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Walter J. Nicholls. The Dreamers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. 226 pp. Paper: $24.95. ISBN-13: 978-0-8047-8884-7.
The ongoing Latina/o immigrant struggle to secure social capital in U.S. socio-political contexts highlights the perpetually recurrent confluence of their national advances with the frequently hostile environments of the public sphere. Additionally, Latina/o immigrants have had to overcome both political exclusions within established and competing U.S. governance structures, as well as internally tenuous moments of solidarity that have all too often undermined their organizational attempts to gain substantial footholds throughout an extensive history of colonial hegemony. In his book The Dreamers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate, Walter Nicholls judiciously documents the development of a group of diverse and frequently dissimilar young Latina/o immigrant activists. The text documents the group's origins, as well as its atypical and unexpected ascent to a subjective but undeniable level of national prominence.
The undocumented youth who constitute the heterogeneous group known nationally as the Dreamers are an often-divergent association of young adults. Initially, the movement's cast and direction was created and groomed by more established Latina/o rights organizations to embody Western notions of the exceptionally deserving immigrant. Organizations that included the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) believed that the Dreamers' model traits could soften the anti-immigrant sentiment that had significantly intensified after September 11. The inception of the Dreamers paralleled the momentary hopefulness, fluidity, and resiliency demonstrated by myriads of social justice activists, who also have sought to challenge entrenched systems of hegemony and oppression.
However, Nicholls's holistic account additionally shows that the Dreamers movement contains and reflects many inherent and residual organizational complexities. These organizational dynamics include the interplay of internal and external conflicts involving the immediacy of local economic concerns in addition to shifting regional public agendas on the U.S. national political stage.
The book consists of six chapters, an introduction, a conclusion, and an appendix that discusses Nicholls's research methodology in greater detail. He draws on interviews, participant observations, social media, and relevant New York Times articles published throughout the 2000s to document the development of this movement. The book's introduction immediately immerses the reader...