Dreamers Moms and Their Struggle for Legal Reunification: Maternal Acts of Public Disclosure as a Form of Constructive Resistance

Abstract

Maternal activism is a long tradition in Latin America. Its research focuses on how women mobilize their identity as mothers to take the streets to reclaim their rights, their children’s, and their families’, and ultimately to resist the actions of the State. However, how does this maternal activism manifest itself when motherhood and deportation intersect? Drawing on our ongoing ethnographic research with Dreamers Moms (DM), a grassroots organization in Tijuana, Mexico composed by Mexican women, we argue that the acts displayed by members of DM are part of an ample repertoire of what Orozco Mendoza (2019) refers to as “maternal acts of public disclosures” through which these women engage in a form of constructive resistance. Rather than trying to change the world order and, particularly, the unjust U.S. migration policy, these women, by performing these acts, seek to achieve two goals: to fight against being stripped of their humanity and dignity as they were violently expelled from the U.S. due to their deportation, and to avoid the invisibility and otherization of their subjectivity once they become deported mothers.