Emotions and emotional reflexivity in undocumented migrant youth activism

Abstract

Emotions play a role in drawing people into activism and are a key dimension of activist experiences. However, although researchers have examined the political significance and ethical imperative of centring the voices and leadership of migrants in migrant rights struggles, there is limited consideration of how emotions are engaged in ways that inform, facilitate and challenge migrants in sustaining their activism. Through the case of undocumented youth activism in California, I explore how undocumented young people drew on practices of emotional reflexivity to navigate the complicated emotional register produced through activism as they reflected on their participation and trajectory through the undocumented youth movement. I suggest that the cultivation of storytelling spaces, cultures and practices within undocumented youth spaces supported and enhanced young people’s opportunities and capacity for engaging in relational practices of emotional reflexivity. These relational practices of emotional reflexivity supported young people to carve out expansive, dynamic and creative modes of activism that adapted to their shifting needs, circumstances and politics, while helping them to configure practices of care within the movement.

Introduction

This article looks at how emotions inform, facilitate and challenge the activism of migrants involved in migrant rights struggles. In doing so, it advances research that has examined the involvement of migrants within these struggles, through considering how emotions are engaged in these practices. Migrant rights activism has drawn attention to the violence of immigration controls and enforcement experienced by refugees and undocumented migrants who are resorting to increasingly dangerous migration journeys in the absence of safe and legal routes; are facing exclusion from many social, economic and political rights and entitlements in the states they move to; and are at risk of immigration detention and deportation (Bloomraad & Voss, 2020; Stierl, 2016; Tyler & Marciniak, 2013). However, while researchers have examined the political significance and ethical imperative of centring the voices and leadership of migrants in these migrant rights struggles, there is limited consideration of how emotions are engaged. Emotions play a significant role in drawing people into social justice activism and are a key dimension of activist experiences. Social justice activism can enhance activists’ emotional well-being (Vestergren et al., 2017), but can also induce emotional strain and burnout – ‘a state of emotional exhaustion caused by excessive psychological and emotional demands made on people helping people’ (Jackson et al., 1986, p. 630). Through the case of undocumented youth activism in California, I explore how undocumented young people drew on practices of emotional reflexivity to navigate the complicated emotional register produced through activism as they reflected on their trajectory and emotional well-being through the undocumented youth movement.

In ways reminiscent of Sara Ahmed’s (2014) observation that ‘the struggle for survival is a life struggle and a political struggle’, these undocumented young people were engaged in a political struggle against border controls, immigration enforcement and an exclusionary citizenship regime, while simultaneously living through and trying to survive the very conditions they protested. In this article, I reflect on research conducted in 2017 for a Leverhulme funded project titled ‘Undocumented Young People in the US, Political Activism and Citizenship’. This research examined how undocumented young people navigated their way through the undocumented youth movement in California, and how their experiences shaped and were shaped by their understandings of citizenship.

During the research, young people frequently raised the topic of the emotions involved in activism, speaking about the connected issues of emotional well-being and how emotions informed their trajectories through the movement. There are likely several factors that prompted this attention. As discussed later, the emotional impacts of living as an undocumented person have always been central in conversations in the undocumented youth movement and in the movement’s campaign narratives. Meanwhile, at the time of the research, the targeting of undocumented populations by the Trump administration was a catalyst for some young people, who had taken a break or reduced their activist commitments, to return to active organising and, in doing so, to consider their mode of engagement. Trump’s election also prompted young people who were new to the movement to become involved, or to scale up their involvement and reflect on this.

Undocumented young people’s entry into activism was driven and sustained by their strong emotional connections to the cause as they struggled to live through the violent conditions that they protested. Involvement in the movement was a means through which they engaged with collective spaces of support, reflection and action to make life liveable. However, their emotional connections to the cause and the circumstances of their engagement also factored into producing a complicated emotional register over the course of their activism; this informed their political reflections and careful decisions about their mode and degree of engagement, while prompting periods of withdrawal and burnout for some.

This article makes contributions that deepen scholarly analyses on migrant rights activism through a focus on ‘emotional reflexivity,’ which refers to people’s practice of drawing on their emotions in assessing and responding to their lives and circumstances (Holmes, 2010; King, 2006). In the first instance, I examine how undocumented young people drew on emotions – understood as social and relational (Burkitt, 2014) – to reflect on and inform their activist trajectories. I show how the cultivation of storytelling spaces, cultures and practices within the movement enabled relational practices of emotional reflexivity that in turn buoyed up activists’ capacity for sustaining their well-being and involvement in activism. Although not preventing burnout, and the structural oppressions and violence driving this, young people’s practices of emotional reflexivity did to an extent enable them to explore and carve out expansive, dynamic and creative modes of activism that adapted to their shifting needs and circumstances. Through this discussion of young people’s biographies and engagement with others in the movement, I show that rather than being an individual practice, emotional reflexivity generated through activism was a relational endeavour with the potential to drive social change, in this case facilitating migrants’ resistance to repressive immigration controls.

