Chronotopes of (Im)mobility and Imagination: Undocumented Migrant Mothers’ Narrative Constructions of Identity and Experience

Social scientific scholarship has emphasized how parents’ undocumented legal status might influence the emotional, social, and economic well-being of mixed immigration status families, pointing to a greater need to better understand the lived realities of the undocumented population. Although Arizona is home to a large and growing number of undocumented migrants, a strongly anti-immigrant socio-political environment shapes the experiences and opportunities that migrants encounter. With an estimated 16 million people living in mixed-status families nationwide and over five million children under 18 living with at least one undocumented parent, deportability is an urgent social problem. This qualitative dissertation draws on narrative and discursive methods to shed light on the spatiotemporal dimensions of undocumented migrant mothers’ narratives, with a particular focus on the understudied area of how identities are constructed, performed and/or resisted in narratives of the future. Narrative inquiry is a useful method to explore issues of identity construction and negotiation in migration contexts. Theoretically, my approach leans on identity as a discursive practice, as contextualized and negotiated in storytelling. The study is further guided by a dialogic/performative approach to narrative. Analytic concepts, such as (im)mobility and imagination, and Bakhtinian theory of novelness, particularly dialogism and chronotope, also inform my approach to narrative analysis. Data come from sixteen hours of semi-structured interviews with seven undocumented mothers from Mexico who live in mixed-status families in Arizona. The findings show that the participants oftentimes felt at the bottom of the local social hierarchy due to their undocumented legal status. Furthermore, findings shed light on how the participants perceived, imagined, negotiated and sometimes resisted various social and spatial (im)mobilities in contexts of illness, loss, and grieving. The analysis also demonstrates how the participants navigate their spatiotemporal fragility through discourses of imagination and contrastive chronotopes as they raise their children and consider alternative timespaces for their future.