Discourses of Migration in Documentary Film: Translating the Real to the Reel 3031065387, 9783031065385

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Discourses of Migration in Documentary Film Translating the Real to the Reel

Alexandra J. Sanchez

Discourses of Migration in Documentary Film

Alexandra J. Sanchez

Discourses of Migration in Documentary Film Translating the Real to the Reel

Alexandra J. Sanchez Translation Studies Research Unit KU Leuven Antwerp, Belgium

ISBN 978-3-031-06538-5 ISBN 978-3-031-06539-2 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06539-2

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Doug Steley B/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Everyone is acquainted with dogs and horses, since they are seen daily. To reproduce their likeness is very difficult. On the other hand, since demons and spiritual beings have no definite form, and no one has ever seen them, they are easy to execute. —E. H. Gombrich (1984)

To mama and papá, and every other unsung migrant out there. Your stories matter

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisors Profs. Drs. Inge Lanslots and An Van Hecke (KU Leuven Campus Antwerpen) for taking me on as a Ph.D. student for their research project “The Representation of Migration from Latin America to the United States: Documentary Filmmakers as New Storytellers on Border Crossing” (2017–2021). My four-year journey with them resulted in a doctoral dissertation, which laid the groundwork for the present book. I would also like to thank my doctoral jury for their invaluable feedback: Profs. Drs. Elisabeth Bekers (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Peter Flynn (KU Leuven Campus Antwerpen), María Isabel Alfonso (St. Joseph’s College New York), and Lieven D’hulst (KU Leuven Campus Kortrijk). Many thanks, also, to the academics and students whom I met during my research stay at the University of California Santa Cruz (2018– 2019) and who all, in their own way, influenced this work: Prof. Jennifer Maytorena-Taylor, Prof. Dr. Sylvanna Falcón, Prof. Dee Hibbert-Jones, Prof. Dr. T.J. Demos, Prof. Dr. Juan Poblete, and the URAP focus group

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Acknowledgments

(Tatiana Ruíz, Luis Diego Ramírez, Lehna Cohen, Crystal CisnerosVilla, Gina Fernández, Araceli Herrera, Crystal Farmer, Nattjelly Lupita Betancourt Ramos, and Andrea Rosas). I would also like to express my gratitude to the members of the independent documentary film community who generously shared their insights with me: Sally Jo Fifer (President and CEO of ITVS), David Eisenberg (Senior Director of Production at ITVS), Luis Ortiz (Managing Director of the Latino Public Broadcasting), Stephen Gong (Executive Director of the Center for Asian American Media), Casey Davis Kaufman (Associate Director for WGBH’s Media Library and Archives and Project Manager for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting), Nicole Tsien (Associate Producer of POV), Sophie Harari (Associate Producer of POV), Alice Quinlan (Director of Community Engagement and Education at POV), and Dolores Morris (Documentary Producer at HBO). Mis gracias, also, to the documentary makers who allowed me to use screenshots of their work in this book: Cecilia Aldarondo and her mother Nylda Dieppa, Juan Carlos Zaldívar and his late father Pachuco, Natalia Almada, and duo Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar. Finally, last but not least, Quang, my fellow Cold War baby. For everything: merci.

Contents

1

Introduction

2

Documentary Makers as Translators: Translating the Real to the Reel

13

Four Factors of Translation: Contexts, Agents, Practices, and Discourses

39

4

The Universal Experience of Migrant Mothers

73

5

The Universal Experience of Migrant Fathers

89

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The Universal Experience of Migrant Children

109

7

The Group Experience of Migrant Citizens

129

8

The Group Experience of Bicultural Migrants

149

9

The Group Experience of Migrant Criminals

165

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10 The Individual Experience of Migrant Queers

193

11 The Individual Experience of Migrant Adoptees

215

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Contents

12 The Individual Experience of Migrant Celebrities

239

13

261

Conclusion

Index

275

About the Author

Alexandra Jorgevna Sanchez is a Research Fellow at KU Leuven (Research Group Translation and Intercultural Transfer—Translation Studies Research Unit). She studies how the Latin American diaspora translates itself and is translated by others.

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List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 10.1

Made in LA (Carracedo & Bahar, 2007; screenshots by the author) Memories of a Penitent Heart (Aldarondo, 2017; screenshots by the author) 90 Miles (Zaldívar, 2003; screenshots by the author) Made in LA (Carracedo & Bahar, 2007; screenshots by the author) Al otro lado (Almada, 2006; screenshots by the author) Al otro lado (Almada, 2006; screenshots by the author) Memories of a Penitent Heart (Aldarondo, 2017; screenshots by the author)

50 52 57 139 171 189 206

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List of Tables

Table 1.1 Table 3.1

Corpus (documentary, documentary maker, PBS premier) Corpus (documentary, documentary maker, theme, level of identity)

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1 Introduction

On June 21, 2015, the 74th Annual Peabody Awards Ceremony premiered on national television in the United States. Among the winners that night was No le digas a nadie (Shwer, 2015), a documentary that the host of the ceremony, actor Keegan-Michael Key, described as a “remarkable film” highlighting “the harshness of immigration policy that regularly ostracizes and criminalizes young people, who are just as American as any of us” (“Mikaela Shwer”, 00:00:21). The audience watched on as documentary filmmaker Mikaela Shwer, accompanied by her protagonists Angy and Maria Rivera, graciously received the award and delivered an acceptance speech in which she thanked the mother– daughter duo for “the incredible work that [they were] doing to be […] the face of immigration” and for “trusting [her] to help share this story” (00:01:34). Here we had a woman filmmaker, a black host, and undocumented Latinx activists taking center stage in an institution founded on patriarchal, Eurocentric values (cf. Winston et al., 2017), seemingly providing living proof that Americans were now in a ‘post’ racial and ‘post’ gender era (cf. Nicholson, 2010).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Sanchez, Discourses of Migration in Documentary Film, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06539-2_1

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Roughly a year later, another (inter)nationally broadcast speech would attest to a diametrically opposite reality. During the final presidential debate, when asked to elaborate on his plans to tackle immigration, thencandidate Donald Trump famously answered: “[…] we have some bad hombres here, and we’re going to get them out” (Blake, 2016). Trump’s use of Mock Spanish—Spanish utterances in English speech that indirectly index whiteness as an unmarked normative order and reproduce highly negative, racializing stereotypes of the Latinx community (Hill, 1995)—was, in and of itself, nothing out of the ordinary for a rhetorician of his caliber. What was so exceptional was his coupling of Mock Spanish with the age-old stereotype of the Mexican bandit: the ‘bad guy’ with a Spanish accent who has pervaded the public imagination for over a century. However, Trump’s catchy one-liner hit home with his electorate not because it was mildly creative. It caught on because it was blatantly offensive. His trademark, after all, was his readiness to taunt the opposition with its taboos: a signature move that made him look “authentic” (Sclafani, 2017) in comparison to the pokerfaced attitude of so-called nasty woman Hillary Clinton (cf. Kray et al., 2018). For as insulting as his words about Latinx migrants may have been, they did evoke a familiar image: el bandido, an old American cliché decked out in a new, Trumpian jacket. Donald Trump’s bad hombre harks back to one of the oldest and most widely recognized Latinx stereotypes: the Mexican bandit. Although historically el bandido can be traced back to the American conquest of the Wild West, audiovisually the figure became a staple with the arrival of the Western (Fojas, 2009). In their glorification of the Manifest Destiny that led to the annexation of a vast amount of Mexican territories, Westerns were eager to justify “taking a rich land away” by depicting Mexicans as “people who were not making good use of it” (Delgado, 2007, p. 1721). Hence, el bandido became generally known as: dirty and unkempt, usually displaying an unshaven face, missing teeth, and disheveled, oily hair […]. Behaviorally, he is vicious, cruel, treacherous, shifty, and dishonest; psychologically, he is irrational, overly emotional, and quick to resort to violence. His inability to speak English

1 Introduction

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or his speaking English with a heavy Spanish accent is Hollywood’s way of signaling his feeble intellect. (Ramirez-Berg, 2002, p. 68)

Over the years, the trope of legitimate conquest that generated the Mexican bandit progressed into another: the trope of illegitimate Reconquista (cf. Chavez, 2013) by a brown tide (cf. Santa Ana, 2002) of undocumented immigrants (cf. Pérez Huber & Solorzano, 2015). The emergence of this new figure, to which Trump referred as “bad hombre,” is intimately linked to the changes that the US immigration policy has undergone since the days of the gunslingers of the Wild West (cf. Fleegler, 2013).

From Bandido to Bad Hombre In the United States, the earliest comprehensive immigration law was adopted in 1917. Prior to that date, there had only been a range of exclusionary provisions aimed at prohibiting immigration and authorizing the deportation of, among others, convicts, lunatics, imbeciles, professional beggars, anarchists, polygamists, and women with immoral purposes (Mendelson, 2009). As the nation grew more nationalistic with the advent of World War I, it also became more inclined to believe that “new immigration” was a “problem” (Garis, 1927). Hence, in the coming years (1917–1924), a series of bills was passed to maintain the racial composition of the United States by restricting immigration based on national origins. Reinventing the “American” as a settler from the larger area of northwestern Europe, these bills purposefully based themselves on censuses that were disadvantageous to immigrants from elsewhere (Haney Lopez, 1996). This is where the “constative fallacy” began that would characterize US immigration policy: “the misperception that actions are describing an identity they are actually creating” (Yoshino, 2002, p. 901). Only in 1965, under the influence of the civil rights movement, were the national origins quotas replaced by the “first come, first served system” of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Most importantly, the Act was the first to impose numerical limits

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on immigration from Latin America, a region whose historical migratory flows had always been significant. US foreign policy toward Latin America, however, would soon spill over into its immigration policy, causing it to split in two different directions. In 1966, in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of Fidel Castro’s government, Congress enacted the Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA), which granted Cuban migrants the status of refugee and permitted them to gain permanent residence after one year of physical presence in the United States, regardless of whether they had entered the country legally or not. This arrangement remained unaltered until President Clinton instated the “wet foot, dry foot” policy in 1996, which stipulated the interdiction and repatriation of Cuban migrants intercepted at sea by the US authorities. In 2017, in his final week in office, President Obama ended this policy as a “gesture of goodwill” toward the Cuban government (de Bhal, 2018). The CAA itself remained intact, although from then on its “preferential treatment” was supposed to be extended only to Cuban migrants who entered the country legally (Meyers, 2018). The US immigration policy was less benevolent toward the rest of Latin America. Congress vacillated for several decades (1930–1965) between the deportation and legalization of its Mexican farm-workers, unsure whether to protect a workforce it desperately needed or to remain coherent with its deportation system (Romero, 2010). In 1965, it ruled in favor of the latter by letting the Bracero Program expire—a labor initiative that had been, up to that point, the main source of foreign farm labor in the United States. This decision is at the base of the “Mexican preponderance” among undocumented immigrants in the United States; the migratory flows from Mexico continued, but the millions of Mexican migrants suddenly went from “authorized workers” to “illegal aliens” (Flores & Schachter, 2018). In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was passed to deter unauthorized immigration; it allowed undocumented migrants who already resided in the United States to apply for legal status while limiting the access to social benefits and criminalizing the hiring of all future illegal aliens. In 1996, the passing of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA) fundamentally transformed life for all immigrants—undocumented, documented, and quasi-documented alike—by

1 Introduction

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expanding (in some cases retroactively) the grounds for exclusion and deportation (Menjívar, 2016). A decisive factor that drove the criminalization of immigration law was the US’ growing discomfort with Mexico’s notoriety as a prominent source of contraband in the “war on drugs” it was waging. Over time, these congressional and presidential concerns over human and drug trafficking led to an ever-increasing militarization of the southern border, spurred by the Supreme Court’s support of racial profiling as a constitutionally sound tool to identify undocumented migrants (Romero, 2010). The tendency to treat illegal immigration as a crime culminated after 9/11, which led President Bush to declare a “war on terror” and sign the PATRIOT (Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) Act—a bill that used immigration policy as a tool to identify possible terrorist and criminal threats to the United States. As a result of the Bush Administration’s approach to immigration, the mass detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants skyrocketed during the Obama and Trump Administrations (Guerrero, 2021). To this day, the overwhelming majority of undocumented deportees hail from Mexico and Central America, making Latinxs preeminent targets of the criminalization of immigration policy (Cervantes et al., 2018).

Aim of the Book It is precisely in the contradiction between the discourses of migration as exemplified by the US immigration policy or Donald Trump’s “bad hombre” and those exemplified by the Peabody Awards or Shwer’s No le digas a nadie that the present book takes root. Its point of departure is the brand of poststructuralism that pushed identity toward post-identity, a container of worldviews that recognize the invented, constructed primordiality of identity as well as ideologies that fall prey to these so-called inventions (cf. Croucher, 2003). Of special interest is the US independent documentary scene, which developed so as to offer an alternative, subjective lens to social issues (Heyman, 2018)—a goal that runs parallel to poststructuralism’s suspicion of objectivity (Renov, 2012). If, on one end of the discursive spectrum, we have a rejection of older valuations of

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power and difference and, on the other, a denial of their importance and depth (cf. Nicholson, 2010), then this book focuses on openly subjective media texts that, like No le digas a nadie, find themselves at the intersection of both dialectical habits of thought. In particular, real-life stories of migration from Latin America to the United States are at stake here. In order to be inclusive, the present book will refer to this community of Latin Americans in the United States as “Latinx”—a term which, as the editor of Latino Studies declared, has become an established alternative to other gender-inclusive terms, such as Latina and Latino, Latin@ or Latina/o (Torres, 2018). Hence, in this book, “Latinx (im)migrants” are understood to be all people who are about to migrate or already have immigrated (sometimes generations ago) to the United States from Latin America—a geographical region that includes all Western Hemisphere countries south of the United States, regardless of their language. However, the book centers on Latin American countries that were once colonies of the Spanish or Portuguese crown and omits other former European colonies, because the identity formation of the latter is generally considered to have emerged in a significantly different context than that of the former (cf. Santos, 2002). The question that this book sets out to answer is how documentary makers like Shwer, in their (conscious or unconscious) knowledge of the abovementioned discursive spectrum, go about translating stories of migration like Angy and Maria’s from “the real” to “the reel.” More specifically, the book considers documentary making as a form of translation and documentary makers as translators. It centers on how “independent documentary makers”—that is, documentary makers who were not employed by the distributing broadcast network, whose work was acquired and licensed by the distributing broadcast network to showcase publicly, and who were free to make the final choices about the story, characters, and crew (Chattoo et al., 2018)—translate real-life discourses surrounding Latin American migration to the United States to the documentary film reel. In other words, in this book, translation theory is used as a heuristic tool that facilitates the discourse analysis of its corpus. Concretely, the book focuses on the discourses of (a) 18 independent documentaries; (b) with at least one Latinx protagonist (who, when filming began, either had already immigrated to the United States from a

1 Introduction

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Latin American country or was planning to do so); (c) that were broadcast on the PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) series POV, the first and longest-running series of independent nonfiction films in the United States; (d) from the program’s inception in 1988 until the present day (Table 1.1). The book’s transversal application of translation theory to documentary films goes beyond interdisciplinarity. It strives to achieve antidisciplinarity, as understood by Halberstam: ways of acquiring knowledge that lead to unbounded forms of speculation and modes of thinking that ally not with rigor and order but with inspiration and unpredictability Table 1.1 Corpus (documentary, documentary maker, PBS premier) #

Documentary

Documentary maker

PBS premiere

1

Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business The Transformation

Helena Solberg

1995

Carlos Aparicio and Susana Aiken Laura Simón

1996

Lourdes Portillo

1999

Catherine Ryan and Gary Weimberg Hannah Weyer Stephen Olsson Aaron Matthews

1999

Hannah Weyer Patricia Flynn and MJ McConohay Juan Carlos Zaldívar Natalia Almada Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar Kieran Fitzgerald

2002 2003

Theo Rigby Mikaela Shwer Cecilia Aldarondo

2012 2015 2017

Kim Hopkins

2018

2 3

9 10

Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez La Boda Our House in Havana My American Girls: A Dominican Story Escuela Discovering Dominga

11 12 13

90 Miles Al otro lado Made in LA

14

The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández Sin País No le digas a nadie Memories of a Penitent Heart Voices of the Sea

4 5 6 7 8

15 16 17 18

1997

2000 2000 2001

2003 2006 2007 2008

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(2011). Rather than depending on a particular discipline as “an overtrained pied piper leading obedient children out of the darkness and into the light” (ibid., p. 14), the present book attempts to amplify Translation Studies and its framework of “punishing norms that discipline behavior” (ibid., p. 3) by drawing on other disciplines, such as Media, Migration, and Discourse Studies. Previous analyses of documentary depictions of migration have inferred that the genre can be used to intervene in the politics of globalization (Demos, 2013), communicate the bodily, spatial, and temporal dimensions of the migration experience (Köhn, 2016), bring about social change in the public sphere (Loustaunau & Shaw, 2018), contest the exclusionary discourse on migration that defines mainstream media outlets (Demo, 2012), respond to a political context in which migrants have been racialized and criminalized (Schreiber, 2018), and so on. These studies have sufficiently explored the ways in which the documentary film form can convey counterhegemonic discourses (“counterdiscourses”; cf. Zimmerman, 2000) of migration. However, a systematic analysis of these discourses has not been conducted yet. Hence, the goal of this book is to produce “undisciplined knowledge” (Halberstam, 2011) on the kind of counterhegemonic discourses that the documentaries of the corpus have been conveying over the last thirty years. The book relies on translation theory to lay out its conceptual framework, which it complements with a mixture of text and discourse analysis, interviews, ethnographies, etc. In Chapter 2, the theoretical framework of the book is discussed. Translation theory is used to approach the abovementioned POV documentaries as “intersemiotic translations” (cf. Jakobson, 1959) from one medium (“the real”) to another (“the reel”). This equation allows for an analysis of the corpus according to the “four basic factors of translation” (Flynn & Gambier, 2011): contexts, agents, practices, and discourses. Chapter 3 looks into three of these four factors: the contexts, agents, and practices of the 18 POV documentaries of the corpus. Discourse, the fourth factor of translation, is addressed in the next nine chapters. In Chapters 4 to 12, a discourse analysis of the corpus is conducted.

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Finally, Chapter 13 offers a conclusive overview of the “undisciplined knowledge” (Halberstam, 2011) on the discourses of migration that this book brings to light.

References Primary Sources Aiken, S., & Aparicio, J. (1996, July 9). The transformation. In POV Season 09. PBS. Aldarondo, C. (2017, July 31). Memories of a penitent heart. In POV Season 30. PBS. Almada, N. (2006, August 1). Al otro lado. In POV Season 19. PBS. Carracedo, A., & Bahar, R. (2007, September 4). Made in LA. In POV Season 20. PBS. Fitzgerald, K. (2008, July 8). The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández. In POV Season 21. PBS. Flynn, P., & McConohay, M. J. (2003, July 8). Discovering Dominga. In POV Season 16 . PBS. Hopkins, K. (2018, September 3). Voices of the sea. In POV Season 31. PBS. Matthews, A. (2001, July 3). My American girls: A Dominican story. In POV Season 14. PBS. Olsson, S. (2000, July 25). Our house in Havana. In POV Season 13. PBS. Portillo, L. (1999, July 13). Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena. In POV Season 12. PBS. Rigby, T. (2012, August 9). Sin País. In POV Season 25. PBS. Ryan, C., & Weimberg, G. (1999, July 27). The double life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez. In POV Season 12. PBS. Shwer, M. (2015, September 21). No le digas a nadie. In POV Season 28. PBS. Simón, L. (1997, July 1). Fear and learning at Hoover elementary. In POV Season 10. PBS. Solberg, H. (1995, October 6). Carmen Miranda: Bananas is my business. In POV Season 08. PBS. Weyer, H. (2000, June 27). La Boda. In POV Season 13. PBS. Weyer, H. (2002, August 27). Escuela. In POV Season 15. PBS. Zaldívar, J. C. (2003, July 29). 90 Miles. In POV Season 16 . PBS.

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Secondary Sources Blake, A. (2016, October 20). The final trump-clinton debate transcript, Annotated. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/ 2016/10/19/the-final-trump-clinton-debate-transcript-annotated/ Cervantes, A. G., Alvord, D., & Menjívar, C. (2018). “Bad Hombres”: The effects of criminalizing Latino Immigrants through law and media in the rural midwest. Migration Letters; Luton, 15 (2), 182–196. Chattoo, C. B., Aufderheide, P., Merrill, K., & Oyebolu, M. (2018). Diversity on U.S. Public and Commercial TV in authorial and executive-produced social-issue documentaries. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 62(3), 495–513. Chavez, L. (2013). The Latino threat: Constructing immigrants, citizens, and the nation (2nd ed.). Stanford University Press. Croucher, S. L. (2003). Globalization and belonging: The politics of identity in a changing world (New Millennium Books in International Studies edition). Rowman and Littlefield. de Bhal, J. (2018). More continuity than change? US strategy toward Cuba under Obama and Trump. Contemporary Politics, 24 (4), 436–453. Delgado, R. (2007). Rodrigo’s Corrido: Race, postcolonial theory, and U.S. civil rights. Vanderbilt Law Review; Nashville, 60 (6), 1689,1691–1745. Demo, A. T. (2012). Decriminalizing illegal immigration: Immigrants’ Rights through the documentary lens. In D. R. DeChaine (Ed.), Border rhetorics: Citizenship and identity on the US-Mexico Frontier (pp. 197–212). The University of Alabama Press. Demos, T. J. (2013). The migrant image: The art and politics of documentary during Global Crisis. Duke University Press. Fojas, C. (2009). Border bandits: Hollywood on the Southern Frontier. University of Texas Press. Fleegler, R. L. (2013). Ellis Island Nation: Immigration Policy and American identity in the Twentieth Century. University of Pennsylvania Press. Flores, R. D., & Schachter, A. (2018). Who are the “Illegals”? The social construction of illegality in the United States. American Sociological Review, 83(5), 839–868. Flynn, P., & Gambier, Y. (2011). Methodology in translation studies. Handbook of Translation Studies Online, 2, 88–96. Garis, R. L. (1927). Immigration restriction; A study of the opposition to and regulation of immigration into the United States. The Macmillan Company.

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Guerrero, M. (2021, February). Our next deporter-in-chief? These Times, 45 (2), 18–24. Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure. Duke University Press. Haney Lopez, I. (1996). White by law: The legal construction of race. NYU Press. Heyman, N. (2018, March 8). “POV” founder Marc Weiss. https://soundcloud. com/currentpubmedia/pov-founder-marc-weiss Hill, J. H. (1995, October 9). Mock Spanish: A site for the indexical reproduction of racism in American English. Language and Culture: Symposium 2, Binghamton University. Jakobson, R. (1959). On linguistic aspects of translation. In R. A. Brower (Ed.), On translation (pp. 232–238). Oxford University Press. Köhn, S. (2016). Mediating mobility: Visual anthropology in the age of migration. WallFlower Press. Kray, C. A., Carroll, T. W., & Mandell, H. (2018). Nasty women and bad hombres: Gender and race in the 2016 US Presidential Election. Boydell and Brewer. Loustaunau, E., & Shaw, L. E. (2018). Telling migrant stories: Latin American Diaspora in documentary film. University of Florida Press. Mendelson, M. K. (2009). Constructing America: Mythmaking in U.S. immigration courts note. Yale Law Journal , 119, 1012–1059. Menjívar, C. (2016). Immigrant criminalization in law and the media: Effects on Latino immigrant workers’ identities in Arizona. American Behavioral Scientist, 60 (5–6), 597–616. Meyers, L. (2018). U.S.-Cuba Immigration through the lens of executive regulatory policy: Understanding the recent end to a half century of special immigration regulations for Cuban Nationals Notes. Georgetown Immigration Law Journal , 33(1), 91–114. Mikaela Shwer—Don’t Tell Anyone—2015 Peabody Award Acceptance Speech. (2016, July 1). POV: Don’t Tell Anyone (No Le Digas a Nadie) (PBS). http://www.peabodyawards.com/award-profile/pov-dont-tell-anyoneno-le-digas-a-nadie Nicholson, L. (2010). Identity after identity politics. Washington University Journal of Law and Policy, 33(1), 43–74. Pérez Huber, L., & Solorzano, D. G. (2015). Visualizing everyday racism: Critical race theory, visual microaggressions, and the historical image of Mexican Banditry. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(3), 223–238. Ramirez-Berg, C. (2002). Latino images in film: Stereotypes, subversion, and resistance. University of Texas Press. Renov, M. (2012). Theorizing documentary. Routledge.

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Romero, V. C. (2010). Decriminalizing border crossings. Fordham Urban Law Journal, 1, 273–302. Santa Ana, O. (2002). Brown tide rising: Metaphors of Latinos in contemporary American Public Discourse (1st ed.). University of Texas Press. Santos, B., & de Sousa,. (2002). Between prospero and caliban: Colonialism, postcolonialism, and inter-identity. Luso-Brazilian Review, 39 (2), 9–43. Schreiber, R. M. (2018). The undocumented everyday: Migrant lives and the politics of visibility. University of Minnesota Press. Sclafani, J. (2017). Talking Donald Trump: A sociolinguistic study of style, Metadiscourse, and Political Identity (1st ed.). Routledge. Shwer, M. (2015, September 21). No le digas a nadie. In POV Season 28. PBS. Torres, L. (2018). Latinx? Latino Studies, 16 , 283–285. Winston, B., Vanstone, G., & Chi, W. (2017). The act of documenting: Documentary film in the 21st Century. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. Yoshino, K. (2002). Covering. The Yale Law Journal, 111(4), 769–939. Zimmerman, P. R. (2000). States of emergency: Documentaries, wars, democracies. University of Minnesota Press.

