“At its heart, this research is about stories of belonging and wanting to belong,” writes Jose Antonio Vargas in the book’s foreword. Gonzales lays out this data in Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America, published in 2016-although, truthfully, data feels like too narrow a word. Photograph by JOSE LUIS MAGANA/AFP via Getty Images Supreme Court last November, ahead of oral arguments in the case to decide DACA’s fate. He has spent two decades (three, if you count his previous life as a youth worker in Chicago’s immigrant neighborhoods) amassing arguably the world’s most comprehensive data set about a population that, up until then, had never been closely studied.ĭemonstrators march in front of the U.S. His phrase for this kind of existence is, “Ni de aquí, ni de allá”: from neither here nor there. He studies the lives of young undocumented immigrants like Jonathan and Ricardo, people who were brought, or sent, or smuggled into the United States as children, often before they were old enough to remember, and who then grew up here, in a state of perpetual in-between. “It’s probably where I’ll be in five years.” He has figured out what Gonzales’s research notes have inexorably begun to show: that no matter what his education, or talent, or work ethic-or intrinsic “Americanness”-the thing that defines his life is his illegality.Īn ethnographer as well as a sociologist, Gonzales is a professor of education and director of the Immigration Initiative at Harvard. “You see, this right here is right where I’m supposed to be,” he tells Gonzales. “He shouldn’t even be here,” Jonathan says, sitting at a lunch table in the factory’s crowded break room. One of them, Jonathan, never finished high school, while the other, Ricardo, has a college degree in political science and a master’s in management. Like everyone else in Gonzales’s book, they’ve spent most of their lives in the United States. The men are friends, both in their late twenties, and both undocumented immigrants. The penultimate chapter of sociologist Roberto Gonzales’s book Lives in Limbo-the chapter he calls the most painful and gripping to read, the one that would be its climax, if the book were a work of fiction-opens with a story about two factory workers on an auto-parts assembly line.
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