Driving While Undocumented: Circulating Fear and Fearlessness Available to Purchase

Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of an affective economy, chapter 3 explores how attrition and deportation logics turn driving into an experience of risk and jeopardy that fosters fear, isolation, and hopelessness while materially wearing down bodies and stripping away ties and resources. In response, undocumented migrants, many of them queer- and trans-identified youth of color, innovated a logic of “undocumented and unafraid” to counter experiences of fear and terror while driving and undertaking other activities in the public sphere. The UndocuBus project, in which more than forty undocumented people rode a bus from Arizona to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the summer of 2012, used both the bus and riders’ bodies to circulate “undocumented and unafraid” as a framework that summoned new, queer, affective economies, intimacies, and collectivities into being.