Oscar R. Cornejo Casares – D’17, Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies, Davidson College

Drawing on in-depth life history interviews with 56 Latin American undocumented, semi-legal, and formerly undocumented immigrants in the Chicagoland area, Dr. Casares addresses the profound effects of legalization and its significant limits on undocumented immigrants’ incorporation patterns. He argues that undocumented immigrants internalize structures of immigration law through long-term socialization, forming durably conditioned and conditioning dispositions connected to embodied exclusionary socio-legal histories. He terms this system of dispositions the habitus of illegality and these reconfigured dispositions the habitus of neo-illegality—a newer yet similar form of illegality in the lives of the formerly undocumented. Legal status thus emerges as an enduring embodied form of socio-legal exclusion through immigrants’ continued ways of living and being. This research challenges the prevailing citizenship logics of pro-immigrant social movements and the scholarly understanding of legal status, demonstrating the need for the transformation of immigration structures.

Sponsored by Rockefeller Center, Latin American, Latino & Carribbean Studies, and Sociology Truxal Funds