1Introduction

I had just returned to Los Angeles from my research travels throughout the U.S. South, primarily visiting cities across Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. My mission was to follow in the footsteps of the Trail of Dreams, an undocumented-youth-led march that took place in 2010 from Miami, Florida, to Washington, DC. On this particular morning, I was scheduled to meet with my graduate advisor to report back from my fieldwork. Seated in his office, I shared my assemblage of oral histories, pictures, and of course, my Greyhound adventures. In addition to conducting more than twenty-five interviews that summer of 2015, I visited key locations along the Trail of Dreams route where press conferences and community gatherings had been held. These places hosted the Trail’s walkers and community leaders and are now historical sites. Using the Trail of Dreams website (www.trail2010.org) as my compass, I made it a point to visit urban cities, suburbs, and rural towns that left an imprint on the undocumented youth activists, who were in their early twenties. The website featured a “thick map” with dropped pins that referenced blog reports by the organizers.¹ As I walked out, my advisor asked if I had archived the website. For the next few months, I found myself organizing and categorizing an immense amount of digital data from the Trail’s website, from its landing page to its blog posts to its digital photos.²

By the following year in 2016, the Trail’s website (which was established in 2010) became nonoperational because of domain renewal issues. Now nowhere to be searched or discovered, the website’s data, stories, photos, and maps had been lost to the public. Like historical documents, the Trail’s website content was ephemeral; but unlike newspapers, not one institution was archiving it. Digital permanence, or the idea that “once on the web, always on the web,” is a myth that needs to be scrutinized. We must make ethical decisions to conduct digital ethnographic methods that will ensure that what I call “archives of migrant refusal” are preserved for future historians and researchers and for consumption and interpretation by the public.

In my essay in Record, Document, Archive: Constructing the South Out of Region (LSU Press, 2026), I argue that the Trail of Dreams activists and their creation of digital material advanced an “archive of migrant refusal,” that included actions, motivations, thoughts, and feelings against the rise of immigration enforcement. Migrant refusal is not only about visible acts of mass mobilization but rather a materialization of hidden or covert acts of protection against a nation-state’s deportation efforts. This archive is from the perspective of undocumented/undocuqueer and women-of-color activists and is essential for understanding intersectional place-based experiences and activism within the Undocumented Youth Movement.

2Archiving from los de abajo

Following queer and women of color scholars, this research process has placed importance on fully recording vital forms of collective actions and political consciousness within Latinx social movements. Over the years, I have used oral histories, specifically long-life interviews to understand the spaces from which Latinx activists emerged. Life history interviews are different from the typical interview method used in qualitative data research. These interviews are conducted over several sessions and typically take four to six hours to complete. As a social movement historian, I aim to understand my narrator’s opinions, experiences, and behaviors. I am able to connect their knowledge and strategies to various stages in their life and not just a single event or movement. Moreover, oral histories reveal how the activists’ political consciousness was linked to a particular geography—to local knowledge and histories, events and people, and literature. For instance, studying the Trail of Dreams has also required learning the rich legacy of counter-movements and mobilization efforts across Florida and Georgia such as slave uprisings, the Seminole Wars, the underground railroad, and the 1960s civil rights movements, to name a few. Like oral histories, digital archives of migrant refusal highlight the less hierarchical, collective work that formed the undocumented/undocuqueer and women-of-color base of the Trail of Dreams, los de abajo—the labor of how it was assembled, where and with whom the Trail began. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention how my work is inspired by Jo Ann Gibson Robinson’s memoir, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, which illustrates Black women’s opposition to oppression, which in turn ignited the civil rights movement of the 1950s.³