I begin by setting out the conceptual framework and context for understanding emotions and emotional reflexivity in migrant rights activism before outlining the context and methodology of the study. Drawing on qualitative research, I explore how emotions informed young people’s entry into the movement and their early trajectories and experiences. I then examine how emotions generated through their activism layered on to these early and ongoing experiences, and how this informed their experiences and decision-making about their role within the movement. Finally, I focus on the role of storytelling practices and spaces within the movement, drawing out how these facilitated young people’s emotional reflexivity and informed their decisions and trajectories in the movement.

Setting the scene: Undocumented youth and migrant rights activism in the US

The undocumented youth movement emerged as a coherent and visible movement in the US in the 2000s through campaigns for a federal Dream Act that would provide a pathway to citizenship for some undocumented young people living in the US. ¹ Being undocumented has created significant barriers for young people in accessing higher education and employment opportunities, while also placing them and their families at risk of detention and deportation (Abrego, 2006; Nicholls, 2013). The campaign for the Dream Act highlighted these barriers and the harms (Abrego, 2006; Escudero, 2020; Negrón-Gonzales, 2013). Despite repeated attempts during the 2000s, the Dream Act did not pass into legislation, but in 2012 President Obama signed the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) administrative order. This gave eligible ² undocumented young people a two-year temporary protection from deportation and a social security number (Negrón-Gonzales, 2013). Since then, undocumented young people have continued to mobilise, and the movement has become more autonomous and centred on the leadership, goals and strategies of undocumented young people (Sirriyeh, 2019). Under the Trump presidency (2017–2021), these young people were once again in the spotlight as his administration sought to end DACA, and as the wider undocumented population were targeted by immigration enforcement (Zepeda-Millán & Jordán Wallace, 2018).

Emotions, emotional well-being and emotional reflexivity in activism

Emotions and emotional well-being

Research in migration studies has documented how migrant rights campaigns engage with public emotions, exploring how emotions such as grief, outrage and compassion mobilise allies into activism and generate support among wider publics (Maestri & Monforte, 2020; Sirriyeh, 2018; Stierl, 2016). However, there has been less consideration of how emotions are engaged and intervene in migrant activists’ trajectories and emotional well-being. This is significant because as feminist (particularly Black feminist) and social movements scholarship have shown, emotions play a central role in activist experiences (Horn, 2020; Jasper, 2011; Lorde, 1984). Meanwhile, emotional well-being is important for the survival and flourishing of both individuals and their organisations (Chigadu & Chigadu, 2015).

Social movement scholars have explored how emotions are engaged in the recruitment of activists to social movements and in sustaining their involvement (Brown & Pickerill, 2009; Vestergren et al., 2017). Activists feel anger and fear about current conditions, but also become motivated to pursue political action through ‘the excruciating contrast between the way things are now and the way things might be’ (Jasper, 2011, p. 291). Engaging in activism with others also generates emotions for activists. Taking part in marches and other collective actions can boost emotional energy (Gould, 2001; Gruszczynska, 2009). Meanwhile, the joy of building social connections through a movement and developing a sense of belonging to a group are key factors in sustaining engagement (Jasper, 2011; Ransan-Cooper et al., 2018).

Emotions can also have a more destructive role, inducing burnout and related withdrawal from social justice movements (Brown & Pickerill, 2009; Gorksi, 2019). Burnout can be induced because of external societal hostility towards the causes that activists agitate for and the emotional strain that norm-transgression, sanctions and backlash bring (Brown & Pickerill, 2009). Gorski (2019) urges the need to take account of the different identities and social positioning of activists when examining the causes and impacts of burnout. He (2019, p. 669) writes that, racial justice activists who are themselves racially minoritised can be at considerable risk of burnout because they ‘carry the burden of structural understanding on top of the challenge of coping with the grind of racism in their own lives, often referred to as racial battle fatigue’. He suggests that this is underexplored in social movements research. However, feminist activists and scholars, especially Black feminists, have long recognised how the emotional labour of resistance takes a toll on directly impacted people (Ahmed, 2014; Emejulu & Bassel, 2020), highlighting the importance of self-care and attention to well-being (Chigadu & Chigadu, 2015). When people are engaged in a politics of survival (Hill Collins, 1990/2000) there is not a distinct separation between ‘activism’ and living, or the privilege to opt to disengage (Ahmed, 2014). As Olufemi writes (2019, p. 234), ‘some organise because it is necessary for their survival’ inside fundamentally oppressive structures. Resisting under conditions of oppression and silencing within these institutions can take a heavy toll.

