Photo of first direct action with civil disobedience led by undocumented youth of the National Immigrant Youth Alliance after the failure of the DREAM Act to pass in December 2010.
Image description: Four students participating in sit-in protest; several people are standing around them; some of them are recording the action. Over the image, a separate image has been placed, as if in a collage; the image is a drawing in red, white and yellow. It consists of three children and a woman with a baby in her arms. The woman’s head is framed by a big yellow sunshine.
About the event
Join us for The Undocumented-Led Struggle for Freedom, a conversation with four of the six co-authors Marco Saavedra, Claudia Muñoz, Mariela Nuñez-Janes, and Stephen Paveyof Eclipse of Dreams, a timely book which recounts, via self–authored testimonial narratives and collective storytelling, the journey of six activists who met “somewhere in between classrooms, academic conferences, and organizing for the DREAM Act.” Their paths crossed in 2010, the year when the Senate failed to pass the DREAM Act. For this heterogeneous group comprised of undocumented youth activists and activist-scholars, the notorious failure of the DREAM Act revealed the paradoxical position of immigrants in their struggle for “inclusion.” As they poignantly ask in the Introduction:
“What if our dreams, the very scope of our horizons, what we hoped for ourselves and others, was limited by the framework in which we expressed them, the American Dream itself?”
“Eclipse of Dreams,” the eloquent title-image that frames the whole conversation, conveys precisely this contradiction—it names the “space where nightmares and dreams intersect, the third space that Chicana feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldúa calls la encrucijada/the crossroads,” the space “where shadows meet light.” In this event, we will pick up where the book left off to discuss and explore how, in the search for alternative ways of struggle for real liberation, justice, and dignity, undocumented youth activists began to organize differently and to devise several forms of direct action.