2 Documentary Makers as Translators: Translating the Real to the Reel

There is a wealth of scholarship on Latinx tropes and typifications in the media (e.g. Aldama & González, 2019; Aldama & Nericcio, 2019; Lie et al., 2012) as well as on polarizing media frames of migration (e.g. Brabeck et al., 2011; Ommundsen et al., 2014; Van Gorp et al., 2021). However, the literature on media texts that seek to transcend these stereotypizations remains scarce. In order to address this knowledge gap, the present book canvases the discourses of migration in documentaries that pride themselves on their “counterdiscourse to both transnational and nationalist media and their de facto privileging of commercial exchange values” (Zimmerman, 2000, p. xix). Concretely, the book charts the discourses of migration present in 18 documentaries dealing with Latin American migration to the United States that were broadcast on the PBS series POV between 1988 and the present day. To that end, it uses the “metaphors” of the translation process (St. Andre, 2014) as a “metalanguage” (Gambier & van Doorslaer, 2009). This equation between translation and nonfiction film allows for the consideration of discourse as a basic factor of translation, whose meaning is amplified when interpreted in function of the other factors: contexts, agents, and practices (Flynn & Gambier, 2011). In other words, the book relies on the “tool” © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Sanchez, Discourses of Migration in Documentary Film, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06539-2_2

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of translation (D’hulst, 2012) to comprehend what kind of discourses are contained in the “intersemiotic” translations (cf. Jakobson, 1959) of its corpus: their transfers from one medium (“the real”) to another (“the reel”). The cornerstone of this book’s translation heuristics is Espagne’s definition of cultural transfer: a process of selection of cultural knowledge guided by the “specific needs of the target system” (Espagne, 1999, p. 286; my translation). Espagne’s formula was taken onboard by translation scholars as it was in keeping with the so-called “cultural turn” that translation scholars Bassnett and Lefevere famously promulgated in 1990. Fueled by poststructuralist thought, the cultural turn incited Translation Studies to view their former reliance on the equivalence between sources and targets as, on the one hand, too eager to accept meaning as a stable and easily transferrable entity and, on the other, too dismissive of the circumstances and ideologies that inspired the target system to import a foreign source text (Leal, 2012). Thanks to the cultural turn, translation scholars began taking notice of culture-specific frameworks, such as the one proposed by Espagne and Werner (1988). From then on, the defining feature of these culture-specific approaches of translation became their “target-orientedness” (Marinetti, 2011). This novel focus on the end product allowed for translation to be regarded as the expression of larger transfer movements aimed at transforming a source text into a target text that fulfills specific functions for its audience in the target culture. Already hinted at by Even-Zohar in 1990 and 1997, the abovementioned concept of transfer has been gaining terrain in Translation Studies over the decades (Weissbrod, 2004). Göpferich even tentatively rechristened the discipline “Transfer and Translation Studies” (2007, 2010), which leveled the playing field for D’hulst to plead for an expansion of the notion of transfer. He proposed that translation scholars step outside purely linguistic explorations of translation theory and widen their field of interest by using translation theory as a heuristic tool to study all kinds of “assumed transfer”—that is, all features presented or regarded as transfer features within a given cultural setting (2012). It is precisely the

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“assumed transfer” of real-life discourses of migration to the documentary film form1 that the present book explores, with the help translation theory. Adaptation scholars have also been drawn to translation as a conceptual framework because, as Stam explains, the “trope of adaptation as translation” allows the adapted text to be approached as “a principled effort of inter-semiotic [sic ] transposition, with the inevitable losses and gains typical of any translation” (2000, p. 62; cf. Hutcheon, 2006). Stam’s use of translation as a trope endows his discussions of adapted (film) texts with a myriad of possibilities, all stemming from the relatively recent view that translation is, first and foremost, a sociocultural practice (cf. Toury, 2012; Venuti, 2008). As film scholars Welsh and Lev suggest, reconfiguring adaptation as translation replaces the leading question “How has a given adaptation succeeded or failed in capturing the leading textual features or its sourcetext [sic ]?” with open questions, such as “How has a given adaptation rewritten its sourcetext? Why has it chosen to select and rewrite the sourcetexts it has? How have the texts available to us inevitably been rewritten by the very act of reading? and How do we want to rewrite them anew?” (2007, p. 332). In order to ask the same questions, documentary scholars have also shown interest in translation as a conceptual model. Nichols, who along with Beattie (2004) can be credited for having laid the groundwork for modern-day Documentary Studies, relies on translation to separate documentary style from style in fiction: Style in fiction derives primarily from the director’s translation of a story into visual form; it gives the visual manifestation of a plot a style distinct from its written counterpart as script, novel, play, or biography. Style in documentary derives partly from the director’s attempt to translate her perspective on the historical world into visual terms, but it also stems from her direct involvement with the film’s actual subject. That is, fictional style conveys a distinct, imaginary world, whereas documentary 1 Approaching audiovisual texts as intersemiotic translations is not unheard of, neither in Adaptation Studies (e.g. Perdikaki, 2017), Documentary Studies (e.g. Gershon & Malitsky, 2011) nor Translation Studies (e.g. Davier & Van Doorslaer, 2018). Similarly, Cattrysse proposes a translation-based approach in film and adaptation studies (2014). See also Martínez and Cerezo Merchán (2017).

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style or voice reveals a distinct form of engagement with the historical world. (Nichols, 2010, pp. 43–44)

Bruzzi, another preeminent scholar of the field, also makes reference to the practice of translation to define the nature of documentary film: “Documentary film is traditionally perceived to be the hybrid offspring of a perennial struggle between the forces of objectivity (represented by the ‘documents’ or facts that underpin it) and the forces of subjectivity (that is, the translation of those facts into representational form)” (2006, p. 46). Further on, Bruzzi paraphrases Hayden White to reconfigure documentary making as “translating knowing into telling” based on the artform’s construction of “fluid narratives out of potentially fragmentary, disjointed material” (ibid., p. 87). Similarly, Zimmerman also draws on a canonical text to argue that the independent documentary is essentially a translation of “counterdiscourse to both transnational and nationalist media and their de facto privileging of commercial exchange values” (2000, p. xix). Referencing Bhabha’s trope of cultural translation, Zimmerman presents independent documentary making as an “insurgent act” and “a war over a discursive territory, a war over how the public spaces of the nation are defined and mapped, a war between the faux homogeneity of corporatist multiculturalism that absorbs and vaporizes difference and a radical heterogeneity that positions difference(s) and conflict(s) as a core of contestation over identity with frisson as its modus operandi” (2000, pp. 13–14). Zimmerman’s allusion to the concept of cultural translation builds on the “translational turn” (Bachmann-Medick, 2013) that Cultural Studies underwent in the early 1990s. Bhabha’s use of the concept of translation is a textbook example of the translational turn’s call for hybridization in terms of form (interdisciplinarity) and content (discursive in-betweenness), which implied a cross-fertilization between cultural and translational practices that encouraged scholars to widen both disciplines: Translation Studies and Cultural Studies. Inspired by the agenda of Cultural Studies to destabilize received notions of “foreign” and “familiar” and to challenge restrictive social norms (Conway, 2012), Translation Studies (TS) in turn branched out into the analysis of “committed approaches” to translation (Brownlie,

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2010). The goal was to nuance previous, dichotomous stances whereby the translator was either seen as colluding with the status quo and producing fluent, self-effacing translations or opposing power differentials through foreignizing strategies and terms that were unfamiliar to the receiving culture (cf. Tymoczko & Gentzler, 2002; Venuti, 2008). One subfield of Translation Studies that has been particularly prolific in terms of describing the effects of culture and power in translation is imagology. Originally rooted in literary studies, imagology aimed to describe, analyze, and raise awareness of the origin, process, and function of national prejudices and stereotypes (Beller & Leerssen, 2007). Imagology then crossed over to translation to “show TS scholars how imagology and its conceptual apparatus can help broaden and deepen our understanding of the discursive construction of cultural phenomena in translation” (Flynn et al., 2016, p. 8). Thus, being a “conceptual apparatus” (Beller & Leerssen, 2007, p. 12), imagology as understood from the perspective of TS echoes the documentary/translation parallel mentioned earlier. As van Doorslaer contends, a translator who has been tasked with the interlingual, intralingual, or intersemiotic translation of cultural images functions as “a cultural mediator, an informant transferring cultural knowledge, and as such also authoring a new text” (2019, p. 62). Expounding the notion of “translation as mediation” (Roig-Sanz & Meylaerts, 2018), van Doorslaer coined the term “journalator” to redefine the journalist as an agent “who makes abundant use of translation (in its broader definitions) when transferring and reformulating or recreating informative journalistic texts” (2012, p. 1049). The journalator’s task is then to entextualize news by reformulating the source text “in response to priorities and values relevant within the target context” (Kang as cited in van Doorslaer, 2012, p. 1050). Similar to van Doorslaer’s plea to consider journalism a form of translation2 is documentary film scholars Gershon and Malitsky’s call for a revision of documentary making as a process of entextualization by the documentary maker. Like van 2 Van Doorslaer’s merger of Translation Studies and Journalism Studies can be placed within the discipline of “journalistic translation research.” This subfield of Translation Studies is interested in (1) news writing strategies; (2) language/sign transfers that can be interlingual, intralingual, or intersemiotic; and (3) all other types of (non-linguistic) transformation (Valdeón, 2018).

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Doorslaer’s journalators, Gershon and Malitsky’s documentary makers “transform speech and events into circulable texts” via entextualization processes imbued with the ruling ideologies (2011, pp. 50–51). Based on the “entangled history” (Werner & Zimmermann, 2006) between Documentary Studies and Translation Studies, and specifically between “independent documentary making” (Zimmerman, 2000) and “committed approaches” to translation (Brownlie, 2010), the present book considers documentary making as a form of translation and the documentary maker as a translator. Similar to van Doorslaer’s journalator, the documentary maker is therefore viewed as an agent “who makes abundant use of translation (in its broader definitions)” (2012, p. 1049) for the transfer of real-life discourses to the documentary film form. Focusing on independent documentary makers who circulate in a post-identitarian context that is, on the one hand, plagued by “a sense of exhaustion around the whole project of identity” (Millner, 2005, p. 541) and, on the other, keen to broach “new topics” in order to “break out of a rather stifling orthodoxy” (Eagleton, 2004, p. 222), this book aims to chart their discourses of migration. More specifically, the book centers on how “independent documentary makers”—who were not employed by the distributing broadcast network, whose work was acquired and licensed by the distributing broadcast network to showcase publicly, and who were free to make the final choices about story, characters, and crew (Chattoo et al., 2018)—translate discourses of migration from the real to the reel. Previously, documentaries on migration to the United States have been investigated as performances of artivism (Demos, 2013), as examples of visual anthropology (Köhn, 2016), as creative and critical media strategies (Schreiber, 2018), and as acts of resistance at the hand of the Chicano movement (Demo, 2012) and the Latin American diaspora (Loustaunau & Shaw, 2018). However, since these analyses examined a selection of handpicked narratives, they lacked what TV scholar Straubhaar calls a “systemic focus” (2007, p. 2). The “ecologies” (Altheide, 1994) in which these documentary narratives were embedded have remained largely understudied. In contrast, the present book favors a

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more holistic approach. By rooting its conceptual framework in Translation Studies, it looks at the documentaries of its corpus as if they were translations that were molded to the needs and expectations of their target system. This framing allows for the documentary makers of the corpus to be approached as agents who performed “intersemiotic” translations (cf. Jakobson, 1959) of real-life discourses of migration to the documentary form. This logic, in turn, facilitates the contextualization and comprehension of the different discourses of migration that are present in the corpus. The book restricts itself to (a) independent (b) documentaries for two reasons. On the one hand, the US independent documentary scene developed to offer an alternative and subjective lens to social issues (Heyman, 2018), making its texts susceptible to exploring counterhegemonic discourses (“counterdiscourses”; cf. Zimmerman, 2000) of migration in which the book is interested. On the other hand, it may be argued that the transfer process of translation sensu stricto closely resembles that of the documentary film; both take place between source and target poles; both apply to products; both need agents manipulating those products; both recur to one or more linguistic carriers; and both make use of specific procedures or techniques to impose formal, semantic, or functional changes on the transferred products (cf. D’hulst, 2012). Additionally, what distinguishes the audience’s involvement with the documentary from its involvement with other genres is the anticipation of “an oscillation between the recognition of historical reality and the recognition of a representation about it” (Nichols, 2010, p. 39). In this way, the documentary’s genre-defining “claim to the real” (Winston, 1995) could be seen as mimicking the (traditional) objective of translation: seeking equivalence in the target text by professing fidelity to the source text (cf. Toury, 2012). This book contends that, as the field of Translation Studies is premised on the exploration of the translator’s ability to represent a source text and make authenticity claims about their representational work (Flynn, 2013), it lends itself to the analysis of the documentary—a genre characterized by a translation-like “oscillation between the recognition of historical reality and the recognition of a representation about it”

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(Nichols, 2010, p. 39). Moreover, following Bassnett and Lefevere’s “cultural turn” (1990), the field has grown increasingly interdisciplinary, crossing over from textual to cultural translation,3 exploring new epistemological impulses,4 and drawing from other disciplines to develop translation-oriented approaches5 (Bachmann-Medick, 2009). Such interdisciplinarity enables the present book to posit documentaries as “posttranslations” (Gentzler, 2016), “*translations” (Tymoczko, 2014), or “translations2” (Hermans, 1995)—stylizations that were born out of Translation Studies’ persistent call “to expand outwards, to improve communication with other disciplines, to move beyond binaries, to engage with the idea of translation as a global activity, and to configure the planetary into all our thinking” (Bassnett & Johnston, 2019, p. 187). What makes the cultural turn in TS especially appealing for this book is its view that all transferred products are “facts of the target culture” (Toury, 2012, p. 24). From this perspective, translations can be clustered around their contexts, agents, practices, and discourses: “basic factors relating to translation, each with its own set of methodological implications […] separated out from the messy reality of translation for methodological purposes only” (Flynn & Gambier, 2011, p. 90). Only by gradually laying bare the intricate relations between these factors of translation (contexts > agents > practices) can the discourses of these translations be properly identified. This gradation is purely formal; the contexts, agents, practices, and discourses of a translation are, in fact, inextricably intertwined with each other. In this book, however, these factors have been “separated out from the messy reality of translation for methodological purposes only” (ibid.).

3

See, for example, the interdisciplinary subfield of imagology (Flynn et al., 2016). See, for example, the interdisciplinary subfield of postcolonial Translation Studies (Bandia, 2014). 5 See, for example, the interdisciplinary use of Latourian actor—network theory in Translation Studies (e.g. Gonne, 2018; Van Rooyen, 2019). 4

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Contexts Ever since the cultural turn in Translation Studies (Bassnett & Lefevere, 1990), the translator has been recognized as having agency—the ability to exert power in an intentional way (Buzelin, 2011). This concept of agency, however, cannot be detached from the translator’s target structure (“context”), as the latter bestows upon the former the social role of mediator between the foreign source text and the target structure itself. In this vein, Giddens6 suggests to view all social agents—such as translators (cf. Van Rooyen, 2013)—as individuals who organically internalize the structure on which their role of agent depends. After all, “the structural properties of social systems are both medium and outcome of the practices they recursively organize” (Giddens, 1984, p. 25). Hence, from a Media Studies perspective, the properties of Giddens’s structure are seen as boundaries within which cultural agents operate and which, therefore, provide them with resources as well as constraints (Straubhaar, 2007). Similarly, from the vantage-point of translation theory, the source-to-target transfer is considered to be imbued with the norms and expectations of the target structure, because the agent who performs this transfer is so as well (Toury, 2012). To understand this transfer, it is therefore imperative to pinpoint the said norms and expectations (“structural properties”). In this book, the agents are independent documentary makers who “make the final choices about story, characters, and crew” themselves (Chattoo et al., 2018, p. 499) and who are not employed by the program POV. The latter only acquires the rights to showcase their films on PBS. Yet, the book’s hypothesis is that, despite their apparent artistic freedom, POV’s independent documentary makers still internalize the norms and expectations (“structural properties”) of PBS (“target structure”) and adapt their discourses accordingly. In order to better understand the nature of the discourses that the agents of this corpus applied in their 6 Although the present book favors Giddens’s structuration theory to give shape to this symbiosis between agency and structure, in Translation Studies different schools of thought have defined the “context” of an agent. Apart from Giddens’s structuration theory (e.g. Van Rooyen, 2013), there is also Latour’s actor—network theory (e.g. Gonne, 2018), Lahire’s habitus theory (e.g. Meylaerts, 2013), and Bourdieu’s theory of fields (e.g. Simeoni, 1998).

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documentaries on Latin American migration to the United States (“target texts”), a literature review of the structure in which the documentary makers were made to operate—namely PBS and its independent documentary series POV—will be conducted in the next chapter.

Agents The cultural turn in Translation Studies revealed that no transfer process from one semiotic system to another happens in isolation. It is a sociocultural event, influenced by a multitude of factors, that turns translations into facts of the target culture (Toury, 2012). However, the role of the translator in the transfer process was neglected until translation scholars such as Gouanvic (1999) and Simeoni (1998) began applying Bourdieu’s field theory (cf. Bourdieu, 1977) in order to relate the structures in which agents of translation circulate to the translation decisions they make in their target texts. As Meylaerts7 explains in her seminal essay The Multiple Lives of Translators, Bourdieu’s field theory was meant to transcend the binarity that had existed up until that point in sociology, vacillating between a theory of effects (“structure”) and a theory of strategies (“agency”) for the explanation of societal phenomena (2013; cf. 2008, 2010, 2017). Bourdieu’s notion of “habitus” (cf. Bourdieu, 1993) united both paradigms as it posited that social agents developed dispositions throughout their lifetime via an unconscious internalization of their surrounding social structures. These dispositions entailed principles, attitudes, opinions, ways of thinking, and acting—all resulting from certain life conditions. Hence, Meylaerts defines “habitus” as a social identity that coincides with the way social agents view the world and their place in it. Meylaerts also insists on the “multipositionality” of the translating agent, which contradicts the traditional view of social agents’ habitus as predominantly directed and defined by their profession. The same 7 Although the merit of using Bourdieu’s theory for translation analyses has been examined by a great number of scholars (e.g. Inghilleri, 2003; Sela-Sheffy, 2005; Wolf & Fukari, 2007), this book prefers Meylaerts’s use and exploration of Bourdieu’s conceptual framework as it is arguably the most well-rounded and complete (2008, 2010, 2017).

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tendency exists in Translation Studies and is based on two common, but incorrect assumptions: (1) there is an autonomous field of translation and (2) translation is an exclusively professional activity that can only be performed by highly skilled professionals. Meylaerts, on the other hand, proposes that translating is more often than not the translating agent’s secondary activity, because translation is itself a vague (“not autonomized”) field that is only activated when a target culture sees it fit to import a particular foreign source text. Moreover, formal training is rarely a requirement for a translator. Therefore, Meylaerts suggests that in order to better gauge the agents’ “translation practice, their perception and self-perception,” it is important to pay attention to their socialization in other fields than translation and to acknowledge that translators lead “multiple lives” outside the translation industry (2013, pp. 108–109). Mutatis mutandis, Meylaerts’s holistic perspective of the habitus could equally be applied to the independent documentary makers showcased by POV, as their agency is largely defined by PBS (“structure”). Owing to the chronic scarcity of funds for documentary making in the United States, it is rare for an independent documentary maker not to have other sources of income. Just like the “traditional” translation profession, the field of independent documentary making is porous and fickle, fully dependent on whether a real-life story (“source text”) comes to the attention of the documentary maker whose transfer of this story to the documentary form (“target text”) may or may not interest PBS— or, in this case, the PBS program POV (“target structure”). Additionally, with the advent of digital media and the increased availability of film equipment, documentary makers are more likely to be autodidacts who learn the job on the go. Finally, because of public broadcasting’s mission to diversify the public sphere, PBS has grown increasingly committed to securing diversity in front of and behind the lens (Chattoo et al., 2018). As will be argued in the following chapter, it seems that, over time, the non-professional aspects of the documentary makers’ habitus (e.g. gender, ethnicity, sexuality) have become an increasingly influential factor in the selection of POV and ITVS documentaries.8 Hence, 8 So much so, that some voices are starting to protest against the “identity epistemology” (“Glenn Loury on Race, Inequality, and America,” 2020) that underlies this focus on “diversity

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in order to explain the documentary makers’ discourses in the following chapters, it is imperative to pinpoint their habitus: their internalization of all the structures— which include public broadcasting—that influence the way they translate stories from the real to the reel. Translation scholars usually have recourse to a number of ways to chart these internalizations, such as combing through archives related to the translation at hand or reviewing the translator’s drafts, correspondence, and footnotes (e.g. D’hulst & van Gerwen, 2018; Meylaerts & Gonne, 2014). For this book, a generous source of paratextual material of the agents’ habitus has proven to be the website of POV itself (http://arc hive.pov.org). The biographical blurbs that are featured on this website are analyzed in the next chapter.

Practices In this book, “practices” are understood to be entextualizations of particular intersemiotic translation decisions. These were invariably influenced by the translating agents’ contexts, habitus, and discourses at a given time and place in the world (Flynn & Gambier, 2011). Although there are no fixed categories of translation decisions, some taxonomies are more widely used than others (e.g. Baker, 1992; Chesterman, 1997). In fact, even the terminology used to refer to these translation decisions varies. Among others, they have been called “procedures” (Vinay & Darbelnet, 1995), “techniques” (Nida, 1964), “processes” (Kiraly, 1995), and “strategies” (De Beaugrande, 1978). However, Gambier’s definition of the term “translation strategy” is arguably the most specific one, as it introduces a second “level of intervention” of the translator’s agency by means of the concept of “translation tactic”:

in terms of agency”—“the idea that experiences of the marginalized have long been misrepresented by the mainstream and that, to understand those experiences, we need to hear from the marginalized directly” (Gill, 2020; cf. Carlson et al., 2017; Lewis, 2019). It should be noted, however, that this line of thinking is generally considered “multicultural conservatism” cutting across the boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality (Dillard, 2001).

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We have at least two levels of intervention. Firstly what the military call strategy or a planned, explicit, goal-oriented procedure or programme, adopted to achieve a certain objective (with priorities, commands, and anticipations), and secondly tactics, or a sequence of steps, locally implemented. Strategy is achieved through tactics, subject to monitoring and modification adapted to a given situation. In differentiating strategy for a translation event (which includes what is happening before and after the translation per se, such as making a deal with the client, terminology mining, delivering the output in a given format, etc.) and tactics in a translation act (translation in a narrow meaning), we can better highlight the division of labour and responsibilities in translation. (2010, p. 412)

The interaction between different levels of intervention that is implied by Gambier’s “strategies” and “tactics” can be considered applicable to the documentary makers of the corpus because they tend to rely on tactical uses of media technologies to introduce discontinuities in hegemonic discourses and disorient the strategic system of powerful media institutions (cf. Sützl & Hug, 2016; Heyman, 2018). This is especially true if Gambier’s understanding of “strategies” and “tactics” is complemented with that of de Certeau. De Certeau’s interest in tactics and strategies started with his cogitations on Foucault’s focus on dominant texts, which allegedly only reproduced the marginalization of historically underrepresented voices (cf. Briggs, 2015). Although concurring with Foucault that the grid of power was becoming ever more pervasive and extensive, de Certeau disagreed with his implication that individuals were either enabled or constrained by the power-generated discourses that govern them. To go beyond Foucault’s fatalistic views, de Certeau attempted to explain how everyday individuals, in their everyday lives, manage to mitigate the said discourses. He employed the terms tactics and strategies to signify their quotidian ways of coping with possibilities and interdictions. Hence, tactics were to be understood as “the ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong,” whereas strategies were to be seen as “a calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an ‘environment’” (2011, pp. xvii–xix). Over time, de Certeau’s tactic became a heuristic tool, commonly used to uncover

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the myriad ways in which people constantly and creatively manipulate mechanisms of discipline, conforming to them only in order to evade them (Alonso, 2017). As was argued earlier, around the same time that the independent documentary scene underwent a paradigmatic shift that embraced counterhegemonic discourses (Zimmerman, 2000), Translation Studies experienced a “cultural turn” (Bassnett & Lefevere, 1990). Under its influence, a number of translation scholars began advocating for “committed approaches” of translation—practices of translation that exposed previously ignored power differentials in target texts (Brownlie, 2010). One of the best-known calls for translational activism is Venuti’s plea to end the “invisibility of the translator” (2008). Based on an overview of translations from the seventeenth century until the present day, Venuti argues that the default strategy of translation has been one of fluency. Supposedly always involving a degree of ethnocentric violence, these traditional translations tend to erase the cultural specificities of the source text in order to trigger an “illusion” of domesticated foreignness—a suspension of disbelief that involves making translators invisible by ignoring their intervention in the transfer process between foreign sources and domestic targets (Gouanvic, 2005). Consequently, Venuti pleads for “foreignizing” translations: target texts in which the translators’ interventions are visible thanks to translation decisions that force the said texts to reveal themselves as domestic reproductions that are subservient to foreign originals. These foreignizing translations are allegedly capable of pointing to themselves and, therefore, make visible not only the agent at the helm of the transfer but also the violence that the transfer operation may entail. According to Venuti, translation is a process “by which the chain of signifiers that constitute the foreign text is replaced by a chain of signifiers in the translating language,” and it is therefore essentially guided by “the strength of [the translator’s] interpretation” (2008, p. 13). Readily acknowledging that translations have to conform to a certain degree of domestication on account of the translator’s obligation to draw on the resources of the translating language and culture, Venuti does plead in favor of translations that flaunt their partiality. As it is impossible to do that consistently throughout the translation because of

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the inherently domesticating nature of the endeavor, Venuti takes satisfaction in defamiliarizing, estranging, foreignizing translation decisions that give proof of the translator’s so-called reflexivity: awareness of the target text’s partiality (cf. Kadiu, 2019). Although criticized for, among others, unnecessarily distancing the target language from the reader (Bassnett, 2005), erasing translators by prioritizing the foreign source over the foreignizing agent (BoaseBeier, 2010), and inciting stereotypical representations of Otherness (Polezzi, 2017), Venuti’s distinction between foreignizing and domesticating translations has raised awareness in Translation Studies about the translator’s agency to anticipate possible geopolitical and social injustices in the target text (Brownlie, 2010). Most importantly, Venuti’s conceptualizations provided a heuristic framework for the valuation of translators who were willing to explore their agency’s counterhegemonic potential for the sake of addressing power imbalances. In this book, Venuti’s logic makes it possible to pinpoint and reflect on the intersemiotic translation choices (“practices”) of the documentary makers of the corpus. Inspired by previous analyses that relied on Venuti to identify and explain the nature of a translator’s decisions by holding them up against more traditional taxonomies of translation (e.g. Kadiu, 2019; Myskja, 2013), the next chapter of the book resorts to a similar methodology. Applied to documentary makers, this approach consists of evaluating their manipulations (“tactics”) of Nichols’s 6 documentary modes of representation (“strategies”)—an established taxonomy9 in Documentary Studies (cf. Bruzzi, 2006; Ward, 2006). Importantly, like nearly all documentaries, the films of the corpus hybridize several of these modes of representation (cf. Cagle, 2012). However, just as was the case with Flynn and Gambier’s four factors of translation, Nichols’s six modes of documentary representation have been “separated out from the messy reality of [documentary film] for methodological purposes only” (2011, p. 90).

9 Per Nichols’s own demand, his taxonomy should be considered more of “a pool of resources available to all” than “a genealogy of documentary film” (Nichols, 2010, p. 159).

