Complexities of belonging: Compounded foreignness and racial cover among undocumented Central American youth

Legally excluded from the state through their status, undocumented Central Americans must also navigate belonging in social movement spaces that do not center their cultural experiences. Drawing on 25 interviews with Guatemalans, Hondurans, and Salvadorans from multiple studies, we explore Central Americans’ agency and identity development in immigrant rights organizations and in daily life. We employ the term, compounded foreignness, to capture the layered practices of exclusion they face for being unauthorized and for not fitting into dominant conceptions of Latinidad. We demonstrate that undocumented Central Americans develop various strategies of belonging. For example, shared experiences of racialized illegality can lead to solidarity amongst undocumented immigrant youth across racial, ethnic, and national lines. When they are being negatively targeted, however, they use racialized illegality as racial cover–that is, a way to divert attention away from their illegality in relation to the state, as well as social and cultural foreignness from Latinidad. This means that some choose to pass as Mexican by adopting Mexican cultural norms and colloquial speech, while others take pride in their cultural difference as Central Americans. In other instances, they seek spaces and people who share their cultural identity. Importantly, while racial cover may work as a strategy for navigating these different forms of marginalization, racial cover can also cover up and make invisible Central American identities and needs. Together, these experiences reveal a level of agency and nuance needed to deepen our understanding of undocumented immigrants, Central Americans, and belonging in the United States.