ABSTRACT
This chapter concludes the series of close readings with an examination of José Ángel N.’s Illegal: Reflections of an Undocumented Immigrant, published in 2014 by the University of Illinois Press. Even though published around the same time as Peralta’s text, and hence another representative example of a post-DACA undocumented life narrative, Illegal completely breaks with the trajectory of strong continuance of undocumented productions sketched so far, as it processes frustration and anger in its storyline and does not see or present a solution to the author’s dilemma, such as a call for legislative action. In stark contrast to both earlier undocumented productions and Peralta’s text, Illegal almost ironically takes on strategies of the generic DREAMer narrative, and eventually showcases an altered understanding of them. Illegal also subscribes to remarkably innovative strategies of narrating undocumentedness, as anger and frustration are not only channeled into a political rant, but become a process of emotional self-discovery that inherently challenges traditional notions of citizenship—a reformulation that could indeed be productive for future undocumented productions, as it is not based on traditional, state-based notions of inclusion.