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Discourses In Translation Studies, the term “discourse analysis” has been used to designate investigations of (1) language in use, in contrast to the traditional structural linguistics focusing on language as a system; (2) oral communications, in contrast to written communications; (3) communicative behavior (e.g. spoken interactions, turn-taking mechanisms, face-work); (4) commonalities in terms of text and talk (e.g. the discourse of an author, a political movement, a literary genre); and (5) discursive reproductions of real-life power relations (Schäffner, 2013). The latter is generally known as Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and it is the type of discourse analysis in which the present book is interested. More specifically, this book focuses on Critical Discourse Studies (CDS)—a relatively novel amplification of CDA. Critical Discourse Studies cannot be labeled as an approach, a theory, or a method. It is a discipline that does not restrict itself to “applied analysis” as it also includes “philosophical, theoretical, methodological and practical developments” (Flowerdew et al., 2017, p. 2). Building on CDA’s focus on “the analysis of fundamental social problems, such as the discursive reproduction of illegitimate domination” (Van Dijk, 2008, pp. 821–822), CDS can be used for the purpose of dismantling structures of social domination as well as to champion discourses that are attentive to the ideologies invested in the representation of socially subordinated groups (Roderick, 2018). Moreover, CDS does not consider linguistic utterances as its default object of study. Instead, it ventures into multimodal analyses of all types of semiotic systems, from visual communication and media texts to magazines, advertising, music videos, and so on (Machin & Mayr, 2012). This extension toward counterhegemony and multimodality echoes the present book’s research interest: discourses that go against mainstream representations of a socially subordinated group, such as Latinx (im)migrants, and that involve multimodal communication. Of particular significance to the present book is Roderick’s call for mutualism between critical approaches to communication and discourses that are “defined through alterity” (2018, p. 167). Using Latour’s essay “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?” as inspiration, Roderick pleads

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for CDS’ transcendence of their previous binarism, eternally vacillating between “fairy” and “fact” positions: the former refers to critics who claim they can demystify (mis)representations of the real world, the latter to critics who assume they are capable of debunking the fetishes of the powerful. Suggesting that both positions are more concerned with reasserting the supposed sophistication of the critics themselves than with sincerely engaging in the matters of others, Roderick follows Latour in his proposition to carve out a third, “fair” position in the fabric of CDS: one that uses discourse analysis to denaturalize what “has been made to be experienced as natural and self-evident” (ibid., p. 164). This is where the tool of CDS, as understood by Roderick, partially coincides with the tool of translation, as understood in this book. While one method studies how certain acts of communication came to be seen as “natural” in the context in which they were performed (cf. Roderick, 2018), the other investigates how transferred products came to be viewed as “facts” by the target culture that commissioned the transfer (cf. Toury, 2012). Additionally, the discourse analysis conducted in this book departs from the abovementioned “fair” position, which pays attention to ideology that does not “[lift] the rugs from under the feet of naïve believers” but rather “offers participants arenas in which to gather” (Latour as cited in Roderick, 2018, p. 164). As will be argued in the next chapter, the corpus of this book seems to have emerged in a post-identitarian context that was concerned with “the ways identity categories are deployed to sustain the status quo and […] the ways alternative notions of identity already exist that defy, deconstruct, or perversely alter power asymmetries” (Roof, 2003, p. 3). Hence, the point of departure of the present discourse analysis is not the emancipation from power abuse but rather the negotiation of and/or resistance to such abuse (cf. Hughes, 2018). In reference to Foucault’s positivity of discourse, this type of critique is known as Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA) because of its focus on how discourse can be construed as an inspiring artifact that can offer a message of encouragement, hope, and strength in times of difficulty (Nartey, 2020). Hence, PDA is generally defined as a method that (1) approaches discourse not as a static entity but as a constant struggle over meaning, (2) emphasizes the fluidity of

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what is predominant and what is dissenting, and (3) allows for alternative representations to shift into a mainstream space (Macgilchrist, 2007)—an agenda that coincides with the mission of public broadcasting (cf. Mccauley et al., 2016). Given that there are no clear methods or prescribed approaches in PDA, the analysis conducted in the next chapters will consist of a close reading of the documentaries of the corpus. This PDA will be based on the assumption that the corpus consists of (a) acts of communication on the topic of Latin American migration to the United States; (b) that have undergone a semiotic transfer from real-life to the documentary form; (c) whose transfer was performed by agents influenced by contexts that made the discourses about these acts of communication likely to be progressive rather than oppressive (cf. Hughes, 2018). In the following chapter, a thorough discussion follows of the contexts, agents, and practices of the corpus. This chapter sets the scene for the Positive Discourse Analysis of the 18 documentaries of the corpus, which is conducted in Chapters 4 through 12.

References Aldama, F. L., & González, C. (2019). Reel Latinxs: Representation in U.S. film and TV . University of Arizona Press. Aldama, F. L., & Nericcio, W. A. (2019). Talking #browntv: Latinas and Latinos on the screen. Ohio State University Press. Alonso, A. E. (2017). Listening for the cry: Certeau beyond strategies and tactics. Modern Theology, 33(3), 369–394. Altheide, D. L. (1994). An ecology of communication: Toward a mapping of the effective environment. The Sociological Quarterly, 35 (4), 665–683. Bachmann-Medick, D. (2009). Introduction: The translational turn. Translation Studies, 2(1), 2–16. Bachmann-Medick, D. (2013). Translational turn. Handbook of Translation Studies Online, 4, 186–193. Baker, M. (1992). In other words: A Coursebook on translation. Routledge. Bandia, P. (2014). Translation as reparation. Routledge.

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Bassnett, S. (2005). Bringing the news back home: Strategies of acculturation and foreignisation. Language and Intercultural Communication, 5 (2), 120– 130. Bassnett, S., & Johnston, D. (2019). The outward turn in translation studies. The Translator, 25 (3), 181–188. Bassnett, S., & Lefevere, A. (Eds.). (1990). Translation, history, and culture. Pinter Publishers. Beattie, K. (2004). Documentary screens: Non-fiction film and television. Palgrave Macmillan. Beller, M., & Leerssen, J. T. (2007). Imagology: The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters: A critical survey. Rodopi. Boase-Beier, J. (2010). Who needs theory? In A. Fawcett, K. L. Guadarrama García & R. Hyde Parker (Eds.), Translation: Theory and practice in dialogue (pp. 25–38). A and C Black. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production: Essays on art and literature. Columbia University Press. Brabeck, K. M., Lykes, M. B., & Hershberg, R. (2011). Framing immigration to and deportation from the United States: Guatemalan and Salvadoran families make meaning of their experiences. Community, Work and Family, 14 (3), 275–296. Briggs, C. L. (2015). Discourse, anthropology of. In J. D. Wright (Ed.), International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences (2nd ed., pp. 503–509). Elsevier. Brownlie, S. (2010). Committed approaches and activism. Handbook of Translation Studies Online, 1, 45–48. Bruzzi, S. (2006). New documentary. Routledge. Buzelin, H. (2011). Agents of translation. Handbook of Translation Studies Online, 2, 6–12. Cagle, C. (2012). Postclassical nonfiction: Narration in the contemporary documentary. Cinema Journal; Lawrence, 52(1), 45–65. Calzada-Perez, M. (2014). Apropos of ideology: Translation studies on ideologyideologies in translation studies. Routledge. Carlson, E., Rowe, G., & Zegeye-Gebrehiwot, T. (2017). Decolonization through collaborative filmmaking: Sharing stories from the Heart, Journal of Indigenous Social Development, 6 (2), 27. Cattrysse, P. (2014). Descriptive adaptation studies: Epistemological and methodological issues. Maklu.

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Chattoo, C. B., Aufderheide, P., Merrill, K., & Oyebolu, M. (2018). Diversity on U.S. Public and Commercial TV in authorial and executive-produced social-issue documentaries. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 62(3), 495–513. Chesterman, A. (1997). Memes of translation: The spread of ideas in translation theory. John Benjamins Publishing. Conway, K. (2012). Cultural translation. Handbook of Translation Studies Online, 3, 21–25. Davier, L., & Van Doorslaer, L. (2018). Translation without a source text: Methodological issues in news translation. Across Languages and Cultures, 19 (2), 241–257. De Beaugrande, R. (1978). Factors in a theory of poetic translating. Assen. de Certeau, M. (2011). The practice of everyday life. University of California Press. Demo, A. T. (2012). Decriminalizing illegal immigration: Immigrants’ rights through the documentary lens. In D. R. DeChaine (Ed.), Border rhetorics: Citizenship and identity on the US-Mexico Frontier (pp. 197–212). The University of Alabama Press. Demos, T. J. (2013). The migrant image: The art and politics of documentary during global crisis. Duke University Press. D’hulst, L. (2012). (Re)locating translation history: From assumed translation to assumed transfer. Translation Studies, 5 (2), 139–155. D’hulst, L., & van Gerwen, H. (2018). Translation space in nineteenth-century Belgium: Rethinking translation and transfer directions. Perspectives, 26 (4), 495–508. Dillard, A. D. (2001). Guess who’s coming to dinner now? Multicultural conservatism in America. NYU Press. Eagleton, T. (2004). After theory. Penguin UK. Elliott, A. (2019). Routledge handbook of identity studies (Second). Routledge. Espagne, M. (1999). Les transferts culturels franco-allemands. Presses universitaires de France. Espagne, M., and Werner, M. (1988). Transferts. Les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand (XVIIIe et XIXe siècles). Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations. Even-Zohar, I. (1990). Polysystem studies. Poetics Today, 11(1), 1–268. Even-Zohar, I. (1997). The making of culture repertoire and the role of transfer. Target: International Journal of Translation Studies, 9 (2), 355–363. Flowerdew, J., & Richardson, J. E. (2017). The Routledge handbook of critical discourse studies. Routledge.

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Flynn, P. (2013). Author and translator. Handbook of Translation Studies Online, 4, 12–19. Flynn, P., & Gambier, Y. (2011). Methodology in translation studies. Handbook of Translation Studies Online, 2, 88–96. Flynn, P., van Doorslaer, L., & Leerssen, J. (2016). Interconnecting translation studies and imagology. John Benjamins Publishing Company. Gambier, Y. (2010). Translation strategies and tactics. In Handbook of translation studies online (Vol. 1, pp. 412–418). John Benjamins. Gambier, Y., & van Doorslaer, L. (2009). The metalanguage of translation. John Benjamins Publishing. Gentzler, E. (2016). Translation and rewriting in the age of post-translation studies. Routledge. Gershon, I., & Malitsky, J. (2011). Documentary studies and linguistic anthropology. Culture, Theory and Critique, 52(1), 45–63. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. University of California Press. Gill, N. (2020, November 20). “Decolonize” the documentary? Persuasion. https://www.persuasion.community/p/decolonize-the-documentary Glenn Loury on Race, Inequality, & America. (2020, July 20). In EconTalk. http://www.econtalk.org/glenn-loury-on-race-inequality-and-america/ Gonne, M. (2018). From binarity to complexity: A Latourian perspective on cultural mediators the case of Georges Eekhoud’s intra-national activities. In D. Roig-Sanz & R. Meylaerts (Eds.), Literary translation and cultural mediators in “Peripheral” cultures: Customs officers or smugglers? (pp. 263– 289). Springer International Publishing AG. Göpferich, S. (2007). Translation studies and transfer studies. A plea for widening the scope of translation studies. In Y. Gambier (Ed.), Doubts and directions in translation studies (pp. 27–39). John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://benjamins.com/catalog/btl.72 Göpferich, S. (2010). Transfer and translation studies. Handbook of Translation Studies Online, 1, 374–377. Gouanvic, J.-M. (1999). Sociologie de la traduction: La science-fiction américaine dans l’espace culturel français des années 1950. Artois presses université. Gouanvic, J.-M. (2005). A Bourdieusian theory of translation, or the coincidence of practical instances. The Translator, 11(2), 147–166. Hermans, T. (1995). Toury’s Empiricism version one. The Translator, 1(2), 215– 223. Heyman, N. (2018, March 8). “POV” founder Marc Weiss. https://soundcloud. com/currentpubmedia/pov-founder-marc-weiss

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Hughes, J. M. F. (2018). Progressing positive discourse analysis and/in critical discourse studies: Reconstructing resistance through progressive discourse analysis. Review of Communication, 18(3), 193–211. Hutcheon, L. (2006). A theory of adaptation. Routledge. Inghilleri, M. (2003). Habitus, field and discourse. Target Online, 15 (2), 243– 268. Jakobson, R. (1959). On linguistic aspects of translation. In R. A. Brower (Ed.), On translation (pp. 232–238). Oxford University Press. Kadiu, S. (2019). Visibility and ethics: Lawrence Venuti’s foreignizing approach. In Reflexive Translation Studies (pp. 21–44). UCL Press. Kiraly, D. C. (1995). Pathways to translation: Pedagogy and process. Kent State University Press. Köhn, S. (2016). Mediating mobility: Visual anthropology in the Age of Migration. WallFlower Press. Leal, A. (2012). Equivalence. Handbook of Translation Studies Online, 3, 39–46. Lewis, T. (2019, November 1). #DecolonizeDocs: A check-in a year after the getting real sessions. International Documentary Association. https://www.documentary.org/feature/decolonizedocs-check-year-aftergetting-real-sessions Lie, N., Mandolessi, S., & Vandenbosch, D. (Eds.). (2012). El juego con los estereotipos: La redefinición de la identidad hispánica en la literatura y el cine postnacionales. P.I.E-Peter Lang S.A. Loustaunau, E., & Shaw, L. E. (2018). Telling migrant stories: Latin American Diaspora in Documentary Film. University of Florida Press. Macgilchrist, F. (2007). Positive discourse analysis: Contesting dominant discourses by reframing the issues. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines, 1(1), 74–94. Machin, D., & Mayr, A. (2012). How to do critical discourse analysis: A multimodal introduction. SAGE Publications Ltd. Marinetti, C. (2011). Cultural approaches. Handbook of Translation Studies Online, 2, 26–30. Martínez, J. J., & Cerezo Merchán, B. (Eds.). (2017). Special issue: Building bridges between film studies and translation studies. InTRAlinea, 19. http:// www.intralinea.org/specials/building_bridges Mccauley, M. P., Artz, B. L., Halleck, D., & Peterson, P. E. (Eds.). (2016). Public broadcasting and the public interest. Taylor and Francis. Meylaerts, R. (2008). Translators and (their) norms: Towards a sociological construction of the individual. In A. Pym, M. Shlesinger, & D. Simeoni

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(Eds.), Beyond descriptive translation studies: Investigations in homage to Gideon Toury (pp. 91–102). John Benjamins. Meylaerts, R. (2010). Habitus and self-image of native literary authortranslators in diglossic societies. Translation and Interpreting Studies, 5 (1), 1–19. Meylaerts, R. (2013). The multiple lives of translators. TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction, 26 (2), 103–128. Meylaerts, R. (2017). Conceptualizing the translator as a historical subject in multilingual environments: A challenge for descriptive translation studies? In P. F. Bandia and G. L. Bastin (Eds.), Charting the future of translation history (pp. 59–79). Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa|University of Ottawa Press. Meylaerts, R., & Gonne, M. (2014). Transferring the city—Transgressing borders: Cultural mediators in Antwerp (1850–1930). Translation Studies, 7 (2), 133–151. Millner, M. (2005). Post post-identity. American Quarterly, 57 (2), 541–554. Myskja, K. (2013). Foreignisation and resistance: Lawrence Venuti and his critics. Nordic Journal of English Studies, 12(2), 1–23. Nartey, M. (2020). Voice, agency and identity: A positive discourse analysis of ‘resistance’ in the rhetoric of Kwame Nkrumah. Language and Intercultural Communication, 20 (2), 193–205. Nichols, B. (2010). Introduction to documentary (2nd ed.). Indiana University Press. Nicholson, L. (2010). Identity after identity politics. Washington University Journal of Law and Policy, 33(1), 43–74. Nida, E. A. (1964). Toward a science of translating: With special reference to principles and procedures involved in Bible translating. Brill Archive. Ommundsen, R., Larsen, K. S., van der Veer, K., & Eilertsen, D.-E. (2014). Framing unauthorized immigrants: The effects of labels on evaluations. Psychological Reports, 114 (2), 461–478. Perdikaki, K. (2017). Film adaptation as translation: An analysis of adaptation shifts in Silver Linings Playbook. Anafora, 4 (2), 249–265. Polezzi, L. (2017). Translating Travel: Contemporary Italian Travel Writing in English Translation. Routledge. Roderick, I. (2018). Multimodal critical discourse analysis as ethical praxis. Critical Discourse Studies, 15 (2), 154–168. Roig-Sanz, D., & Meylaerts, R. (Eds.). (2018). Literary translation and cultural mediators in “Peripheral” Cultures: Customs officers or smugglers? Springer International Publishing AG.

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Roof, J. (2003). Thinking post-identity. The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 36 (1), 1–5. Schäffner, C. (2013). Discourse analysis. In Handbook of translation studies online (Vol. 4, pp. 84–91). John Benjamins. Schreiber, R. M. (2018). The undocumented everyday: Migrant lives and the politics of visibility. Univ Of Minnesota Press. Sela-Sheffy, R. (2005). How to be a (recognized) translator: Rethinking habitus, norms, and the field of translation. Target, 17 (1), 1–26. Simeoni, D. (1998). The pivotal status of the translator’s habitus. Target, 10 (1), 1–39. Stam, R. (2000). Beyond fidelity: The dialogics of adaptation. In J. Naremore (Ed.), Film adaptation (pp. 54–76). Rutgers University Press. St. Andre, J. (2014). Thinking through translation with metaphors. Routledge. Straubhaar, J. D. (2007). World television: From global to local . Sage. Sützl, W., & Hug, T. (2016). Introduction. In Activist media and biopolitics: Critical media interventions in the age of Biopower (pp. 7–14). Innsbruck University Press. Toury, G. (2012). Descriptive translation studies and beyond (Revised edition). John Benjamins PubCo. Tymoczko, M. (2014). Enlarging translation. Routledge. Tymoczko, M., & Gentzler, E. (2002). Translation and power. University of Massachusetts Press. Valdeón, R. A. (2018). On the use of the term ‘Translation’ in journalism studies. Journalism, 19 (2), 252–269. Van Dijk, T. A. (2008). Critical discourse analysis and nominalization: Problem or Pseudo-problem? Discourse and Society, 19 (6), 821–828. van Doorslaer, L. (2012). Translating, narrating and constructing images in journalism with a test case on representation in Flemish TV News. Meta: Journal Des Traducteurs/Meta: Translators’ Journal , 57 (4), 1046–1059. van Doorslaer, L. (2019). Embedding imagology in translation studies. Slovo.Ru: Baltic Accent, 10 (3), 56–68. Van Gorp, B., Van Hove, J., Figoureux, M., & Vyncke, B. (2021). Anders communiceren over migratie en vluchtelingen: Aan de slag met frames en counterframes (pp. 1–88). [Report, KU Leuven]. Van Rooyen, M. (2013). Structure and agency in news translation: An application of Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 31(4), 495–506. Van Rooyen, M.. (2019). Tracing the translation of community radio news in South Africa: An actor-network approach [PhD, KU Leuven].

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Venuti, L. (2008). The translator’s invisibility: A history of translation. Routledge. Vinay, J.-P., & Darbelnet, J. (1995). Comparative stylistics of French and English: A methodology for translation. John Benjamins Publishing. Ward, P. (2006). Documentary: The margins of reality. Columbia University Press. Weissbrod, R. (2004). From translation to transfer. Across Languages and Cultures, 5 (1), 23–41. Welsh, J. M., & Lev, P. (2007). The literature/film reader: Issues of Adaptation. Scarecrow Press. Werner, M., & Zimmermann, B. (2006). Beyond comparison: Histoire Croisée and the challenge of reflexivity. History and Theory, 45 (1), 30–50. Winston, B. (1995). Claiming the real: The documentary film revisited . British Film Institute. Wolf, M., & Fukari, A. (2007). Constructing a sociology of translation. John Benjamins Publishing. Zimmerman, P. R. (2000). States of emergency: Documentaries, wars. University of Minnesota Press.

3 Four Factors of Translation: Contexts, Agents, Practices, and Discourses

Contexts The story of public broadcasting in the United States can be traced back to the Titanic. Up until 1912, when the Titanic sank, radio functioned primarily as a point-to-point form of communication and there were virtually no regulations surrounding radio licensing. However, after the tragedy, the public perception was that radio amateurs had circulated misinformation about the scale and scope of the disaster and that ships capable of aiding the sinking Titanic had failed to receive its distress call. That is how the Radio Act of 1912 came to allow the government to intervene in the “structuring of speech, of the press, and of other media” (Perlman, 2016, p. 4). Radio interest grew exponentially and by 1927 a new Radio Act was meant to put a cap on the mushrooming radio sector by declaring that the airwaves were a scarce public resource. Congress ruled that the allocation of broadcast licenses was to be guided by “public interest, convenience, and necessity” (“The Radio Act,” 1927). However, what this “public interest” entailed would only start to be

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defined and codified from 1934 on. By then, an awarded broadcast license had become synonymous with licensee property rights and broadcasting—which by then also included television—had already turned into a competitive marketplace. It is only at that point, however, that Congress started voicing concern about the need to set aside airwaves for noncommercial licensees (McChesney, 2004). From its early beginnings, public service broadcasting in the United States was forced to scrape by as it depended on meager federal funding and donations from subscribers (“viewers like you”). The US Telecommunications Act of 1996, passed under the Clinton Administration, delivered the final blow. It deregulated the telecommunications market by equating the public interest with the public’s interest, as exemplified by the following quote by Federal Communications Commission chairman Mark Fowler and his legal associate David Brenner: Our thesis is that broadcasters as community trustees should be replaced by a view of broadcasters as marketplace participants. Communications policy should be directed towards maximizing the services the public desires […]. The public’s interest, then, defines the public interest […]. The first step in a marketplace approach to broadcast regulation, then, is to focus on broadcasters not as fiduciaries of the public […] but as marketplace competitors. (1981, pp. 3–4)

In other words, it was thought that by removing the limit on broadcasting stations that one corporation could own, the number of television channels would increase, organically triggering a diversification of content (Mccauley et al., 2016). The irony here is that to compete with this expanding commercial television market, public television was forced to become more commercialized (Cook, 2006). After 1996, public television executives had no other choice than to reinvent PBS as a brand and turn the cultural value of the “old PBS” into financial value for the “new PBS” (Hoynes, 2016). The public service that used to be a given in public broadcasting—namely for its capacity to serve as “a forum for debate and controversy,” to provide a voice for “groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard,” and to “help us see America whole, in all its

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diversity” (Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, 1967)— was now “increasingly being packaged and sold to consumers who [were] brand-loyal to PBS” (Hoynes, 2016, p. 50). Deregulation coincided with what Henry Jenkins calls “convergence culture”: an environment “where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways” (2006, p. 2). According to Jenkins, convergence consists of a top-down corporate-driven process and a bottom-up consumer-driven process: Corporate convergence coexists with grassroots convergence. Media companies are learning how to accelerate the flow of media content across delivery channels to expand revenue opportunities, broaden markets, and reinforce viewer commitments. Consumers are learning how to use these different media technologies to bring the flow of media more fully under their control and to interact with other consumers. The promises of this new media environment raise expectations of a freer flow of ideas and content. Inspired by those ideals, consumers are fighting for the right to participate more fully in their culture. (2006, p. 18)

It could be argued that PBS fed into this combination of deregulation and convergence: it made itself more marketable by offering programming that complimented its already established reputation of “town hall of the air” with convergent grassroots content, seemingly plucked from the street (Starr, 2016). PBS’s tradition of service to the non-mainstream paved the way for a series such as POV: the very first showcase of independent documentaries on national television. In the 1980s, growing neoliberalism triggered a crisis in US documentary production. As Zimmerman explains, the Reagan Administration—a strong advocate of deregulation—played a major role in this crisis when it kept altercating with Congress over funding cutbacks at PBS (1982). It eventually proposed a 50% reduction in National Endowment for the Arts as well as in National Endowment for the Humanities budgets. Naturally, independent documentary makers were hit the hardest. As they worked outside the corporate management model

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in order to maintain control over all phases of production, public television had traditionally been their main source of funding. Since public television’s congressional mandate was to obtain programming from a diversity of sources, it had always provided a logical doorway to the support and showcasing of documentary programs that, owing to the controversial (“independent”) nature of their content, point of view, and/or style, were not very likely to obtain funding from private sources. Outraged by this turn of events, independent documentary makers soon organized themselves to remind Congress of public television’s diversity mandate, which included airing a broad spectrum of political viewpoints as well as reflecting the diversity of American social, cultural, and political issues. Their intervention launched the then-novel idea that, as the government depends on informed citizenry, the public—which, in this case, overlaps with the PBS audience—does not only hold a constitutional right to produce diverse viewpoints but also to have these viewpoints publicly disseminated. In 1988, independent creators obtained funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB); on the one hand, for ITVS (Independent Television Service), a production unit that was not guaranteed airtime on PBS but was allowed to concentrate solely on independent work that fit within the “public television ecology” (Aufderheide, 2019); on the other hand, for POV, an anthology series for independent work that, to this day, continues to be a major outlet of ITVS documentaries. In other words, the independent documentary scene in the United States, as it is understood today, emerged from the perceived need to go against the deregulatory avalanche of commercial narratives geared toward profit maximization and support of the dominant political system (Zimmerman, 1982, 2000). From that moment onward, the independent documentary became almost synonymous with authorial voice and point-of-view reporting (Chattoo et al., 2018). By focusing on beyond-objectivity storytelling and challenging the notion of there being two sides to every story (cf. Aufderheide, 2019), the independent documentary paradigm coincided with the post-identity project of looking “both at the ways identity categories are deployed to sustain the status quo and at the ways alternative notions of identity already exist that defy, deconstruct, or perversely

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alter power asymmetries” (Roof, 2003, p. 3). Marc Weiss, the creator of POV, actually came up with the idea for the show because he wanted to offer airtime to independent documentaries that had been rejected elsewhere owing to their unconventional explorations of style, voice, aesthetics, and so on (Heyman, 2018). Hence, one of the POV missions became to provide a platform for voices not present elsewhere, which echoed the original 1967 mandate for public television (Bullert, 1997). However, after the 1996 Clintonian deregulation, the “audienceas-market” (Ang, 1991) began to expect such a stance from a PBS show. Thus, as a proxy for the “town hall of the air” into which public broadcasting had evolved (Starr, 2016), POV organically synched with PBS’s post-deregulation, three-point mission to be America’s largest classroom, its largest stage, and its most trusted1 window to the world (Mission and Values, n.d.). Although millennials are increasingly turning to streaming, public broadcasting continues to garner the largest audience at any single time for any medium (Aufderheide, 2019). According to the PBS website, public broadcasting reaches 100 million US Americans through television and more than 28 million online viewers (Mission and Values, n.d.). Not only does POV’s distribution have an impressive reach but it also pays documentary makers for the rights to broadcast their program on PBS, while allowing them to retain their own voices. Thanks to this agreement, POV has a wealth of independent documentaries from which to pick every year—films for which it has thus far been awarded 25 Peabody Awards, 38 Emmy Awards, 3 Academy Awards, 14 duPont-Columbia Awards, etc. This selection is made not only by semiindependent PBS programmers but also by outside screeners, an editorial advisory committee, and POV’s own executive producers. Guided by the principle that POV films should “speak for others in society” rather than “for themselves” (Weiss as cited in Bullert, 1997, p. 33), POV ends up selecting 14 to 16 feature-length documentaries per year. 1 Every year, PBS publishes a so-called Trust Brochure on its website, which contains the percentage of trust bestowed on PBS by the American public (e.g. “For 17th Consecutive Year, Americans Name PBS and Member Stations as Most Trusted Institution,” 2020). PBS has been consistently voted #1 in public trust—ahead of commercial TV, the federal government, and even the courts of law.

