UCLA

Influential elite allies; a supportive electorate; and organizations with a sizable base. These are just a few of the predictors that have traditionally been used to measure social movements. Yet during the year 2010, a national movement emerged, led by undocumented/undocuqueer youth and guided by the slogan, “Undocumented and Unafraid.” To gain national attention, youth activists organized a series of marches and civil disobedience acts that would ultimately lead to executive actions like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Departing from traditional social movement theories, this thesis offers an alternative framework to more dynamically capture the ways that undocumented/undocuqueer youth built and mobilized a movement through political ingenuity, resourcefulness and queerness.

As a case study, the Trail of Dreams demonstrates how a collective action led by non-normative and queer political subjects—undocumented migrants living in the southeastern U.S.—centered the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and legal status within the broader scope of the migrant rights movement. The Trail not only recovers the history and agency of activists but contributes to new theoretical directions in Latino politics, queer migration studies, and social movement theories.