Everyday Activists

Strategies of resistance by undocumented young adults


About 825,000 of the more than two million undocumented young adults in the United States benefited from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program started by President Obama in 2012. Through DACA, these young adults are able to work legally in the United States and have been insulated from deportation. However, since President Trump’s attempted termination of the program in 2017, DACA recipients have endured a rollercoaster of legal battles that have left them in an unimaginable state of prolonged limbo.

Amid this rapidly shifting political climate, many undocumented young adults have joined the large-scale, high-visibility social movement to fight for policy change and immigrant justice. Yet often overlooked are the thousands more DACA recipients nationwide who have never participated in immigration-related activism. As Christina M. Getrich argues, in less publicly visible ways, they are nonetheless fighting for immigrant well-being and justice in their everyday adult lives, and their more private forms of action should be considered political activism. Drawing from five years of rich ethnographic research with a diverse population of thirty DACA recipients living in the Washington, D.C., area, Everyday Activists portrays the alternative political engagement strategies they enact in their daily lives as they leverage their unique knowledge bases and skill sets and make a meaningful impact in their communities. The volume reveals how these young activists’ strategies are instructive for thinking creatively about how to show up in our everyday lives for immigrants and others who are systematically subjected to social exclusion.