Lives in limbo: undocumented and coming of age in america, paperback/roberto g. gonzales

My world seems upside down.

I have grown up but I feel like Im moving backward.

And I cant do anything about it.

-Esperanza Over two million of the nations eleven million undocumented immigrants have lived in the United States since childhood.

Due to a broken immigration system, they grow up to uncertain futures.

In Lives in Limbo, Roberto G.

Gonzales introduces us to two groups: the college-goers, like Ricardo, who had good grades and a strong network of community support that propelled him to college and DREAM Act organizing but still landed in a factory job a few short years after graduation, and the early-exiters, like Gabriel, who failed to make meaningful connections in high school and started navigating dead-end jobs, immigration checkpoints, and a world narrowly circumscribed by legal limitations.

This vivid ethnography explores why highly educated undocumented youth share similar work and life outcomes with their less-educated peers, despite the fact that higher education is touted as the path to integration and success in America.

Mining the results of an extraordinary twelve-year study that followed 150 undocumented young adults in Los Angeles, Lives in Limbo exposes the failures of a system that integrates children into K-12 schools but ultimately denies them the rewards of their labor.