UCLA

This project emerges from the circulation of discourse between the Obama Administration, the media, and (im)migrant rights organizers about how to see and what to call migrants who live in the US without legal status (“illegal,” “undocumented,” “undocuqueer,” “DACAmented,” “DREAMer,” “DAPAmented”). Considering the evolution of this terminological struggle alongside the proliferation of scholarship on undocumented populations, the call for eligible undocumented migrants to prepare their official documents for deferred action programs, and enactments of “documenting the undocumented” in three recent works of performance art, this thesis questions how legal labels and categories work within larger ideological regimes that determine whether Latina/o migrants in the US are granted eligibility for “legal presence,” are marked as targets for removal, or are held in a state of legal uncertainty. I propose a theory of “systems of documentation,” a critical framework for analyzing the regulatory technologies specific to the subjection of (im)migrant bodies and envisioning strategies of refusal and transformation.