3The Rise of Digital Organizing Within the Undocumented Youth Movement

The Trail was a regional racial and migrant justice campaign that lasted 120 consecutive days, covered 1500 miles (up to 24 miles a day), and more than 100 cities. On Friday, January 1, 2010, four Miami Dade College students—Felipe Matos, Gaby Pacheco, Carlos Roa, and Juan Rodriguez—stood in their new walking shoes during a press conference at the foot of the Freedom Tower, a landmark building in downtown Miami. They were ready to embark on a walk to Washington, DC, called the Trail of Dreams (see figs. 1–8). Except for Juan, who attained legal residency in 2008 after being undocumented for thirteen years, all were undocumented.⁴ The walkers stopped at churches, family homes, universities, and community centers, and their organizational hosts varied depending on place and space—rural, suburban, and urban cities. Some days, the walkers were accompanied by youth of color and undocumented high school and college students. On other occasions, Maya day laborers and farm workers from central Florida and Georgia joined. On other days, the walkers were escorted by immigrant, racial justice, and civil rights leaders including Black Christian leaders. With only two months of planning and a dilapidated RV for storing food, water, first aid, laptops, clothes, and shelter, the Trail’s organizers were able to build an intergenerational, cross-sector, mixed-status, and mostly women-of-color support network that helped them reach Washington, DC.

After four months, the Trail had transformed from a local and regional campaign to a national one, launching the walkers as the face of the Trail, generally associated with the Undocumented Youth Movement. At the center of the campaign was a network of undocumented women and queer youth of color, some of whom had never participated in political activism.⁵

4Websites and Social Media as Sites of Migrant Refusal

Unquestionably, the Trail was a collective effort at all scales and from all sides, including cyber space. On January 1, 2010, with the support of Presente.org, the Trail walkers not only began their journey but also launched an interactive bilingual website: www.trail2010.org (see figs. 9–23). The site was meant to establish their presence; explain their mission and coalition partners; build their credibility for potential donors; capture stopovers by publishing blog posts, press, videos and pictures; detail their route via thick mapping; refer allies and volunteers to social media profiles, Facebook, and Twitter; and, generate a “brown list” of followers and allies via text messaging that would be key to developing an intended (albeit niche) audience. The Trail’s website and social media platforms captivated undocumented youth, racial justice allies, and journalists, and in the process became a power tool that shaped the identity of the Undocumented Youth Movement. And for social movement scholars, the digital archive became a critical record of migrant refusal and a site from which to witness the development of a social movement. To view photos from the Trail, you can access them at https://www.flickr.com/people/trail2010/.

The Trail’s collection of newspaper reports, photographs, videos, and blog posts can appear excessive. To better understand this archive, I met with the Presente.org team, Favianna Rodriguez and Roberto Lovato in 2015. As consultants, Favianna and Roberto had assisted the Trail walkers with media and social media production.⁶ Both were outspoken Latina/o artists, journalists, and social justice advocates for migrant rights. At that time, they had recently taken down television’s most outspoken anti-immigrant news anchor, Lou Dobbs, who was fired from CNN in 2009. They did so by coordinating the Basta Dobbs campaign, which included a constellation of actors–migrant rights groups, Latina/o/x civil rights organizations, celebrities, and local community-based organizations–who wrote and called network executives and advertisers demanding Dobbs’s resignation.⁷ Media scholar Sasha Constanza-Chock described the Basta Dobbs campaign as a sophisticated strategy that linked social media, mobile phones, the web and radio, and a rapidly built database of tens of thousands of email addresses and phone numbers.⁸ For Roberto, the Basta Dobbs campaign was effective and had to be reproduced for the Trail because it was bilingual and included high-quality tools that were reproducible so everyday people could print posters on their home computers.⁹

At the heart of the digital archive I collected are the stories, photos, and videos that appeared on the Trail of Dreams website.¹⁰ The website introduced student activists, outlined their mission, described their organizational allies, collected news stories and press releases, and promoted events. The website contained a blog, titled Notes from the Trail, with posts (including cyber testimonios) from the youth organizers and their supporters. Embedded in the posts were more than thirty YouTube videos and a library of photographs. A thick map of the walkers’ route linked sites on the map to images and cyber testimonios (see figs. 10–13). The team made sure everyone on the Trail was documenting the journey by administering cameras, making posters/signage and T-shirts, and supporting online fundraising and social media efforts on Facebook and YouTube. At the end, sixty-seven posts or cyber testimonios became part and parcel of the Notes from the Trail. (See my essay in Record, Document, Archive for more discussion about the political ingenuity and resourceful strategies activist use, as I frame these practices as manifestations of rascuachismo.)

