Legal–Spatial Consciousness: A Legal Geography Framework for Examining Migrant Illegality

• Author: Edelina Burciaga,Andrea Flores,Kevin Escudero
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lapo.12120
• Published date: 01 January 2019
• Date: 01 January 2019

Legal–Spatial Consciousness: A Legal Geography

Framework for Examining Migrant Illegality

ANDREA FLORES, KEVIN ESCUDERO, and EDELINA BURCIAGA

Here we advance the concept of legal–spatial consciousness—an individual’s awareness of how

law and space are mutually formed and influential on their lives. Through this concept, we

explore how undocumented youth in a variety of American destinations understand and experi-

ence migrant illegality. By examining how immigration law and local places are imbricated, we

demonstrate how immigrant illegality is defined not only by a patchwork of municipal, state,

and federal laws, but also by how undocumented people move through these differently legal

spaces in their everyday lives. Illegality is thus continually reproduced through individuals’

im/mobility through space.

I. INTRODUCTION

Driving in Nashville, Tennessee, choosing a college in California, and protesting in Illi-

nois are disparate experiences that share a critical commonality: they reveal that law,

space, and immigrant illegality are coproduced for the undocumented youth behind the

wheel, application, or banner.

1

Increasingly, US federal immigration law and enforce-

ment has devolved to local contexts that choose to comply—or not—with federal law.

This shift has led to the emergence of contexts that are inclusive and hospitable to

immigrants, like California, and others that exclude and criminalize undocumented

immigrants, like Georgia (Steil and Vasi 2014). This disjuncture between federal and

subfederal immigration lawmaking is consequential for illegality as both a legal con-

struct and an experience (Olivas 2007; Rodriguez 2007; Villazor 2008). As ethnographers

working with undocumented immigrant youth and families in the West, Midwest, and

South, we became interested in how place had become entangled with our interlocutors’

experiences of their undocumented statuses and how these same statuses were experi-

enced differently across our field sites. We asked the following questions: What do these

local sites, and the illegality experienced and constituted within them, have in common?

What do these commonalities, and differences, do to expand our notion of migrant

illegality?

We owe our greatest thanks to the people who generously shared their experiences with us during our respec-

tive projects. We also thank our generous funders. The Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline, which we

and our fellow coeditors received from the American Sociological Association, made for a fruitful collabora-

tion in the conference and in the writing of the piece. We also thank the anonymous reviewers of our article for

their thoughtful, constructive, and insightful feedback.

Address correspondence to: Andrea Flores, Assistant Professor of Education, Brown University, Box 1938

Providence, RI 02192, USA. Telephone: 617-584-3221; Fax: 401-863-2407; Email: andrea_flores@brown.edu.

LAW & POLICY, Vol. 41, No. 1, January 2019

©2018 The Authors

Law & Policy ©2018 The University of Denver/Colorado Seminary

doi: 10.1111/lapo.12120

ISSN 0265-8240

We take a constitutive approach (see Braverman et al. 2014; Delaney 2015) to

immigration law’s uneven implementation and devolution both within and across

geographic spaces, arguing for the comaking of law, space, and immigrant illegality. We

illustrate that in this coconstitution of immigration law and space, community members’

experiences vary, but they share a common understanding of law as unfolding in space,

and vice versa.

We term this common understanding “legal–spatial consciousness,” which refers to

individuals’ sense of how space and law are interconnected and experienced at the per-

sonal level. Drawing from legal geography, our concept layers space and place onto the

notion of legal consciousness—the awareness individuals have of how the law affects

their lives as well as their everyday understanding of the law (Ewick and Silbey 1998; Sil-

bey 2005; Fleury-Steiner and Nielsen 2006). Across our cases, we show how individuals

demonstrate their understanding of illegality’s legal geography through both their care-

ful movement between spaces that heighten or lessen their experience of illegality and

their challenges to illegality through place-based community action.

Rather than look at one place and see how these categories of law, space, and subject

are coproduced there, we examine how illegality is experienced and made sense of in

three cases. These cases are distinct in terms of their geographic locations (California,

Illinois, Tennessee, Georgia), legal jurisdiction (national, state, county/municipal gov-

ernment), domains of everyday life (education, driving, activism), and the actions taken

(levels of relative compliance, circumvention, challenge to law). These cases share a

focus on immigrants’ im/mobility through legally marked places. Across cases, we see

illegality as a “moving” target across space that individuals navigate as they move

through disparate legal spaces in the course of daily life at different geographic scales. In

this way, mobility and legality and immobility and illegality are fundamentally linked.

While illegality unfolds differently across legal geographies, those touched by illegality

are uniformly aware of its spatiolegal dimensions and act accordingly.

We start by discussing what legal geography offers to illegality studies of migrant

youth. In doing so, we build on the constructivist nature of both fields to articulate what

we term “legal–spatial consciousness,” which is exhibited across the cases under exami-

nation. Next, we discuss our ethnographic methodologies in our broader projects. Then,

we turn to our cases. In our discussion of them, we argue that they (1) provide further

evidence of the scalar nature of immigration law; (2) demonstrate the mutual constitu-

tion of immigration law and il/legal places and persons; and 3) most centrally, illustrate

legal–spatial consciousness among immigrant community members. We conclude with a

speculative discussion of how comparative legal geographies rooted in person-centered

ethnography can deepen our understanding of immigration and the experience of

illegality.

II. THE LEGAL GEOGRAPHY OF MIGRANT ILLEGALITY

Illegality is a legal, racial, and spatial condition that is complexly constructed and

applied along racial, gender, and class lines (De Genova 2002, 2004; Ngai 2004; Chavez

2007; Willen 2007; Abrego and Menjı

´var 2012; Enriquez 2017; Garcı

´a 2017). The experi-

ence of illegality is defined largely by deportability (DeGenova 2002) but also by the

lived experience of navigating across various institutional, social, and political contexts

(Ruszczyk and Barbosa 2016). According to Hiemstra (2010, 78), “labeling a person

‘illegal’ is a subtle yet powerful tool for creating, marking, and magnifying perceived dif-

ference and exclusion.” While illegality is a “master status,” the status is always socially

©2018 The Authors

Law & Policy ©2018 The University of Denver/Colorado Seminary

Flores, Escudero, and Burciaga LEGAL–SPATIAL 13