Despite activist critiques of wider social structures and conditions, social justice movements may also have oppressive practices and structures (Bassel & Emejulu, 2017; Vacaro & Mena, 2011). Meanwhile, activists can feel pressure to commit to unmanageable workloads because issues are so urgent and because their sense of emotional responsibility to other community members makes it hard to step back (Vaccaro & Mena, 2011). In this vein, the ‘ideal’ activist is often perceived as an extraordinary person who sacrifices all other needs and desires for the good of the movement (Bobel, 2007). This can include engaging in the more visible and recognised repertoire of the social movement’s actions (Tilly, 2004). The pressure to embody these qualities and perform activism in this way means those who do not engage on these (gendered, racialised and ableist) terms may doubt their standing as ‘real’ activists or may lack recognition for their political activities (Brown & Pickerill, 2009; Craddock, 2019). I explore how young undocumented activists engaged in practices of emotional reflexivity to reason through and respond to some of these contexts and challenges as they reflected on their political goals and emotional well-being.

Emotional reflexivity

Reflexivity refers to the long running internal conversation we have about our life projects and the ‘practices of altering one’s life as a response to knowledge about one’s circumstances’ (Holmes, 2010, p. 139). Two significant reflections on the theorisation of reflexivity are pertinent for this study. First, while noting the critiques of the individualistic and conservative framings of Beck (1992) and Giddens’ (1991) theories of reflexivity, King (2006) argues that rather than necessarily leading to further integration in society, practices of reflexivity can enable people to challenge social determinations to create more radical possibilities. This is relevant to this study as I explore how young people engaged in reflexivity in challenging external conditions and constraints encountered within the movement itself. Second, there has been a call for greater consideration of how emotions are engaged in such reflexive practice (Burkitt, 2012; Holmes, 2010; King, 2006). While Archer (2007) to an extent considers the role of emotions in motivating and monitoring life projects, wider scholarship on reflexivity has been critiqued as overly focused on the cognitive and the individual without adequately attending to emotions and how these are produced in patterns of relationships that the embodied individual engages in over time in the social world (Burkitt, 2012, 2014; Holmes, 2010; King, 2006). Addressing this relative absence, Holmes (2010, p. 139) and others use the term ‘emotional reflexivity’ to describe how people ‘are increasingly drawing on emotions in assessing themselves and their lives’. Emotions inform our perceptions of self, others and the social world and so influence our responses in social interactions, which means that emotional reflexivity is not simply ‘about the way emotions are reflexively monitored or ordered, but about how emotion informs reflexivity itself’ (Burkitt, 2012, p. 458). King (2006) identified the significance of emotional reflexivity for activists in a peace organisation. She observed the complexity of emotions that they contended with and how some coped by using practices of emotional reflexivity to reflect on and problematise their internalisation of social norms that constrained their actions in the world and created barriers to sustaining their activism. Although further literature on emotional reflexivity in activism is limited, there has been some engagement with the concept. While King (2006) focused on activists’ use of Re-evaluation Counselling explicitly as a tool for emotional reflexivity, practices of emotional reflexivity do not necessarily require formal tools and interventions and can also be enabled when there is a supportive emotional culture and space to discuss the difficult emotions associated with activism on social justice issues (Hausfather, 2021; Ransan-Cooper et al., 2018). Connecting to discussion on care and activist spaces, Ransan-Cooper et al. (2018, p. 643) found that engaging in emotional reflexivity was a protective factor against burnout and so ‘having spaces to express difficult emotions associated with activism’ was significant in managing burnout and maintaining movements. I contribute to this literature through exploring how storytelling practices within the undocumented youth movement facilitated such spaces and orientated undocumented young activists to practices of emotional reflexivity and, in doing so, show how emotional reflexivity is a relational endeavour.

Storytelling and emotion in activism

Storytelling has been recognised as a valuable tool for community healing and resistance in response to racial trauma. Chioneso et al. (2020, p. 100) describe storytelling as directing a ‘renarrating of trauma’, enabling people to develop a recognition of the structural and collective conditions of trauma, and to approach healing as a collective rather than individual endeavour. Writing about youth-led organising among racially minoritised young people in New York, Ortega-Williams et al. (2020, p. 626) describe storytelling as a ‘therapeutic function of youth organizing’ since sharing stories with young people in similar situations can help respond to isolation, build relationships, and collectivise and politicise their experiences. However, while observing that storytelling practices have helped undocumented young people address feelings of shame, stigma and fear (Escudero, 2020; Swerts, 2015), research on storytelling and emotions in undocumented youth organising has primarily centred on how storytelling practices have engaged with emotions for political mobilisation.

