ABSTRACT
Following the increasing public attention undocumented representations created, this chapter centers on Jose Antonio Vargas groundbreaking essay “Outlaw: My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant,” published in the New York Times Magazine in 2010. When situating Vargas’ essay within the larger framework of the productive history of texts by undocumented individuals, Vargas’ public storytelling indeed marks a transformative moment. For the first time, the generic DREAMer narrative is consciously and drastically revised through an emotional narrative vernacular which centers on the importance of self-disclosure rather than the performance of a desirable or even exceptional migrant. Though the undocumented movement grew precisely because of their ability to attach desirability to undocumented migrants by adhering to meritocratic frameworks, Vargas challenges such strategies and instead transforms his undocumentedness into new narrative structures in order to advocate a new way of talking and thinking about US power, immigration, and legality: an approach that legitimizes undocumented self-representations irrelevant of their political agenda.
