Our conceptual essay begins with the recognition of the U.S. racialized tragedy and embattled discussions on race.  Within this tragedy and embattled discussion, we attempt to renew and reinvigorate authentic, dialogic, and vulnerable exchanges on race.  With this focus, we critique yet further advance multicultural foundations’ notions of racial identity predominant in the academy and in broader national discussions on race.  Critiquing yet advancing multicultural foundations, we emphasize conceptual content from five books on race and power by Cornel West.  Working through West’s conceptual content, we emphasize complex and historicized identifications and relationalities as key concepts in the present moment.

I chose poetic performance narratives to create a provocative piece offering a glimpse of the reality, tragedies, dreams, and hopes lived daily by more than 12 million people in the United States. These individuals are reported as unauthorized, undocumented immigrants by the U.S. Census Bureau. These specific stories were shared and collected ethnographically on the agricultural fields of the South East of the United States. My goal is to have “captured” readers to be seduced into the “uncomfortable” world of undocumented people and have the poems/performance narratives become not only representation of the events but, as Renato Rosaldo said, “the event itself.”

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A yearlong collective auto-ethnographic stories of three colleagues at a Hispanic Serving Institution at the U.S.–Mexican frontera culminated in the realization that our disparate experiences, the multiple voices used in articulating these, and the diverse ways these manifested in classroom practices and interactions had crafted the only academic space where we-three felt to belong.