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In conclusion, prior to POV’s inception, public broadcasting was synonymous with “the public sphere”: a forum in which private people come together to form public and compel the public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion (Habermas, 1991). However, when deregulation began taking hold of public broadcasting, these private people of which the public sphere was supposed to be made up became synonymous with “governmental bureaucrats who [rationalized] the system and [programmed] politically safe shows […] to curry the favor of major corporations and an upper middle-class, check-writing clientele” (Zimmerman, 1982, p. 10). Consequently, when the neoliberal Reagan Administration pushed independent documentary makers into a state of crisis, the latter organized and confronted PBS by presenting themselves as a “counterpublic sphere” (Fraser, 1990) that existed in the public interest. Therefore, it could be argued that, true to the post-identity paradigm that began taking shape around the same time, independent documentary collectives such as ITVS and POV developed an ethos that moved beyond the facile tendency of romanticizing the political capabilities of alternative identities (cf. Downey & Fenton, 2003). Instead, they insisted that nonmainstream media had to be involved in public broadcasting in order to aid PBS to generate a healthy public sphere. As representatives of “subaltern counterpublics,” they were to “formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (Fraser, 1990, p. 61), offering much-needed counter-publicity “for prevailing products and practices” (Downey & Fenton, 2003, p. 193). Hence, PBS eventually echoed the (counter)public mission for which it had initially acted as a foil. In a deregulated telecommunications market guided by the public’s interest rather than by the public interest, public broadcasting was forced to align itself with the “zone of conscience and consciousness” from which politically engaged media content, such as independent documentaries, emerged (Zimmerman, 2000, pp. 13–14).

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Agents Starting from 1996, POV systematically dedicated a webpage to every one of its selected documentaries, which included a biographical blurb of the documentary makers, next to additional reading material, lesson plans, discussion guides, and so on. What follows is a habitus review: an assessment of the biographies published on POV’s website (http://arc hive.pov.org) concerning the documentary makers of the corpus, which were either written by the documentary makers or (tacitly) approved by them. A number of factors keep recurring in these biographical blurbs: their previous experience in the audiovisual field; their (media) activism; their formal training; their accolades; their personal background; and credits that attest to their filmmaking abilities beyond directing. The frequency with which the documentary makers of the corpus stress their previous/other audiovisual credits, degrees, and accolades reveals their eagerness to prove their virtuosity as independent documentary makers. This wish to distinguish themselves from other professionals is, in and of itself, a natural feature of their highly competitive field. Interestingly, however, many of these agents of translation tend to frame their capability as independent documentary makers by means of degrees or professional experience that are not directly related to the independent documentary-making scene itself. Matthews holds an MA in English Literature, for example. Ryan and Weimberg allude to their commercial documentaries, Olsson to broadcast journalism, Carracedo to directing, and Hopkins to general TV work. Additionally, although some of the descriptions make it appear as if independent documentary making is currently the documentary makers’ main professional activity, the versatility of their other credits—from the organization of film festivals (Zaldívar; Bahar) to photography (Rigby), teaching (Simón), producing (Fitzgerald; Shwer; Aldarondo), or writing (Flynn; McConohay)—suggests otherwise. Both of these elements corroborate the hypothesis that independent documentary making, like translating, is a field that is not “autonomized” and therefore characterized by the “multipositionality” of its agents (Meylaerts, 2013).

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A field that is not autonomized cannot guarantee its agents of translation a straightforward “intermediary position” (Buzelin, 2011). Therefore, the “community of practice” is key in confirming the agents’ status of mediator (Wenger, 1999; cf. Cadwell et al., 2020). This community of practice consists of all those who are somehow involved in the translations that the documentary makers (“agents of translation”) produce, but the power to grant or withhold the agents’ status lies primarily with the authoritative establishments that regulate the said community (Koskinen, 2011). The prestige that these establishments award by means of accolades is essentially evidence of the fact that some agents of translation are more worthy of “patronage” and able to perform qualitative transfers than others, which lends them both credibility in and undisputed access to a field that is difficult to define and therefore to valorize (cf. Lefevere, 1992). Hence, it could be argued that the documentary makers view their accolades as clear authentications of their otherwise vague status by the patrons of their ambiguous field. This could explain the general insistence of these documentary makers not only on their training and experience but also on the awards, grants, and prizes that they have received from media institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation (Aiken and Aparicio), the Sundance Institute (Aldarondo), or the Academy Awards (Portillo). Consequently, the documentary makers’ habitus not only consist of internalized schooling systems and work environments but also of authoritative media institutions, which provide them with formal knowledge, practical skills, and prestige. Another trait that many of the documentary makers examined in this book seem to share is their involvement in media activism: the tactical use of media technologies to introduce discontinuities in hegemonic discourses and disorient the strategic system of powerful media institutions (Sützl & Hug, 2016). Zaldívar refers to his membership of NALIP,2 Bahar to his establishing of Doculink,3 and Hopkins to her co-founding 2

The National Association of Latino Independent Producers seeks to change media culture by advocating and promoting the professional needs of Latinx artists in media. See https://www. nalip.org/. 3 Doculink is a community for documentary filmmakers who share information, leads, ideas, and a commitment to support each other’s growth as nonfiction filmmakers. See http://www. doculink.org/.

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of a documentary department in a Cuban film college. Some also allude to philanthropy that is not media-related: Simón touches on her advocacy of immigrant rights and education, Weyer on her dispensing of vaccinations in rural Paraguay, Carracedo on her academic research on the US–Mexico border, and McConohay on her ties with the World Affairs Council.4 Just as often as they cite their humanitarianism, the documentary makers bring up their background. For example, Almada and Portillo disclose that they are Mexican-American, Zaldívar is CubanAmerican, Hopkins is British-American, and Carracedo is Spanish. These identity markers, which may appear circumstantial, become contingent when they are placed in the documentary makers’ context. As explained earlier, the public discourse has become increasingly antagonistic toward Latinx immigrants in the United States. In a deregulated mediascape that has come to cater to the public’s interest rather than to the public interest, mainstream media outlets have tended to side with antagonizing discourse, portraying Latinx immigrants as dangerous and animalistic burdens to society (e.g. Chavez, 2013; Santa Ana, 2002). POV, on the other hand, was premised on the idea that since public broadcasting is responsible for reflecting the public sphere in all its diversity, it must encourage independent documentary makers to transfer non-mainstream perspectives from real life to the documentary reel. This premise stemmed from what Aufderheide calls the “public television ecology”: an environment that “emerged from the civil and human rights struggles of the 1960s” and “perceived public television as a venue with an obligation to showcase […] dissident viewpoints, often skewing liberal or left” (2019, p. 6). Aufderheide’s “public television ecology” could be seen as another habitus—another social structure that the documentary makers internalized. As independent documentary making is a loosely defined field with unclear requirements for its agents, the understanding of and conscious partaking in its ecology becomes a crucial factor in the demonstration of the agents’ merit. This logic aligns with the documentary makers’ keenness to demonstrate their participation in a broad range

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The World Affairs Council is a nonprofit, nonpartisan forum for the public to join leading foreign policy and international relations experts to discuss and debate global issues. See https:// www.worldaffairs.org/.

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of civil and human rights struggles, which are core elements of the said public television ecology. Additionally, public broadcasting distinguishes itself from commercial media through its active support of diversity, both before and behind the lens. Not only have PBS programs such as POV been called upon to feature more people of color and women on-screen, but they have also made an increasing effort to endorse creators from historically underrepresented communities behind the scenes (Chattoo et al., 2018). Among the documentary makers of the corpus, there are indeed more women than men and quite a few people with a hyphenated identity. It could be argued that the embodied knowledge of belonging to an underrepresented segment of the public sphere also counts as habitus. This could explain why, in a highly competitive and non-autonomized field, documentary makers brandish their internalization of such knowledge as another badge of honor that justifies POV’s selection of their work.

Practices Poetic Mode The poetic mode dates back to the early beginnings of documentary film. Essentially a counterpoint to Hollywood’s Golden Age and its overbearing preoccupation with fictional worlds, this mode of representation does not allow social actors to take on the full-blooded form of characters with psychological complexity and a fixed worldview. By keeping the rhetorical element underdeveloped and stressing mood, tone, and affect instead, the poetic mode opens up the possibility of alternative forms of knowledge. Eschewing making sense of events realistically, this mode represents reality “poetically” through a series of fragments, subjective impressions, incoherent acts, and loose associations. (Nichols, 2010, pp. 172–173)

Although all the documentary makers of the corpus hold on to a narrative arc, they do make regular use of “poetic” sequences to trigger

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a sensory overload on the part of the viewer in tactical instances. For example, in Made in LA, Carracedo and Bahar splice in a kaleidoscopic sequence of images of many anonymous hands slaving away at sowing machines, the whirring sound of which they superimpose over the images of various storefronts in Los Angeles (00:00:20; Fig. 3.1). In Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary, Simón uses the same poetic tactic to catapult us into the chaos of the protest marches against Proposition 187 (00:01:00). Aldarondo bombards us in Memories of a Penitent Heart with a string of audio and visual fragments of vitriolic hate speech against LGBTQ+ rights in the United States (00:34:19). There are also instances of documentary makers overwhelming their viewers with information. In The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez , Ryan and Weimberg begin their film by audiovisually teleporting us right to their dramatic dénouement and firing away shot after shot of seemingly unrelated events: images of an as-yet-unknown woman’s triumphant release from prison (00:01:09), a young man—the future protagonist—breaking down in this woman’s arms (00:00:26), and President Clinton giving a speech on the release of Puerto Rican political prisoners (00:01:02). Similarly, in Our House in Havana, Olsson erratically switches back and forth between present-day footage of his main character Silvia pining for her Cuban past (00:09:50), archival footage of one of Fidel Castro’s discourses against the imperial tyranny of the United States (00:09:44), and what appears to be future footage of Silvia’s house in modern-day Havana (00:10:54). A less aggressive tactic is the addition of seemingly unrelated images to the storyline that, in hindsight, were commenting on the events we were witnessing. In No le digas a nadie, for example, Shwer slides the camera’s gaze over a selection of trinkets in her protagonist’s room, such as colorful drawings, handmade bracelets, or a yellow, blue, and red handbag imprinted with the word COLOMBIA (00:01:51). Only much later do all of these separate objects click together like pieces of a puzzle: when it is revealed to the viewer that, for example, Shwer’s protagonist Angy first communicated about having been sexually assaulted through drawings (00:35:30), that her journey toward self-acceptance began with her selling “education bracelets” to fund her schooling (00:10:32), or that Angy and her mother fled Colombia when she was

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Fig. 3.1 Made in LA (Carracedo & Bahar, 2007; screenshots by the author)

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just a toddler (00:04:13). In Memories of a Penitent Heart , on the other hand, Aldarondo’s poetic referencing is immediate when she alternates family photos of her HIV-positive protagonist—her uncle Miguel—in a hospital bed with stock footage of stained glass windows and oil paintings depicting Jesus’s crucifixion. With this poetic juxtaposition, Aldarondo intervenes subtly in her film’s storyline to point out the overwrought religiosity that had always surrounded her queer protagonist—even as he was on his deathbed (00:41:00-00:45:15; Fig. 3.2). Perhaps the most surprising of these poetic tactics is the referential symbolism created by the collective of documentary makers of this corpus in terms of their “natural meaning units” (Greer et al., 2013)— that is, the recurring themes that they weave into their audiovisual stories. These thematic choices seem to confirm Kluckhohn and Murray’s seminal claim that every man is in certain respects like all other men, like some other men, and like no other man (1948). More recently, Sue’s “tripartite framework of personal identity” (2001) further elaborated on this age-old adage by proposing that all people belong to three concentric circles: only they belong to the first (“individual level”), only some others belong to the second (“group level”), and everybody belongs to the third (“universal level”). In terms of the corpus, some documentaries naturally seem to hover toward explorations of universal aspects of migrancy, such as motherhood, fatherhood, and childhood. These are identity markers that have been understood by all civilizations, throughout history. Then, there are also documentaries that dwell on concepts such as criminality, biculturalism, and (non)citizenship: stories that emerge from the protagonists’ group experience as migrants in a foreign country. Finally, there are a number of documentaries that address topics such as queerness, adoption, and celebrity: subjects that refer to identitarian questionings to which only certain individuals of the community (“group”) of Latinx migrants can relate. In other words, it could be argued that thanks to their shared counterhegemonic context (cf. sections “Contexts” and “Agents”), the documentary makers of the corpus organically subscribe to imagine all personal identities—including those of migrants—as containing universal, group, and individual levels of experience.

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Fig. 3.2 Memories of a Penitent Heart (Aldarondo, 2017; screenshots by the author)

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Expository Mode Assembling fragments of the historical world into a rhetorical frame, the expository mode addresses the viewer directly with titles or voices that propose a perspective, advance an argument, or recount history. This mode relies heavily on an informing logic carried by the spoken word, which it tends to relegate to either voice-of-God (the speaker is heard but never seen) or voice-of-authority (the speaker is heard and also seen) commentary. Contrary to the poetic mode where editing is used to establish rhythm, symbolism, or pattern, in the expository mode the editing is evidentiary as it is meant to audiovisually support the spoken argument. Hence, this mode is largely concerned with evoking an impression of objectivity and instilling a sense of credibility. It is an ideal mode for conveying information or mobilizing support within a framework that pre-exists in the film. (Nichols, 2010, pp. 175–178)

As was mentioned earlier, the modern-day independent documentary emerged from a “public television ecology” that was set on countering the deregulatory avalanche of commercial narratives geared toward profit maximization (Zimmerman, 1982, 2000). In striving for representation of the diverse and, per definition, subjective voices of which the public sphere consists, independent documentary makers made it a point of honor to be perceived as beyond objective (Aufderheide, 2019). Hence, over time, the independent documentary genre’s signature became its reliance on authorial voice and point-of-view reporting (Chattoo et al., 2018). At first glance, several of the documentary makers of the corpus seem to recur to voice-over commentary that appears to hark back to the originally objectivity-concerned expository mode. In The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez , for example, Nuyorican poet and activist Piri Thomas delivers voice-of-God commentary, like actor Tommy Lee Jones does in The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández . In Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business and Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary, documentary makers Solberg and Simón provide voice-of-God-like narration as well, as they never feature on-screen. In 90 Miles, on the

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other hand, it could be argued that documentary maker Zaldívar relies on the voice-of-authority commentary because he makes several camera appearances. This tactic, however, does not seem to aim so much for objectivity as it does for authenticity. In our post-identitarian era of “categorical flux,” the fragmentation of the identitarian landscape has generated so many uncertainties and ambiguities about (self-)identification that there is an increased demand for and policing of “authentic” identity narratives (Brubaker, 2016). In this light, the choice of documentary makers Ryan and Weimberg, on the one hand, and Fitzgerald, on the other, for respectively Piri Thomas and Tommy Lee Jones appears rather intentional. Piri Thomas, a figurehead of the emancipatory movement of Puerto Rican Americans, lends an aura of embodied knowledge to their film. The same could be said of Tommy Lee Jones, who is an authority of US–Mexico border activism and whose participation in Fitzgerald’s film implicitly entails a blessing of the documentary’s openly unobjective narrative. Hence, these documentary makers’ reliance on voice-of-God narration from social actors who are perceived as having access to ingroup knowledge of the social issue at hand allows them to legitimate their “beyond-objectivity storytelling” (cf. Aufderheide, 2019). By contrast, Solberg, Zaldívar, and Simón bring politically laden stories of ethno-racial belonging that may easily be accused of being overly biased or even skewed. By turning their “embodied identities” and their ensuing “authentic” knowledge on inherently Brazilian, Cuban, and Californian polemics into a crucial, legitimizing feature of their argument thanks to their voice-over narration, they anticipate possible doubts about the perceived factuality of their films (cf. Brubaker, 2016). Finally, Aldarondo goes a step further in tactically adapting the expository mode to her narratological advantage. In Memories of a Penitent Heart , she plays around with the “logic of trial” (Wacquant, 1997) that is so intimately tied to the rhetorical nature of the expository mode: constructing an argument that seeks out victims or culprits rather than identifying the mechanisms that force them into either position. She falls back on her voice-of-God commentary throughout the film to navigate through equally inculpatory as exculpatory evidence about the “true” nature of her uncle Miguel, her grandmother Carmen, her

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uncle’s partner Robert, her grandfather Jorge, and her mother Nylda. Eventually, however, she questions her own stubborn desire for a clear resolution to a family quarrel that is so multifaceted and layered that it is beyond any straightforward logic of trial. At the end of her film, by overlapping the audio of a phone call in which she discusses the artificiality and therefore futility of her expiatory endeavor with poetic images of Floridian canals, Aldarondo invites us to reconsider the veracity of the meandering story through which her voice has just guided us. Rather than undermining the truthfulness of her storytelling, she celebrates its beyond-objectivity with this tactic and thus transcends the rigid subjective-objective dichotomy of traditional documentary making.

Observational Mode Prioritizing the unabashed filming of people over the construction of formal patterns (poetic mode) or persuasive arguments (expository mode), the observational mode strives to spontaneously capture people’s lived experiences. By placing the responsibility on the viewer to determine the significance of what is said and done in front of the camera’s lens, this mode retires the position of the filmmaker to that of an observer. Somewhat related to the ethnographic “cinema of attractions” tradition that surveys supposedly exotic or bizarre behaviors, the observational mode raises a series of ethical considerations that involve the act of watching others go about their affairs. Additionally, its ethically problematic indexicality often fails to accentuate the referential gap between the unedited footage as it was originally shot and the edited sequence that is presented to the viewer. (Nichols, 2010, pp. 179–182)

Considering public broadcasting’s evolution toward a three-point mission to be “America’s largest classroom, largest stage, and most trusted window to the world” (Mission and Values, n.d.), the observational mode could be expected to predominate in the documentaries of the corpus. Surprisingly, that does not seem to be the case. As was posited above, because the documentary makers of the corpus are encouraged by their context to promote positive discourses on social

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issues such as migration, their unique selling point is the treatment of overtly personal angles on these overgeneralized topics. However, with positive discourses, the trick is to arouse the viewers’ curiosity with counterintuitive information without presenting them with unsurmountable levels of uncertainty and thus losing their attention (Macgilchrist, 2007). Although there are plenty of instances where the documentary makers of the corpus leave the camera rolling to capture their own or their characters’ lived experiences, such as when Zaldívar unexpectedly records his father Pachuco’s endearing reaction to his coming out in 90 Miles (00:13:20; Fig. 3.3) or when Hopkins interweaves her main plotline in Voices of the Sea with handheld footage of her characters’ hazardous crossover to the United States (01:06:09), there is always an implied level of reflexivity in their presentation of these seemingly uncut rushes. At all times, the documentary makers have to remain mindful of the so-called “curiosity gap”—the assumption that the viewers seek moderate gaps between their current level of knowledge and their desired knowledge state. The key, then, for these documentary makers who are well aware that they are piquing their audience’s interest with titillating content on seemingly trite material, is to meet them “where they are and add a manageable amount of new information” (Macgilchrist, 2007, p. 88). Hence, rather than relying on the bizarre or exotic nature of unabridged observational footage to draw in their audience, as per the “cinema of attractions” tradition, these documentary makers rely on frames with which the audience is somewhat familiar (e.g. motherhood, fatherhood, childhood, biculturalism, citizenship, criminality, queerness, fame, adoption). Having activated their shared knowledge with the audience, they then add a new dimension by introducing defamiliarizing observations and thus entering into dialogue with this familiar frame—via audiovisual means. In Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary, for example, Simón leaves the camera rolling as her colleague, elementary school teacher Diane Lee, unselfconsciously advocates for the “children of today that belong here”—as opposed to the migrant, often undocumented majority of her own students (00:01:16). Later on, when Diane asks for another interview to “explain [herself ]” (00:41:48) on some of the statements she

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Fig. 3.3 90 Miles (Zaldívar, 2003; screenshots by the author)

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made earlier, Simón accepts while still abstaining from direct commentary. However, from behind her camera, she does ask Diane whether she has ever felt “discriminated” (00:42:30). Without any further intervention, Simón records how Diane corners herself with her impulsive, hypocritical answer, “Not until yesterday, when you told me people think I didn’t belong here!” (00:42:34). In the same vein, in The Transformation, Aiken and Aparicio do not appear to have any underlying intentions when they film former drag queens Ricardo and Hugo catching up with each other. When the men start speaking in hushed tones with each other, seemingly trying to discuss something off camera, Aiken and Aparicio keep recording, catching the gist of Ricardo and Hugo’s exchange, in which they question the sexuality and gender identity of their supposedly irreproachable pastor Terry—the macho man who convinced them to leave their old lives behind (00:18:03). Interestingly, Aiken and Aparicio juxtapose the observational footage of the latter gossiping about the former with interview fragments in which Ricardo blindly rehashes Terry’s conservative views on queerness. Although the documentary makers never make overt appearances in the documentary, it is their mixing and matching of apparently pristine, purely observational rushes that reveals to us, viewers, how they interpret these observations. Similar to Simón’s compilation of contrasting observational footage of Diane, which points out her hypocritical stance toward (migrant) children, Aiken and Aparicio’s editing hints at Terry, Ricardo, and Hugo’s sanctimony toward (migrant) queers. In other words, in both instances, the documentary makers tactically use the observational mode to create a manageable curiosity gap between familiar frames and defamiliarizing observations.

Participatory Mode Just like the observational mode draws on ethnography, the participatory mode echoes anthropology by placing filmmakers in the role of field workers who do not allow themselves to “go native” but retain a degree of detachment from whoever they are describing. Stepping out

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from behind the cloak of voice-over commentary (“expository mode”), stepping away from poetic mediation (“poetic mode”), and stepping down from a fly-on-the-wall perch (“observational mode”), the filmmaker becomes another social actor. De-emphasizing persuasion to give us a sense of what it is like to be in a given situation, while omitting what it is like for the filmmaker to be there too, this mode represents the historical world as it is witnessed by somebody who actively engages with it. Permitting the filmmaker to serve as a mentor, critic, interrogator, collaborator, or provocateur, the interview is the most common tool with which the participatory mode triggers and documents the encounter between filmmaker and film character. (Nichols, 2010, pp. 185–191)

As the introductory text on the website of POV states, “POV films are known for their intimacy, their unforgettable storytelling, and their timeliness, putting a human face on contemporary social issues” (POV | American Documentary, n.d.). Taking POV’s concern with humanizing intangible social issues to heart, the documentary makers of the corpus regularly resort to interviews with their flesh-and-blood Latinx protagonists. As a matter of fact, when Shwer received a Peabody Award for No le digas a nadie, she even thanked Angy and Maria in her acceptance speech for being “the face of immigration” (“Mikaela Shwer,” 00:01:34). However, the documentary makers of the corpus do not seem to fall back on interviews to draw attention to their participation per se in the historical world of their characters, as was argued by Nichols. There are countless instances of masked interview scenes in the corpus: instances where the interviewee seems to address the camera and/or the interviewer promptly, without the documentary maker’s intervention, such as Helen’s sorrowing over her parents’ deportation as she is cooking a bean stew in Sin País (00:10:55). Talking head interviews are also common: moments where the documentary makers’ questions have been edited out, but the interviewee is filmed from the bust up looking either directly at the camera, as with Monica’s testimonial in My American Girls: A Dominican Story (00:07:54) or at the interviewer behind the lens, as with Silvia’s musings in Our House in Havana (00:10:18). In fact, the documentary makers’ audio/visual interventions are so rarely included in the final cut

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that the Q&A-format of the traditional interview seems to be more of an exception to the rule in the corpus, such as Almada’s back and forth with Mexican border crossers in Al otro lado (00:45:38). What could explain the documentary makers’ self-erasure in interviews—a tactical adaptation of a strategy that was originally supposed to highlight the filmmaker’s participation—is their implied subscription, as independent documentary makers, to the “public television ecology” that “emerged from the civil and human rights struggles of the 1960s” (Aufderheide, 2019, p. 6). In the light of these agents’ activistic context, the goal of their interviewing is not to stage an “encounter between filmmaker and [film character]” (Nichols, 2010, p. 191) but rather between character and viewer, with the goal of triggering the latter’s empathy.5 As was argued earlier, the independent documentary makers of this corpus are imbued with the engaged ecology of public broadcasting. They are not apolitical creatives; these filmmakers are encouraged by their “context” to take on the role of translator-mediator between underrepresented voices and the vast audience of PBS. Hence, in their function as documentary makers, their goal is to bring their subjects’ plight as close as possible to the viewer. Rather than victimizing their Latinx protagonists with affective framing (“poetic mode”), lecturing the viewer by means of authoritarian commentary (“expository mode”), or expecting the audience to solve the ethical riddle of the events that are unfolding in front of its eyes (“observational mode”), this tactic incites a phenomenological exchange between Latinx subject and anonymous viewer. Thanks to their self-effacing interviews, the documentary makers invite their viewers to encounter their subjects. By creating an “illusio” or suspension of disbelief of their intervention in this encounter (cf. Gouanvic, 2005), they bring the viewer on par with the subject in order to facilitate an empathy-inducing mirroring between them. Hence, 5 As promulgated by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), a crucial element in storytelling that strives toward “changing the public narrative on migration” and “promoting tolerance” as well as “confronting xenophobia against migrants” is fostering empathy (Expert Roundtable on Shaping the Public Narrative on Migration, 2016). “Maximising Migrants’ Contribution to Society” (MAXAMIF), a multipronged research project consortium funded by the EU Commission, concurs by calling for an impact on public opinion of migration via “real-life stories, which engage empathy” (“Research,” 2019).

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rather than educating the audience on known unknowns, this tactic allows the documentary makers to stimulate the audience to identify with the film’s subjects and thus confront their unknown knowns: things they did not know that they knew (cf. Žižek, 2006).

