A student's shirt at a coming-out event in Orange County, March 10, 2011
What began as a small number of undocumented college students going public with their immigration status in recent years, done as a political act, has developed into a growing movement that embraces a term once synonymous with the gay rights movement: coming out.
During the past week, a national campaign mounted by student immigrant advocacy groups has urged students and other young people to reveal their status. Advocacy sites have solicited coming-out stories via social media and posted them. Student groups around the country have held coming-out events, including one last week in Orange County.
The movement began as a strategy to attach names and faces to the young people affected by the Dream Act, proposed federal legislation that would have granted conditional legal status to undocumented youths brought to this country before age 16 if they went to college, or if they joined the military.
The bill failed in the Senate last December. The students and graduates who supported it cling to the hope that it will be reintroduced, and many have thrown themselves into pushing for state bills proposing in-state tuition and college financial aid that’s now not available to them. In the meantime, the practice of coming out as undocumented has taken on a life of its own as part political strategy, part group catharsis.
“People have reached this point,” said Jorge Gutierrez, a 26-year-old activist and graduate of Cal State Fullerton who was brought here by his family from Mexico at age 10, and who has not been able to adjust his status. “It has become a cultural phenomenon.”
It’s too soon to know if it’s a cultural phenomenon that will endure. While promoting last year’s “National Coming Out of the Shadows” week, the advocacy site DreamActivist.org posted a quote from gay rights hero Harvey Milk, the slain San Francisco city supervisor who in a 1978 speech urged his peers, “you must come out.”
