Afterword

After working together on this project for nearly a decade, we close this book with an experiment in collective composition. This experiment involves an approach to authorship that allows us to proudly identify ourselves while also mitigating the enduring risks of disclosure traced throughout this book. Our challenge has been to find a way of writing that allows us to reveal who we are without forcing any one of us to disclose our (or our family members’) immigration status. After many conversations among ourselves and with our families about the wisdom of using our own names or continuing with pseudonyms, we decided on a strategy that could balance our desire to be visible with our need to protect the most vulnerable among us. We list our real names in the table of contents in recognition of our coauthorship, and we also shift between “I,” “she,” “we,” and “her” pronouns to anonymize any one individual’s images or words. In order to move freely between speakers—avoiding attributing experiences (and therefore immigration status) to any one of us—we have sometimes altered the subject–verb agreement of our sentences throughout the prose. The result is a choral, composite text in which we are all visible as writers but also shielded from publicizing our immigration status.

We hope that this models a kind of expression beyond the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies following Plyler that have sought to uphold our rights to schooling by rendering us invisible. We are inspired here in part by the solidarity among documented and undocumented students on the Dream Team panel described in chapter 4—a solidarity that recognizes differences while building on shared commitments. By finding creative ways of writing together, we can talk back to the myth of ignorance while still working to protect one another. This afterword extends our collective understanding of the ways in which immigration status has shaped our lives from childhood to young adulthood, and it also demonstrates that our commitment to this project and to one another has been equally long-lasting.

We present excerpts from four “lifemaps” that convey memories of our pasts and visions of our futures. We can call this a kind of pictorial prolepsis that underscores the use of visual methods to represent a moment in time that is laden with concerns about the future. Lifemaps, which are both approach and artifact, are a method used by researchers to elicit the narratives of immigrant children through drawing. We worked to create our lifemaps at two points in this project. In 2014, when we were ten and eleven years old in fifth grade, Ariana asked us to illustrate our experiences of coming to the United States, important events that took place before and after migration, and our goals for the future. Recently, in 2022, we revisited these documents together, and we added new imagery and text to our original drawings in order to bring our lifemaps up to date while imagining our future goals now that we are nineteen and twenty years old.1 We also read and discussed work by Marjorie Faulstich Orellana and Inmaculada García-Sánchez, who use this approach with immigrant children. We wrote this afterword by analyzing our own lifemaps using sentence starters adapted from the scholarly literature that we completed in Google Docs. Ariana collaged images from our original and updated lifemap drawings as well as our written analyses into a draft that we then reviewed and further edited as a group.

Lifemaps are one way of “tapping into children’s views of how their lives could unfold” by asking them to illustrate their experiences.2 We think of lifemaps as “literary acts” or “pictorial narrations” that help us tell our stories by enlisting readers in meaning making beyond what is spoken out loud.3 In this book about talk, where the transcripts represented in the preceding chapters hold so much information about us—based on what we have said and what we have chosen not to say—our lifemaps offer a different way to understand the unique and various situations we’ve found ourselves in, beginning at such young ages. The lifemaps that we share here make visible the connections between immigration and education across place and over time; they refer to geographic locations spanning national borders and educational programs that we have participated in over the last decade. In keeping with the themes of this book, they show how much we knew about the importance of having or not having papers from a very young age.

The term “lifemap” is, of course, metaphorical; it invites us to think of important life moments as destinations along a route.4 The paths that we have drawn represent significant transitions in our lives and open onto futures that are still coming into view. For some of us, returning to our lifemaps felt like looking into a fog. It was hard to clearly name the emotions we were feeling in the moment. For others, revisiting our lifemaps and adding to them with new captions and additional drawings felt like entering a time machine or like seeing stars in the night sky, creating a connection with—a flashback to or a reflection of—what we were thinking and feeling when we first drew them. Some members of our group who participated in the original study have taken paths leading to more distance between us. The five of us have chosen to stay connected—avoiding taking the exit ramp—to continue the sustained inquiry that this project has become.

Our lifemaps display how even at young ages we were all, in our different ways, making sense of migration and raising questions about responsibility, sacrifice, belonging, and the importance of having papers. Figure 7 is a lifemap chronicling an intergenerational story that starts with a mother leaving her home in El Salvador via boat and continues with her U.S.-born daughter growing up in Brooklyn.

Moving from left to right, this lifemap begins from the perspective of a mother who moved to the United States and then gave birth to one of us in New York City. We can see that she is taking this trip as a pregnant woman expecting to give birth, a mother on the move (the lady on the boat who then crosses the desert). This drawing represents a story of parental sacrifice coupled with a child’s sense of responsibility for her family’s well-being. As the path continues, the little U.S.-born girl with two ponytails grows taller and older. While the focus of the drawing is on the parent, this book has shown how the mother’s experiences also affect the daughter. Looking back, I know that my childhood worries may not be considered normal or child-appropriate topics—border crossing, ICE, losing your parents—but they were very present for all of us with undocumented parents.

For those of us who crossed the border, those memories have always remained vivid, and they’ve shaped our lives ever since. Our early lifemaps show that this experience overshadowed other memories and even stifled our imaginations of the future. In Figure 8, one of us leaves a time stamp of crossing the border by noting how old I was when I experienced that defining moment that has shaped my interactions with people ever since.

This drawing focused on crossing borders—not just one, but several, which I had to pass through on the long trip from Central America to the United States. The road continues beyond the border without any additional detail, and I wonder whether those crossings were so formative that it was hard for me to imagine a future self at the time.

Despite the traumas we endured to come to the United States, we’ve never felt fully accepted here, and questions about our birthplace come up in everyday conversations with people. Even though we work to hide our immigration experiences from most people, we are often asked where we’re from when we say our names in Spanish. It’s common for people to express surprise when they hear us speak English fluently. Once, when I was just getting to know someone, he asked me to explain where I was from. Referring to how I spoke, he said, “Oh, you weren’t born here?” When I answered no, he replied, “But your English is so good.”