Storytelling has featured in undocumented youth organising as a tool for recruiting new members, for building community within the movement, and for outward facing claims-making and the generation of support (Nicholls, 2013; Swerts, 2015). In the early campaigns for a Dream Act, young people who fitted the ‘Dreamer’ image of academically high achieving, assimilated and innocent youth were invited to tell their stories to sympathetic politicians and the media (Escudero, 2020; Nicholls, 2013). As the movement grew more autonomous and youth-led, storytelling became centred within ‘coming out’ practices under the slogan of ‘undocumented, unafraid’. Young people came together to share their stories and bear witness to each other’s experiences of being undocumented, while also crafting and practising telling their stories to public audiences to raise awareness and mobilise support for their cause (Escudero, 2020; Swerts, 2015; Unzueta Carrasco & Seif, 2014). Over time through these practices and, also through the rich and expanding undocumented arts scene, a more diverse range of stories about undocumented life is being told.

In the discussion below I shift the lens to examine how young activists engaged with and experienced practices and spaces of storytelling in the undocumented youth movement in the context of the trauma of illegalisation, focusing on the relationship between storytelling and emotional reflexivity to examine the impacts on activists’ emotional wellbeing and trajectories over time in the movement.

The California study

One quarter of undocumented immigrants in the US reside in California (Ward & Batalova, 2023). There is also a long history of migrant rights activism in the state, particularly in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, while the state has some of the most active and long-standing undocumented immigrant youth organisations in the US (Nicholls, 2013).

In 2017 I spent two months in Los Angeles and Orange County followed by two months in the Bay Area. Through participant observation and biographical narrative interviews with 24 undocumented young activists, I explored how the young people’s engagement in undocumented youth activism shaped and was shaped by their understandings and experiences of ‘citizenship’. Participants discussed their entry into and pathways through the undocumented youth movement.

Mexicans and Central Americans account for 67% of the undocumented population in the US; however, a range of other nationalities are also present (Ward & Batalova, 2023). Participants in this study were aged 18–30 and included young people born in Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador, but also the Republic of Korea, the Philippines, Argentina and various other countries across South America, Southeast Asia and East Asia. ³ Some became active in the movement prior to the introduction of DACA while others joined more recently. I met participants through their undocumented youth organisations and through events I attended. Interviews lasted 1.5–2.5 hours, were audio-recorded, transcribed and analysed through narrative analysis. I also engaged in 44 hours of participant observation. During this period, I was a guest member of a community-based undocumented youth organisation, there on the invitation of members of the organisation. In this capacity, I participated in rallies, meetings, training events, lobbying events, workshops and conferences. This gave me direct insights into the day-to-day work of the activists and discussions taking place in the movement.

Participants did not express discomfort with narrating their experiences in activism. However, this is a highly researched community, and it is likely that some young people were fatigued by requests to participate in research. Therefore, this may have impacted on who elected to participate in the study. In a context where these young people were repeatedly telling their story through research but also in their activism – and the fatigue around that – I tried to design a study that worked with methods that enabled them to steer the narrative and framing. In hindsight and considering young people’s reflections on storytelling discussed later, I would also have incorporated possibilities for creative and arts-based research methods as well as centring a participatory approach so the framing and methodology of the study could have embedded and responded to some of the critical and insightful engagements with storytelling that young people raised in their reflections on activism. ⁴ I continue to be in touch with many of the young people who took part in the study, and some have engaged in dissemination activities from the study where we have continued this dialogue, including through their arts-based interventions.

Driving activism: Emotional reflexivity and traumas of illegalisation

I begin with a discussion of young people’s reflections on getting involved in undocumented youth activism, looking at how their experiences and emotions in navigating undocumented life shaped their entry into the movement and informed their experiences of activism, decision-making and pathways through the movement.

Unsurprisingly, young people expressed a strong emotional investment in the causes they campaigned on and explained how this motivated them to become involved in undocumented youth activism (Bunnage, 2014). Their pathways into activism were shaped by their direct experiences of harm through the immigration regime and the traumas of illegalisation. In discussing what had prompted them to become involved in the movement, they all described their emotions at that time, most commonly a sense of despair, loneliness, shock, anger, or fear.

Being in limbo at the end of high school was one of the most frequently mentioned reasons for joining undocumented youth organisations. Most young people had been aware of their undocumented status as children, but this had not impeded their access to education because undocumented children in the US have the right to attend school ⁵ alongside citizen peers. However, on graduating high school some faced an impasse either because (prior to the introduction of DACA) they could not work legally and could not access most student loans and scholarships, or (if graduating after DACA was introduced) because they did not meet the eligibility criteria for DACA. Laura, a Mexican young woman from LA, recounted her feelings on finding out she had been accepted to two prestigious universities but would not be able to take up these offers due to her fees status as an undocumented student. She said, ‘It was a strong moment in my life. I remember crying my way home. I remember feeling devastated.’

