Last Wednesday’s Rose Cafe featuring GRF Esmerelda brought light to the current issues regarding what we call DREAMers, or rather, the repercussions of the term encapsulating them. Because the DREAM act emphasized that educated undocumented immigrants who arrived in the US at a young age could not remember their immigration at such a young age, they were innocent of this act many American citizens view as criminal. However, this criminalized their parents, who were without a doubt cognizant of their immigration circumstances. This wrongful criminalization simply redirected blame towards other undocumented, uneducated immigrants rather than producing a panacea for the overall issue regarding how illegal immigrants are viewed, treated, and given legal rights.

One thing that intrigued me during the talk was how Esmerelda paralleled this racial struggle to the African American Civil Rights movement. She brought up the tale of Henry “Box” Brown, who in the 19th century had physically mailed himself from the pro-slavery South to the abolitionist North. I found this comparison remarkable because it was a parallel both systematically and symbolically. What Henry did in the 19th century was illegal, yet he was rebelling against an unjust system and trying to achieve a better life as a free man. This may be likened to the immigrants who escape to America illegally, who may be running from opressive circumstances and are trying to find a better life. However, symbolically, when these immigrants arrive in the States, they find themselves just as boxed in as Henry “Box” Brown was when he arrived in his crate. They are faced with paperwork and more paperwork, with a complicated legal system where they must fit themselves into a box where they mark their citizenship status, their race, among others, and they must reduce their entire life into a series of check marks which can never define who they really are.