When this happens—when people ask us to say where we are from according to what we sound like—they are really telling us that to speak Spanish is to be from somewhere else, to not belong here. This is hard to hear for all of us, even though this kind of othering affects us differently if we are U.S. citizens born here or if we are born in Latin America and hold citizenship in our countries of origin.

Even though it was hard for some of us to leave our countries, we felt a sense of possibility in coming here, and it’s been hard to face those moments when we cannot access opportunities because of our immigration status. In the illustration below (Figure 9), I represent sadness: being driven to the airport to leave my home in Mexico, where I was happy. That sense of loss is part of migration, and these sacrifices are justified by the idea leaving for the United States to pursue new opportunities. When I was younger, I drew New York City as a place with pretty, nice things. This was my way of making sense of the idea of leaving my country for the promise of a better life.

The promise of obtaining those nice things has always been tied up with the hard work that I knew I would need to put in to achieve my goals, even when the future remained uncertain. In my drawing, “buena carrera” (good career) and “future” are represented on a different road from my migration story, there is no transportation illustrated, and it is unclear how I would arrive there. At age ten, we just knew we wanted a good future for our older selves.

Over time, we’ve had to work to live with the contradiction of being told to be good students while still being denied certain chances. Updating my lifemap reminded me that I’ve missed out on opportunities to participate in schooling events because I didn’t have a U.S. passport, and that I’m always making calculated choices about how to account for my realities without revealing my immigration status (Figure 10). It continues to be difficult to hide important parts of our lives from people we consider friends.

Throughout a lifetime of living in our mixed-status communities, we have learned how to proudly assert who we are while always weighing the risks involved when we are asked about where we are from.

All of our stories convey the importance of travel as a symbol of possibility. For those of us living undocumented lives, travel by car has been the only way to visit family and places in other states throughout the country. Our lifemaps communicate our preoccupation with modes of transportation, beginning with childhood migrations to the United States, back when we were too young to choose, and continuing with travel to new destinations that, for us, symbolize independence. These drawings represent not only places but also the emotions we felt at ages ten and eleven when we thought about where we’d come from and tried to imagine where we might go next. In Figure 11, one of us travels by car from her birthplace in Mexico to a new home in Brooklyn. Rather than seeing it as a limitation, I’ve come to appreciate car travel because it deepens my sense of connection to each place, especially in that moment of leaving a town in Mexico for a city like New York.

The lifemap in Figure 12 represents how much we were trying and how much we are still trying to figure out. The bottom arches on the left panel include the word “limbo,” representing how much of life we felt unsure about. I knew that after elementary school there was middle school, and after middle it was high school. But now that I’m in college, I don’t know what’s next. There’s not a set path for me, and I have questions. What is it that I can do and what is it that I cannot do as an undocumented student? I want to pursue a career in medicine, but I’m unsure about certain things—do I need to find a private institution that will accept me? Will my international taxpayer ID be enough, or will I need a social security number?

As I’ve grown up, moving around has remained important to me. When we revised our lifemaps recently, I chose to add new places that once seemed far away—like high school in Manhattan—before I could imagine traveling more than a few blocks away from home (Figure 13).

I also named the programs and places that we were able to apply for as non–U.S. citizens; I proudly included them as destinations on the map to show that I was accepted. When I applied to college, I started to see that I was more than just my good grades. I am also who I am because of the programs I’ve been a part of and because of the people I have connected with.

In spite of the difficult time of the pandemic—and the disappointment we experienced as we missed out on high school rituals like prom and graduation—all of us were admitted to college. One of us has taken a leave from college to work in a community-based organization, and three of us are juniors. The three of us felt a huge a sense of accomplishment on becoming the first people in our family to attend college. For two of us, being able to enroll in college while living undocumented has given way to new dreams of graduating, securing employment, and even obtaining a license (Figure 14 and Figure 15).

For several of us, driving a car is an important life goal; as of 2019, it is now a privilege that all of us can strive for regardless of immigration status.5 This represents a step toward obtaining full membership in society that had previously been denied to people without social security numbers.

It’s hard for us to disentangle the different forms of papers that remain important to us today. My updated lifemap and my new set of goals include getting my driver’s license and also applying for citizenship. Even though I gained some sense of stability after getting my legal permanent resident status in elementary school, obtaining U.S. citizenship remains a major life goal. When I was younger, I knew about my immigration status and about the steps involved in obtaining a different set of papers, but back then, my mom managed decisions about schooling and paperwork. Ever since I entered high school, I’ve been in a position to establish my own goals and timeline, and the kinds of papers on my mind now include my driver’s license, my citizenship, and my diploma (Figure 16).

And for those of us born here, we continue to witness our parents, siblings, and friends pursuing the enduring and elusive goal of becoming U.S. citizens.

As we added new destinations to our lifemaps, the ongoing importance of migration and papers to our lives was clear. Our understanding of who we are is represented in these lifemaps and gives us a sense of footing as we continue our journeys into the future. Our work together over many years has had the stated of goal of helping educators and researchers to understand just how much we know; in the process, we have also come to see the importance of what we have experienced. We understand that our experiences growing up in mixed-status families link to the experiences of many other children in this country. We know how aware we have been of immigration status all these years, and we also see how much we have accomplished, not in spite of but because of our sense of responsibility to our loved ones. Our collaboration—which will continue beyond the borders of this book—fills us with a sense of possibility. Seeing our lifemaps now motivates us by connecting us again to those little girls who wanted a buena carrera. This process has encouraged us to keep on going with our goals. We are still here. We are still going strong.