Meanwhile, even when young people did manage to attend university, navigating university life as an undocumented person could be a challenging and isolating experience. They spoke of struggles with academic departments, student support services and administrative services that lacked knowledge about the needs of undocumented students or did not act to support them, and about racism and xenophobia they encountered from other students on campus. Patty, a Mexican student in Orange County, remembered that when she first arrived at university, ‘there wasn’t a lot of awareness on campus, the way people would refer to undocumented people on campus was ‘oh you are an illegal immigrant’.

While encountering education barriers was the primary entry point for most, for others, the impetus to get involved in activism came through witnessing detentions or deportations or facing this prospect themselves. Ana, who had herself been in deportation proceedings, became involved with undocumented activism when her friend was detained. At this point in her life, unable to finance a college education and feeling ‘really bummed out and depressed’, Ana saw a possibility for pushing back against the harms inflicted on her and her community. As she said, ‘that event happening really made me interested. And like, oh there’s something that you can do about it.’

Most young people joined undocumented youth groups to try to survive and navigate these conditions. They described how attending undocumented youth meetings and events had offered a lifeline, often providing a sense of hope and a space of healing. Tony, a Filipino student, who did not qualify for DACA, recalled a period of depression as he started college. He was drinking heavily and described how he had ‘just wanted to escape from the reality’. On becoming involved with a campus-based undocumented youth group he felt ‘a big relief’ because he ‘could really be with people who had shared similar struggles or had been struggling for longer than I had’ and they could share their stories with others who understood. However, as Ana suggests, young people were also drawn to, or became further involved in, these groups because they were driven by the possibility of changing the conditions that caused them such hardship (Jasper, 2011).

Considering critiques of the Dreamer narrative described earlier and shifts to more youth-led organising (Nicholls, 2013), young people I spoke with urged that it was imperative that they were at the forefront of campaigns about their lives and futures. However, this was also imbued with challenges in sustaining their emotional well-being and avoiding burnout as they and their families continued to live through the harms and traumas of illegalisation. While young people’s strong emotional investment in the cause drove them to get involved in and sustained their activism, they were conscious of how campaigning could place acute pressures on their mental health and well-being. David, a Filipino activist in the Bay Area, became involved in activism after being released from immigration detention. He described the most recent anti-deportation campaign he had been involved in and why this had confirmed his decision to step back from activism. He recalled,

The [detained man’s] kids were like right there while we were working on it, and they’re all crying, and I’m just, like, man, like, this is just like. . . It’s just emotionally draining, and it’s not something I want to do, and deal with, you know? Out of self-preservation.

Joanne, a Korean activist in LA born in South America, explained how the impact of being involved in such campaigns differed for undocumented people in comparison to allies who were not subject to immigration enforcement:

It’s one thing when you can go home and your conscience is clean, ‘oh I’m doing something good for the world.’ You go home and you can forget about it. It’s another thing when you are undocumented, and you hear about it. [. . .] That wears you down. So, for me I know I don’t want to do this forever because I will go crazy.

I now turn to examine in further detail the emotions entailed in young people’s activist labour and how these layered on to their formative experiences to impact on their navigation of emotional well-being during these times.

Emotional strains: Navigating the limits of ‘ideal’ undocumented activism

To better understand how young people’s engagement in the undocumented youth movement impacted their emotional well-being and, relatedly, how emotions factored into their decision-making about future trajectories, it is necessary to explore some of the labour performed by young people in the movement. The emotions generated through these activities became layered onto and connected with the experiences discussed earlier, creating a complex emotional register, and often leading to some conflicting feelings about activism.

As mentioned earlier, public biographical storytelling has been a key tactic in the undocumented youth movement’s campaign repertoire, used as a means of legitimising grievances and making moral appeals to the public. Young people’s public storytelling has been powerful in engaging the public’s emotions and building support for the cause. Emotions are centred in these practices as young activists tell stories in ways that induce empathy in their audiences (Swerts, 2015). The success of storytelling in engaging emotions in this way in undocumented youth campaigns has been well documented, but some young people also described difficulties in sustaining their involvement in these activities, as Justin, a student in Orange County, explained:

It’s great at first but eventually it became more like a necessity like I feel like I need to do it because no one else is going to do and I feel like oftentimes I’m not even prepared to do it, mentally prepared. I just feel like I’m just repeating my story again and again and I’m just bringing negative like memories up [. . .] I think it affected me because I started victimising myself because I say it so much. I was kind of living in the past and stuck in that moment [. . .] I know it’s taking a toll on me.

