Illustrates how the Dreamer community was created rhetorically—in the discourse, messages, actions, and visual representations of undocumented youth

Dreamer Nation tells the story of how Dreamers in the Obama era creatively confronted a complex sociopolitical landscape to advocate for immigrant rights and empower undocumented youth to proudly represent their lives and identities, all while under the ever-present threat of detention and deportation. Contributing to rhetorical studies of social movements, immigration, and minoritized rhetorics, Ribero argues that even though Dreamer rhetorics were reflective of the discursive limits of the neoliberal milieu, they also worked to disrupt neoliberal constraints through activism that troubled the primacy of the nation-state and citizenship, refused to adhere to respectability politics, forwarded embodied identity and transnational belonging, and looked for liberation in community—not solely in legislative action.

Each chapter presents a different rhetorical situation within the US “crisis” of immigration and the rhetoric that Dreamers used to respond to it. Organized chronologically, the chapters document Dreamer activism during the Obama presidency, from the 2010 hunger strikes advocating for the DREAM Act to undocuqueer “artivism” responding to Trump’s presidential campaign. The author draws not only on the methods and theories of rhetorical studies but also on women of color feminisms, ethnic studies, critical theory, and queer theory. In this way, the book looks across disciplines to illustrate the rhetorical savvy of one of the most important US social movements of our time.
 

Ana Milena Ribero is assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at Oregon State University. She has published articles in Rhetoric Review, Peitho, and Present Tense, among others.

 

“Dreamer Nation is an elegantly written and thoroughly researched rhetorical history of undocumented youth activism during the Obama years. Ribero’s book will be beneficial to readers interested in social movements, queer of color critique, decolonial feminism, and anyone interested in immigration politics.”
—J. David Cisneros, author of The Border Crossed Us: Rhetorics of Borders, Citizenship, and Latina/o Identity

"Elegant and compelling, Dreamer Nation tells a much-needed rhetorical story. Ribero’s account of Dreamer activism centers the troubling, yet all-too-common, intersection of radicality and normativity, challenging us to rethink the persistent separation of these two related ideals."
—Lisa A. Flores is professor of communication and the Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the University of Colorado. She is the author of Deportable and Disposable Public Rhetoric and the Making of the Illegal Immigrant.— -