Research has documented the ways in which students of Mexican origin are not succeeding academically in the same proportion as the rest of the US population. This process of educational failure occurs in the context of overt and more subtle forms of racism experienced throughout their schooling and everyday lives. Undocumented Mexican students face even harsher educational challenges as they experience life in an environment of heightened xenophobic US nativism. The paper acknowledges these experiences and fuses Critical Race Theory (CRT), life history and performance, to research and work alongside undocumented American students of Mexican origin. It seeks to show how a politicised qualitative paradigmatic re envisioning can occur in which counter-histories and counter-stories can be co-created into a powerful, evocative, and transformative arts-based performance text. The presentation reflects on how critical arts-based research in education can function as a means to legitimise, empower and promote the voices of the educationally and socially marginalised; evoking an experiential and sensual means of feeling and knowing by which researcher and researched may co-recover, interrogate and enrich an anti-colonialist critique of the dominant social order.