Reflexive Mode The focus of attention for the reflexive mode is the process of negotiation between filmmaker and viewer. Rather than following how the filmmaker engages with other social actors (“participatory mode”), this mode attends to the filmmaker’s engagement with us, viewers, speaking not only about the historical world but also about the problems and issues of representing it as well. Instead of making us see through documentaries to the world beyond them, the reflexive mode asks us to see the documentary for what it is: a construct, a representation. From a formal perspective, reflexivity makes us aware of our assumptions and expectations about the documentary form itself. From a political perspective, reflexivity points towards our assumptions and expectations about the world around us. Both perspectives rely on techniques that jar us, achieving ostranenie—making the familiar strange. (Nichols, 2010, pp. 195–198)

In Introduction to Documentary, Nichols himself refers to Portillo’s Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena as a textbook example of the reflexive mode. Allegedly, by creating a family portrait of Selena and her legacy, the documentary maker surreptitiously nudges her viewers into contemplating whether the popular Tex-Mex singer was a positive role model for young women or a victim of “stereotypical images of female sexuality” (2010, p. 200). However, Nichols does not explain how Portillo manages to do so. It could be argued that Portillo’s reflexivity only surfaces when she wants to be perceived by the viewer as self-conscious about her partiality. Thus, her tactical reflexivity echoes Venuti’s concept of foreignization (2008), which foments defamiliarizing translation decisions that give

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proof of the translator’s reflexivity—that is, awareness of the resulting target text’s partiality (Kadiu, 2019). As the public television ecology of independent documentaries allows filmmakers to behave as translator-mediators between underrepresented voices and the vast audience of PBS, there is also an expectation of support in terms of the discourses that they underwrite regarding these marginalized voices. Hence, in occasions where they broach polemical topics or adhere to controversial stances, they tend to signify their intentional endorsement of the said ecology by falling back on audio/visual translation decisions that give proof of their reflexivity and remind us to “see the documentary for what it is: a construct, a representation” (Nichols, 2010, p. 195). In Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena, Portillo’s reflexivity—her self-conscious partiality—arguably shines through when she antagonizes some of her characters by means of her editing choices. One example hereof is when Portillo tactically juxtaposes Latinx writer Sandra Cisneros’s allusion to Abraham Quintanilla’s exploitation of his daughter Selena (00:31:40) with a talking head interview in which Abraham seemingly contradicts these claims (00:32:18), followed by footage of a Lolita-like Selena performing in a nightclub at the age of 15 (00:32:23). The same could be said of the moment when we, the viewers, become aware of documentary maker Fitzgerald’s discomfort in The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández with Cpl. Torrez’s blind loyalty to the Marines— which leads him to be incapable of accepting his part in the senseless shooting of a Latinx high-schooler. Without uttering a word, Fitzgerald manages to imply how the Cpl.’s loyalty can easily be interpreted as brainwashing when he follows Torrez’s impassioned speech about the Marine Corps (00:49:49) with footage of him asking his toddler to recite the Marines’ slogan. Eager to please, the latter quickly recites: “Honor, courage, commitment!”—clearly unaware of the meaning of these words or their impact on his father and himself (01:11:10). Another example of this reflexivity of the public television ecology is Aldarondo’s undermining in Memories of a Penitent Heart of the supposed North American open-mindedness—as opposed to Latinx backwardness—toward queerness by interrupting her film with a collage of audiovisual examples of homophobia in the United States (00:34:19). Up to that halfway

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point in her film, her storyline seemed to veer toward an acceptance of her traditional Puerto Rican family’s blame for the death of her queer uncle. However, her splicing in of the abovementioned deluge of USbred queerphobia derails the documentary into a whole other direction: that of a merciful—because more holistic—view on her family’s past, present, and future. Additionally, the application of Venuti’s foreignization model to the reflexive mode can offer another constatation (2008). Contrary to traditional translators who have to accept a certain level of domestication of the foreign language in their target text, the documentary makers of the corpus have the option to adhere to “performative foreignization” by means of subtitling (cf. Kadiu, 2019). Subtitles (Spanish>English) are another way of making the documentary makers visible, both by signaling their reflexivity in terms of their intervention in the encounter between film character and viewer and by stressing their intention to interfere minimally in the said encounter. When the documentary makers do rely on dubbing (Spanish>English), as in The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez (00:01:54) or Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business (00:30:40), they do so for purely poetic reasons: to evoke Ernesto/Guillermo’s linguistic duality in the former and to intimate that Carmen mistook her exoticization and eroticization in the United States for a genuine appreciation of her artistic prowess in the latter.

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Performative Mode Approaching knowledge as based on the specificities of personal experience, the performative mode sets out to demonstrate how embodied knowledge provides entry into an understanding of the more general processes at work in society. By viewing meaning as subjective phenomenon, this mode presupposes the existence of an inherent mutuality between experience, memory, emotion, value, belief, commitment, principle and the societal constructs that engender them. Due to its interest in performative moments that draw us into subjective, the performative mode ends up addressing us, viewers, emotionally and expressively rather than pointing us to the factual world we hold in common. (Nichols, 2010, pp. 201–202)

According to Nichols’ diachronic overview of the documentary modes of representation, the performative mode emerged in the 1980s, which coincides with the inception of non-profit organizations such as POV, aimed at fostering the independent documentary community. As POV’s name implies, its objective is to introduce personal points of view that put “a human face on contemporary social issues” (POV | American Documentary, n.d.)—in other words, “embodied knowledge” that can provide PBS’s audience “entry into an understanding of the more general processes at work in society” (Nichols, 2010, p. 201). Considering the contexts and agents of this book, the performative mode could be seen as an organic feature of the corpus. However, the tactical application of this mode in the documentaries of the corpus does not simply “draw us into subjective” (ibid., p. 202). It could be argued that because of the “public television ecology” (Aufderheide, 2019) in which the documentary makers of the corpus circulate, their documentaries are not mere art pieces that end when their final credits stop rolling. Rather, as the POV website confirms, they are pieces of communication meant to engage the public sphere in a productive conversation on complex social issues (“Engage Your Community | Engage | POV,” 2019).

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Based on the belief that the deliberate pursuit of diversity in all facets of public life is a democratic endeavor, public broadcasting sees its content as an opportunity to multiply televised encounters between film characters and viewers who would have otherwise remained distant social actors (Kidd, 2012). Therefore, PBS and its affiliate programs (such as POV) are perhaps better seen as meeting platforms that no longer solely aim to educate the nation, which was the original purpose of public broadcasting (cf. McChesney, 2016). Rather, they seem to take the poststructuralist assumption to heart that reality is constructed by human interaction (cf. Berger & Luckmann, 1991) and that, in order to fulfill their mission of serving as “a forum for debate and controversy,” providing a voice for “groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard,” and “[helping] us see America whole, in all its diversity” (Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, 1967), they are to expose their vast audience to as many points of view as possible.

Discourses In the following nine chapters, a Positive Discourse Analysis is performed on the corpus. Structured according to Sue’s “tripartite framework of personal identity” (2001), each chapter will be exploring one of the recurring themes or “natural meaning units” (Greer et al., 2013) that were established in the “practices” section (Table 3.1).

Table 3.1 Corpus (documentary, documentary maker, theme, level of identity) #

Documentary

1

Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business The Transformation

2

Documentary maker

Theme

Level of identity

Helena Solberg

Fame

Individual

Carlos Aparicio & Susana Aiken

Queerness

Individual

(continued)

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Table 3.1 (continued) #

Documentary

3

Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez La Boda Our House in Havana My American Girls: A Dominican Story Escuela Discovering Dominga

4 5

6 7 8

9 10

11

90 Miles

12 13

Al otro lado Made in LA

14

The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández Sin País No le digas a nadie Memories of a Penitent Heart Voices of the Sea

15 16 17 18

Documentary maker

Theme

Level of identity

Laura Simón

Childhood

Universal

Lourdes Portillo

Fame

Individual

Catherine Ryan & Gary Weimberg Hannah Weyer Stephen Olsson

Adoption

Individual

Biculturalism Motherhood

Group Universal

Aaron Matthews

Motherhood

Universal

Hannah Weyer Patricia Flynn & MJ McConohay Juan Carlos Zaldívar Natalia Almada Almudena Carracedo & Robert Bahar Kieran Fitzgerald

Biculturalism Adoption

Group Individual

Fatherhood

Universal

Criminality Citizenship

Group Group

Criminality

Group

Theo Rigby Mikaela Shwer

Childhood Citizenship

Universal Group

Cecilia Aldarondo Kim Hopkins

Queerness

Individual

Fatherhood

Universal

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References Primary Sources Aiken, S., & Aparicio, J. (1996, July 9). The Transformation. In POV Season 09. PBS. Aldarondo, C. (2017, July 31). Memories of a Penitent Heart. In POV Season 30. PBS. Almada, N. (2006, August 1). Al otro lado. In POV Season 19. PBS. Carracedo, A., & Bahar, R. (2007, September 4). Made in LA. In POV Season 20. PBS. Fitzgerald, K. (2008, July 8). The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández. In POV Season 21. PBS. Flynn, P., & McConohay, M. J. (2003, July 8). Discovering Dominga. In POV Season 16 . PBS. Hopkins, K. (2018, September 3). Voices of the sea. In POV Season 31. PBS. Matthews, A. (2001, July 3). My American Girls: A Dominican Story. In POV Season 14. PBS. Olsson, S. (2000, July 25). Our House in Havana. In POV Season 13. PBS. Portillo, L. (1999, July 13). Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena. In POV Season 12. PBS. Rigby, T. (2012, August 9). Sin País. In POV Season 25. PBS. Ryan, C., & Weimberg, G. (1999, July 27). The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez. In POV Season 12. PBS. Shwer, M. (2015, September 21). No le digas a nadie. In POV Season 28. PBS. Simón, L. (1997, July 1). Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary. In POV Season 10. PBS. Solberg, H. (1995, October 6). Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business. In POV Season 08. PBS. Weyer, H. (2000, June 27). La Boda. In POV Season 13. PBS. Weyer, H. (2002, August 27). Escuela. In POV Season 15. PBS. Zaldívar, J. C. (2003, July 29). 90 Miles. In POV Season 16 . PBS.

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Secondary Sources Ang, I. (1991). Desperately seeking the audience. Routledge. Aufderheide, P. (2019). Documentary filmmaking and US public TV’s independent television service, 1989–2017. Journal of Film and Video, 71(4), 3–14. Bassnett, S., & Lefevere, A. (Eds.). (1990). Translation, history, and culture. Pinter Publishers. Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1991). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Penguin Books. Brubaker, R. (2016). The Dolezal affair: Race, gender, and the micropolitics of identity. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39 (3), 414–448. Bullert, B. J. (1997). Public television: Politics and the battle over documentary film. Rutgers University Press. Buzelin, H. (2011). Agents of translation. Handbook of Translation Studies Online, 2, 6–12. Cadwell, P., Federici, F. M., & O’Brien, S. (2020). Call for papers: Communities of practice and translation. The Journal of Specialised Translation. Carnegie Commission on Educational Television. (1967). Public television: A program for action. Bantam. Chattoo, C. B., Aufderheide, P., Merrill, K., & Oyebolu, M. (2018). Diversity on U.S. public and commercial TV in authorial and executive-produced social-issue documentaries. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 62(3), 495–513. Chavez, L. (2013). The Latino threat: Constructing immigrants, citizens, and the nation (2nd ed.). Stanford University Press. Cook, T. E. (2006). The news media as a political institution: Looking backward and looking forward. Political Communication, 23(2), 159–171. Downey, J., & Fenton, N. (2003). New media, counter publicity and the public sphere. New Media and Society, 5 (2), 185–202. Engage Your Community | Engage | POV . (2019, July 3). POV—American Documentary Inc. http://www.pbs.org/pov/engage/events/ “Expert roundtable on shaping the public narrative on migration.” (2016, April 21). OHCHR. https://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Migration/Pages/Sha pingthepublicnarrativeonmigration.aspx

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“For 17th Consecutive Year, Americans Name PBS and Member Stations as Most Trusted Institution.” (2020, February 10). PBS. https://www.pbs.org/ about/about-pbs/blogs/news/for-17th-consecutive-year-americans-namepbs-and-member-stations-as-most-trusted-institution/ Fowler, M. S., & Brenner, D. L. (1981). Marketplace approach to broadcast regulation. Texas Law Review, 60, 207–258. Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text, 25 (26), 56–80. Gouanvic, J.-M. (2005). A Bourdieusian theory of translation, or the coincidence of practical instances. The Translator, 11(2), 147–166. Greer, E., Neville, S. M., Ford, E., & Gonzalez, M. O. (2013). The cultural voice of immigrant Latina women and the meaning of femininity: A phenomenological study. Sage Open. Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of Bourgeois society. MIT Press. Heyman, N. (2018, March 8). “POV” founder Marc Weiss. https://soundcloud. com/currentpubmedia/pov-founder-marc-weiss Hoynes, W. (2016). The PBS brand and the merchandising of public service. In M. P. Mccauley, B. Lee Artz, D. Halleck, & P. E. Peterson (Eds.), Public broadcasting and the public interest (pp. 41–51). Taylor and Francis. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York University Press. Kadiu, S. (2019). Visibility and ethics: Lawrence Venuti’s foreignizing approach. In Reflexive translation studies (pp. 21–44). UCL Press. Kidd, D. (2012). Public culture in America: A review of cultural policy debates. The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 42(1), 11–21. Kluckhohn, C., & Murray, H. A. (1948). Personality in nature, society, and culture. Knopf. Koskinen, K. (2011). Institutional translation. In Handbook of translation studies online (Vol. 2, pp. 54–60). John Benjamins. Lefevere, A. (1992). Translation, rewriting, and the manipulation of literary fame. Routledge. Macgilchrist, F. (2007). Positive discourse analysis: Contesting dominant discourses by reframing the issues. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines, 1(1), 74–94. Mccauley, M. P., Artz, B. L., Halleck, D., & Peterson, P. E. (Eds.). (2016). Public broadcasting and the public interest. Taylor and Francis. McChesney, R. (2004). The problem of the media: U.S. communication politics in the twenty-first century. Monthly Review Press.

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McChesney, R. (2016). Public broadcasting: Past, present, future. In M. P. Mccauley, B. Lee Artz, D. Halleck, & P. E. Peterson (Eds.), Public broadcasting and the public interest (pp. 10–24). Taylor and Francis. Meylaerts, R. (2013). The multiple lives of translators. TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction, 26 (2), 103–128. “Mikaela Shwer—Don’t Tell Anyone—2015 Peabody Award Acceptance Speech.” (2016, July 1). POV: Don’t Tell Anyone (No Le Digas a Nadie) (PBS). http://www.peabodyawards.com/award-profile/pov-dont-tellanyone-no-le-digas-a-nadie “Mission and Values.” (n.d.). PBS. Retrieved March 9, 2021, from https:// www.pbs.org/about/about-pbs/mission-values/ Nichols, B. (2010). Introduction to documentary (2nd ed.). Indiana University Press. Perlman, A. (2016). Public interests: Media advocacy and struggles over U.S. television. Rutgers University Press. “POV | American Documentary.” (n.d.). Retrieved May 20, 2020, from https://www.amdoc.org/pov/ “Research.” (2019). MAXAMIF . https://maxamif.eu/research/ Roof, J. (2003). Thinking post-identity. The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 36 (1), 1–5. Santa Ana, O. (2002). Brown tide rising: Metaphors of Latinos in contemporary American public discourse (1st ed.). University of Texas Press. Starr, J. (2016). Public television in the digital age: Town hall or cyber mall? In M. P. Mccauley, B. Lee Artz, D. Halleck, & P. E. Peterson (Eds.), Public broadcasting and the public interest (pp. 238–251). Taylor and Francis. Sue, D. W. (2001). Multidimensional facets of cultural competence. The Counseling Psychologist, 29 (6), 790–821. Sützl, W., & Hug, T. (2016). Introduction. In Activist media and biopolitics: Critical media interventions in the age of biopower (pp. 7–14). Innsbruck University Press. “The Radio Act of 1927,” Pub. L. No. 632. (1927). https://www.americanradi ohistory.com/Archive-FCC/Federal%20Radio%20Act%201927.pdf Venuti, L. (2008). The translator’s invisibility: A history of translation. Routledge. Wacquant, L. (1997). For an analytic of racial domination. Political Power and Social Theory, 11, 221–234. Wenger, E. (1999). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press.

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Zimmerman, P. R. (1982). Public television, independent documentary producer and public policy. Journal of the University Film and Video Association, 34 (3), 9–23. Zimmerman, P. R. (2000). States of emergency: Documentaries, wars. University of Minnesota Press. Žižek, S. (2006). Philosophy, the “unknown knowns”, and the public use of reason. Topoi, 25 (1–2), 137–142.

4 The Universal Experience of Migrant Mothers

In Our House in Havana (2000), documentary maker Stephen Olsson centers on Cuban-American Silvia Morini as she ends her exile of 37 years to make her son Guillermo’s dearest wish come true: to revisit their house in Havana. Being the voice of history in the documentary, Silvia explains to the viewer that she was bullied out of Cuba after the Revolution of 1959, together with other bourgeois Cubans who refused to acquiesce to the new political regime. Although she had tried giving Fidel Castro the benefit of the doubt, when her properties were repossessed and distributed among the population by his government, she and Guillermo fled to the United States in the hope of returning one day. However, when the Castro regime unilaterally decided to nationalize oil refineries, the United States saddled Cuba with a commercial, economic, and financial embargo as well as a travel ban. Only after 1978, a fragile policy of family reunification made it possible to visit the island under restrictive conditions. However, it would take until 1992— when President Bill Clinton signed the Helms–Burton Act and codified

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the embargo—for travel to Cuba to become more mainstream. Nevertheless, Silvia continued to believe that by not returning to Cuba, she was boycotting the Cuban economy (00:12:30; 00:54:05). As Guillermo explains, like so many other “Cubans [in exile],” his mother was “against giving a dollar to Castro” (00:31:38). Yet, over the course of the documentary, Silvia’s stance on the US foreign policy toward Cuba starts shifting. As she goes from being a hardliner to becoming a dialoguera (cf. García, 1998), the motivations behind her change of heart also alter significantly. From a devoted mother who is willing to sacrifice her convictions for the sake of her son, in front of Olsson’s camera, Silvia transforms into a political activist whose care and concern expand from her nuclear family unit to that of an entire diaspora. In My American Girls: A Dominican Story (2001), documentary maker Aaron Matthews also focuses on a Latinx mother, Dominican immigrant Sandra Ortiz, whose life revolves around her three daughters: Monica (21), Aida (16), and Mayra (14). The documentary follows the family’s increasingly difficult balancing act to find a middle ground between their newly adopted American belief system and their Dominican norms and values. As the Ortiz’s story unfolds across borders, Sandra’s perspectives undergo a perceptible modification. As the camera rolls, Sandra and her husband Bautista are shown investing all their hard-earned money into a house they are building in the Dominican Republic, where they hope to retire. However, over the course of Matthews’s film, it slowly begins to dawn on Sandra that “home” is where her daughters are— “American girls” who set out to integrate into a larger community of Dominican-Americans who have settled in the United States to stay. Like Olsson, Matthews captures how a migrant mother’s involvement with her own house(hold) broadens over the course of the documentary and ends up encompassing not only her family but the transnational Dominican-American community as well.

Motherhood and Marianismo Even though Latin Americans are not a homogeneous people (cf. Hernandez & Curiel, 2012), they do tend to hold similar beliefs about

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gender roles and family values, such as marianismo/machismo (Da Silva et al., 2018). The latter refers to a cult of the female moral high ground: a celebration of women as “semi-divine, morally superior to and spiritually stronger than men” (Stevens, 1973, p. 91). Of course, women who endorse honorific codes of conduct that perpetuate male domination and female subordination are not unique to Latin America. What is typically Latin American, however, is the existence of honor cultures where the Roman Catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary plays a central role. Here, religion predicts honor beliefs for both genders: mariana piety, devotion, and obedience sets the tone for male roguery. Hence, as a form of female chauvinism, marianismo is rather a reciprocal arrangement whereby Latinx women accept uncouth machista behavior in the hope that it will underscore their wifely saintliness and guarantee them the support of their community (cf. Glick et al., 2016). According to the Marianismo Beliefs Scale, Latinx women tend to adhere to five behavioral tenets: the Family Pillar, the Virtuous and Chaste Pillar, the Subordinate to Others Pillar, the Silencing Self to Maintain Harmony Pillar, and the Spiritual Pillar (Castillo et al., 2010). These ideals hark back to the typically Latin American values of collectivism (the encouragement of interdependence and group collaboration rather than individual achievement); simpatía (the ability to maintain harmonious, positive relationships by treating others with dignity and respect); personalismo (the cultivation of inner qualities rather than material wealth); respeto (mindfulness regarding an individual’s responsibilities to the family and society at large); and familismo (the importance of loyalty, solidarity, and reciprocity within the family unity) (Ruiz, 2005). In Our House in Havana, Silvia does not only bestow her simpatía, personalismo, respeto, familismo, and sense of collectivism upon her nuclear family, which consists of her Cuban American son Guillermo and American second husband Heath, but also upon the anticastrista, predominantly bourgeois Cubans who fled to the United States in the 1960s. For decades, she was loyal to this collective of exiles, of whom it is implied that their judgmental attitude kept her from traveling back to Cuba. Sitting in a wicker chair, casually talking over the phone with an unnamed friend, Silvia states:

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Yeah, yeah, yeah. But now I’m charged. You know? It was like I had a cork, you know, on the bottle of champagne? And now, all my things [are] coming up and, uhm, I’m so excited. Of course, a lot of Cubans have [said] “Silvia, you are going to Cuba? You, of all people?” [and] I say “Hey, you know, I’ve changed my mind.” It’s a woman’s privilege. (00:12:29)1

Turning to the camera, Silvia goes on to give a talking head interview in which she explains that, after the Revolution, she concurred with the Cuban, largely Miami-based defectors: “We’ve done so many pickets in Washington and we want [Fidel Castro’s] downfall. And we feel if we have a blockade and sort of squeeze Fidel and the government, it would fall. But it hasn’t” (00:10:18). However, she is quick to foreshadow her approaching apostasy by declaring that she found it “ridiculous” that “in Miami everybody was talking about going back […] pretty soon,” based on the unrealistic assumption that Fidel Castro’s military coup would somehow be undone (00:09:33). Shortly before this confession, Silvia had already revealed to Olsson’s camera how traumatic her departure from Cuba had been because of the repossession of her palatial villa, together with all its contents. After the confession, we are made privy to supposedly future footage that mimics Silvia’s gazing at her nowdilapidated house in Havana (00:10:54). In the same interview, she also foreshadows the impoverished state of her once stately mansion, thus implying that the whole of Cuba—which, from her bourgeois perspective, had been a paradise until the Revolution—has been decaying under Castro’s reign. Claiming that when, in the 1960s, she had witnessed the aggression of Cuba’s Marxist–Leninist regime from up close, she knew “we weren’t going back”—a reference, assumedly, to the loss of her carefree life in pre-revolutionary times rather than to the physical place that proletarian Cuba had become (00:09:50).

1 In the following chapters, all direct quotes will be transcriptions. Occasionally, they will contain spoken language that may be considered (grammatically, syntactically, lexically, etc.) incorrect. To be respectful of the speakers’ idiolects, it was decided not to add the adverb “sic” to the transcripts whenever a supposed linguistic error was recorded.

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Olsson regularly interrupts this sit-down interview by splicing in black-and-white stock footage of Fidel Castro that supports Silvia’s declarations: There is no step back in the history of our country. We will never waver on our revolutionary course. We will stand up in the face of imperialists… who are, and always will be our enemy. […] We will hold firm to the road of Marxism-Leninism… Our country or death! We will win! (00:09:44; translation in the original)

Curiously, at the end of Castro’s speech, the camera pans over and hovers above the cheering audience before landing in the shrubbery of an impressive mansion. As the title “Our House in Havana” (00:10:54) appears in front of this black-and-white shot of what appears to be Silvia’s house, the anachronism of this sequence becomes apparent. Although the building itself looks contemporary, going by its modern-looking fire extinguisher and Soviet-style boiler, Olsson’s black-and-white filter ties it in with Castro’s historical footage, symbolically predicting Silvia’s upcoming confrontation between the reality of Cuba’s present and her nostalgia of Cuba’s—and, by extension, her own—past. As Silvia’s choice to go back to Cuba can be seen as an act of disloyalty vis-à-vis the collective of Cuban exiles in the United States, she appeases her conscience by explaining her faux pas with the only absolving motivation in the marianista mindset: her son. In the interviews leading up to Silvia and Guillermo’s arrival in Cuba, she implies in various ways that had it not been for the sake of her son’s well-being and his need to—in Guillermo’s own words—“revive” his memories (00:14:38), she would never have committed the “sin” of visiting her home country again: I really started because of my son, that is a photographer. He really wants to go to Cuba and we had left when he was nine years old. […] I wanna see it myself, judge myself, and then I don’t know that what I’m gonna say will be the right thing, but it’s gonna be the right thing for me. And maybe my son will have another version, because he is a different age. (00:11:23)

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True to the Spiritual Pillar of the Marianismo Beliefs Scale, according to which Latinx women cast themselves as “the spiritual leaders of their families, responsible for their spiritual growth and religious practice” (Da Silva et al., 2018, p. 5), Silvia asks the heavens for guidance. Armed with the prayer book of Faustina, her favorite Catholic saint, she goes to church with her husband Heath in order to decide whether or not to board their plane. While sitting on a prayer bench next to her impassive husband, Silvia is filmed intensely staring at the altar and fervently crossing herself (00:11:58). Eventually, Silvia herself reveals the marianista reasoning behind her decision to journey back to Cuba. Being her household’s spiritual leader and, therefore, the one who is in closest contact with God, she suggests that she is the best placed to interpret Faustina’s signs from above: Faustina is the one that I really been asking to her if it was OK to go to Cuba. […] If she thought it wasn’t the right time, then she’d find a way to tell me. OK? But apparently she’s telling me “Yeah, it’s OK, let’s go!” So Silvia is going, I’m happy. (00:13:39)

Once in Cuba, she is shown going to church again, where she takes a liking to a priest who not only supports her anticastrista beliefs but also confirms that he regularly hands out Faustina-related pamphlets to his churchgoers (00:29:59). With him, she shares the moral dilemma of her visit to Cuba and implies, once again, that she only reneged on her political exile for the sake of her son: I asked Faustina if I should ever come back to Cuba… because my son and I weren’t getting along, so I asked Faustina… and finally, BOOM, Faustina had us come here. So every time I have a problem, I open the book and ask for help. (00:30:29; translation in the original)

In My American Girls, sacrifice also underlies Sandra’s motherly existence. In the comfort of her bedroom, Sandra’s middle daughter Ayda confesses in a heartfelt exchange with the camera that Dominicans “have it a lot harder than other kids” (00:05:22). Being first-generation Dominican-Americans, she and her sisters cannot turn to their parents

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for advice about “Huckleberry Finn or, like, Charles Dickens” because “they are from the Dominican Republic” and “they never had that education” (00:05:25). As if trying to prove that Sandra does the best she can, Matthews follows up Ayda’s indirect jab at her parents’ lack of education with footage of her mother cleaning hospital wards. In a voice-over, Sandra admits: “[It] is not easy, standing from 5 o’clock in the morning to 10, 11 o’clock at night, is not easy” (00:05:50). Still, despite Sandra’s good intentions, her oldest daughter Monica resents her mother for working so much; in Monica’s mind, Sandra had better invest those hours in her children and their schoolwork. Over B-roll of Sandra and Bautista cleaning offices, which is interspersed with home footage of Monica’s sisters goofing around with their friends, Monica confides to the viewer: I’ve told my parents that they should really think about not going to clean the doctor’s office at night. I mean, their lives are crazy enough without having a second job. And what do they make? An extra 100 bucks a week? But I’m like “That extra 100 bucks a week is causing you no time with your kids.” Ugh! (00:07:54)

Still looking straight into the camera, she segues into the central predicament of the documentary: I know that mami and papi want to build their house in the Dominican Republic. I mean, so many Dominicans come to this country with the idea that they’re going to work temporarily and make their money and then go back, you know, to live in their dream house. But they’ve made this their home now and they have to think about the present too. (00:08:40)

By means of Monica’s soliloquy, Matthews foreshadows the crux of his film: Sandra and Bautista’s difficult choice between retiring to the house of their dreams in the country of their past or settling for imperfect living quarters in a country where their children have a future. As the camera keeps rolling, Sandra’s vacillation becomes easier to understand. Falling back on the Family Pillar as well as the Subordinating to Others Pillar of marianismo, she points out that she was the

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first of her family to come to the United States (00:01:02). As she grew up poor and because she happened to be the oldest of 14 brothers and sisters, she was expected to sacrifice herself by leaving her home behind and supporting her family from afar, in the United States (00:05:50). In a talking head interview that coincides with images of her working at the hospital, Sandra adds: “That’s why I cannot go to school. And I cannot have a education but I wish my children working hard because I know is the best way to live in… in this world” (00:06:10). When Mayra, Sandra’s youngest, comes home with slipping grades, Sandra does not shy away from reminding her daughter that she is “sacrificing too much so [Mayra] can get ahead” (00:32:09). Here, Matthews seems to suggest that Sandra’s sacrifice did not end when she established her own nuclear family unit in the United States. Instead, her sacrificial burden doubled: not only did she have to take care of her family in the Dominican Republic but she was also forced to act selflessly toward her husband and children in New York City.

