Learning To Be Illegal, By Roberto Gonzalez

In the article Learning to Be Illegal: Undocumented Youth and Shifting Legal Contexts in the Transition to Adulthood, Roberto G. Gonzalez addresses that undocumented young Latino adults transition into adulthood differently from their legal companions and hold a mindset of illegality, thus unable to assimilate in the United States. Roberto Gonzalez states:
“This article focuses on the interactions between such favorable and unfavorable contexts during what I call the transition into illegality. I conceptualize this process as the set of experiences that result from shifting contexts along the life course, providing different meanings to undocumented status and animating the experience of illegality at late adolescence and into adulthood. The

transition to illegality brings with it a period of disorientation, whereby undocumented youth confront legal limitations and their implications and engage in a process of retooling and reorienting themselves for new adult lives” (pg. 606).
To support his belief, Roberto interviews 150, 1.5-generation Mexican-origin young adults between the ages 20 and 34 years from Southern California, to examine the unique ways they’ve lived in the United States as adolescents and young adults.

Firstly, Roberto Gonzalez lays out some background situations involving the struggle to transition into adulthood. He says that public schools teach undocumented students at early ages the idea of what he terms “unity of experiences and orientation,” which is the feeling of fitting in with peers in school. After, he says that the coming of age is delayed much longer today because young adults are taking longer in college, exit from their parent’s household, entry into a full-time career, and decisions about marriage and

children.
Getting back to the point, Roberto Gonzalez conducted a study from various settings, including continuation schools, community organizations, college campuses, and churches in the Los Angeles Metropolitan area to further analyze undocumented individuals’ experiences. In his life history interviews, he asked questions regarding their past and present lives and their future aspirations. Once gaining their trust, Gonzalez accompanied respondents throughout their school and work days, volunteered at local schools and organizations, and sat in on numerous community meetings. Afterwards, he analyzed the responses by meta-themes and overall common meta-themes. During the period of 2003 to 2007 and 2008 to 2009, Gonzalez collected data that focused on three transition periods into illegality: discovery (ages 16 to 18 years), learning to be illegal (ages 18 to 24 years), and coping (ages 25 to 29 years). Though most scholars believe the life changing point happens at age 18, Gonzalez chooses the age 16 for the fact that most of his volunteers adopted semi-adult roles. As shown in table 2, statistics display that 73 out of the 150 participants exited high school and 77 were college students. On the participants who dropped out, 41.1% of them were between the ages 20 and 25 years, 46.6% were between ages 26 and 30 years, and 12.3% were between ages 31 and 34 years of total early-exiters. Compared to college-goers, 40.3% were 20-24 years old, 50.6% were 25-30 years old, and 9.1% were 31-34 years old.
During the discovery period, he says respondents reacted with confusion, anger, frustration, despair, and paralyzing shock. For instance, Roberto Gonzalez quotes a college-goer:
“Cory put it this way: ‘I feel as though I’ve experienced this weird psychological and legal-stunted growth. I’m stuck at 16, like a clock that has stopped ticking. My life has not changed at all since then. Although I’m 22, I feel like a kid. I can’t do anything adults do’” (pg. 610).
Furthermore, Gonzalez says early-exiters learning to be illegal began to face limitations in employment jobs like their parents as well as stress and difficult work.

In addition, the lack of experience in the labor market was a major disadvantage. Likewise, they struggled to negotiate precarious situations because of their undocumented status and were not prepared for it. On the other hand, college-goers who had more favorable situations including sufficient money to pay for school, family permission to delay or minimize work, reliable transportation, and external guidance and assistance were able to prevent the negative effects of unauthorized status. Several college-goers had enough support and focus to succeed in post-secondary schooling, however, many others found it to be a discontinuous experience, with frequent stalls and detours. Many took leaves of absences, others enrolled in one school term per year, needed to work, had few scholarships, or long commutes was a factor. Eventually, respondents learned and understood their legal status after prolonged experiences of illegality. By this time, most young adults in the United States had finished school, left the parental home, and were working full-time. But even so, Gonzalez finds college-goers’ and early-exiters’ employment options as uniform. He discovered that despite advanced degrees and higher learning, they still worked in jobs that uneducated individuals worked in. As a result, aspirations of college-goers were

decreased, had low expectations for the future, and finally accepted their fate in the U.S.
In Summary, Roberto Gonzalez recognized undocumented young adults’ entry into a stigmatized identity had negative and usually unanticipated consequences for their educational and occupational paths, as well as for their social lives. In fact, he believes successful integration may now depend on immigration policy and the role of the state. Indeed, blocked mobility caused by a lack of legal status renders traditional measures of inter-generational mobility by educational progress irrelevant. Gonzalez concludes that undocumented youngsters are fooled by hard work and educational attainment, and experience a downfall in their lives.