This post is also available in: Spanish
By Adrienne Wiebe, MCC Latin America
The “Dreamers” are young people who were brought to the United States by their parents as children and have grown-up in the US. There are an estimated one million of these young people, about 90% from Mexico.
Last year, the Obama administration instituted the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals(DACA) which allows qualified young people to stay in the U.S. without fearing deportation and to be eligible to legally work.
However, by the time DACA was put in place, many young DREAMers had already been either deported or voluntarily returned to their birth countries, unlikely to be able to return to the United States legally for a very long time. These are “L@s Otr@s Dreamers.”
Jill Anderson, a friend of MCC Mexico, is currently doing a project with deported DREAMers as part of her post-doctoral work at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Jill, along with Nin Solis, a Mexican photographer, and a group of deported young people are working on book titled Los Otros Dreamers — The Book. They have a Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds for the book.
Jill describes the book project like this: .
“This book is a collective testimonio of life in Mexico after growing up in the United States. These are the stories of being de aquí y de allá(from here and from there), even though feeling like you can belong in the United States and in Mexico has never been easy. In word and image, these young people, between the ages of 10 and 32, share what it is like to be rejected in one home only to feel homeless in another. They also describe their surprises, their accomplishments, and their dreams that continue in spite of the immigration system that divides them from their childhood memories, their friends, and their family.”
To see a great video about the project –
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/756486278/los-otros-dreamers-the-book
For more information see: