UC Irvine

My dissertation, “An Asset-Based Approach to the Mental Health of Undocumented Students” is a three article-based dissertation that examines how undocumented students experience their mental health and promote their psychological wellbeing in an exclusionary and unpredictable socio-legal context. I address the following questions: 1) How do undocumented students experience emotional distress and psychological wellbeing? 2) How do undocumented students practice agency to promote psychological wellbeing? and 3) To what extent is engaging in acts of resistance associated with emotional distress, measured as anxiety and depression? To answer these questions, I conducted 66 in-depth interviews and analyzed a unique survey data set composed of 1,277 Californian undocumented college students. I argue that, despite a multitude of legal barriers and vulnerabilities, undocumented students practice agency to protect their wellbeing. While previous work has highlighted undocumented students’ poor mental health outcomes, I take an asset-based approach to illustrate how undocumented college students take action to manage their mental health and promote their psychological wellbeing. Throughout, I advance the concept of acts of resistance to capture undocumented students’ agency in navigating and contesting their structural marginalization.My first chapter establishes the process through which undocumented students experience coexisting feelings of emotional distress and psychological wellbeing. I build on my interviewees’ descriptions of their mental health as a rollercoaster to illustrate how this process is shaped by both the socio-legal context and students’ agency. I find that as students confront their legal realities, they experience emotional distress which leads them into downward motions (i.e., spirals and plunges). These downward motions are comprised of students’ feelings of legal insecurity and uncertainty. However, students promote their psychological wellbeing by employing their agency which in turn allows for them to experience upward motions. Student agency encompasses students drawing strength from their undocumented immigration status, and envisioning opportunities for themselves to experience upward motions or psychological wellbeing. Yet, these emotions collide because of structural constraints of the socio-legal context, leaving students feeling like they are in a perpetual rollercoaster ride. Contrary to prior research which has focused on adverse mental health outcomes, this manuscript sheds light on the multidimensional nature of mental health and shows how it is shaped by socio-legal barriers. My second chapter examines the agentic actions employed by students to resist structural constraints and foster their psychological wellbeing. I find that students utilize undocumented student programs on their campus, engage in political actions, expand their critical consciousness, and practice self-care to mitigate the negative consequences associated with their legal status. These actions promote wellbeing by demystifying the constraints imposed by exclusionary immigration policy and helping students reframe their negative thoughts. I conceptualize these efforts as acts of resistance, or actions taken to resist structural inequality and socio-legal barriers and theorize these as a unique dimension of the stress process. Whereas stress process theory focuses on coping actions as a critical pathway to protect mental health by buffering against the effect of stressors, acts of resistance are unique actions taken to mitigate legal vulnerabilities. My third chapter is a quantitative analysis that examines undocumented students’ political engagement, critical consciousness raising, and undocumented student programming usage to see if these acts of resistance are associated with mental health outcomes. I use 2020 survey data collected by the UC Collaborative to Promote Immigrant and Student Equity (UC PromISE), for which I served as a graduate student researcher allowing me to add measures of interest. Findings suggest that students who report higher political engagement and critical consciousness raising report higher depression and anxiety symptomatology. This work highlights that undocumented college students’ efforts to navigate and contest their marginalization harms their mental health outcomes. The complete manuscript is published in Society and Mental Health; I am first author with co-authors Dr. Flores Morales who aided with data analysis at the revision stage and Dr. Enriquez who is PI on the UC PromISE study.