Lessons in Advocacy: Strategic Storytelling for Undocumented Student Rights

This article examines the stories undocumented students and their citizen allies shared in support of a 2017 Connecticut bill granting undocumented students access to institutional financial aid. Drawing on 113 testimonies submitted to the Connecticut General Assembly, I use narrative analysis to identify five distinct story types. While the existing research on immigration movements tends to examine how differences across political environments shape and constrain claims, this article offers a case in which narrative diversity emerged within a single movement campaign. I find that undocumented students and their allies told stories that reflected not only different strategic orientations but also different ideas about hard work, citizenship, and “deserving” political subjects. While some testimonies aligned with the broader group narrative—emphasizing undocumented students’ complexity and decoupling worth from achievement or faultlessness—others reproduced preexisting stories about meritocracy or assimilation. This analysis underscores the moral and affective dimensions of political storytelling, highlighting the need to understand narrative as a site of intergroup differentiation, negotiation, and identity-making within movements. The findings contribute to ongoing discussions in the literatures of social movements and immigrant activism by offering new insights into the political storytelling practices of undocumented students and their allies.