Undoing Marianismo Although marianismo does correspond to a perceived societal truth (Castillo & Cano, 2007), it is premised on a number of injurious assumptions. Not only does it contain ahistorical, essentialist, anachronistic, sexist, and orientalist elements (Navarro, 2002), but it also partakes in victim blaming by claiming that Latin American wives tend to accept callousness from their husbands because it benefits their saintly status of wife/mother (Ehlers, 1991). Additionally, it relegates women to the domestic sphere, where they are supposedly so content with their feminine reign that they do not even consider to challenge the general balance of power. In imitation of this skepticism toward marianismo, Olsson and Matthews follow Silvia and Sandra as they put their understanding of motherhood to the test. Initially compliant with the self-sacrificial nature of their motherly role, they begin acquiring a new sense of self once they realize that women do not have to put up with unhappiness and suffering—a belief that dates back to colonial times (cf. Boyer, 1989;

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Ehlers, 1991). While the camera keeps rolling relentlessly, Silvia and Sandra slowly but surely step away from the house they left behind in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, respectively. Tired of the mental “domestic exile” (cf. Rocha-Sánchez & Díaz Loving, 2005; Utomo, 2014) that they have been imposing on themselves for years, they break free from their mental prisons by redirecting the aim of their mothering and engaging with the transnational community in which they circulate. Once they do away with interpretations of motherhood that only accept biological kinship as a warranty of social or emotional proximity, Silvia and Sandra begin to partake in “careship” (cf. Challinor, 2018) instead: a mutual sense of solidarity and commitment that connects human beings to each other through social action and cultural meaning. Their motherhood-induced domestication—a self-imposed mental house arrest that prevents them from thinking outside the framework of their household—begins to dawn on Sandra and Silvia because of the motherly love for their children. Thanks to the transformative love ethic of motherhood (cf. Velazquez, 2017), both Sandra and Silvia allow the love they have for their offspring to take over and transform them from within. In both documentaries, Sandra and Silvia go through a number of epiphanies, which lead them to question the mother–child dynamic that dictated most of their adult lives. In Our House in Havana, it turns out that Guillermo’s journey back to Cuba will not be a personal quest. As a photographer, he aims to capture present-day Cuba on film in the hope that it might appease the CubanAmerican exiles who remain hostile toward the castrista government and its subjects (00:31:40). Silvia seemingly goes along with her photographer son’s agenda, still playing the role of “madre abnegada” (Subero, 2016) who puts her own needs and wishes aside in order to seek justice on behalf of her child. Shortly afterward, Olsson orchestrates Silvia’s epiphany—the birth of her own agenda—by juxtaposing footage of her boarding her return flight to the United States (00:47:36) with a musical sequence, shot the evening before, in which she is filmed dancing to a salsa song. As she is happily twirling around a live band, the deceivingly cheerful song hints at the gravity of Silvia’s actual state of mind, as its lyrics are exclamations of

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a dying person who is resisting their approaching end (00:46:13). In a sitdown interview, filmed sometime after her return to the United States, a teary Silvia expounds on those shots: I wanted to depart but, on the way, I wanted to stay a little longer. You know? And different emotions, different things. Some sad, some happy. So anyway, we finally start walking out and going up the steps of the plane and when that happened, without even knowing, I turned back… [tears up] I can’t talk about this. Too emotional. Always, very emotional… [mumbles]. So, I turned back [sniffs] and I saw some people say goodbye that didn’t know me [sniffs]. And one of them even threw me a kiss. And then I knew what the word freedom meant. Those people couldn’t get out of the island. And I could. And that just broke my heart [sniffs]. And I cried. (00:47:38)

Only then, as Silvia implies, did she understand her son’s desire to act as a bridge between all Cubans: those who have no choice but to stay on the island and those who refuse to go back. That being said, Silvia does not simply replicate Guillermo’s somewhat simplistic ambition to bring present-day Cuba on a photographic platter to the exiles in the United States. After having gone through a depressive period, during which she was “blocked” and “[her] hands were tied,” Silvia began wondering: “Maybe I wasn’t doing what I had to do? Maybe there was something else? […] Why can’t I find that something else? Why can’t I help?” (00:51:31). In an effort to escape the “horrors of marianismo” that make women “abject through a lack of identity beyond motherhood” (Subero, 2016, p. 145), Silvia uses her son’s drive as an inspiration that sets her on a very distinct life path. In the final moments of Our House in Havana, Silvia is shown talking on the phone with a politician about her belief that the embargo must be undone, “because when you’ve done something for 39 years and it hasn’t worked, it is time to change” (00:52:55). She reveals that, after several psychotherapy sessions, she began calling the White House, US Senator Jesse Helms, “and everybody that [she] could” to put an end to the embargo (00:52:36). The documentary concludes with Silvia’s statement that, to those who accuse her of having become a communist, she simply replies that she has become “human, more human” (00:54:24).

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Like Silvia in Our House in Havana, the mother-protagonist of My American Girls allows the love she has for her offspring to transform her by opening up to their mentality. In particular, Sandra is “so proud” of Monica, the first of the family to graduate from college (00:11:10). Matthews goes along with this portrayal of Monica as the maverick of the family, not only because of her academic achievements but also because of her fearlessness to break away from the expectations and burdens of familismo. As she explains: “I think that a lot of Latinos in this country that are trying to make it here, they struggle with that” (00:39:03). Following Monica’s lead, Sandra slowly begins to question her role of madre abnegada toward her children and husband. The first inkling of Sandra’s rejection of marianismo becomes apparent when—in a voiceover that accompanies images of her early morning commute to the hospital—she acknowledges: “Sometimes I forget who I am working [for], for me or for my daughters? I don’t know, I’m tired to thinking about work. I’ve been working from the first day I came to this country” (00:09:52). Having already voiced her doubts about relinquishing her sense of self for her daughters, she does the same with her husband when she catches him going through photographs of the house they’re building in the Dominican Republic: [Sandra] Maybe you say you wanna go and then after you living there for few months, you wanna coming back. […] [Bautista] No, no, no. I wanna stay there. [Sandra] That’s what you say now, you not living there yet. [Bautista] I wanna stay there. [Sandra] We never know. (00:16:25)

It is as if Sandra were replicating Monica’s earlier remark: “But [mami and papi] made this their home now and they have to think about the present too” (00:08:53). In fact, over the course of the documentary, Sandra appears not only to come to terms with Monica’s rebellious streak but she seemingly even begins looking up to it. When Monica announces that she won’t be able to join her parents and siblings on their trip back to the Dominican Republic, Sandra’s reaction is almost one of admiration: “I have feeling she not gonna made it cos she have a lot of work to do. Monica is a real American girl. Yup!” (00:45:48). From that moment on, it is almost as if Sandra begins

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molding herself after Monica and her decision to put her own life first. However, as was the case with Silvia, Sandra does not copy her child’s ambition. Instead, she draws on Monica’s ideas to follow her own path; Monica may prefer her life in the United States, but Sandra likes her life on the island better. In order to offer proof of Sandra’s mental change, Matthews contrasts images of Sandra in the United States, slaving away within the confines of her home or on the premises of her jobs, and Sandra singing, dancing, swimming, and laughing in the Dominican Republic. There, for the first time, Sandra takes the time to think about her own feelings: “When I’m here, I forgot everything in New York. I forgot uhm… my job, I forgot hospital, I forgot everything” (00:50:55). She does admit, however, that not everything is perfect on the island. Agreeing with Ayda’s statement that the Dominican Republic is “like… a Third World country” (00:28:54), Sandra insists on using her relative wealth, acquired through hard labor in the United States, to help those in need. One of the first things she does when she arrives in her hometown is to distribute food to the poor (00:49:35). One of the last things she does before departing is to organize a reunion for all those who wish to have a seat at her table, regardless of whether or not they are related to her (00:56:44). This newly found sense of purpose, which goes beyond her own nuclear family, stays with her and helps her make a final decision about her future. After flying back to New York and picking up her daily routine, Sandra takes her girls’ wishes into consideration once more, because she knows full well “they want to stay in America” (01:00:50). This time around, however, she does not allow her motherly duties to stand in the way of her personal ambitions any further because, just like Silvia, she has found a purpose on the island that set her free from her domestic exile and from the restrictions of mariana motherhood. Although the documentary closes with Sandra’s admission that she knows that her girls will be “more happy in this country” (01:01:20), she has no doubt that someday she and Bautista will end up in the Dominican Republic, even if it means she will have to “be leaving [her] family again” (01:00:08).

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Beyond Motherhood In Our House in Havana (Olsson, 2000) and My American Girls: A Dominican Story (Matthews, 2001), two mothers grapple with the meaning of their American present and their Latin American past. Both films testify to the kind of nostalgic, existential questioning that surrounded Latinx migration in the United States before the “war on terror” erupted. This was a time when the legality of immigrants and the nature of their status were relegated to the sidelines of their everyday lives. Hence, the documentaries focus on the psychological make-up of their transnational and transient Latinx protagonists as these undergo the “double transition” (cf. Challinor, 2018) of being a mother in an alien environment. Mothers Silvia and Sandra are initially depicted as nostalgic Caribbean immigrants who pine after and idealize the life they left behind in their countries of origin. As the events unfold, it becomes increasingly clear that their need to romanticize the past is actually a coping mechanism through which they deal with the trauma of their forced emigration. Their “loss of homeland” (cf. Pérez, 2015) is ambiguous because it is characterized by uncertainty and unanswered questions that can never be fully resolved. This ambiguous loss is particularly tricky because there are no clearcut answers as to how a healthy grieving is best stimulated. Moreover, the “double transition” (cf. Challinor, 2018) of migrant mothers into motherhood and into a new sociocultural environment means they are the worse for wear because they are made to experience interruption twice over. Sandra and Silvia’s nostalgia is further complicated by the fact that they hail from Latin American countries, where many mothers are still held to the exacting standards of marianismo (cf. Greer et al., 2013). As marianas, they are expected to sacrifice themselves for their children and endure suffering better than men, while remaining submissive, religious, modest, and humble. At first, Cuban-American Silvia Morini and Dominican-American Sandra Ortiz seem to comply with marianismo, without ever paying a second thought to the burdens this cultural expectation adds to their lives. Their concern is with their house and household in their countries

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of origin and reception. Silvia only wants to go back to Cuba to have another look at the house where she was born, and Sandra cannot wait to go back to the dream house she is building in the Dominican Republic. However, their journey back soon forces them to become “introspective,” as Silvia’s husband Heath describes it (00:50:44). When Sandra and Silvia realize that they can transfer the “love ethic” (cf. hooks, 2018) that they have been reserving exclusively for their children to a larger audience, the scope of their activism widens considerably and becomes much more fulfilling. Instead of merely re/acting within an oppositional framework that labeled them as victims against the oppressor, they become aware of their capacity to serve as a bridge, not only for themselves but also for the community from which they emerge and to which they return (cf. Velazquez, 2017). Once they allow the love for their children to transform them, the arbitrariness of their marianismo begins to dawn on them. Silvia and Sandra become capable of undoing their lack of identity beyond motherhood (cf. Subero, 2016) when they choose a clear life path of their own: one that is motivated by their personal desires and aspirations. Through social action and an increased understanding of the cultural meaning of their migrant status, Silvia and Sandra’s transnational existence becomes synonymous with a “careship” (cf. Challinor, 2018) that enables them to connect with fellow Cuban-Americans and DominicanAmericans outside their family unit. In the end, Sandra and Silvia’s prioritizing of their own happiness turns out to be more selfless than their previous self-abnegating behavior; in the long run, it benefits considerably more people than their closest family and relatives.

References Boyer, R. (1989). Women, “La Mala Vida” and the politics of marriage. In A. Lavrin (Ed.), Sexuality and marriage in colonial Latin America (pp. 252– 286). University of Nebraska Press.

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Castillo, L. G., & Cano, M. A. (2007). Mexican American psychology: Theory and clinical application. In C. Negy (Ed.), Cross-cultural psychotherapy: Toward a critical understanding of diverse clients (pp. 85–102). Bent Tree Press. Castillo, L. G., Perez, F. V., Castillo, R., & Ghosheh, M. R. (2010). Construction and initial validation of the marianismo beliefs scale. Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 23(2), 163–175. Challinor, E. P. (2018). Cross-border citizenship: Mothering beyond the boundaries of consanguinity and nationality. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41(1), 114–131. Da Silva, N., Verdejo, T. R., Dillon, F. R., Ertl, M. M., & De La Rosa, M. (2018). Marianismo beliefs, intimate partner violence, and psychological distress among recently immigrated, young adult Latinas. Journal of Interpersonal Violence. Ehlers, T. B. (1991). Debunking marianismo: Economic vulnerability and survival strategies among Guatemalan wives. Ethnology, 30 (1), 1–16. García, M. C. (1998). Hardliners v. “Dialogueros”: Cuban exile political groups and United States-Cuba policy. Journal of American Ethnic History, 17 (4), 3–28. Glick, P., Sakallı-U˘gurlu, N., Akba¸s, G., Orta, ˙I. M., & Ceylan, S. (2016). Why do women endorse honor beliefs? Ambivalent sexism and religiosity as predictors. Sex Roles, 75 (11), 543–554. Greer, E., Neville, S. M., Ford, E., & Gonzalez, M. O. (2013). The cultural voice of immigrant Latina women and the meaning of femininity: A phenomenological study. SAGE Open, 3(2). Hernandez, A. M., & Curiel, Y. S. (2012). Entre nosotros: Exploring Latino diversity in family therapy literature. Contemporary Family Therapy, 34 (4), 516–533. hooks, b. (2018). All about love: New visions. William Morrow Paperbacks. Matthews, A. (2001, July 3). My American Girls: A Dominican Story. In POV Season 14. PBS. Navarro, M. (2002). Against marianismo. In R. Montoya, L. J. Frazier, & J. Hurtig (Eds.), Gender’s place: Feminist anthropologies of Latin America (pp. 257–272). Palgrave Macmillan US. Olsson, S. (2000, July 25). Our House in Havana. In POV Season 13. PBS. Pérez, R. M. (2015). Cuba No; Miami Sí: Cuban Americans coping with ambiguous loss. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 25 (1), 50–66.

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Rocha-Sánchez, T. E., & Díaz Loving, R. (2005). Cultura de género: La brecha ideológica entre hombres y mujeres. Anales de Psicología, 21(1), 42–49. Ruiz, E. (2005). Hispanic culture and relational cultural theory. Journal of Creativity in Mental Health, 1(1), 33–55. Stevens, E. P. (1973). Marianismo: The other face of machismo. In A. M. Pescatello (Ed.), Female and male in Latin America (pp. 89–101). University of Pittsburgh Press. Subero, G. (2016). Bloody femininities: The horrors of Marianismo and maternity in recent Latin American cinema. In G. Subero (Ed.), Gender and sexuality in Latin American horror Cinema: Embodiments of evil (pp. 111–146). Palgrave Macmillan UK. Utomo, A. (2014). Mother tongue, mothering, and (transnational) identity: Indonesian mothers in Canberra, Australia. Austrian Journal of South—East Asian Studies, 7 (2), 165–182. Velazquez, M. (2017). Primero Madres: Love and mothering in the educational lives of Latina/os. Gender and Education, 29 (4), 508–524.

5 The Universal Experience of Migrant Fathers

In 90 Miles (Zaldívar, 2003) and Voices of the Sea (Hopkins, 2018), documentary makers Juan Carlos Zaldívar and Kim Hopkins explore the psychological turmoil that accompanies their protagonists’ decision to defect to the United States and leave their Cuban homeland behind. In their deconstruction of the (aspiring) migrants’ psyche before and after their crossover, both documentary makers focus on a father figure. Testing the boundaries of the machista stereotypes of authoritative sternness and mental stoicism that are associated with Latinx fatherhood, the Cuban-American Pachuco in 90 Miles and the Cuban Pita in Voices of the Sea are portrayed as emotionally intelligent family heads who are conflicted about how to ensure their family’s well-being. As Miami-based Pachuco—the father of documentary maker Juan Carlos Zaldívar— ponders the consequences of his escape from Cuba in the 1980s, Pita’s family and friends are still contemplating whether or not to flee from the island by sea when the Obama Administration threatens to put an end to the exceptional treatment of Cuban immigrants. By depicting migration as a fickle endeavor that these measured Cuban fathers—who are at the

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mercy of political forces beyond their control—approach as a gamble, Zaldívar and Hopkins expose the ambiguity of the US immigration policy toward Cuba.

Abstract Policy, Real People Throughout both films, the documentary makers use iconic fragments of Cuban music to contextualize the human heartbreak that is unfolding before our eyes. For example, 90 Miles begins with Juan Carlos’s own memories of Cuba, 90 miles away from Florida, where he grew up. As Carlos Puebla’s original rendition of Hasta Siempre Comandante plays in the background, a slew of black-and-white archival images flashes by: statues, flags, and portraits of José Martí and Che Guevara splayed out across Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución, military parades by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, Cubans cheering in honor of Fidel Castro, and so on (00:00:02). A final farewell to El Ché, Puebla’s ballad returns a couple of times in Zaldívar’s film, as a symbol of his and his family’s long-lost communist ardor. Another melody that resurfaces every now and again is the lesser-known El colibrí by Cuban-American José Conde: “Oye bien, oye bien / Hay un colibrí que salió de su nido / Mirando a su nido el colibrí volaba / Extrañando a su nido el colibrí voló”1 (00:35:57). Throughout the documentary, the song keeps haunting the protagonists, reminding them of the nest they left behind in Cuba. Finally, a little-known rendition of Babalú—an Afro-Cuban song that Ricky Ricardo turned into American patrimony in I Love Lucy (cf. Waldman, 2003)—announces a new era for the Zaldívar household. Originally titled San Lázaro, the song dates back to the time when African slaves were forced to pretend that their chants about Yoruba gods like BabalúAyé were homages to Catholic saints like Saint Lazarus.2 With its ambiguity, the song celebrates the diversity of cubanidad , seemingly implying that the Zaldívars’ new American reality is just another ingredient in their 1 “Listen up, listen up / A hummingbird left its nest / Looking at its nest the hummingbird flew around / Missing its nest the hummingbird flew away” (00:35:57; my translation). 2 This brought forth the religious practice of Santería, a mixture of Roman Catholicism and West-African polytheism.

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“Cuban stew” or ajiaco (cf. Ortiz, 2014)—a classic metaphor for Cuba’s perpetual heterogeneity. By contrast, the song that cleaves Voices of the Sea in two is Willy Chirino’s political chant Nuestro Día: “Mi padre me vistió de marinero / Tuve que navegar 90 millas / Y comenzar mi vida de extranjero / Huyéndole a la hoz y al verdulino / Corriendo de esa absurda ideología”3 (00:36:53). Humming through the windows of an innocent-looking car that drives by the camera under the cover of darkness, the song is actually summoning migrants-to-be to join their attempt to defect by sea. The next morning, when it turns out that Roilán—Pita’s brother-inlaw—jumped at the occasion and is now sailing somewhere along the Florida Straits, the mood of the documentary changes completely. Up until that point, emigration seemed a fuzzy idea to Pita’s clan, something discussed and considered but still quite intangible. However, with Roilán’s departure, the stark reality of migration hits them hard. Shortly after Roilán manages to make it safely to Arizona, Pita’s best friends Michel and Estrella also try to defect, but they are less fortunate. Having yet again failed to flee from Cuba, at the very end of the film it turns out that they were apprehended at sea by the US Coast Guard, sent to the Guantanamo Naval Base for 14 months, and finally relocated to Australia. Hence, from Roilán’s lucky escape onward, the visuals of Voices of the Sea are interlaced with the nineteenth-century habanera La bella cubana—a melancholic hymn to Cuba’s sad beauty by the Afro-Cuban expatriate José White (cf. Lam, 2018). Considered together, these musical masterpieces paint a tragic picture of the Caribbean island: a country that has been losing its inhabitants to the American Dream for decades, despite their reluctance to leave. The musical score in both documentaries thus also alludes to Cuba’s conflicted relationship with the United States. According to San Lázaro, it is a tale of mutual influence and exchange, whereas for Willy Chirino, the Cuban-American bond is marked by political absurdity and oppression.

3 “My father dressed me as a sailor / I had to sail 90 miles / I had to start to live as a foreigner / Fleeing the sickle and hammer / Escaping from this absurd ideology” (00:36:53; translation in the original).

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Indeed, the relationship between the United States and Cuba has been marred by imperialist intrigue and anti-imperialist revolt ever since the nineteenth century. The United States were already a long-established trade partner of Cuba’s sugar industry when, in 1898, they intervened in the Cuban independence wars against Spain (1868–1898). With the help of the traditional Cuban elites, the United States went on to set up a Republic in 1902—the first of many puppet governments meant to ensure the triumph of the Cuban oligarchy and the demise of any social revolution (cf. Pérez, 2003). The occupation and planned annexation of Cuba (as well as of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and other Pacific islands) was a logical next step of the American project, dictated by such foundational documents of US foreign policy as the Monroe Doctrine and the Manifest Destiny (cf. Pérez, 2014). By merit of the island’s geostrategic position and economic potential, the control over Cuba was considered both a necessity for the survival of the American Republic and a right stemming from nature, politics, and predestination (López & Yaffe, 2017). With these ambitions in mind, the Platt Amendment was added to Cuba’s first constitution, authorizing the United States to intervene in internal Cuban affairs and establish a naval base on Guantánamo Bay. Consequently, by repeatedly endorsing blatantly corrupt governments and consistently ignoring the Cubans’ indignation at the imperialist treatment of their country, the United States set the stage for Castro’s rise to power in 1959 (cf. Hughes, 2010). Initially, Fidel Castro’s feat was applauded by most Cubans; he was seen as a revolutionary hero who had defeated a corrupt and brutal dictatorship despite tremendous odds (cf. Masud-Piloto, 1995). In 90 Miles, Pachuco’s son Juan Carlos and Pachuco’s brother Wicho confirm that most Cubans were initially enthusiastic about the Revolution, “hoping, like most people, that the overthrow of the Batista dictatorship would mean a better future for Cuba” (00:22:08). However, mass emigration ensued when the people began witnessing “persecutions, limited human rights, […] issues of repression” as well as forced repossessions of properties and goods (Castellanos & Gloria, 2018, p. 79). In Voices of the Sea, Pita expounds:

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Revolution is beautiful. In 1959, Cuba was very happy. I was a little child but I saw it in my parents, my grandparents—Cuba was truly happy. People in the streets… beautiful. But we were cheated. It means nothing to me now. That was a moment in history and nothing else. (00:17:52; translation in the original)

Wicho and Juan Carlos corroborate Pita’s feelings of betrayal. Their grievance concerns the treacherous way in which the new government introduced communism to Cuba. To them, Cuba became another Czechoslovakia: “a caricature” (00:22:34; translation in the original). Consequently, when the Castro regime established a Communist Party, the United States retaliated by imposing the most stringent embargo in US history, which prohibited Americans from traveling to Cuba, investing in Cuba, exporting US products to Cuba, or importing Cuban goods (cf. Weinmann, 2004). Additionally, in 1966, the Johnson Administration enacted the Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA). This was meant, on the one hand, to create an asylum for the Cuban refugees who left their communist country for political reasons and, on the other, to destabilize the new communist regime under Fidel Castro (cf. Meyers, 2018). From then on, the parole status of Cuban nationals in the United States could be changed to that of LPR (“lawful permanent resident”) after a physical presence in the country of more than one year. Although the US immigration policy toward Cuba has been variously criticized for its anomalies and abuses (“An End to Cuban Exceptionalism,” 2015), its contradictions (Nackerud et al., 1999), its reluctance to view Cubans through the prism of international law (Fullerton, 2004), its unjust favoring of Cubans over other immigrants (Flores, 2015), its irrationality (Weinmann, 2004), and its hypocrisy (Muscarella, 2016), it has remained relatively unchanged, triggering several waves of migration. The Historical or Golden Exiles of 1959–1962 partially coincided with the child refugees of Operation Peter Pan, conducted in 1960– 1962. They were succeeded by the exiles of the Freedom Flights of 1965–1973, those of the Mariel boatlift of 1980, the Cuban rafters of 1994–1996, and the Dusty Feet migrants of 2015–2017 (Castellanos & Gloria, 2018). This being said, in legal terms, there is quite a difference between the Marielitos of 1980 and the arrivals before and after them.

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This Cuban diasporic flux can be divided into three groups that fall, chronologically, under three distinct US foreign policy approaches regarding Cuba: (1) destabilizing the revolutionary government by enforcing a blockade and fast-tracking all Cuban entrants to the LPR status in the 1960s; (2) normalizing relations in the 1970s while holding on to previous sanctions; (3) reversing previous policies from the 1980s onward (Pérez-Stable, 2016). The Reagan Administration initiated the overhaul of past tactics by applying—for the first time since the Revolution—restrictionist terminology to Cuban arrivals. Although the CAA still applied to the Marielitos, they were symbolically denied the status of refugee and given the pending status of “entrant” instead (Henken, 2005). This changing rhetoric crystallized under President Clinton, whose “wet foot, dry foot” policy dictated that only Cubans who reached US land would be eligible for LPR status. Those found at sea would be considered illegal aliens and would not be granted asylum or refugee status (cf. Masud-Piloto, 1995). Moreover, depending on their ability to prove their fear of persecution, they would either be returned to Cuba or taken to Guantanamo Bay for further processing and a possible relocation to a third country (cf. Dastyari, 2015). Finally, the change in US foreign policy toward Cuba reached its peak during Obama’s fourth quarter, when he reversed Clinton’s “wet foot, dry foot policy” as part of a larger effort to normalize relations with Cuba (cf. Meyers, 2018). This reversal effectively ended the preferred immigration status of Cuban nationals. Currently, because the CAA remains intact, Cubans are still eligible for a fast-track LPR status but—in theory—only if they enter the United States legally.

