Hernandez, Luz2018-01-102018-01-102015-10https://hdl.handle.net/11299/192673University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. October 2015. Major: Hispanic and Luso Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics. Advisor: Francisco Ocampo. 1 computer file (PDF); vii, 206 pages.Keywords: Immigration, Deportation, Discourse Analysis, Gender, Social Identity, Agency This research presents a comparative discourse analysis of the discourse of Guatemalan and Mexican women who changed their immigration status from undocumented to documented or from undocumented to deported due to an immigration raid in 2008. The corpus data analyzed consists on fifteen interviews, eight interviews with deportee women and seven interviews with women who regularized their immigration status. The analysis focuses on identifying the discursive strategies that these women use to make sense of the experience of changing their immigration status. The interviews are analyzed using discourse analysis as a method along with an interdisciplinary approach using Linguistics, International Migration, Migrant Rights and U.S. Immigration Law. Data analysis demonstrates that deportee women and women who regularized their immigration status use the same discursive strategy, utilizing the pronoun one to talk about changing their immigration status. Deportee women express how they endure this legal punishment and the resulting lack of employment and basic goods. Women who regularized their immigration status explain how their labor rights were denied while undocumented but are granted to them as documented workers. Both use the pronoun one, which reveals that they view and present the experience as a collective experience that they have undergone as part of a social group. This discursive strategy of using uno also discloses how identity is constructed socially. Immigrants are defined and identified as part of a group in society: undocumented, documented or deportee. Contrasting this similarity using uno, women who regularized their immigration status also utilize the pronoun I as a linguistic strategy to indicate that they have more agency in their daily life. In addition, they employ narratives to explain how they solve difficulties and problems that affected them while they were immigrants without proper documentation. The discourse analysis of the discourse of these immigrant women shows how immigrants experience the immigration law that penalizes them. As well, it exhibits how migration and deportation are collective activities, and how migrant rights are granted based on the immigrant’s immigration status. Further data and conclusions are discussed.esAgencyDeportationDiscourse AnalysisGenderImmigrationSocial IdentityThesis or Dissertation