Negotiating Spaces: The Lives of Undocumented Youth

A Lifetime of Uncertainty

Throughout the United States, undocumented students live in constant fear of their legal status being disclosed and, despite their educational success and professional objectives, face uncertainty and an unknown future.

Negotiating Spaces: The Lives of Undocumented Youth puts forward the question: what are the effects of the symbiotic relationship of a historical anti-Mexican sentiment and a failed U.S. immigration policy on the negotiation of spaces by college age Mexican-origin undocumented students?

Negotiating Spaces research asks: what are the existing social-psychological forces that shape the daily experiences and negotiated spaces of unauthorized youth, in particular, those pursuing access to higher levels of education in the United States?

The conceptual framework of the study uses two dimensions. The first consists of explicit and implicit modes of behavior. The second dimension focuses on how students navigate between regulated and unregulated spaces in their communities.

The findings derived from triangulated qualitative approaches informed the study on how unauthorized youth consistently negotiate their lived spaces.

Eight themes describe the explicit and implicit tensions of lived space: identity, membership, micro-aggressions, trauma, resiliency-adaptability, pragmatism, agency, family, and structural violence. 

Furthermore, four additional concepts describe their regulated and unregulated legal space in the form of social-psychological trauma, namely living in ambivalence, encapsulation, dissonance, and rejection.

Negotiating Spaces provides recommendations for further research. Specifically, the recommendations related to the human condition of unauthorized youth attending college, and discourse over the criminalization and virtual internment of undocumented youth in the United States.