CRITICAL QUESTIONS ON DREAMERS and PEACE Is taking ownership an effective approach to political empowerment? What uncertainties persist?

We need to cede all our efforts to the public mode not to privatized modes of political ownership (academics, service learning, charitable organizations, activism industries). My opinion is that rather than demand a fait accompli, we focus on a continuing campaign for legislative exigency with its full contents leading into a full representation of our true citizenship claims as immigrants and as community members racialized as perennial immigrants. Undocumented dream act- eligible youth are becoming leaders in their own survival and transcendence. There is nothing he or she needs to be requesting of anyone. But rather, that the student should be acquisitive and continuously incorporating, composing, and reflecting on the changing tempo brought on by a deep questioning of the concept of survival. As it turns out, survival is a dream. By this definition, the Dream Act is just a preview of what our youth, our students, children and generation can do to give us the peace we deserve as we watch them become self-reliant in a mode of active states of dreaming as integral for survival. As one dreamer told me today, healing must begin. We must Heal from the battle for our dignity which began long before now in the histories of institutions and ideas which were intended not as

vanguards of innovation or even of social justice; democracy was intended to be a form of representation in process, principle, and selfmaintenance according to fairness to all of its people. Is it a Hoax of America, or are we at a new historical precedent which endangers not only the individuals who make up our communities but the possibility for organizing them to be more than self-sufficient orphans in a captive economy and a captive culture? When all possibilities for inclusion are closed, those who are self-sufficient have become it ironically through the aegis of de facto exclusion. Self-reliant communities, dreamer communities, deported and separated communities, we are the evidence that self-reliance emerges not as a function of wider trust in the world, but as a noteworthy submission of what appears to be a counter-narrative but what is in fact, an incorporation of a political philosophical quandary. The border is a wall with two purposes: containment and restraint. It removes the eyes of the witness, the mathematics of the accountant, and the rights of the people; everything which had purpose is lost to the tyranny of disaster. The past of wounds and slights concerning the essentialized Dream identity should be resolved. Claims to being unique to the experience of being undocumented are counter-intuitive in significant ways. While it is true that the Dreamer possesses an ordinary Americanness, it is her/his grace, efficacy,

and certainty in embodying a form of civil disobedience remarkable in its historicity. The Dream Act is in this sense, an ideal legislative procurement poetically addressing the humane values of aiding highly motivated youth whose merits are sterling, exemplary, and worthy. For this reason, I believe Dreamers should receive a nomination for a Nobel Prize.