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 time, youth, and vitality play in the United States as settler colonial nation and in the migrant bioeconomy ? To answer these questions, I study the figure of the child migrant. Approaching youth as a transitory and extractable resource, a relation of power, and a fulcrum of futurity, I explore what I call undocutime: the prolonged waiting, permanent temporariness, enforced presentism, devaluation of the time, and persistent patience of the undocumented.
Undocutime is part of Bioprecarity: Latinx Migrants, Captivity, and Resistance, a group I co-lead with Jonathan X. Inda of the University Illinois, Chicago, and Rebecca Schreiber of the University of New Mexico. Our group is supported by the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative based at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Crossing Latinidades is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.