Documenting the Undocumented addresses the question of how U.S. Latino/a literature of the last two decades responds to and represents the issue of undocumented immigration in an era of escalating enforcement. It examines how Latino/as tell stories about being “illegal” in what is essentially a hostile political and cultural climate. It addresses questions such as these: How is recent Latino/a narrative negotiating immigration debates? How do these stories imagine the “American nation” in potentially radical and transformative ways? How and when do the stories invoke notions of cultural trauma ... More

Documenting the Undocumented addresses the question of how U.S. Latino/a literature of the last two decades responds to and represents the issue of undocumented immigration in an era of escalating enforcement. It examines how Latino/as tell stories about being “illegal” in what is essentially a hostile political and cultural climate. It addresses questions such as these: How is recent Latino/a narrative negotiating immigration debates? How do these stories imagine the “American nation” in potentially radical and transformative ways? How and when do the stories invoke notions of cultural trauma and/or a human rights framework? When do these texts imagine identity categories that cross national and ethnic boundaries? To what degree might current immigration debates, and the pressures they exert on undocumented subjects, constrain the possibility of transnational identities? Documenting the Undocumented argues (1) that these narratives complicate and humanize the views that typify current discourse about unauthorized immigration from Latin America, presenting an array of challenges to the standard tropes of “illegality”; (2) that they seek to affect political discourse by advancing the possibility of empathy across lines of ethnicity or citizenship status; and (3) that stories of unauthorized immigration also increasingly function as narratives of “peoplehood” that stitch together a new “imagined community” of the undocumented and their extended immigrant networks.