“If they don´t let us go to school, we will build our own”: student political experiences of the Dreamer movement

Abstract

I analyze the Dreamer movement as a non-university student movement in a novel way, with Latin American perspectives. These young, undocumented migrants arrived in the United States as children and were named after the proposed Dream Act. As a theoretical framework, I used social movements and a feminist epistemology to study them. The categories I recover are massification, differentiation, identity, participation, and alliance; as well as crimmigration and legal violence. In addition, I methodologically conducted a literature review with a hermeneutic analysis. Thus, I argue that the Dreamers began as a student movement that later transformed into a migrant struggle that recognizes the intersection of their multiple marginalized oppressions. Finally, I emphasize the context of crimmigration in which their activism emerged; the legal violence against access to higher education; and student political experiences from a feminist perspective.