‘Drifting Across the Border: On the Radical Potential of Undocumented Im/migrant Activism in the US’ by Ana Milena Ribero puts the SI's concept of drifting in conversation with North American indigenous ontologies of walking as world-making to analyze a moment of im/migrant youth activism popularly known as the Dream 9 action. On the 22nd of July, 2013, nine young im/migrants—Dreamers—who had lived in the United States without legal documentation for most of their lives but had recently been living in Mexico, the country of their births, walked as a group to the US Port of Entry in Nogales, Arizona and asked the US government for asylum. The nine Dreamers were not only asking for their own paths toward legalization in the US; their actions were also meant to condemn President Barack Obama's skyrocketing im/migrant deportation rates and the US Congress’ inability to pass im/migration reform. This article employs drifting as a border hermeneutic—a method of ‘reading’ the border and interpreting its meaning(s)—to explore the ways in which the Dream 9 action confronted exclusionary im/migration policies and questioned the very idea of national borders. Basing her analysis on videos, images, and testimony of the action, Ribero frames the Dream 9 as a drift—an activist performance that re-signifies US/Mexico border politics and re-appropriates border spaces for social action. However, the author also proposes that reimagining undocumented youth as drifters highlights the ways in which the SI's notion of drifting relies on assumptions of freedom of movement that are unavailable to many minoritized populations in the US. She calls for those who see the disruptive potential of drifting to explore how walking is situated at the intersections of radical performance and racialized oppression. © 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

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