Undocumented Knowledges
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Undocumented Knowledges is an archival project dedicated to preserving and making publicly accessible important documents of the undocumented youth movement, a juridical rights-based movement within the larger immigrant rights movement in the United States. The project identifies the city of Chicago and the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) as key sites in the emergence of the undocumented youth movement. Chicago, for example, was the site of the first National Coming Out of the Shadows Day (March 10, 2010), an event that included UIC undocumented student activists whose public declaration of immigration status transformed the immigrant rights debate and redirected the larger immigrant rights movement.
To advance our understanding of a national movement and the innovative forms of civic engagement undocumented student organizers have developed in Chicago and at UIC, our project asks: What role have undocumented (and previously undocumented) UIC alumni played in undocumented organizing at a local level—at UIC and in Chicago—more broadly? How has UIC served as an integral site for migrant-led mobilization from the 2010s to the present in the City of Chicago? How has the Fearless Undocumented Alliance (UIC-based student organization) impacted civic engagement within UIC, the City of Chicago, and the national undocumented youth movement? How can we learn and archive important contributions from non-citizens who engage and participate in political movements and civic engagement (outside of voting)? How can we best archive undocumented knowledges while collecting oral histories from current and former UIC undocumented student activists?
Undocumented Knowledges provides an answer to these questions in various phases. Starting the fall 2024 semester, the research team hosted a public conversation with oral history interview participants about civic engagement in Chicago and UIC. This program marked the first step in the collection of oral history interviews with UIC undocumented student activists in the spring 2025 semester. During this time, the team will develop a digital archive that will include recordings of oral history interviews, public conversations with interview participants, and other documents of the undocumented youth movement in Chicago and UIC to document the ways that undocumented people understand and move through the world and advance our understanding of civic engagement and more.
This project is a collaboration between staff and faculty from the UIC Latino Cultural Center, the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, and the Department of English.