2021 marked the twentieth anniversary of the introduction of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act in the US Congress. A year later, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) turned ten. As their names alone signal, the DREAM Act and DACA emphasize youth. Both also have age limits. If the DREAM Act passed today, many prospective Dreamers would be too old to qualify for it. Meanwhile, the age of the average DACA recipient continues to climb every year.
Inspired by the twentieth anniversary of the introduction of the DREAM Act and the beginning and possible end of DACA, this project explores waiting as a hallmark of migration, particularly undocumented migration, in the twenty-first century. What kinds of subjects does waiting produce? How is time used by and against migrants? And what roles do youth, vitality, and vulnerability play in migration to the United States, US racial capitalism, and US settler colonialism? To answer these questions, I study the figure of the child migrant and what I call undocutime: the prolonged waiting, permanent temporariness, enforced presentism, devaluation of the time, and persistent patience of the undocumented.
My work on undocutime and migrant youth grows out of a Crossing Latinidades research group I co-lead with Jonathan X. Inda of the University Illinois, Chicago, and Rebecca Schreiber of the University of New Mexico. With the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative based at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Jonathan and I are co-editing a volume titled Bioprecarity: Rethinking Migrant Life and Death.