Vol.:(0123456789) Lat Stud https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-018-0148-5 ORIGINAL ARTICLE “Since when have people been illegal?”: Latinx youth refections in Nepantla Mónica González Ybarra 1 © Springer Nature Limited 2018 Abstract Using Gloria Anzaldúa’s idea of nepantla alongside critical theories of race and citizenship, this article highlights how Latinx undocumented youth and youth of mixed status families navigate, resist, and at times endorse the vari- ous and competing discourses around immigration, citizenship, and illegality. The author uses pláticas as a methodological and pedagogical tool with youth who live in a migrant housing complex to examine how they enter sociopolitical conversa- tions centered on their lived realities. Drawing on the youths’ refections, the author emphasizes a need to centralize and create spaces for the voices of youth within dis- cussions and action around immigration and citizenship, because they are continu- ously subjected to and forced to navigate dominant narratives and discourses that surface about them, their families, and (im)migrant communities. Keywords Latinx Youth · Nepantla · Citizenship · Illegality · Pláticas During a plática, a semi-structured conversation in which knowledge is shared and produced through dialogue (Gonzalez 2001; Preuss and Saavedra 2013), Axel asked, “Since when have people been illegal?” This question sparked a variety of student responses. One student answered “a long time ago,” while another began, “since before there were slaves.” As the facilitator of this plática, I contemplated Axel’s question. One response could have been framed around the history of immi- gration and the increasing numbers of undocumented (im)migrants from Asia and Latin America, but Axel’s question interrogated something else. At its core, Axel’s question disrupts the normalized idea that people, human beings, can be illegal. * Mónica González Ybarra mgonzalez100@utep.edu 1 University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX, USA