Undocumented and Queer Emerging Adults

Abstract

This study explores the lived experiences of queer undocumented young adults who were brought to the United States as children and have come of age within overlapping systems of exclusion. Based on five months of ethnographic fieldwork in California, including a focus group with undocumented queer youth, the research examines how participants navigate conditional forms of acceptance and rejection across both familial and state contexts. Participants described feeling embraced by family while excluded by the state, or accepted by certain institutions while rejected at home, revealing how queerness and immigration status intersect in uneven and often contradictory ways. Attending intersectionality as both an analytic and lived reality, the study centers how these identities compound vulnerability while also shaping unique forms of community and resistance. These tensions are not merely structural; they shape daily decisions about disclosure, safety, and identity. The emotional labor of living between visibility and fear, love and erasure, emerged as a constant thread. Ultimately, the study highlights the quiet forms of care, resilience, and resistance that sustain these young people as they move through fragmented spaces of belonging that rarely recognize them in full.