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Nicolas1 immigrated to the United States with his mother when he was 2. Although he does not remember Mexico, he has never truly felt at home here. Nicolas is an undocumented immigrant, and despite living in the same California neighborhood for 16 years, this status classifies him as a perpetual outsider. Like many of his undocumented peers, this interplay of exclusion and inclusion defines his young life, exemplified by his account of a student government field trip he took:
We were going to go meet the Border Patrol and have a question and answer session. And this was so devastating to me, because I hadn't told anybody. And I was like, God, what if they ask? ... But I've learned to be uncomfortable. Everything in my life has stressed me out. That's how I look at it. ... So the border patrol dude let us climb the border, look over the top of it. And the whole time that I was there, I was like, man, I'm climbing the border going to Mexico . ... And then afterwards, we rode in the jeep all along the border, and he was like, 'Yeah, I catch them coming over' and he showed us all his tricks - how he looks at the tracks and stuff. And then he was like, 'You guys came on a good day, today we're racing our ATVs.' And I was thinking, man, if only they knew . And that's how I feel every day. If only people knew. (Nicolas, interview by author, 2007)
Nicolas is a leader in an emergent movement that advocates for the civil rights of undocumented youth - a role forged from his own complex, fractured, contradictory experiences. He has learned to occupy the space between belonging and exclusion, the only place he feels at home.
Nicolas, and other undocumented young activists, are profoundly shaped by the debate on immigration, their lives intimately intertwined with distinct forms of regulation like Arizona's State Bill 1070 and House Resolution 4437. They are implicated in the discourses and imaginaries that constitute the problem space of immigration and the figure of the immigrant - the talk of "anchor babies," the debate to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment and the call for a closed...