Introduction

This excerpt, describing through the eyes of a minor the significant process of leaving the country of birth behind to enter the United States, constitutes the beginning of a unique and exceptional autobiographical essay, published in the New York Times Magazine on June 22, 2011. In “Outlaw: My life as an undocumented immigrant,” Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas not only revealed how he was sent to enter the United States illegally as a child, but also detailed how he discovered his lack of citizenship as a teenager and how he resided and worked in the United States without legal documents for almost 15 years. As such, the essay is first and foremost a prototypical representation of the so-called US undocumented youth movement, which has gained a powerful voice in American political debate since the turn of the millennium (Nicholls, 2013). What is more, however, Vargas’ essay includes a revealing moment of his life in his account which had until then often been silenced. He narrates how during his junior year of high school, he raised his hand in history class after watching a documentary on Harvey Milk and told his classmates and teacher that he was gay.

Reading Vargas’ essay one thus attends a personal journey that is on the one hand emblematic of the undocumented youth movement and its diverse tactics, but on the other also bears witness to a development that had for long been discounted by undocumented representations: the growing recognition of self-identified LGBTQ migrants within the overall undocumented youth movement.