Huge congratulations to Jacky Mendez who successfully defended her dissertation proposal and was awarded the RESI-Cantú Graduate Research Fellowship for her dissertation project. Jacky is mentored by Dr. Nancy Plankey-Videla, her committee includes Dr. Nadia Kim, Dr. Pat Goldsmith, and Dr. Sarah McNamara (History and LMAS).
The Race & Ethnic Studies Institute (RESI) and the Carlos H. Cantú Endowment & Scholarship Fund are partnering to offer the RESI-Cantú Graduate Research Fellowship for current Texas A&M University doctoral students for their dissertation research. This award is also intended to provide students with grant-writing experience and, as such, students are expected to work closely with their advisors on a grant application.
Jacky's dissertation, titled "Bureaucratic Brokering for Resource Acquisition in Mixed-Status Families: Barriers, Strategies, and Resilience" examines the bureaucratic brokering within mixed-status Latina/o families, emphasizing the reciprocal dynamics of resource acquisition between adult citizen children and their undocumented parents. In the context of mixed-status families, bureaucratic brokering involves both undocumented parents and their U.S. citizen children leveraging their respective positions – legal, social, or familial – to overcome structural barriers tied to citizenship, documentation, and eligibility. In a society where access to essential resources is both vital and governed by complex bureaucratic systems with strict citizenship-based eligibility, mixed-status families navigate a profoundly different reality, one in which they need each other to overcome obstacles imposed by institutional barriers.
This research explores two interconnected dynamics: first, how adult citizen children depend on their undocumented parents to navigate state or federal systems requiring parental information, such as in college financial aid; and second, how undocumented parents depend on their adult citizen children to access titled assets, including property deeds, vehicle ownership, and business licenses, which are often legally held in the children’s names. By shedding light on these resource-based interdependencies, this dissertation illuminates the hidden labor and emotional toll carried by adult citizen children and their undocumented parents in navigating restrictive institutional frameworks contributing to sociological understandings of mobility, citizenship, family, illegality, and bureaucracy. In the process, the dissertation reveals how these dynamics perpetuate inequalities and redistribute the burdens of illegality within mixed-status families.
Double congratulations on these two amazing successes!