Storytelling has been a valuable tool for healing and mobilisation. However, while having a space and opportunity to tell their stories could be therapeutic and empowering, some young people found that repeatedly retelling and reflecting on their stories with others, in campaign contexts, over time became distressing and wearing. As Justin explained, this began to undermine his ability to heal, cope and orientate himself to the future. He felt obliged to keep telling this story of his struggles in aid of campaigns, despite the impact that reliving these difficult experiences was having on his mental health. As a mentor to other activists, Alex, an activist in LA, reflected that people often felt a sense of duty to engage in campaign actions at the expense of their own well-being and out of a sense of responsibility to the cause and their communities.

In addition to the emotional strain of repeatedly telling their stories, speaking out publicly brought young people a heightened visibility with further repercussions for their well-being if they received hostile responses (Gorski, 2019). Hostility was directed towards their cause, but as undocumented people this also constituted an attack on their personhood, identity, presence and survival. Anxiety about backlash was heightened in the aftermath of Trump’s election. Patty had been due to feature in a university publication because she had won an award. However, she requested the interview be withdrawn because she feared being targeted on social media. Her fears were compounded by her previous experience of a lack of action from the university administration in response to the harassment of undocumented students on campus.

Some of the iconic images of the undocumented youth movement are of highly visible direct actions and civil disobedience, including the occupation of politicians’ offices, marches and protests outside detention centres. Young people who had taken part in such activities spoke with pride and excitement about their involvement in such actions, showing videos and photographs from the events in their interviews or as they reminisced with one another. They described the close bonds they developed with fellow activists through taking part in actions together. However, most young people also acknowledged that direct action was not the only way to be politically engaged. They spoke of the diverse ways in which people could be involved, particularly in this context of heightened fears about visibility during the Trump presidency and recognising the heterogeneous circumstances and vulnerabilities of others in the undocumented community.

As the movement has become more established, more young people are becoming involved – including those with diverse interpretations of activism and pathways through the movement. April, a Korean college student from Orange County, regarded her actions as activism but distinguished this from ‘political activism’ which she identified as happening off campus. She began her story by alerting me to how her work might not fit with common perceptions and understandings of who an undocumented young activist is and explained how she drew on her emotions as she considered the activist pathways she could pursue. She said,

I’m not involved in any way in political activism and things like that because of my own safety and it’s not something I want to jeopardise in anyway so what I call activism is what I do here on campus. [. . .] If I am outside of campus like walking down the street, I would be paranoid. I would be fearful. I would be scared. So, I would not be able to stand up and walk saying I am undocumented. [. . .] So it’s like on campus I’m okay, there are no barriers, but outside I’m afraid to speak. I can’t be that person who is undocumented, unafraid outside of the campus and that’s why I love the campus so much because it gives me a chance to speak and be vocal about it and do something.

In addition to the forms of activities activism entailed, young people also commented on the timescales of activism and the emotions generated in response. They described relief and sometimes elation at the campaign wins that had been achieved over the years, discussing the direct impacts this had on their lives, such as enabling them to attend college. However, despite seeing that their interventions could contribute to producing meaningful change, there was also frustration and exhaustion at the lack of more radical, transformative and permanent resolutions for undocumented communities, such as a pathway to citizenship and an end to detention and deportation. Young people mentioned burnout as a significant issue arising from navigating activism in this political juncture and spoke of how this had prompted their own and other young people’s withdrawal from activism, whether temporary or permanent. David reflected, ‘you can’t be in this space forever, and sometimes you just get burnt out and become jaded’. Almost all activists who had been involved in the movement for two years or more raised the topic of burnout and identified periods of time when they had to step back from activist work. Joanne and David were planning to exit entirely from migrant rights activism. Joanne explained, ‘I see myself probably in five years not doing this work anymore like this immigrants’ work anymore [. . .] I feel like I’ve been undocumented for 15 years so it’s burnout. I feel like you become jaded or start losing hope.’

Through these discussions young people reflected on the embodied aspects and the physical toll of the emotional demands of activism. Migrant rights activism was about life. It was about survival and making life liveable rather than something that could be contained within work and working hours. Herein there was a paradox in that securing migrant rights was necessary to make life liveable, but the emotional costs of participating in frontline aspects of this struggle at the same time made living in the struggle difficult to bear.

While burnout prompted Joanne and David to plan their exit from activism, others responded through making transitions in their modes of activism to reconcile these needs and navigate the complex emotional register of undocumented life and activism. This is discussed in the following section, through reflecting on how emotional reflexivity was engaged to inform these decisions about transitions and future trajectories through and out of the movement.

