Doctoral Dissertation Research: Legal and Oppositional Consciousness Among Actors in the Central American Refugee Movement

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Since 2014, thousands of Central Americans have fled their home countries and traveled across Mexico to the U.S. border to seek asylum. In response to increased migration from Central America, the U.S. government has implemented a number of policies meant to deter migration. Rather than dissuading Central American asylum seekers, these policies may foster resistance among some asylum seekers and their U.S. legal allies, including attorneys and legal advocates. In contrast to undocumented youth in the United States, asylum seekers, particularly those that have not yet entered the physical boundaries of the nation state, lack claims to cultural citizenship, let alone formal citizenship. Yet many make claims against the U.S. state. At the same time, a broad base of attorneys and legal advocates are engaging with asylum seekers, working en mass to provide short-term pro bono legal services both before and after asylum seekers' transnational border crossings. Unlike impact litigation, direct legal services provision is not traditionally thought to lead to social change, yet it may be a new form of social movement engagement. How do these diverse actors think about their actions? Do these individuals consider themselves part of a social movement? If so, what roles do law and identity play in how they come to see themselves as activists and how, if at all, does this shift across spaces inside and outside of the United States? Understanding the role these factors play in fomenting resistance will have critical implications for both our understanding of social movements and for U.S. immigration policy. Combining a multi-sited ethnographic field study with interviews with Central American asylum seekers and U.S.-based attorneys and legal advocates, this study will provide the first systematic empirical examination of whether and how these various actors come to view themselves as part of a broader movement, what has been called the development of oppositional consciousness. Contributing to the literature on social movements, the legal profession, and migration, this project maps consciousness among actors in the social field of the Central American refugee movement and generates a theoretical model for analyzing the processes through which asylum seekers, attorneys, and legal advocates begin to view themselves as part of a social movement. Focusing on the development of consciousness before, during, and after asylum seekers' transnational border crossing, the study particularly examines how law, and the punitive policies enforcing law, shapes actors' consciousness; how actors' identities, including the asylum seeking identity and professional identity, influence the development of consciousness; and how space mediates consciousness. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.