The Critical DREAMer Memoir
Educational Mobility and the Limits of Meritocratic Citizenship
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3761949 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Guadalupe Escobar (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 95 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 29-58 |
| Publication date | 2023-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-9831 • E-ISSN: 1527-2117 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/00029831-10345351 |
| OpenAlex | W4312007521 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 41 |
This article takes up the figure of the DREAMer in the twenty-first-century Latinx memoir by the formerly undocumented to consider the coupling of the right to education with narratability. The author reads Alberto Ledesma's Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer (2017), Reyna Grande's The Distance between Us (2012), and Dan-el Padilla Peralta's Undocumented (2015) as examples of the critical DREAMer memoir, foregrounding suppressed and subversive self-representation. Such self-fashionings are constrained by overachievement while still troubling the myth of meritocracy to determine deservingness of US citizenship. This trio of texts shows how school systems are mechanisms of coercive assimilation that reproduce a ranking regime wherein racial others are excluded or subordinated. Even as school environments can silence, they can also be safe havens for amplifying the human voice. The freedom of expression found in education marks a transformation of silence into advocacy. The present proliferation of critical DREAMer memoirs largely reflects a new shape of post-9/11 Latinx literature, as well as the subgenre of human rights and literature
Aesthetics · Art · Citizenship · Foregrounding · Homeland · Literature · Memoir · Meritocracy · Political science · Politics · Privilege (computing) · Silence · Sociology · Critical Race Theory in Education · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law
White by Law
Hunger of Memory
Human Rights and Narrated Lives
Human Rights, Inc.
The DREAMers
Barrio-Logos
Borderlands/La Frontera
Socially Undocumented
Triangulations
The Violence of Citizenship in the Making of Refugees
Local Histories/Global Designs
On Being Included
Spanish is not spoken here
Dreamlands, Border Zones, and Spaces of Exception
A Journey to/through Family
Translating Blackness
Anchor Babies and the Challenge of Birthright Citizenship
Evicted
Assimilation
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2024 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |