1 of 2: Undocumented Identity, or, Sketch from Memory of an Illegal Alien

Part I: Illegals Without Corpses, Illegals Outside Time.

This essay will use the terms illegalized, illegal and illegal alien intentionally. Though they have their origins in nativist and racist politics, the recent adoption of “Undocumented” by the Biden administration and its deportation and detention apparatus renders that an impossible alternative. We cannot reclaim Illegal, but we can defang it.

llegalized migrants setting first foot on American land or at the very minute their tourist visa expires instantly experience the evaporation of their Self. They are reassembled crudely into the grotesque, quivering mass of millions of unauthorized aliens always threatening to destroy the nation from its always tender, always bleeding limes. A child who once played on the street and was called by their name, a young man fleeing the terror of a jobless and poverty-stricken future, a mother desperate to reunite with her children the State means to traffic to another family—their individual existence and experience meld into the permanent amalgam of illegality. They, Illegalized migrants, experience ontological devastation through the criminalization of their very existence through law, a process both banal and sadistic; importantly, it happens without intervention and it happens instantly. At that moment, for the ante-Illegal, time flattens and space constricts until the limes of the ante-Illegal increasingly blur and the identity of the ante-illegal is cloaked in the identity of the Illegal Alien slowly becoming one in the same. Soon they will begin internalizing the xenophobia aimed at them and begin learning to live with the constant fear and dread of exposure. The anxiety is so intense that they will only revert to human persons during the brief conversations with loved ones thousands of miles away to whom they will lie about their quotidian lives. When the phone call ends, they revert to illegality. Tears become a scarce resource.

Depending on where the winds scatter them, the now-Illegal will live within the tight radius drawn by the government’s compass. Moving through space becomes a constant conscious decision for the first time. Existing in space and moving through it is now a risk and a threat. Driving an automobile will feel like dying with every police vehicle threatening to transform a commute into what you feel will be an execution. There are rumors about ICE on city buses. Walking appears to be the safest, only option until an officer demands a search and life suddenly depends on whether he will accept the lie that you simply left your identification at home. You cannot take the Greyhound to visit a cousin 120 miles away because ICE agents frequently board them and ask for documents. This claustrophobia and immobility begin to change you, the rush of leaving to a new country is replaced by the melancholy of never being allowed to see it. Timidity, meekness, cowardliness crosses the limes of what you mistakenly believe is still your Self. You will suffocate. You will dream of traveling or simply allowing your body outside the 20 miles in which you are trapped. You will live in California for 25 years; you will never see the Pacific at its western edge.

This fear of your body is not restricted to the world beyond your home. You will fear that severe illness will come and you will have to choose between trusting ancestral remedies or the hostile nurses at the hospital who ask too many questions about your place of birth. You fear the reproductive capacity of your body because you cannot care for another child and birth control is only available to you from clandestine distributors. You fear injury or maiming which for the Illegal means the end of utility and a crisis for families who suddenly face homelessness and hunger. Fear saturates all the areas of life. You distract yourself by watching the news. They’re talking about you and your parasitic existence again. You’re too tired from ceaseless din of your screaming body to be offended, moved, or even bothered. At that moment you’ll understand your body is no longer yours. Who it belongs to is a controversial philosophical question: America’s or the nude avatar of Power?

The fourth dimension offers no reprieve. Time slowly congeals and the constitutive elements of your identity float in the past as if in an aspic. You will resist this. You will fight the progress of time itself as if you could prevent the sun from rising; Illegal versus Cronos. You will attempt to stay in touch with loved ones via every means and the sight of their aging faces or their protruding pregnant bellies will fill you with feelings of envy, bitterness and impotence you will conceal with congratulations that are sincere but hollow. You will seek images of your former home or use Google Maps to survey the state of the neighborhood and sit in your chair slack-jawed when the name of the street you grew up on has been changed. Someone will cut down the tree under which you kissed the first boy who was like you and you will spend months mourning the fact. Cronos has the upper hand, but your will is inexhaustible. In your mind, through the power of your vivid and unimpeachable memories, everything you left will still be there. You protest against the idea of painting the house a different color, you will insist every photo be guarded as if in a museum archive and you will find yourself perplexed by the fact you are furious when a new couch replaces the one you slept on so many times.

In your mind, the place you left behind remains unchanged and the relationships with the people whom you loved endure. But this is not the case. Faster than you can imagine, they will cease to think of you in their day to day. The seat at the bar they always left for you will be filled by someone new. Your landlord has forgotten your name. The bodies of all the lovers you had are wrapped around other lovers. It’s a law of nature. Voids fill. If you left family behind, they will cling the tightest to you and your memory, but even they will soon feel less, remember less, care less about you. You will detect this, but deny it because in your mind, in your invented motherland, everything must remain as you left it.

Then, a death. You will feel time open your ribcage and pull your limbs from their joints. Cronos has transformed you into Antigone. All the years that have passed collect in the pit of your stomach. An anguished decision: to stay or to leave and attempt to cross yet again. But you are not brave or noble like Antigone, you do not fulfill the rites, you stay, not to follow the law, but to avoid its fury. Coward. But you say they, they need to understand that you have ties now, roots. Roots like those of a precariously hanging parasitic plant on the branches of a great tree, but roots nonetheless. Your children, your job, your home and your Honda weigh more in the end than paying respects to the woman that gave you life. You will never forgive yourself for this. You will hate America even though you are becoming more like her. Cruelly, you cannot look to the future for comfort. The future is impossible. You are moored in the past. How can you dream of a future when you live every moment? Illegals have mastered a kind of mindfulness.

Time. Space. They conspire against the Illegal. They are enemies as much as ICE agents, border patrol, police, child welfare agents and the store clerk who doesn’t accept your consular identification when all you want is to buy the cheapest whiskey so you and your boyfriend can forget the day. That moment of indignation, that frustrated desire for apple-flavored whiskey convinces you, for the first time, to admit out loud that you regret coming to America.

This is a blurry sketch of the phenomenological experience of being Illegalized that follows the ontological disfigurement from a former, unique self into a legal and social chimera that is indistinguishable from the others. Experiences vary on infinite variables: origin, gender, age, disability, destination, the experience of crossing itself, family size, etc. But I argue that the depersonalization of undocumented migrants is something experienced in common and simultaneously; the bodiless Illegal floating in the past is every illegal. The risks of detention and deportation, though mitigated by various personal and political factors, exist for all. These, among others are the shared experiences and attributes that suggest the possibility for an Illegal Alien or Undocumented self-identity. In the next part of this series, I will discuss whether there can be an Illegal or Undocumented identity, who is identified or identifies in this way, and who or what has formed the identity if it exists.