Gabrielle Cabrera

GABRIELLE CABRERA, then a graduate student at Rutgers Univeristy, New Brunswick, New Jersey, was awarded funding in August 2020 to aid research on “Migrant Futures: Mexican and Filipino Undocumented Youth in California’s Central Valley,” supervised by Dr. Ulla Berg. This dissertation project examines the moral and political economy that shape the legibility and forms of political recognition available to undocumented migrants in Merced County, California, and the broader San Joaquin Valley. It explored the lives of undocumented youth, often marked “diverse” by their lack of legal status in the university and the lives of an older generation of undocumented migrants who live around the outskirts of the university system, in “the migrant city.” The project completed a comparative analysis of generational differences among undocumented migrants who are university students (with and without DACA) and those who work within the city and rural agricultural fields, by examining how these groups construct themselves in response to numerous social pressures across axes of difference beyond citizenship, such as racialization, ethnicity, age, and gender. The project explored the promises and deceptions of higher education, diversity initiatives, and immigration reform as key site where migrant futures are fought out in contemporary United States. The data collected from the project makes significant contributions to understandings of undocumented migrants’ subjectivities.