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In this ethnographic study, Elaine C. Allard describes and analyzes the characteristics and experiences of undocumented newcomer adolescents attending a US suburban high school. She considers the ways in which newcomer adolescents show agency in their border crossing, prioritize work over formal education, and express transnational identities. She contrasts their experience with the predominant narrative of DREAMers, undocumented childhood arrivals who are often characterized as migrating to the United States "through no fault of their own, " who prioritize professional aspirations through schooling, and who are "American in spirit. " Allard calls attention to a subgroup of undocumented students who may benefit from different approaches by educators and immigrant advocates.
The discussion about undocumented students, among both advocates and academics, has focused on DREAMers, 1.5 generation adolescents whose parents brought them to the United States at a young age and who are also primarily US educated.1 However, DREAMers are not the only undocumented students in US schools. An estimated 2.4 million undocumented immigrants under the age of thirty arrived after the age of fifteen (Passel & Lopez, 2012), and some subset of these teenagers attends or has attended US high schools. These undocumented teenage arrivals graduate from high school and attend college at lower rates than undocumented childhood arrivals (Passel & Cohn, 2009), and yet newcomers-newly arrived immigrant teens attending US high schools (Faltis & Coulter, 2007)-are seldom included in discussions of undocumented students, whether among journalists, researchers, or advocates (e.g., Abrego, 2006, 2008; Gonzales, 2010, 2011; Immigration Policy Center, 2010; Perez et al., 2009; Winerip, 2011).
While there is a growing body of scholarship that has begun to describe the experiences of undocumented 1.5 generation youth and to identify interventions that can help support them in and through high school, we know less about the experiences and the potential interventions that could better support more recent arrivals. In order to better serve and advocate for all undocumented students, including newcomers, I aim to shine a light on their experiences. Through my ethnographic study of a high school English as a Second Language (ESL) class populated predominantly by undocumented newcomers from Mexico, I found experiences that diverge significantly from most existing portrayals of undocumented students. In this article I illustrate these dimensions of difference...