2011

Abstract Chapter 6 follows the establishment of the National Immigrant Youth Alliance in early 2011 and its first year of escalating actions. It explains how this choreography of protest was inspired by NIYA’s critical rejection of the reified immigration reform movement and the obedient role of the fetishized “good” DREAMer within it. NIYA organized undocumented youth who had never had a chance to go to college and were living in regions neglected by United We Dream. The members of the new alliance called themselves “bad DREAMers.” The chapter explains the genesis of NIYA’s strategy of using the arrests of DREAMers in social protests as object lessons to show undocumented communities that coming out of the shadows led to empowerment and greater security. This protest strategy hinged on undocumented youth exploiting the image of the reified DREAMer and risky acts of self-instrumentalization.