Layla Mayorga Gonzalez

The DACA program, administered by the Department of Homeland Security, protects Dreamers—undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. However, without legislative support, Dreamers face the imminent threat of losing their homes, rights, and deportation. I argue for the passage of the DREAM Act, which would protect Dreamers from unfair targeting and provide a path to citizenship. Dreamers possess a unique social membership in American society, and it is ethically imperative to shield them from deportation and grant them equal rights as fellow citizens if we ought to demonstrate a commitment to addressing oppression and injustice.

Gloria Anzaldúa’s unfinished poem, “Like a Spider in Her Web,” introduces envisioning a dream world within one’s refuge while simultaneously enmeshed in another realm’s dreamscape, epitomizing Nepantla as a threshold of interconnectedness. This paper, inspired by her poem, proposes the notion I call a “Nepantla-Spider process,” amalgamating Anzaldúa’s Nepantleras, Brian Burkhart’s locality, and José-Antonio Orosco’s pragmatic interculturalism framework. I argue that a Nepantla-Spider process facilitates an expanded understanding of interculturalism that includes the non-living, animals, and the Land as requirements for interculturalism and democratic justice under a pragmatist approach to growth and pluralism.

ABSTRACT This article critically examines Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s concept of the Absolute Spirit, Mexican philosopher José Revueltas’s reinterpretation of Hegelian dialectics, and Carlos Alberto Sánchez’s phenomenological analysis of undocumented immigrant reason. This article argues that fixed narratives, epitomized by Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, obscure the authentic experiences of undocumented immigrants. By synthesizing Hegel, Revueltas, and Sánchez, the article proposes the concept of Espíritu de Muerte, or Spirit of Death, reminiscent of the Holy Death as a counter to the Absolute Spirit, advocating for a historiographical shift that acknowledges and liberates forgotten memories as a canonical history of undocumented reason. Taking Revueltas’s emphasis on unseen histories offers a means to surpass Hegelian limitations and reveals a notable inconsistency in Sánchez’s observations regarding the undocumented experience: namely, that undocumented reason inherently serves as a counternarrative always.