The Trope of the Papers: The Coloniality of Citizenship and the Turn to the Undocumented in Black and Chicana Feminist Thought examines the work the undocumented immigrant, its presence and absence, has enabled in feminist history, theory, and literature, from the mid-nineteenth century to the late-twentieth century, and argues that the undocumented immigrant is central to the development of U.S. feminist thought. Specifically, this project traces a theoretical shift in Black and Chicana feminist thought, what I term the turn to the undocumented, where citizenship is replaced by undocumentedness, a multidimensional experience that is not simply a result of the modern immigration regime but is rather a result of interlocking oppressions and resistance to them, as the organizing rubric in Black and Chicana feminist thinking and organizing. This process, as this project demonstrates, begins with Black and Chicana feminist thinkers’ recognition of the coloniality of citizenship, by which I mean, legal citizenship’s function as a mechanism for the perpetuation of colonial forms of domination, and is followed by a rejection of the institution of legal citizenship that is enacted through the trope of the papers, what I define in this project as the use of legal and extralegal documents in Black and Chicana feminist writings to interrogate both the limitations of legal citizenship and the liberatory potential in the abolition of this institution. This theoretical shift, I argue, demonstrates that Black and Chicana feminist thought cannot be understood without accounting for the undocumented immigrant, that Black and Chicana feminist thinkers’ engagement with this figure has created a new set of possibilities and relations among feminist thinkers and organizers that have facilitated greater organizing between them across existing boundaries, and that feminist thinkers’ and organizers’ continued engagement with the undocumented immigrant is necessary to advance the ongoing feminist project of decolonization.