UC Irvine

This paper argues that when citizenship status is excluded from disaster management and planning, assumptions are made about undocumented communities, leading to their continued marginalization. In response, we introduce undocumented critical theory (UndocuCrit) as a necessary intervention in critical disaster research. By applying its four tenets – fear, liminality, parental sacrifice and acompañamiento – we demonstrate how undocumented status fundamentally shapes disaster experiences. UndocuCrit reorients disaster frameworks to honor the lived realities of undocumented immigrants, and we argue that it challenges exclusionary norms in traditional disaster paradigms.