Familism and Materialism The political circumstances and economic hardships that force the father figures of 90 Miles and Voices of the Sea to choose between Cuba and the United States differ quite considerably. Were it not for their shared memories of Cuba’s glorious first few months under Fidel Castro and their similar disillusionment with the country’s current state of affairs, the protagonists of 90 Miles and Voices of the Sea would have very little

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in common. The portrayal of their contexts of departure and reception is so diametrically opposed in both films that Pachuco, Pita, and their respective families could pass for migrants from different countries. In 90 Miles, Juan Carlos Zaldívar remembers—using a voice-over— how during the first two years after the family’s arrival in Miami, he was “very outspoken” about the anti-American beliefs that the Cuban school system had ingrained in him (00:11:46). He was “still spouting out communist slogans” (00:11:49) and, for example, failed to understand why schoolchildren in Miami did not wear uniforms, as it only “created this atmosphere that there was nobody to answer to” (00:11:36). Conversely, in the Cuba of Voices of the Sea, such communist zeal and anti-Americanism are nowhere to be found. The moment that best illustrates Pita’s family’s veneration of anything American is when Roilán manages to call his sister Mariela—Pita’s wife—for the first time from the United States. While Mariela is desperately trying to decipher through the static noise how long Roilán’s sea voyage lasted and how he is surviving on shore, her children Orlandito and Cynthia are heard shouting enthusiastically in the background, repeatedly asking their uncle for an iPod (00:49:13). By asking for such an emblematic US product, Pita and Mariela’s children unconsciously commodify the United States and glorify its capitalism, even before reaching US soil themselves. Commodities, however, were not the primary concern of Pachuco’s family when they decided to emigrate during the Mariel boatlift era. Pachuco’s wife Nilda is adamant that “[a] lot of people had a tough time. But you were never without a pair of shoes or in need of anything. On the contrary, you never knew what it was like to be without food or milk. You had anything you wanted” (00:02:57). Documentary maker Zaldívar reveals that Pachuco actually held a job of which he was proud in Cuba. As a manager, he distributed jewelry throughout the island and was in charge of the entire province of Holguín (00:20:37). Albeit surreptitiously, he even managed to build a house for his family, having been denied official housing for wearing medals of patron saints and displaying Catholic paintings in his home (00:23:20). Fast-forwarding to the Dusty Feet era, the contrast with the Cuban family of Voices of the Sea could not be starker. In the first scene of the

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film, a fisherman indirectly introduces himself to the viewers by vocalizing a tune that presents him as “Pita” or “fishing line”: “Pita va al mar / Y no pesca na’ / Y no pesca na’ / Y no ve los peces / Pita va arriba y no ve los peces / Y no ve los peces”4 (00:04:35). This scene—in different variants—recurs many times throughout the film: Pita casting nets from his worn rowboat, patiently bobbing along the ocean, waiting for the fish to bite. Over the course of the documentary, it becomes clear that Pita’s catch is consistently meager: so much so that he and Mariela have had to pull her oldest son from school (00:24:10) and are slowly but surely easing her second oldest son Karel into the family trade as well (01:02:00). Talking to Hopkins’s camera, Mariela explains that it is for the sake of her children from a previous marriage and the son she shares with Pita that she is considering an illegal crossover. However, she does acknowledge that her chances of making a successful “dry foot” landing are slim, as she learned from her previous attempt: [Mariela] A better future for my kids… that was the idea. I’ve already had to take my eldest out of school. And the others I might have to do the same. We’ll never do anything or be anybody. “What do you want to be?” “Fisherman!” They don’t know any different. They have no hopes for anything else. It is what it is. It wasn’t as easy as I thought. It’s very disappointing to get so close. We saw the coast, keys, lights. We couldn’t do anything, but get sent back. (00:22:43; translation in the original)

In the meantime, their younger children Karel and Orlandito are pictured getting ready for school, only to be shown taking off their uniforms shortly afterward. The first time, it turns out the school bus broke down on the way to school (00:42:30). The second time, Pita explains to Hopkins’s camera that the teachers simply failed to show up for work:

4 “The fishing line is cast in the sea and it doesn’t catch anything / It doesn’t catch anything / The line is reeled in and it doesn’t see any fish / And it doesn’t see any fish” (00:04:35; my translation).

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Like always, [Orlandito] goes to school 3 times… and has class once. Twice he goes and comes back. If it’s not one reason, it’s another. Here it’s not easy for kids to learn to read and write. A teacher’s salary is not enough, so they don’t turn up. Sometimes they’d rather solve their own problems, rather than remain in class. (00:44:11; translation in the original)

By contrast, in 90 Miles, Juan Carlos recalls in a voice-over that he had been awarded a fully funded scholarship to study film and television at a Cuban “boarding school for gifted kids” two years before defecting (00:06:06). The grant was “a guarantee that [he] could study what [he] loved while contributing to the revolution” (00:06:13). Consequently, when his father presented him and his sister Nilvi with the option to leave Cuba, Juan Carlos “cried straight through for three days” and refused to leave his beloved country (00:06:22). In the end, Nilvi and Juan Carlos decided to go, but only because they did not want to be separated from their family (00:06:50). Years later, in Miami, a nostalgic Pachuco seemingly regrets departing from the Cuba of his past, where he appeared to have it all. In presentday Cuba, we find an equally unhappy Pita who barely makes both ends meet but still holds on to the idea that his family is better off where they are. In a late-night confession to Hopkins’s camera, he tearfully recounts: I know many people… who went because people told them—over there everything’s incredible, you’ll get everything you need. So they create that sweet dream… of a new life there. But they’ll end up living underneath a bridge. I know them, they’re friends of mine. But I’m going to tell you the truth, there’s nothing like Cuba… for me. I was born here and would like to die here. If I go there… there’s nothing for me. There’s nothing. (00:39:20; translation in the original)

Pachuco seems to coincide with Pita, as his sullen demeanor throughout 90 Miles appears to suggest. In a voice-over that accompanies footage of Pachuco working a 12-hour shift at a Miami shoe store, Zaldívar wonders whether his father feels that he somehow failed the family: “He thought that when we came to the United States, he’d be able to buy us anything and that mom wouldn’t have to work” (00:21:35).

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Slowly but surely, Zaldívar’s film turns into an attempt at unraveling the reasons behind Pachuco’s depression. Similarly, Hopkins digs ever deeper into the mystery of Pita’s unwillingness to emigrate.

Machismo and Fatherhood As a psychological construct, machismo has traditionally been associated with violence, hypermasculinity, sexual aggression, the domination of women and children, and so on. However, the documentary makers of Voices of the Sea and 90 Miles are nuanced in their depiction of Latin American masculinity in that they appear to embrace a multidimensional conception of machismo. Indeed, over the years, the concept of machismo has undergone a profound transformation. Repeatedly denounced for being “a grand narrative about Latino men’s cultural history, social experiences, and gender behavior that promotes an essentialist view of masculinity” (Falicov, 2010, p. 310), maintaining “a monolithic representation of machismo” (Torres et al., 2002, p. 164), and stereotyping Latino men “as negative role models, whose identity is based on a model of pathology” (Mayo, 1997, p. 52), machismo is currently more likely to be interpreted as caballerismo by Latinx men—“a code of masculine chivalry” that values social responsibility and emotional connectedness (Arciniega et al., 2008, p. 20). In Voices of the Sea and 90 Miles, Pita and Pachuco seem to be portrayed as caballeros rather than traditional machos, as they appear aware of the double standards imposed on them by the Latin American cult of masculinity. Machismo gives these men a framework in which they can be loving and responsive fathers and husbands (cf. Concha et al., 2016). However, when Pita and Pachuco are incapable of fulfilling certain expectations toward them that emanate from this framework, it also brings about “gender-role stress” (cf. Pleck, 1981). In other words, more traditional understandings of Latinx gender constructs still circulate. Historically, machismo has been approached as a standard of behavior that celebrates masculine gender roles specific to Latino cultures and gives rise to a certain cult of manliness (Torres et al., 2002). Familismo lies at the heart of this cult: a strong sense of duty

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to participate in and ensure the physical and mental well-being of the (extended) family (Mayo, 1997). Contemporary views on both marianismo (e.g. Gil & Vazquez, 1996) and machismo (e.g. Mirandé, 1997) have simply expanded the spectrum of Latin American gender role expectations to include gender-positive as well as gender-negative behavioral traits. Hence, it has been found that modern-day Latinx men tend to subscribe to different types of masculinities and embrace polar behaviors that encompass positive and negative elements, not necessarily exclusive of each other (Torres et al., 2002). In 90 Miles, Zaldívar subtly expresses his admiration for Pachuco’s holistic take on machismo and fatherhood. He does so by mixing footage of his father’s Cuban friends and relatives singing his praises to the camera, emotional one-on-one interviews with the man himself, and personal recollections of Pachuco’s bravery, heroic idealism, and gentle affection—all polar characteristics that belong to the broad spectrum of modern-day machista behavioral patterns. In a bid to figure out whether “the cause of [Pachuco’s] depression is something that [they] left in Cuba” (00:28:13), Zaldívar decides to return to the island for the first time since 1980 and piece together what his father had been like prior to their defection. In Holguín, his relatives Lilia and Otero remember his father as “a man with lots of personality” (00:35:20; translation in the original) and “a great guy, just a great guy” (00:35:36; translation in the original). Aguirre, an old friend, recalls the acto de repudio or act of hate (cf. Campisi, 2016) that they were supposed to perform—a common practice during the Mariel boatlift, meant to publicly announce and denounce the departure of another traitor. There was “no hate at that meeting,” Aguirre assures Zaldívar: “they started to praise him so much… that I wish you could have been there” (00:38:25; translation in the original). Another friend refers to him as “the official block organizer” (00:39:36; translation in the original), while yet another proudly shows Zaldívar a group picture of himself and Pachuco, posing in front of the impressive amount of sugarcane they harvested with their team of revolucionario volunteers (00:36:16). However, Zaldívar mentions an event that proves that his father did also have quite a temper, but only when it came to defending righteous, honorable causes (00:16:15). To further emphasize Pachuco’s nurturing and affectionate nature, Zaldívar thinks back to their traumatic boat lift experience. Having lost all sense of distance, pressed between a crowd of

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people on the vessel, the documentary maker remembers looking up to see his father’s face. In reply, Pachuco simply “kissed [him] on the head” and “told [him] that everything would be fine” (00:08:32). Years later, his father surprised him yet again with his tenderness when Zaldívar came out as gay to him, on camera—footage he includes in 90 Miles. After having hinted at his homosexuality, with his camera pointed at Pachuco, the documentary maker keeps rolling, capturing the moment when his father tells him that it is “better to deal with things sooner than later” because it gives everybody “more time to mature together” (00:13:20; translation in the original). His reaction is so heartfelt that it incites Zaldívar to break the fourth wall and leap up from behind the frame to give his father a hug. Entangled in their embrace, Pachuco and Juan Carlos are filmed whispering how much they love each other (00:13:30). As it turns out, it is only Zaldívar’s second trip to Cuba that allows him to piece all these different clues about his father’s inner life together and crack the code to his machismo. Having been invited to a Havana film festival, Zaldívar films himself standing on a hill, staring at an angry mob below him: a group of activists denouncing the US government’s refusal to return five-year-old rafter Elián González to his Cuban father.5 Consumed by the protesters’ zeal, Zaldívar cannot help but draw a parallel with his relationship with Pachuco. Having struggled for years to understand why Pachuco decided to desert his native country and leave an impressive network of friends and family behind, Zaldívar begins realizing that Pachuco acted out of a deep sense of familismo: The demonstrations in 1999 threw my relationship with dad into a different perspective. My dad thought that raising me a communist would give me a better life in Cuba. But it also distanced me from him. In 1980, when my father gave me the decision to leave Cuba, what he was really asking me to do, was to trust in him. (00:48:13)

5 In 1999–2000, the Elián González incident involved a struggle between the governments of Cuba and the United States over the custody of five-year-old Elián González, who was the lone survivor of a group of Cuban rafters. He was eventually returned to his father in Cuba (cf. Hershberg & LeoGrande, 2016).

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With this realization, the documentary comes full circle, suddenly throwing Zaldívar’s boarding school days in a new light. It dawns on the documentary maker that Pachuco—who mentioned on separate occasions that, at the time, his son had been “negative” about going to America because he “already believed strongly in the Revolution” and was “more with them than with us” (00:05:35; translation in the original)—had simply been desperate to prevent the Cuban government from alienating the Zaldívar family members from each other. For the sake of his family, Pachuco decided to sacrifice his personal well-being and rootedness. As the head of his household, he took it upon himself to provide his family with an environment that would foster their bonds, not destroy them. The tragedy of 90 Miles lies in the fact that Pachuco does not seem to believe that his gamble paid off. As he complains to his son: “I haven’t completely adapted to this system… Especially when it comes to the family because… We don’t see each other; we don’t visit often; we’re hardly ever together” (00:19:57; translation in the original). Thus, the origin of Pachuco’s intense sadness—the mystery Zaldívar has been trying to solve throughout the documentary—is eventually revealed as stemming from the loss of his Cuban, familismo-oriented fatherhood rather than his Cuban fatherland. In Voices of the Sea, Pita could pass for Pachuco’s alter ego—the man Pachuco would have become had he remained in Cuba, resigned to the family’s lack of resources but proud of his success at having kept everybody united. Trying to get through to Mariela, who is desperate to leave, Pita is filmed going through photographs of relatives who left the island during the Mariel boatlift, in a bid to prove that they look “miserable” in the pictures they have been sending him from the United States (00:07:40). Much later, facing the camera, Pita once again refers to those photos to warn Mariela of the grief that awaits her across the border: All of my family from my father’s side left in the 80s. My cousin was maybe 8 or 9. I used to compare photographs—this is my cousin when she was here. This one is when she left. After the brutality of the United States… She was a flower. After a month, you could see the sadness, the

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difference. The same thing was going to happen to her, exactly the same. (00:52:49; translation in the original)

Viewed from this angle, Pita’s brand of machismo seems to be heavily influenced by fatalismo—the typically Latin American machista belief that “a particular condition is unavoidable or its course unalterable if it represents the will of God” (Abreu et al., 2020, p. 195). Keen to underscore that he is not a religious man in the traditional sense of the term, Pita points out the following: “I believe that a perfect nature exists. And nature determined… you can’t make it” (00:53:40; translation in the original). In response, a teary-eyed Mariela ruefully smiles at the camera, stands up, and walks away, visibly hurt by Pita’s deterministic stance. Yet, the events that unfold in the documentary seem to legitimize Pita’s fatalism. As a television broadcast reports on the impending normalization of the relationship between the United States and Cuba, the atmosphere among Pita’s friends and family becomes increasingly tense. In front of the camera, Michel and his wife Estrella act as if these talks of a thaw are laughable: “They won’t agree on anything. That’s stupid. That is only blah, blah, blah…” (00:20:30; translation in the original). However, shortly afterward, they disappear without a trace, only taking a handheld digital camera with them to document their perilous sea journey— presumably at Hopkins’s request. While the main plotline of Voices of the Sea remains Pita’s struggle to keep his family financially afloat in Cuba, from then on, the film is regularly interrupted by the low-quality footage of Michel and Estrella’s small camera, with which they capture their escape on a motorboat that they share with about a dozen of other defectors. The images become increasingly disturbing as the group of people is shown to go from exhilaration to desperation in a short amount of time. Eventually, having had to throw the broken engine overboard in order to lighten the weight of their vessel, the Cubans are almost happy to see the approaching US Coast Guard. That feeling, however, is short-lived: [Group] You think at the last minute you can trick me by making me jump into the water and take me back to Cuba. We’ve all experienced that before. We didn’t make it this far for you to take us back to Cuba. What we want is the American dream. The only thing I own are the clothes on my back. I have nothing in Cuba. The camera is necessary so

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that we can record this, do you understand us? [US Coast Guard] You probably won’t make it! (01:06:09; translation in the original)

After some more negotiating, the camera cuts to Michel’s hands, pensively fingering the digital camera with which he is trying to record the exchange. Suddenly, Hopkins fast-forwards by taking us to the Cuban mainland, where we catch sight of a defeated-looking Michel. Sitting next to Pita, Michel is filmed showing him the footage that we just saw. Apparently, they were lucky to have been caught by the United States rather than the Cuban Coast Guard as the latter would have fined them for attempting to defect. Vowing to the camera that he will “try it again later” (01:09:49; translation in the original), Michel disappears shortly hereafter, only to reappear together with Estrella on the news after having besieged a lighthouse (“dry foot”) in Florida waters (“wet foot”). Curiously, the report in question is read in English by somebody with a distinctly American accent, signifying that whoever is watching this news flash is not in Cuba, but in the United States. The camera abruptly cuts to Roilán’s face as he eagerly scans the television screen, somewhere in Phoenix, Arizona, as per the captions (01:12:10). This is the first time after his surprise defection that Roilán features in the documentary again. Seemingly happy about the coverage that Michel, Estrella, and their fellow “lighthouse rafters” (01:17:21) are receiving, a teary Roilán discloses that he often thinks back to Pita’s prophetic admonition: Sometimes I’d rather not call Cuba because I feel bad. No amount of money… is worth having your family far away. That’s what Pita told me. If you go… be strong. Don’t turn back. You know what you’re leaving behind. It’s a lot. When you come back… prove to us you did it to help us. Don’t abandon us. For this… For this I love Pita, because he knows. (01:15:34; translation in the original)

Juxtaposed with the news report on Michel and Estrella’s latest unlucky escape, Roilán’s speech is a symbolical endorsement of Pita’s fatalismo and Pachuco’s familismo. In the eyes of these Cuban caballeros, it is better to leave things as they are—however unbearable they may seem—if it can guarantee that their family ties remain intact.

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Eventually, after having been diagnosed with stage III cervical cancer, even Mariela begins to echo Pita’s fatalism: “After finding out about my illness… is when I realized that, that maybe there’s less time for… like to be together” (01:20:25; translation in the original). Hopkins then slowly brings her film to a close by stringing together disparate images of a happier-looking Mariela and Pita spending quality time with each other, celebrating Karel’s fifteenth birthday, or watching Fidel Castro’s funeral on TV. With the help of these images of their children shot from a variety of different angles, the camera echoes Mariela and Pita’s all-encompassing parental affection. Here, Hopkins seems to suggest that thanks to her protagonists’ decision to stay in Cuba, they remain a close-knit family whose affective wealth far outweighs their material poverty.

Caballeros and Fathers By focusing on Marielitos in 90 Miles and Dusty Feet migrants in Voices of the Sea, Zaldívar and Hopkins make a strong case for the arbitrariness of Cuban exceptionalism, albeit for reasons that have been largely overlooked by critics. Instead of delving into the moot point of whether Cuban émigrés deserve special treatment depending on their status of migrants/refugees (e.g. Muscarella, 2016) or their political and economic motivations (e.g. Weinmann, 2004), the documentaries make a broader point about how deeply the rhetoric on migration in receiving and sending countries can affect the mental and physical well-being of their migrants. Trapped between the anachronistic Cuban Adjustment Act of the United States and Cuba’s own anachronistic and repressive emigration policies (cf. Henken, 2005), the casts of 90 Miles and Voices of the Sea are portrayed as unwilling participants in a mosaic of push–pull factors driving Cuban emigration (cf. Argüellová, 2017). These films are not about lone wolves dreaming of an easier life abroad, but about caballero fathers carefully considering which environment best guarantees the sanctity and sanity of their family units. To Pita and Pachuco, migrating or staying put is a Catch-22. Their task, as family heads, is to figure out which is the lesser of two evils and stoically bear the

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consequences of the outcome of their choice, for the sake of their loved ones.

References Abreu, R. L., Gonzalez, K. A., Rosario, C. C., Pulice-Farrow, L., & Rodríguez, M. M. D. (2020). “Latinos have a stronger attachment to the family”: Latinx Fathers’ acceptance of their sexual minority children. Journal of GLBT Family Studies, 16 (2), 192–210. An End to Cuban Exceptionalism. (2015). Bloomberg Businessweek, 4455, 10. Arciniega, G. M., Anderson, T. C., Tovar-Blank, Z. G., & Tracey, T. J. G. (2008). Toward a fuller conception of Machismo: Development of a traditional Machismo and Caballerismo Scale. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 55 (1), 19–33. Argüellová, L. (2017). Normalization of U.S.-Cuban relations: The end of the ‘wet foot, dry foot’ policy—The end of the cold war? Central European Journal of International and Security Studies; Prague, 11(4). Campisi, E. (2016). Escape to Miami: An oral history of the Cuban Rafter crisis. Oxford University Press. Castellanos, J., & Gloria, A. M. (2018). Cuban Americans: From golden exiles to dusty feet—Freedom, hope, endurance, and the American dream. In P. Arredondo (Ed.), Latinx immigrants: Transcending acculturation and xenophobia (pp. 75–94). Springer International Publishing. Concha, M., Villar, M. E., Tafur-Salgado, R., Ibanez, S., & Azevedo, L. (2016). Fatherhood education from a cultural perspective: Evolving roles and identities after a fatherhood intervention for Latinos in South Florida. Journal of Latinos and Education, 15 (3), 170–179. Dastyari, A. (2015). United States migrant interdiction and the detention of refugees in Guantánamo Bay. Cambridge University Press. Falicov, C. J. (2010). Changing constructions of Machismo for Latino men in therapy: “The devil never sleeps.” Family Process; Rochester, 49 (3), 309–329. Flores, V. (2015). The favored immigrant no more: Lifting Embargo impact on Cuban immigration. Law and Business Review of the Americas; Dallas, 21(3), 353–360.

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Fullerton, M. (2004). Cuban Exceptionalism: Migration and Asylum in Spain and the United States. The University of Miami Inter-American Law Review, 35 (3), 527–575. Gil, R. M., and Vazquez, C. I. (1996). The Maria Paradox: How Latinas can merge old world traditions with new world self-esteem. Berkeley Publishing. Henken, T. (2005). Balseros, Boteros, and El Bombo: Post-1994 Cuban immigration to the United States and the persistence of special treatment. Latino Studies; London, 3(3), 393–416. Hershberg, E., and LeoGrande, W. M. (Eds.). (2016). A new chapter in US-Cuba relations: Social, political, and economic implications. Palgrave Macmillan. Hopkins, K. (2018, September 3). Voices of the sea. In POV Season 31. PBS. Hughes, J. A. (2010). Rethinking the Cuban adjustment act and the U.S. national interest. St. Thomas Law Review, 23(2), 187–220. Lam, R. (2018, March 19). José White y su bella cubana. La Jiribilla. http:// www.lajiribilla.cu/articulo/jose-white-y-su-bella-cubana López, E. D., & Yaffe, H. (2017). The deep, historical roots of Cuban antiimperialism. Third World Quarterly, 38(11), 2517–2535. Masud-Piloto, F. (1995). From welcomed exiles to illegal immigrants. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Mayo, Y. (1997). Machismo, fatherhood, and the Latino family. Journal of Multicultural Social Work, 5 (1–2), 49–61. Meyers, L. (2018). U.S.-Cuba immigration through the lens of executive regulatory policy: Understanding the recent end to a half century of special immigration regulations for Cuban Nationals notes. Georgetown Immigration Law Journal , 33(1), 91–114. Mirandé, A. (1997). Hombres Y Machos: Masculinity And Latino Culture. Perseus. Muscarella, L. (2016). Cuban “refugees” vs. Central American “immigrants”: Who decides? The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, 36 (12), 3–6. Nackerud, L., Springer, A., Larrison, C., & Issac, A. (1999). The end of the Cuban contradiction in U.S. refugee policy. The International Migration Review: IMR; Thousand Oaks, 33(1), 176–192. Ortiz, F. (2014). The human factors of Cubanidad. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4 (3), 455–480. Pérez, L. A. (2003). Cuba and the United States: Ties of singular Intimacy. University of Georgia Press. Pérez, L. A. (2014). Cuba en el imaginario de los Estados Unidos. Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.

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Pérez-Stable, M. (2016). Cuban exceptionalism. In E. Hershberg & W. M. LeoGrande (Eds.), A new chapter in US-Cuba relations: Social, political, and economic implications (pp. 101–113). Springer International Publishing. Pleck, J. H. (1981). The myth of masculinity. MIT Press. Torres, J. B., Solberg, V. S. H., & Carlstrom, A. H. (2002). The myth of sameness among Latino men and their Machismo. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 72(2), 163–181. Waldman, A. J. (2003, March 24). The legacy of desi Arnaz: The Cuban who revolutionized American TV. The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education; Paramus, 13(12), 24. Weinmann, L. (2004). Washington’s irrational Cuba policy. World Policy Journal; Durham, 21(1), 22–31. Zaldívar, J. C. (2003, July 29). 90 Miles. In POV Season 16 . PBS.

6 The Universal Experience of Migrant Children

In Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary (Simón, 1997) and Sin País (Rigby, 2012), documentary makers Laura Simón and Theo Rigby give the floor to the children of undocumented migrants. Depicting two different but equally pivotal points of the “deportation regime era” (De Genova & Peutz, 2010), both approach the issue of illegal migration and deportability from the perspective of Latinx minors under threat of their own or their family’s precarious legal status. Focusing on the very real trials and tribulations of a voiceless segment of the Latinx community, the documentary makers capture the changes in demeanor that their child protagonists display over the course of their films. Starting off by affectively framing both sets of children as having an ambiguous relationship with their American parens patriae (cf. Estin, 2018), Simón and Rigby then proceed to highlight the impact of the US deportation regime on the children themselves. Seemingly more resilient and wiser than some of their adult foils (e.g. parents, teachers, US government officials), Simón’s and Rigby’s protagonists are not glorified for their perceived precociousness. Rather, by means of their protagonists’ life stories, the documentary makers denounce the policies that are forcing these children to grow up too fast. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Sanchez, Discourses of Migration in Documentary Film, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06539-2_6

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Children as Deportees The deportation of racialized noncitizens has a long history in the United States. The creation of “immigrant detainees” (cf. Hernández, 2008) and their limbic legal position between arrest or exclusion and deportation was made possible by the nineteenth-century Supreme Court ruling Fong Yue Ting v. United States, which determined that deportation constitutes an administrative process—not a lawful punishment for a crime—whereby undesirable noncitizens could be returned to their countries of origin. The legal fallacy of this ruling is that, being an administrative process, detention pursuant to deportation falls outside the protections of the criminal justice system and does not guarantee that a person charged with this administrative offense will be considered innocent until proven guilty or safeguarded from unjustified pre-trial and post-sentence detention. Between 1997 and 2012, foreign nationals of Latin American origin—especially working-class men (Das Gupta, 2014)—were disproportionately targeted in this endeavor, largely as a result of the racial profiling that became standard practice during this 15-year-long “deportation crisis” (Golash-Boza & Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2013). Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary, aired in 1997, and Sin país, aired in 2012, take place at the beginning and end of this era. In Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary, Californian elementary school teacher Laura Simón temporarily wears a filmmaker’s hat as she follows her students and co-workers at Hoover Elementary during the months preceding the vote for Proposition 187. A controversial voting initiative proposed by the State of California in 1994, Proposition 187 was passed by the Californian electorate but ruled unconstitutional by the courts, as it not only denied undocumented immigrants access to public benefits (e.g. nonemergency health care, education) but also enabled any state employee—public school teachers included—to notify INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) of the suspected undocumented status of any apparently illegal alien (cf. Santa Ana, 2002). In Sin país, by contrast, Theo Rigby captures the effects of the deportation crisis from the perspective of a mixed-status family. Mimicking the gaze of a passive bystander, Rigby’s camera witnesses the woes and worries of the

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Mejía family, shortly before and right after the deportation of father Sam and mother Elida to Guatemala. In a way, Rigby’s Sin país picks up where Simón’s Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary leaves off. After the dismissal of California’s Proposition 187, a federal bill was passed to appease the nation’s outrage at the government’s seeming passivity toward illegal immigration: Sect. 287(g) of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA). Allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to enter into cooperation agreements with state and local law enforcement, 287(g) programs permitted police officers to enforce federal immigration laws on whoever they stopped and, if necessary, commence deportation proceedings. Although Sin país does not explain why Sam and Elida were targeted by ICE, on the website of the documentary’s distribution company it says that “immigration agents stormed the Mejía’s house looking for someone who didn’t live there” (“Sin País (Without Country),” 2013). In other words, the Mejías were indeed racially profiled, as per Sect. 287(g), prior to being arrested on suspicion of their status. Simón, on the other hand, captures the chaos and turmoil of the events leading up to what would become a downright deportation crisis in the opening sequence of her film. Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary begins with a silent black title screen, which describes the film’s premise as follows: “California’s Proposition 187 denies public education and health care to undocumented (illegal) immigrants. It is primarily targeted at the Latino population, which is the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States” (00:00:02). The camera then cuts to a panoramic view of Los Angeles’ ominous skyline, whose cloudiness symbolically evokes the storm brewing over the city (00:00:22). Simón supplements the sound of falling rain that accompanies her static shot of LA with the unexpected hum of a helicopter (00:00:36), whose flight she captures in a panning shot of the smoggy city of LA. Momentarily interrupting the helicopter shot with a sober black-and-white title screen (00:00:43), the camera shortly repeats its panning before closing in on a buzz coming from somewhere within that pan shot, as suggested by the camera’s zooming in on the streets of LA.

