Almost all of the researchers, organizers, and activists I’ve encountered with experience advocating for undocumented student’s rights employ and champion one of the same tools over and over again: storytelling.

• Cahill et al.’s research paper itself begins with a narrative told to them by an undocumented youth about his family and experiences. This is the portal into making change as far as Cahill and her co-researchers are concerned.
• Members of the Free Wildin Campaign demonstrate the same.
  • Mika tells Wildin’s story in order to gain support for undocumented youth even today.
  • Sara Katsanis, a biology researcher who specializes in the use of DNA-testing at the border and advocate for reality that not all family is biological, uses an audio clip of Wildin telling his own story to inspire understanding for the conditions that cause immigrants to come to this country in her presentations to police forces (Cummins, 2020).

These women demonstrate that narratives that bring our connections, love, and compassion to the forefront are the most important tool to combat the narrative that slanders all undocumented immigrants as illegal, dangerous free-loaders. These narratives are dehumanizing. But the remedy is simple. The fact is, undocumented immigrants are people. Not aliens. And people have stories. So let’s hear them.

Source: IMDB

    This too, is the work of Spiral Bound, a movie made to centralize the narratives of marginalized youth who needed a creative outlet that public schools weren’t giving them (Winn, 2014). Studio 345 empowered these students and uplifted their voices, which led them to be able to speak their stories before legislators and enact meaningful change (Winn, 2014).

Perhaps, Spiral Bound can serve as an inspiration for ways to effectively communicate narratives and work towards a society where the millions of undocumented people in our country can come out of shadows and be seen and appreciated for the needs they have and the gifts they bring.