Inmigrante indocumentado : transnational communities of thriving in the midst of racial structural inequalities

My work reveals a transnational politics of thriving that foregrounds the importance of affective community relations for oppressed and marginalized communities in the reproduction of LIFE - of social life - and thriving communities in places set for their failure in the US, such as Pasco WA where about 70% of the population identifies as "Hispanic," mostly Mexicans. Drawing from qualitative methods consisting of: archival research; ethnography; interviews of eight city leaders including the mayor of Pasco Matt Watkins; and the chief of the Police Bob Metzger; and from over 40 testimonios from mixed status immigrants, my research analyzes the ways in which undocumented Mexican immigrants construct thriving communities in places where they are not supposed to survive. To answer this question, I employ a transnational/trans-border approach because as I analyze how processes of imperialism, bordering, and immigration law have impacted agrarian communities in Mexico and Mexican immigrants in US cities, and in turn how immigrants themselves resist by adopting and readapting knowledge from the 'South' in order to produce communities of thriving in their everyday lives in the US. My community in Pasco and El Rancho reveal how acts of mourning (at funerals), celebrations (at weddings, quinceañeras, birthdays, etc), and kinship (co-parenting, compadrazgo) make each other strong, whole, and happy enabling a politics of thriving. It is exactly as Shawn Wilson says, we are our relations. In addition, I theorize that many of these rituals celebrate life (even at funerals) and as such, they serve as an antidote to social death - described as the permanent condition that the undocumented is forced to inhabit due to criminalization and denial of personhood through the law (Cacho 2012). However, based on my research, I refine this concept from all-encompassing social death to mean legal death - which means legal discrimination against access to what the state protects through the law including national borders, employment, housing, education, property, vote, and citizenship status. However far from permanent, legal death is a fluid condition in relation to the law. The law does not dictate all our relations and so does not have the power to fully take away social life, personhood and humanity; our multiple relations with people and place do.