UC Irvine

Academic scholarship on undocumented immigration has theorized undocumented through frameworks of necropolitics in which undocumented people exist as socially dead, in the shadows, voiceless, and without agency. While studies should continue to examine the social, legal, and political violence inflicted on the most vulnerable immigrant communities, it is important not to reduce individuals to violence because, in doing so, it is inflicting an epistemological form of violence. In this dissertation, I examine how undocumented visual artists navigate, process, and refuse the violence embedded in their undocumented immigration status. Through art, undocumented immigrants claim agency and, in many ways, humanity. To highlight the multidimensional experience of livability in undocumented life through art, I center the lived experiences of predominantly queer undocumented artists. I conducted two years of ethnographic and autoethnographic fieldwork between 2020 and 202I, in which I carried out interviews, participant observation, and archival research in the US and Mexico with visual artists. Drawing on feminist theories of refusal, belonging, and livability, this dissertation examines undocumented livability as a politics that affirms a self-determined life as a basic human right in which marginalized individuals contest and rearticulate terms of visibility and imagine other worlds beyond violence. I examine the politics of art to explore how undocumented art politics and aesthetics imagine freedom beyond borders, subjectivity beyond legal categories, and envision belonging outside the confines of legal citizenship. By centering livability in art politics, I examine how undocumented aesthetics of livability create a utopian political project that is critical of biopolitics responsible for violence and aims to create a better world.