Storytelling and relational practices of emotional reflexivity

It was evident that young people drew on their emotions, described in the previous sections, to inform their analysis of their experiences in the movement and their decision-making about trajectories that they had taken or were contemplating. I now focus in more detail on how young people practised emotional reflexivity, often honed through collective spaces and practices of storytelling in the movement, to navigate their trajectories through activism, drawing attention to the consequences of being able to engage in emotional reflexivity and factors that facilitated this. In doing so young people frequently questioned and reshaped common characterisations of the ‘ideal’ activist in general (Bobel, 2007), and specifically how these manifested in the undocumented movement.

Given the heterogeneity of the movement, the activities young people engaged in varied depending on the membership of the groups they were involved in and their politics and goals. However, all the young people described peer group discussion spaces and storytelling as core practices within their groups. Storytelling has consistently been a central feature of organising and campaigning in the undocumented youth movement (Escudero, 2020), used to incorporate new members, to build the movement as a community, and as a tool for mobilisation (Swerts, 2015). Young people recounted how undocumented youth groups provided spaces where they could listen to other young people and begin to share their own stories. This practice of storytelling with their undocumented peers provided opportunities for witnessing stories of shared experiences, which young people said had helped them to address feelings of shame, stigma and fear, and build their confidence in speaking out. These storytelling practices provided comfort and an emotional release when they were able to share their stories and feelings with peers who were in similar circumstances. Gabriella, an Indigenous Guatemalan student in the Bay Area, recalled,

I just sort of exploded and I started telling everything and anything you know [. . .] it was just a great relief. [. . .] It just leaves you lightweight because you are taking everything out, because you are letting everything out.

Young people like Gabriella explained how through this process of acknowledging and reflecting on their emotions and witnessing those of their peers, they found release and support. However, this process also led them to develop new understandings of their experiences, in particular an awareness of the collective aspects and structural causes of the struggles they faced (Ortega-Williams et al., 2020).

Discussion of storytelling in the movement has centred on activities in which young people share their biographies of being undocumented with one another and, sometimes, with outside audiences. However, it was also apparent that practices of biographical storytelling and reflexivity filtered through into other activities and organising practices in the movement. Several undocumented youth organisations delivered educational activities which centred critical pedagogical approaches. Here, young people identified topics that they wished to learn about, which were usually pertinent issues that intervened in their lives, including, for example, race and the criminal justice system, the immigration industrial complex, education funding and inequalities, and race and mental health. Young people observed that through the course of their learning with others they had reflected on their own encounters with these issues and the emotions involved. They described how their critical learning on these topics through a lens of lived experiences helped to inform their analysis of these conditions, often enabling them to better articulate and understand them. For example, Gabriella explained that when she had felt lonely at school she had questioned ‘why am I different? I started doubting from here, or I wish I didn’t have this, or I wish I didn’t have an accent and it was just. I was putting myself down. I was trying to fit into a category that would help me have friends.’ Through her youth organisation she had learned about her first language, Mam, her Indigenous community, and their histories both in the US and Guatemala. She explained how now, ‘I embrace what I have and from my background as well’ and was looking to develop her interpreting and advocacy qualifications to focus on working with Mam-speaking communities in these capacities.

In the undocumented youth organisation that I participated in, biographical discussion and reflection was also embedded as a practice and space within the everyday functioning of the group. Each meeting began with a checking-in exercise where members shared what was happening in their lives that week, always with a focus on how this engaged them emotionally. For example, following an anti-deportation protest that members attended, one young woman described how while glad to attend, she had been fearful because she had been thinking about her own family and her responsibilities to them. She explained her conflicting feelings of wanting to stand in solidarity with undocumented people facing deportation yet fearing the consequences for herself and her family, and how this tension repeatedly figured in her decision-making. On this occasion she had chosen to attend the protest but to remain at the edges and distance herself at points of heightened tension, such as when protestors blocked traffic at an intersection.

In addition to regular group meetings, young people described how attending occasional regional or national events also provided these spaces for checking-in and reflection; this often continued outside of the formal spaces of the event and into their friendships and socialising. Justin explained,

Sometimes I’ll meet them just once a year. I’ll meet them at conference and then I’ll meet them again at another conference and we just bonded. A lot of these times we talk about really important issues. Our stories but also what we want versus what our families want which is a very sensitive topic. A lot of [this] introspecting conversation is hard to have in everyday conversation, but we know that every time we have spaces to communicate together.

It was through some of these conversations that Justin shared his discomfort about repeated public storytelling in campaign contexts. He discussed with his friends the impacts this had on his mental health and found that they had similar experiences. Justin felt he was telling a static story that remained anchored in his past without reflecting who he was becoming and his evolving life projects and sense of self. Sharing these ambitions and reflections on his evolving projects with friends highlighted for him the contrast and increasing disconnect between the existing public storytelling scripts and modes of representation he was invited to engage in, and the way he felt about his life and circumstances now, including how he wished to represent himself.

