The impetus of this research came from wanting to investigate how personal narratives become political using the student immigrant movement as a case study.  What my subjects – DREAM Act beneficiaries, or dreamers – and their movement revealed was that the personal is always political: humans are political by nature, and products of the society we reproduce. Further, the poetry and prophecy found in these politicized narratives served – and continue – to recreate the present political reality in a more humane and humanitarian fashion.  Sociology, particularly the form practiced by W. E. B. Du Bois, was elemental for these words to be written; as I explore this world through stories (both in the media and on social networks), American culture, politics, and policy, and overridingly: dreams.  This senior exercise is dedicated to the close to two million souls who strive doggedly and mightily against seemingly indefatigable odds; to the sleepless nights that allowed me to dream; and to the dreams that saved me – and continue to save us – from depression, detention, and deportation.  It is to these “dreams in exile” articulated in a fiercely fearless movement, at a most inopportune time, “that we now turn.”

DREAM ACT, A So[ul]cial History