the stories of youth refugees fleeing their home countries and traveling for hundreds of miles seeking safety and protection in the United States. These powerful narrators describe why they fled their homes, what happened on their dangerous journeys through Mexico, how they crossed the border, and their ongoing struggles to survive in the United States. In an era of fear, xenophobia, and outright lies, these stories amplify the compelling voices of immigrant youth.

Unauthorized: Portraits of Latino Immigrants takes readers inside the diverse contemporary worlds of undocumented Latino immigrants in the United States, exploring the myths and realities of education, health care, work, deportation, and more. This book aims to dispel common misconceptions while introducing readers to real people behind the headlines.

By reading these self-representations as both a product of America's changing views on citizenship and membership, and an arena where such views can potentially be challenged, the book interrogates the role such self-representations have played not only in constructing undocumented migrant identities, but also in shaping social borders. At a time when the inclusion and exclusion of (potential) citizens is once again highly debated in the United States, the book concludes by giving a potential indication of where views on undocumented migration might be headed.

Undocumented Storytellers offers a critical exploration of the ways undocumented immigrant activists harness the power of storytelling to mitigate the fear and uncertainty of life without legal status and to advocate for immigration reform. Sarah C. Bishop chronicles the ways young people uncover their lack of legal status experientially - through interactions with parents, in attempts to pursue rites of passage reserved for citizens, and as audiences of political and popular media.

Taking as its focal point the Trump administration's decision to rescind Obama-era DACA protection, Dreams Derailed delves into the economic, political, and social factors that inform the public conversation about immigration, making a clear case for the many benefits of inclusive policies and the protection of undocumented youths. Schwab also takes a close look at the factors that carried Donald Trump to the White House, demonstrates how economic upheaval and the issue of immigration influenced the 2016 presidential election, analyzes current immigration laws, and suggests next steps for reform.

This book uses a funds of knowledge approach and connects it to other key conceptual frameworks in education to examine issues related to the access and transition to college, college persistence and success, and pedagogies in higher education. Research on funds of knowledge has become a standard reference to signal a sociocultural orientation in education that seeks to build strategically on the experiences, resources, and knowledge of families and children, especially those from low-income communities of color. This book challenges existing deficit thinking in the field and maps future work on funds of knowledge in higher education.

The authors show how immigration policies, ICE enforcement, and societal attitudes affect undocumented students and how teachers and school leaders can recognize these influences on the students' day-to-day lives and learning.

Undocumented Lives tells the story of Mexicans who have been used and abused by the broader economic and political policies of Mexico and the United States.

Sixteen young people from the Latin American Youth Center (LAYC) in Washington, D.C. came together to tell their own stories of immigration and transformation in comics form. The result is this side-by-side bilingual collection of graphic memoirs that not only builds connections across language, but also breaks down barriers and expands hope.

The current daily experiences of undocumented students as they navigate the processes of entering and then thriving in Jesuit colleges are explored alongside an investigation of the knowledge and attitudes among staff and faculty about undocumented students in their midst, and the institutional response to their presence.

Throughout his youth, Dan-el navigated two worlds: the rough streets of East Harlem, where he lived with his brother and his mother and tried to make friends, and the ultra-elite halls of a Manhattan private school, where he could immerse himself in a world of books and where he soon rose to the top of his class. From Collegiate, Dan-el went to Princeton, where he thrived, and where he made the momentous decision to come out as an undocumented student in a Wall Street Journal profile a few months before he gave the salutatorian's traditional address in Latin at his commencement.

In 2001 a bill was presented to the US Congress, known as the DREAM Act. The purpose of this bill was to fix the immigration status of almost two million undocumented youth who came to the country as minors through no choice of their own but now as young adults, with no legal identity, they may be unable to attend college, and live under the constant threat of deportation. These young people are known as Dreamers. As part of activist organizations like United We Dream, National Immigration Youth Alliance, Dreamactivists, among others, these (mostly) Latin American or Asian origin youth that have lived in the US for most of their lives, have worked during the last years to make visible one of the most complex faces of the immigration problem: what to do with those who were brought to this country brought by their parents and had no part in making that decision; who have already received a public K-12 education; who have served in the military, and who lack citizenship rights.

Rodriguez highlights how different members of the same mixed-status families mediate undocumented statuses while maintaining the collective whole of a family. For many young adults, this may mean negotiating the sponsorship of their immigrant parents, and for the parents, planning for the emotional, physical, and financial well-being of their children in case of deportation.

Illustrates how the children of immigrants use art to grapple with issues of citizenship, state violence, and belonging. Young immigrant children often do not have the words to express how their lives are shaped by issues of immigration, legal status, and state-sanctioned violence. Yet they are able to communicate its effects on them using art. Based on ten years of work with immigrant children as young as six years old in Arizona and California and featuring an analysis of three hundred drawings, theater performances, and family interviews Silvia Rodriguez Vega provides accounts of children's challenges with deportation and family separation during the Obama and Trump administrations.

In a world of border walls and obstacles to migration, a lottery where winners can gain permanent residency in the United States sounds too good to be true. Just as unlikely is the idea that the United States would make such visas available to foster diversity within a country where systemic racism endures. But in 1990, the United States Diversity Visa Lottery was created to do just that. Dreamland tells the surprising story of this unlikely government program and its role in American life as well as the global story of migration.

Through stories and thoughtful analysis, this book shows how migration and U.S. immigration detention harms the future of immigrant children and their parents. For decades, the United States has used detention to control immigration. Through Iceboxes and Kennels traces the rise of family migration from Central America and why the U.S. incarcerated and separated thousands of children and parents.

Chapter four is about race, education, and being undocumented.

A young poet tells the inspiring story of his migration from El Salvador to the United States at the age of nine in this "gripping memoir" (NPR) of bravery, hope, and finding family.

Millions of students of noncitizen status or with undocumented family members experience financial, cultural, and socioemotional hardships that can result in profoundly adverse effects upon their academic performances and emotional well-being.

Chapter ten is about education rights and undocumetned students.

Background information on the political, social, and economic forces driving undocumented immigration into America; explains the policies and records of both the Obama and Trump administrations on immigration, deportation, and border security; summarizes current laws and regulations governing U.S. border and immigration policies.

In Lives in Limbo, Roberto G. Gonzales introduces us to two groups: the college-goers, like Ricardo, whose good grades and strong network of community support propelled him into higher education, only to land in a factory job a few years after graduation, and the early-exiters, like Gabriel, who failed to make meaningful connections in high school and started navigating dead-end jobs, immigration checkpoints, and a world narrowly circumscribed by legal limitations.

Contains two chapters specifically on undocumented students: "Undocumented Students at the Community College: Creating Institutional Capacity" and "Why Are Undocumented Students an Equity Issue?"

In 2014, the arrest and detention of thousands of desperate young migrants at the southwest border of the United States exposed the U.S. government's shadowy juvenile detention system, which had escaped public scrutiny for years. This book tells the story of six Central American and Mexican children who are driven from their homes by violence and deprivation, and who embark alone, risking their lives, on the perilous journey north. They suffer coercive arrests at the U.S. border, then land in detention, only to be caught up in the battle to obtain legal status.