“I Was Born at the Border, Like the ‘Wrong’ Side of It”: Undocumented Latinx Youth Experiences of Racialization in the U.S. South

This article provides ethnographic evidence of how Latinx undocumented youth navigate racialization processes. The research occurs in a focal state in the New Latino South, a highly restrictive and hostile context toward immigrants broadly and undocumented ones specifically. The author situates this research in Rogelio Sáenz and Karen Douglas' call for the racialization of immigration studies, considering notions of race and racism in the study of undocumented youth experiences of identity, discrimination, social isolation, and belonging, and how processes of racialization mark the bodies of undocumented youth in negative, punitive ways in school and societal contexts in a restrictive policy context like South Carolina. Drawing on data from a three-year, multisite ethnography in two Title I public high schools in South Carolina, the study shows how youth are racialized in their schools and communities. Their narratives provide moments when undocumented youth elaborate their experiences in schools, which the author argues is an act of resistance where they broker, dismantle, and overcome their position of marginality. This cultural elaboration by undocumented youth positions them as active agents and re-centers and humanizes their experience of racism and racialization in order to make visible the systemic oppression they encounter. It is through their cultural elaboration of their undocumentedness that they can powerfully critique immigration policy and schools’ roles in perpetuating deficit discourses about the “problems” the undocumented subjectivity presents.