2024 Hinckley Lecture
2024 Marjorie P. Hinckley Lecture with Roberto Gonzales
"Lives Split in Two: DACA and the Limits of Semi-Citizenship"
Feb. 8, 2024, 7:30 pm, Hinckley Center Assembly Hall
About Roberto G. Gonzales
As the Richard Perry University Professor and the 25th Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Roberto G. Gonzales has appointments in the Department of Sociology and the Graduate School of Education. His research focuses on factors that shape and reduce economic, legal, and social inequalities among vulnerable and hard-to-reach youth populations as they transition to adulthood. His published research has been widely cited and has garnered awards from multiple disciplines. He is an active public scholar and has advised a broad range of stakeholders in the private and public sectors, has briefed members of the U.S. Congress, and has testified on matters of immigration policy before the U.S. Senate. He has also written opinion pieces for The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and The Guardian and is often quoted in the popular media.
Since 2002 Professor Gonzales has carried out one of the most comprehensive studies of undocumented immigrants in the United States. His landmark book, Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America, is based on an in-depth study that followed 150 undocumented young adults in Los Angeles for 12 years. Lives in Limbo has won eight major book awards, including the C. Wright Mills Award given by the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the American Education Research Association Outstanding Book Award. It has also been selected by a number of universities as a commonly read text and has been used by several dozen school districts and community institutions to train staff. The book was recently optioned for theatrical production. In addition to Lives in Limbo, Gonzales’s other books include Within and Beyond Citizenship: Borders, Membership, and Belonging, and Undocumented Migration
At Penn, Gonzales is the founding director of the newly formed Penn Migration Initiative, a university-wide effort aimed at advancing and promoting interdisciplinary scholarship and intellectual exchange around issues of immigration policy and immigrant communities. Prior to his appointment at Penn, Gonzales held faculty positions at Harvard University, the University of Chicago and the University of Washington. His research has been supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the WT Grant Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, and the Heising-Simons Foundation.
About the lecture
While citizenship is widely considered the ultimate bearer of belonging, time delimited and partial statuses like DACA have become emblematic of U.S. immigration policy. Representing a larger trend in global immigration policy, the set of partial rights DACA confers is a form of what sociologists have termed “liminal legality” — an experience lying somewhere in the gray area between legal and unlawful immigration statuses — because its beneficiaries are not full citizens, but neither are they completely unauthorized.
Drawing from a 10-year longitudinal study that included a national survey of 2,684 DACA eligible young adults and four waves of face-to-face interviews with 481 young people in six U.S. cities, this book argues that liminally legal statuses like DACA endow their beneficiaries with a duality of experiences, of both security and vulnerability. Instead of lying somewhere in the gray area between “legality” and “illegality,” DACA beneficiaries experience both polar extremes as they move back and forth between experiences, depending on time, place, space, and situation. However, because the tension between these competing experiences remains unresolved, control over beneficiaries' circumstances is often shaded if not threatened by hostile and exclusionary contexts.
In the program’s 11 years, DACA has provided an incredible opportunity for hundreds of thousands of undocumented young people to recast their lives while shielding them from deportation. But as a temporary and partial status, it offers no guarantees of a future. As such, the futures to which they aspire are no more clear today than they were at the onset of the program.
Students in the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences gain Experience Points for attending this lecture. Learn more about Experience Points.
Contact Information
Mikaela Dufur