Lives in Limbo : Undocumented and Coming of Age in America.
- 1st ed.
- 1 online resource (318 pages)
Cover -- Contents -- Foreword -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Contested Membership over Time -- 2. Undocumented Young Adults in Los Angeles: College-Goers and Early Exiters -- 3. Childhood: Inclusion and Belonging -- 4. School as a Site of Belonging and Conflict -- 5. Adolescence: Beginning the Transition to Illegality -- 6. Early Exiters: Learning to Live on the Margins -- 7. College-Goers: Managing the Distance between Aspirations and Reality -- 8. Adulthood: How Immigration Status Becomes a Master Status -- 9. Conclusion: Managing Lives in Limbo -- Notes -- References -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.
"My world seems upside down. I have grown up but I feel like I'm moving backward. And I can't do anything about it." -Esperanza Over two million of the nation's eleven million undocumented immigrants have lived in the United States since childhood. Due to a broken immigration system, they grow up to uncertain futures. In Lives in Limbo, Roberto G. Gonzales introduces us to two groups: the college-goers, like Ricardo, who had good grades and a strong network of community support that propelled him to college and DREAM Act organizing but still landed in a factory job a few short years after graduation, and the early-exiters, like Gabriel, who failed to make meaningful connections in high school and started navigating dead-end jobs, immigration checkpoints, and a world narrowly circumscribed by legal limitations. This vivid ethnography explores why highly educated undocumented youth share similar work and life outcomes with their less-educated peers, despite the fact that higher education is touted as the path to integration and success in America. Mining the results of an extraordinary twelve-year study that followed 150 undocumented young adults in Los Angeles, Lives in Limbo exposes the failures of a system that integrates children into K-12 schools but ultimately denies them the rewards of their labor.
9780520962415
Children of noncitizens - United States - Education.