Crafting institutional legibility: the creation of VAWA self-petition narratives for undocumented Latina women

Abstract

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) of 1994 introduced a legal pathway to independent citizenship for undocumented immigrants who have suffered domestic violence at the hands of a U.S resident spouse. The success of VAWA self-petitions relies heavily on the ability of the petitioner to present a convincing narrative testifying to their abuse (Berger, 2009; Parson, N., & Heckert, 2014, Reina, et al., 2014; Salcido, & Adelman, 2004; Villalón, 2010). Versions of these testimonies are often published by legal firms and nonprofit organizations to serve as client testimonials. In this project, these published testimonies were analyzed as literary texts. Much has been written on testimonial literature and the complications in genre, authorship, and conflicting epistemologies of truth and understanding, it implies (Beverly, 1996; Spivak, 2009; Trich, 2010). In the case of VAWA testimonials, the direct involvement of the state adds a unique axis of analysis and begs the question: How are these texts understood within the discourse of testimony and authorship? These texts serve as cultural and literary products that outline not only who is worthy of citizenship but from what type of abuse immigrants deserve protection. They exemplify how the structural violence of undocumented immigrants' systemic vulnerability to domestic abuse is rhetorically and symbolically subverted to that of the everyday, criminal, and individual experience (Bourgois, 2001). Thus, these testimonies function in direct opposition of testimonial literature, which seeks to produce collective action. Reading these texts as literary and defining basic features of the genre can counter the fragmenting and individualizing function of these texts in their original contexts. Through interdisciplinary methods—semi-structured interviews, participant observation, cultural domain analysis, and discourse analysis—this study identified the strategies professionals use to elicit, structure, and refine client narratives while adhering to institutional expectations. Through the analysis of broader sociocultural and legal frameworks surrounding these texts, this research illuminates the dual function of VAWA narratives, which includes tools for navigating legal systems and artifacts of mediated authorship and symbolic violence.