5Cyber Testimonios as Emotional Records

Much has been written about the Undocumented Youth Movement’s media tactics and their storytelling method. In their foundational text, Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets!, media scholar Sasha Costanza-Chock affirms how public narratives assist in developing a collective entity and impact social-movement formation.¹¹ In fact, “messages and frames employed in the narrative have important implications for the kind of movement that emerges” and who controls and shapes the movement.¹² They note that migrant rights activist, specifically undocumented/undocuqueer youth, have struggled over who controls their story—with their public narratives, messaging, and framing—and how.¹³ For instance, migrant youth activists might succumb to Spanish and English network news and organizational allies’ use of the good immigrant/bad immigrant narrative within social media posts. As argued by Amalia Pallares, the notion of the good immigrant or idealized protocitizen narrative perpetuates hierarchical value systems that conditionally accept an individual’s personhood while simultaneously disavowing another racial other through the dependence on neoliberal scripts of self-worth and respectability. Uncomfortable with the messaging used by political pundits, mainstream media networks, and traditional migrant rights organizations, the Trail of Dreams digital blog posts contained a radical migrant imprint of refusal, one that challenged the fantasy of the good immigrant, DREAMer narrative and was instead inclusive of those deemed “too risky” to organize in the U.S. South.

Among the posts in Notes from the Trail were sixty-seven blog posts or cyber testimonios related to the Trail’s campaign.¹⁴ Cyber testimonios are the twenty-first-century form of testimonios—first-person statements of social significance that document experiences within marginalized communities, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. The cyber testimonios from the blog reveal the atrocities and inequities that undocumented youth live in the U.S. South suffer: They depict physical discomfort, a longing for equality, and the frustration of living in an unjust society. For instance, organizers documented hate crimes against undocumented families in the city of Mayo in north-central Florida, as well as large, organized Ku Klux Klan rallies against the “Latino invasion” in South Georgia and the impacts of detention centers on immigrant youth in South Carolina. It also became a critical space that documented the emergence of new identities and racial difference—intragroup and intergroup relations across the South. As an arena in which undocumented youth—queer youth, women of color, youth who were leaders or supporters—could reveal their personal experiences and their legal status, Notes from the Trail offered them the opportunity to discuss their opposition to the rise of detentions and deportations, the separation of families, and their arguments relating to comprehensive immigration reform.

(For further discussion on the Trail’s social media content as a form of undocuqueer counter public and transmedia testimonios, see my full essay in Record, Document, Archive. In the full essay, I discuss present-day efforts in documenting the history of youth activism by women of color, queer, and undocumented youth in California, Florida, and Georgia. I focus on Cal State LA’s Disruptors: Undocumented Working-Class Activism archive project and key lessons learned from collecting undocumented youth activism digital materials.

6The U.S. Global South Is Undocumented and Unafraid

I want to end with a bold declaration: The U.S. Global South must be recognized as a site of undocumented and unafraid refusal, and its legacy must be archived. Black historian Robin D. G. Kelley explains that the U.S. South has always been the most radical place in the country because of its repressive nature; therefore, it must be the most radical place.¹⁵ Looking at the region historically uncovers not only the fact that ideas of racial capitalism developed in the Mississippi Delta, but also how this region emerged as a cultural center shaping innovative music traditions, such as blues and jazz, as well as radical visions for social change.¹⁶ The region continues to be at the cutting edge of racial justice movements. It is a dynamic migrant contact zone where new arrivants from around the world are working side-by-side, organizing, and fighting for human rights. The Trail of Dreams’ website and digital media are representative of radical refusal practices that emerge as innovative techniques of survival in the face of repression.¹⁷