Reproductive Justice in Undocumented Women’s Memoirs

Abstract

This chapter analyzes three memoirs by women who, at some point in their lives, were undocumented in the US to discuss how undocumented migration is connected to issues of reproductive justice and how women use the life writing genre to call attention to poor women of color’s in/ability to raise their children in a safe and nurturing environment. Rosalina Rosay’s Journey of Hope, Julissa Arce’s My (Underground) American Dream, and Reyna Grande’s The Distance Between Us offer intersectional insights into why parents—and specifically mothers—leave their children behind in their countries of birth to secure their families’ financial survival and to, eventually, bring their children to the US for a better life. The memoir genre, I argue, provides these writers with a venue to humanize their guardians’ decisions and to question the idea of “choice” which undocumented migrants supposedly have in where to raise their children. Their writing functions as an effective rhetorical tool to individualize undocumented migrants and to push back against widely popularized xenophobic images of the “selfish and violent” economic migrant. In demonstrating how sexism, shadism, classism, and xenophobia affect reproductive justice, the memoirs powerfully challenge privileged conceptualizations of reproductive “choice.”