He explained how he was addressing this through transitioning into a different mode of activist engagement. He explained,

I knew I still wanted to do immigration work, but I didn’t want immigration work to consume me and be my identity because I knew a lot of times, ‘hi I’m undocumented from this place. Life sucks. You need to wake up.’ [. . .] It’s true but you can live in that so [. . .] I’ve tried to do activism in a different sense. I’ve tied it more to art and that way I’ve tried to do my own thing.

Several young people were pursuing political engagement and expression in the burgeoning undocumented arts and film scene. While undocumented people’s lives and struggles are centred in these projects, there is often a richness, nuance and creativity in the portrayals and framing of the narratives which explore both the extraordinary and ordinary, while also being a vehicle for young people’s artistic expression and skills. As such, these modes of engagement have offered some young people greater autonomy and control over the stories they tell and how, addressing some of the concerns identified earlier.

Young people had begun engaging in undocumented youth activism as a means of navigating and overcoming barriers they encountered as they moved into adulthood. As Joanne explained, ‘Some of my undocumented peers who were dragged into this movement said “oh I actually had so many different aspirations. I wanted to be an actor. I wanted to be a musician” [. . .] you get dragged into that because you almost have to like a survival thing.’ It was important to young people to find spaces and ways of doing activism that accommodated their changing needs and desired modes of expression and ambitions, enabling them to continue to move forwards rather than feeling stuck in practices that no longer resonated with how they felt and wished to engage with the world. Young people such as Justin and others working in the creative industries were successfully blending other interests and career aspirations with their activist practice. Other young people drew on the values and goals of the movement as they pursued their chosen professions in, for example, healthcare, education, trade unionism and conservation, where they sought to address and represent the needs of undocumented communities and build connections between different social justice issues.

Conclusion

Exposing and resisting violent and repressive immigration controls is an intensely emotional endeavour; this is particularly so for migrant activists who engage in this struggle while they are living through and harmed by immigration enforcement. I have explored the role of emotions in undocumented young people’s experiences of activism through the undocumented youth movement, centring on the impacts of activism on their emotional well-being and how they engaged in emotional reflexivity as a relational practice to navigate pathways through the movement in this context.

These reflections contribute to research on the politics of migrant-led activism by exploring the conditions under which migrant activists engage in these struggles and the challenges they encounter in doing so. Building on evidence from feminist and social movement scholarship about the significant role of emotions in the entry of people into activism and in defining activist experiences, I have documented how the emotional politics of migration and migrant activism played out in the everyday lived experiences of young activists as they engaged in the undocumented youth movement. Through this discussion I have also highlighted the importance of considering how emotional reflexivity unfolds not simply as an individual practice, but rather how engagement in activism can facilitate emotional reflexivity as a relational endeavour with the potential to drive social change, in this case resisting the impacts of repressive immigration controls.

It was evident that these young people were well-attuned to their emotions and were emotionally reflexive in assessing their roles and futures within the movement to find a place within it that fitted with their changing needs and goals. Emotions were an integral aspect of this reasoning and reflection process. In being emotionally reflexive as they navigated their pathways through activism, young people drew on the skills, practices and relationships they developed through the undocumented youth movement. The movement emerged and was centred in collective spaces where emotional reflexivity was valued and nurtured, particularly through practices and spaces of storytelling.

Examples discussed illustrate the complex and layered emotions that activists experienced through campaign work, and the dynamic nature of emotions. While a particular course of action or activity aligned with young people’s emotional needs at one time, this was not guaranteed to continue indefinitely. Young people reflected on some of the emotional impacts and engaged in emotional reflexivity as they considered transitions in their activism to address these concerns and changing needs. As young people drew and reflected on their emotions to consider their lives and trajectories, this was about responding to and countering emotions that limited or threatened to derail them, but also about responding to and pursuing joyful and hopeful prospects. Changes in young people’s activist practices were part of their growth and learning in the movement as they engaged with debates and critiques. These changes also reflected the young people’s shifting emotional needs and experiences. Young people took an expansive definition of activism, moving beyond the characterisation of an ‘ideal’ activist that could be exclusionary and unattainable. Their understandings of what constituted activism incorporated multiple, and often creative, ways of being involved.

Finally, as well as peer group spaces of support in the movement, people spoke of the significance of mentorship, with younger activists commenting on how they confided in and sought guidance from more experienced activists, while mentors explained the importance of taking on these roles to support people and to sustain the movement. Joanne reflected on how she came to re-evaluate the movement’s success and her own involvement in activism. She explained, ‘You get involved in something so much bigger than yourself because you know it might not be solved in your lifetime, but you are contributing in some way [. . .] Even like if I leave it doesn’t mean like the movement is not going to be so that’s the way I see it.’ While individuals might step back, there was continuity as new cohorts took up the torch.