Last week, Esmerelda discussed the issues facing young undocumented Americans, particularly the debate surrounding the DREAM Act. Of particular note was the blowback expressed by many of those who stood to benefit from the bill’s legislation, DREAMers, who believed that the terms of the law were insufficiently inclusive. For one, the law and the dialogue surrounded it represented the DREAMers as victims of their parents. Proponents of the act at times seemed to liken DREAMers to kidnapped children, hauled across the border to this country by their parents while blissfully unaware of their illegal status. Unsurprisingly, many DREAMers rejected this attitude which antagonized their parents as scapegoats rather than offering them some route to citizenship as well. Furthermore, DREAMers rejected discourse which emphasized how they “deserved” citizenship due to their scholarship and possible future contributions to the United States. Not only does this treat citizenship as something to be stingily granted according the state’s whims, but it also excludes many undocumented Americans who never entered college. If a person is unable to give much, can they really be refused citizenship?

To me, the issues surrounding the DREAM Act seem to replicate whenever a group tires to construct an identity for themselves. Rarely is a group so narrow and limited in its membership that all its members can unite under a single archetypical story. More often, a group is constructed from multiple narratives with similar themes that nonetheless are too distinct from each other to be interchangeable.