Graduation Year

2025

Date of Submission

4-2025

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Chicanx/Latinx Studies

Reader 1

Gilda Ochoa

Reader 2

Arely Zimmerman

Rights Information

2025ItzelkRamos

Abstract

While public universities and community colleges in California have taken substantial steps towards supporting undocumented students, including the establishment of in-state tuition laws and Dream Resource Centers, these efforts have not been mirrored in private universities. This disparity raises an essential question: How do undocumented students survive and thrive in private institutions that do not support them? What forms of resistance, resilience, and community-building emerge in the absence of institutional safety nets? These are the questions at the heart of this research. It is only through understanding and analyzing the various aspects of the immigrant identity that one can undertake a comprehensive initiative toward institutional change.

Current research on the experiences of undocumented students is almost exclusively focused on those attending public universities and community colleges in California. Their school sizes, public funding, and state accountability have become central to the discourse on undocumented student experiences. However, little to no academic attention has been paid to the experiences of undocumented students in private liberal arts colleges, which are often smaller, more selective, and less accountable to state oversight or public policy mandates. In the course of conducting my literature review, I encountered only a single study focused on undocumented students in private and liberal arts colleges, which was written by Gloria Itzel Montiel (2017). The lack of scholarship in this area makes it challenging to advocate for institutional change within private colleges. It also contributes to the erasure of students whose educational journeys fall outside the public university framework. This includes the lack of access to specific state-funded resources, legal protections, and organized advocacy efforts centered around public institutions, as they must continue to navigate them independently. Moreover, within the existing literature on undocumented students, much of it tends to focus on the barriers they face rather than how they are being overcome. While these challenges are real and deserve attention, what is too often overlooked is the ways students persist, adapt, and survive in the face of systematic marginalization. Many are building informal support networks, developing mutual aid practices, and cultivating community resilience. These strategies are both crucial for survival and should be shown as rich sites of knowledge that can be used to create institutional transformations.

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This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.

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