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The next scene reveals the source of this mysterious noise: its view obstructed by the flashing red-and-blue lights of a police car, the camera catches a glimpse of what appears to be a group of angry protesters (00:01:00). In a kaleidoscopic sequence of mood shots, Simón hints at the Latinx identity of the picketers by including images of their Latin American flags and banners against Proposition 187 as well as audio of their chants (“La Raza unida jamás será vencida”).1 The protesters’ rumble is eventually overtaken by the voice of an unknown woman, later identified as Diane Lee, a teacher at Hoover Elementary, who declares: I think they shot themselves in the foot showing the Mexican flag. I’m sorry, this is gonna sound really bad but if they love Mexico that much, why don’t go back? I pay taxes, I work hard, I’m patriotic. We need to take care of the people that are here. The children of today that belong here need to be taken care of and there’s gonna be no money left. (00:01:16)

Diane’s aside reveals that there are two markedly polarized sides to Proposition 187 in LA, as exemplified by the subsequent amalgam of campaign video advertisements promoting (00:01:35) and discrediting (00:02:18) the measure, footage of peaceful protesters marching against it (00:01:50) and being assaulted by police officers in full gear (00:02:13), and a clip of a press conference given by then-Governor of California Pete Wilson in which he joyfully announces the passing of the proposition (00:03:22). This whirlwind of images and sounds is punctuated by the testimony of a little girl, who states matter-of-factly that “American people, they don’t want us in here no more, they don’t like us, only cos we’re Latinos, they don’t like us,” before being drowned out by the rest of Simón’s footage (00:02:02).

1 The concept of la raza latina dates back to the mid-nineteenth century. Best translated as “Latin lineage” rather than “Latin race,” the notion of a clearly demarcated Latin American identity was formulated as a response to the growing Anglo domination of the hemisphere (cf. Lazo, 2018). Originally meant as an attempt to provide Latin American peoples with a distinct cultural and historical lineage, “la raza” has become a problematic term in recent years because of its ambiguous history, steeped in a rhetoric that has been labeled as both anti-white and inconsiderate of indigenous Latin Americans (Contreras, 2017). Hence, in 2017, the largest Hispanic civil rights organization of the United States NCLR (National Council of La Raza) changed its name to UnidosUS.

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The child’s statement becomes even more poignant when it is echoed, shortly afterward, by a woman—later revealed to be Simón’s fellow school teacher Arcelia Hernández—who passionately addresses the camera with the following words: They are feeling threatened by the many brown faces. What would happen if every child in the Pico-Union, Koreatown, Chinatown, Japantown received a good education? And we became attorneys? And we became medical doctors? And we became teachers? Would the social structure, the power/social structure be challenged even more so? (00:02:35)

After Arcelia’s emotional outburst, Simón segues into the next scene with the help of a pirecua, a traditional Mexican song form with indigenous, European, and African influences. During the musical intermezzo, Simón—who never appears on camera—introduces herself in a voiceover as a first-generation immigrant from Mexico and a fourth grade teacher at Hoover Street Elementary, a school situated in Pico-Union, “a neighborhood that is often thought of as the Ellis Island of Los Angeles” (00:04:27). As the camera pans over the colorful streets of Pico-Union, Simón expresses her dismay at the popularity of a proposition “aimed at [her] kids” (00:05:18) and thus brings us back to the little girl featured earlier. Talking over images of the hustle and bustle of Hoover Elementary, Simón discloses that, the day Proposition 187 passed, that same girl asked her whether “she was now a cop who was going to kick her out” (00:05:30). This little girl, Simón tells us, is called Mayra. Walking toward Simón’s camera, Mayra introduces herself as “the vicepresident of this school” (00:06:00). Toting a red sash in evidence of what she calls her “job” of vice-president of the student council (00:06:10), Mayra proudly shows the camera around her school: “some kids got good minds, some kids… they get their brains off line” (00:06:30), “it’s a big playground… it gots a lot of games” (00:06:40), “there’s a bullet right there, there’s one here and all the way over there, there’s one” (00:07:11). Her interview reaches a questionable apotheosis when Mayra is filmed violently declaiming her thoughts to nobody in particular:

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When I grow up, Imma be a person that’s gonna fight for this country. Imma be important person. I’m going to a good college and Imma learn really good until I get that job. And Imma fight for the persons. I wanna be important person. I want them to be glad I’m there. I want them to come to me and say thank you. I wanna be a lawyer. (00:08:30)

Still off camera, Simón explains to the viewer how out of character it was for Mayra—“the most determined” of her students who allows “nothing […] to get in her way”—to be worried about Proposition 187 and have “fears about being sent back to El Salvador” (00:08:44). The scene closes with Mayra’s revelation of her and her mother’s mixed statuses: she is an American citizen, but her mother is not. Reflecting on her predicament in front of Simón’s camera, Mayra points out where the shoe pinches in the immigration debate: “If I’m American, I won’t have to leave. But my mom will. And who would I stay with? Nobody. I won’t got nobody” (00:09:00). In Sin País, the mixed status of the Mejía family is again the crux of the matter. Rigby’s build-up to the issue that is at the heart of the documentary relies on the same affective framework as Simón’s. He, too, plays with the contradiction between immigrant children’s expected innocence and their perceived worldliness in order to summon a sense of discomfort. His first image is a static pan shot of a view that is immediately recognizable as the Golden Gate Bridge of San Francisco. Rigby goes on to superimpose the documentary’s Spanish title (“Sin País”) on the panorama so as to evoke the paradox at the heart of his film. Here, we have a family who is de facto firmly rooted in San Francisco, but who—for intangible, political reasons—is considered “without country” (sin país). Next, a slew of home videos of toddler Gilbert, the family’s eldest son, begins rolling. He is shown frolicking in a park overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge with his parents (00:00:33), celebrating his sixth birthday (00:01:00), addressing the camera in Spanish to greet and update the family’s relatives who stayed behind in Guatemala (00:01:08), and dancing to a rhythmic Latin song with his one-year-old sister Helen (00:01:45). His mother’s voice is heard explaining off camera that she, her son, and her husband came to the United States with “a dream” and

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to “make a little money” (00:00:49; translation in the original). However, their expectations changed over time as their family expanded with the birth of Helen and Dulce. Now, for all three of the Mejía children, of whom only Gilbert is undocumented because of his foreign birth, “there is no other country but the one they have lived in” (00:01:40; translation in the original). With this succinct sentence, Elida foreshadows that the drama that will unfold before our eyes finds its source in the imagined, yet very real, gap between belonging and unbelonging within mixed-status families. Having alluded to the impeccable moral character of the Mejía parents and the innocence of the Mejía children by means of Elida’s voice-over and the family’s private footage, Rigby fast-forwards to the present day. It is revealed that Gilbert is currently 19, Helen is 13, and Dulce is 4. Rigby moves on to film the present-day Mejía children in situations that testify to their uncharacteristic sense of duty and responsibility for youngsters of their age. Teenager Helen is shown making tortillas for her father’s birthday (00:02:24), studying arduously for a math test (00:08:58), and cogitating out loud about planning to “apply for [her] parents to become citizens when [she’s] 21” (00:10:55). Young adult Gilbert’s portrayal is that of a precocious humanitarian, who defends the entire undocumented Latinx community when he protests against his parents’ and his own deportation. Still hoping for a miracle intervention by “some Senator or something” who might want “to help [them] out” (00:03:35), Gilbert does not sit still—either before or after he and his sister are forced to drop Sam, Elida, and Dulce off at the airport (00:05:05). Instead, he is filmed protesting and chanting in the streets (00:03:52) in a bid to stop his parents’ deportation, giving a phone interview to the San Francisco Chronicle about his family’s “American nightmare” (00:04:30), and acting as a surrogate parent for Helen (00:09:04). Emulating Simón’s portrayal of Mayra, Rigby frames the Mejía children as wise beyond their years. With this discursive tactic, he attempts to subvert his viewers’ expectations and beliefs surrounding childhood as a “natural, universal and biologically inherent period of human development” (Robinson, 2011, p. 115). Although children have “played crucial

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roles in the struggles of marginalized groups to secure basic membership rights” (Gash et al., 2020, p. 44), in political debates they continue to be depicted as “either innocent, deserving, and legitimate on the one hand or as risky, costly and unworthy on the other” (ibid., p. 47). It could be argued that, in defiance of this tendency, Simón and Rigby use excerpts such as teacher Diane’s hammering on the importance of taking care of “children of today that belong here” (00:01:31) or the Mejía attorney’s insistence on his clients’ merits (00:04:14) to display how immigrant children are either held to impossible standards of excellence or blamed for their problematic performance of childhood innocence (cf. Duschinsky, 2013). With their ambiguous portrayal of childhood, both Simón and Rigby imply from the beginning that they intend to go beyond cliché representations of migrant children as either victims who are forced or coerced into migration or unlawful agents who will burden the system for taxpaying citizens (cf. Thompson et al., 2019). Instead, they question the pitfalls of the neoliberal discourse underlying visions of the child as a competent actor (cf. Pechtelidis & Stamou, 2017).

Immigration as Difficult Knowledge Until recently in Western history, children were believed to conform to dichotomous models of childhood: they were either demonic/Dionysian or angelic/Apollonian (Jenks, 1996). These polar views of children as inherently fierce, cruel, and threatening or, on the contrary, as innocent, dependent, and pure were shaped by the pre- and postlapsarian understandings of the Christian doctrine of original sin (Pechtelidis & Stamou, 2017). The construction of such a Janus-faced child can be traced back to the eighteenth century. Under the influence of the biopolitical power construct that began taking hold of the Enlightened West, the child turned into Rousseau’s Émile—a governable child subject who, like early modern society itself, could be defined and controlled with the help of prescriptions of pedagogues and child-rearing experts (Smith, 2012). However, with the advent of (neo)liberalism, the focus began shifting

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from Dionysian/Apollonian governability to an Athenian individualization of risk (ibid.). Neoliberal regimes such as that of the United States tend to favor the “Athenian” model of childhood, as it distances itself from the responsibility of producing either Dionysian (“bad”) or Apollonian (“good”) children-citizens by means of a responsibilization of the children-citizens themselves. Held accountable for their own regulation and socialization, Athenian children are made to believe that neoliberal concepts of “competition,” “choice,” and “enterprise” will guide their way. Initially seemingly blind to the sophism of the Athenian childhood model, Simón prides herself on her own responsibilization of the students in her class. Being well aware that “90% of [her] students are political or economic refugees from Mexico, Guatemala, or El Salvador” (00:05:00) and that their background forces them to enroll in Hoover Elementary, a low-income school “located on the street that is the dividing line between the Mexican 18th Street Gang and the Salvadorian Mara Salvatrucha Gang” (00:07:00), Simón assures us that she makes “[her] kids work very hard” (00:07:56). She even has them pick their future college and career at the beginning of the school year (00:08:10). In a voice-over, she explains that “as a fellow immigrant” she is convinced that education is these children’s “best chance” (00:08:00). Her optimism dims, however, when she pays Mayra a visit at home. As an elated Mayra is filmed showing off her favorite doll and her new library book, the camera pauses on a piece of paper hanging over her bed: the “dream diploma” from Smith College (00:33:50) that Simón awarded Mayra in exchange for the little girl’s promise “to replace it one day with the real thing” (00:33:54). However, in an instant, Mayra’s mood goes from aspirational glee to utter sadness when she gives Simón a chilling account of how she and her mother went homeless after her father was killed in a robbery (00:28:42). In the context of Mayra’s small, run-down apartment in a building for those who “live illegally in Los Angeles” (00:16:00), Simón’s insistence on the importance of staying in school suddenly seems meaningless and, above all, tone-deaf in the grander scheme of things. Indeed, Simón appears to accentuate the fallacy of placing the responsibility of societal success on migrant children by interspacing Mayra’s

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house tour with footage that attests to the other, darker side of the responsibilization coin. In a fly-on-the-wall scene of a staff meeting at Hoover Elementary, Simón films a passive-aggressive exchange between the principal who bemoans that the school is losing funds because of the low attendance rate, and a teacher who reminds him that some parents do not know when their employers will allow them to take time off to go back to their countries with their children (00:23:13). Here, Simón adds footage of a sit-down interview with her colleague Diane. As the perfectly acculturated granddaughter of Russian immigrants, Diane feels entitled to “blame the families” who, unlike her own relatives, do not treat school with enough reverence: “[…] school is important, it’s not somewhere where you go to be babysat and have two meals a day and play, it’s somewhere you go to learn” (00:26:30). Simón uses Diane’s rant as a foil to a statement made by Carmen, an actively involved parent, in which she expounds—in Spanish—that the teachers need to be “more considerate of these people” and “understand that a lot of these parents can’t read or write” (00:23:40; translation in the original). Perhaps the most painful—because most clear-cut—of these loosely related clips is one that features Simón’s fellow teacher Arcelia. As she is filmed talking with her colleagues about the fact that the parents are unhappy with their lack of interaction, an unnamed teacher intervenes by blaming the children for being the source of the short-circuit between teachers and parents: “[…] the child takes the note […] in the backpack and the parents never look in the backpack” (00:25:00). Similarly, Rigby’s initial congratulatory framing of the Mejía children’s precociousness and their parents’ unwavering support grows darker as the events unfold. What marks a clear turning point in Sin País is the moment when Dulce and Gilbert are pictured at the airport, giving their mother, father, and baby sister a final, tearful hug before watching them walk away toward the security check, as their attorney is helplessly standing by (00:05:05). In footage shot some time afterward, Gilbert discloses that, in some ways, he and Helen have gotten closer after their parents left, but that their relationship has become more “difficult” in other ways (00:09:00). Naturally, Helen does not accept her brother’s new role of surrogate parent and regularly reminds him: “[…] you’re not my mom or dad” (00:09:10).

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In turn, Helen confides to Rigby that she is desperate about having to wait until she is of legal age (in seven years) to apply for a reunification with her parents: “Way to take them out, right when I need them the most” (00:11:06). Her anger seems to be directed at the US government—a legal body whose “wide range of state and federal statutes and policies” should “reflect the government’s role in protecting children as parens patriae” (Estin, 2018, p. 593; emphasis in the original). However, the US’ constitutional tradition does not require the state or federal government to protect immigrant children’s interests, which makes the routine separation of these underage citizens from their noncitizen parents perfectly legal. The insidiousness of this setup can be traced back to the paterfamilias principle, which underwrites the American understanding of settler colonialism. The Western idea of civilizational progress rests on the logic that “human beings, as individuals and as a species, progress out of a bestial state into a fully human state through education” (Rollo, 2018, p. 64). Premodern societies were thus classified as orphan civilizations and their peoples were legally defined as wards of the United States, which precluded them from making claims to land. Since the child was to the adult what the Indian was to the European, children–indigenes became the disposable property of their parents–colonizers. The parallel is easily made with all non-European peoples, such as migrants from non-European countries. The children of these infantilized peoples—as opposed to fully adult European peoples who have “already undergone the violent education in faith and reason that they are now morally obliged to impose on non-European peoples” (ibid., p. 74)—thus carry the double burden of “the cipher of the primitive” (ibid., p. 73). Helen bears witness to this fact when she is filmed crying on camera because of her mother’s threat that if “[her] grades aren’t that good, [she will be] coming back” to Guatemala (00:15:30). Elida’s warning betrays the intense pressure under which Helen finds herself, having to perform exceptionally well in school for the sake of disproving the popular idea of her American parens patriae that “the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants are undeserving recipients of full membership” (Gash et al., 2020, p. 53). Yet, Gilbert’s situation is even more precarious as it exemplifies the abovementioned double burden

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(cf. Rollo, 2018). Although he is already 19 years old, he is infantilized twice over by the US legal system as the undocumented child of non-European parents. Contrary to his younger sister, who is an American citizen, he is effectively landlocked because of his status. Hence, Rigby pictures Helen traveling back and forth between Guatemala and the United States to visit her parents (00:14:00). Gilbert, on the other hand, is filmed having to find solace in phone calls (00:08:20) and Skype conversations (00:17:55). Simón further elaborates on the treachery of this neoliberal, Athenian approach to childhood in a scene that is palpably uncomfortable because of its disavowal of the “childhood innocence ideal” (cf. Bennett et al., 2017). Simón sits a small group of Latinx students in front of her camera and begins launching a list of politically loaded questions at them, ranging from “Do you think teachers who voted for 187 should teach at this school?” (00:10:38) to “How does [the word ‘illegal alien’] make you feel?” (00:11:20). Thus, she seems to be testing the popular presumption that “children exist in a space beyond, above, outside the political” because they are supposed to be “noncombatants whom we protect from the harsh realities of the adult world” (Jenkins, 1998, p. 2). Because the scene is taking place in the school’s library, the symbolic epicenter of all knowledge, the school librarian eventually joins in on their conversation, as Simón obliquely warns us for his intervention in a voice-over: “Making this film has made me really examine who we are as teachers and what we do to our kids. I realized that even if 187 never gets enforced, the damage has already been done” (00:37:55). Seemingly unaware of the astuteness and sophistication that the children have been showing prior to his participation, Mr. Piepmeyer chimes in by disguising his patronizing views with deceivingly harmless remarks that appear to hark back to the Western homology between the nonEuropean Other and the child (cf. Rollo, 2018). Rather than conversing with the children, he lectures them by equating “illegal immigrants” (00:38:30) with extra mouths to “feed and clothe” (00:38:20). In his soliloquy, he also states that immigrants are unwilling to “start working towards citizenship” (00:38:48) and claims that “all of [those] that aren’t legal” (00:40:28) inevitably end up littering the streets of Los Angeles. Strengthened by the benevolent presence of Simón’s camera, the students

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riposte with a series of clever remarks; “some people have luck and they have the chance to be, uh, American citizens but not all of us do” (00:38:55); “well, now my mom is 38 and she knows very well English but they still don’t, don’t wanna her to be an American citizen” (00:39:02); “we know that we don’t belong here but, uh, we came here for a better, uh, opportunity” (00:39:10); “American people [throw trash on the streets] and […] legal people do too” (00:40:37); “[the country] ain’t yours, it’s everybody’s” (00:40:54). In this interaction between an adult authority figure and “child educational subjects” (Smith, 2012, p. 30), Simón unveils childhood innocence to be a “contradictory concept constructed by adults for adults” (Robinson, 2011, p. 117). By capturing how the librarian’s attitude becomes defensive and hostile toward the children as their conversation progresses, Simón suggests that the man is increasingly taken aback by how articulate these students turn out to be. Indeed, toward the end of the library scene, Mr. Piepmeyer is filmed sheepishly smiling and chuckling at Simón’s camera (00:40:53) when it seems to dawn on him that the lecture he intended to give escalated into a debate. His surprise could be ascribed to the children’s unexpected understanding of “difficult knowledge” (cf. Britzman, 1998)—that is, information that has traditionally been considered as traumatizing for children, such as sex, death, and politics (cf. Silin, 1995). However, in Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary and Sin País, the notion of difficult knowledge proves to be no more than an imposition on children by adults who use it to keep the adult–child power relationship intact and keep the mutually exclusive worlds of adults and children separate. Simón’s film seems to confirm that adults select knowledge that is deemed inappropriate “in the name of protecting childhood innocence” (Robinson & Davies, 2008, p. 344) only to naturalize the difference between adults and children, and therefore to reassure adults in their understanding of the world. As demonstrated by Simón and Rigby, this adult gatekeeping of difficult knowledge is “ethically violent” (Hopkins, 2013) because it only serves to constrain the ways in which children can fend for themselves. Instead of teaching them how to negotiate and respond to the knowledge that might prove difficult,

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adult gatekeepers essentially muzzle child subjects by insisting on their innocence. With the footage that follows the library scene, Simón signifies that the children’s rhetorical victory over Mr. Piepmeyer is, unfortunately, no more than a serendipitous blip—an exception to the rule according to which children are assumed to lack cognitive, emotional, and moral capacities and are therefore not to be treated as full citizens of a democratic polity (cf. Rehfeld, 2011). In clips that mimic the absurdity of Hunter S. Thompson’s 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,2 it is the adults—the people who are allowed to vote on difficult knowledge—who demonstrate questionable mental capacities. Toward the end of the film, Diane asks Laura for another interview to “explain [herself ]” (00:41:48) with regard to some of the statements that she made earlier, out of concern that her words might be “taken out of context or even in context” to make her appear “hardlined” (00:41:43). Diane’s clarification is not a rectification: she does not feel guilty about her words and neither does she regret voting in favor of Proposition 187. Instead, she declares that she felt the need to defend her views in order to be “understood, not misunderstood” (00:41:50) because, in her previous interview, “Laura mentioned that there is teachers that don’t feel [she] should be here” (00:41:57). When Simón asks Diane whether she ever felt “discriminated” (00:42:30), she mutters: “Not until yesterday, when you told me people think I didn’t belong here!” (00:42:34). She then starts giggling self-consciously, as if suddenly aware of the irony of feeling victimized because she voted for a blatantly discriminatory proposition. To illustrate the consequences of her vote—the severity of which seems to escape Diane—Simón moves on to tell us that Mayra’s mother no longer allows her to interview Mayra, because a neighbor suggested that Simón “may one day turn her child in” (00:44:07). 2

There are no discernable references to Thompson’s novel in Simón’s documentary, but her title is suspiciously similar to Thompson’s. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is often considered to be the foundational text of Gonzo journalism: a style of reporting that is irrational, grotesque, and unapologetically subjective because of the irrational, grotesque, and unapologetically subjective topics on which it tends to report (cf. Alexander and Isager, 2018). In this sense, Simón’s directing is not too far removed from the basic tenets of Gonzo journalism. Additionally, the novel’s subtitle A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream directly applies to the premise of Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary.

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Nevertheless, it is Carmen—a Spanish-speaking parent—activist who came to the United States as an immigrant herself—who delivers the biggest blow in this sequence when she discloses that she is “a bad person” (00:47:11 translation in the original) because she also voted in favor of 187. Her logic for doing so is strikingly close to Diane Lee’s and Mr. Piepmeyer’s: This used to be a close community. It was very tranquil. People would take walks. We all knew each other. And now, you can’t even take a walk. There are shootings. I’ve already been in two. And why? It’s the people who have recently immigrated. They’re not interested in cleanliness. They’re not interested in union. They’re not interested in helping one another. They just take services. Take services. Take services. But they give nothing. That’s what I dislike about them. (00:46:26; translation in the original)

Simón follows this shock revelation up with Arcelia’s reaction to the news that Carmen—Arcelia’s housemate and fellow activist—voted in favor of the law against which both of them organized the first demonstration in Los Angeles (00:37:02). Having surmounted her initial perplexity, Arcelia delivers a climactic speech that diagnoses the core issue of Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary: If you point to someone and you say they are the cause and they are the problem, then you can make people believe that if you make them go away somehow, your life will be better. And not only will your life be better, you will be worth so much more. And I think sometimes people need that sense. (00:48:25)

What Arcelia appears to hint at is that rationalizing “the scapegoating […] of Latino migrants” (Hernández, 2008, p. 50), like rationalizing the incapacitation of children, allows for the construction of a clearly divided world that answers to a set of seemingly natural and universal rules that only benefit the legal adult. In turn, such sophism enables the emergence of social stigma: an “attribute that is deeply discrediting” because it can stigmatize “one type of possessor” while confirming “the usualness of another” (Goffman, 2009, p. 3). The maliciousness of such dialectic

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mechanism is that it gives rise to discourses of “deservedness” (cf. Gash et al., 2020), according to which migrants who manage to stay away from the stigma of pre-established images of migration (cf. Schuster & Majidi, 2015) are promised upward mobility (cf. Kasinitz, 2008). Carmen’s stance should therefore not come as a surprise. As an immigrant herself, she is aware of the fact that belonging to an oppressed minority group is not advantageous and she therefore seeks to avoid the stigma of association with the group, even by analogy (cf. Kasinitz, 2008). For Carmen, this comes down to differentiating herself from “the people who have recently immigrated” (00:46:26), which leads her to imply that her kind were model immigrants—a reasoning that echoes Russian-American Diane’s problematic stance on immigration.

Dismantling Deservedness In Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary and Sin País, documentary makers Simón and Rigby draw attention to the discourses of deservedness that surround their protagonists, who are both immigrants and children. This avowal of deservedness can be linked to the modernday assumption that it is the immigrants themselves, rather than their receiving society, who are responsible for their successful societal incorporation. Hence, based on the same neoliberal discourse of enterprise, immigrant children are also tasked with their own self-actualization (cf. Smith, 2012). Throughout their films, Simón and Rigby give real-life examples of immigrant children who are regarded by their entourage as undeserving of protection, resources, and care despite their best efforts to fulfill the “childhood innocence ideal” (cf. Bennett et al., 2017; Duschinsky, 2013). Their denouncement of this flawed logic culminates when they reveal that Mayra and the Mejía children are not rewarded for their exemplary behavior after all. In the end, Sam, Elida, and Gilbert “remain in limbo” (00:19:07), and Mayra and her mother are forced to move back to El Salvador (00:49:18), having been duped by “a world that simply isn’t willing to invest in them” (00:49:37).

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These unsatisfying endings allow Simón and Rigby to expose the wide range of strategies of responsibilization that, in the United States, reassign the societal responsibility for tackling inequality and disadvantage to the migrants themselves and their children. In one fell swoop, the documentary makers also demonstrate that the dominant narrative of how immigrants can overcome adversity through hard work and perseverance is inadequate (cf. Abo-Zena, 2018): it only disregards all the obstacles that are beyond their control and, in so doing, obscures and reinforces unequal relations of power (cf. Smith, 2012).

References Abo-Zena, M. M. (2018). Supporting immigrant-origin children: Grounding teacher education in critical developmental perspectives and practices. The Teacher Educator, 53(3), 263–276. Alexander, R., & Isager, C. (Eds.). (2018). Fear and loathing worldwide: Gonzo journalism beyond Hunter S. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. Bennett, C., Harden, J., & Anstey, S. (2017). The silencing effects of the childhood innocence ideal: The perceptions and practices of fathers in educating their children about sexuality. Sociology of Health and Illness, 39 (8), 1365–1380. Britzman, D. P. (1998). Lost subjects, contested objects: Toward a psychoanalytic inquiry of learning. State University of New York Press. Contreras, R. (2017, July 13). Why the term “La Raza” has complicated roots in the US. Southern California Public Radio. https://www.scpr.org/news/2017/ 07/13/73744/why-the-term-la-raza-has-complicated-roots-in-the/ Das Gupta, M. (2014). “Don’t deport our daddies”: Gendering state deportation practices and immigrant organizing. Gender and Society, 28(1), 83–109. De Genova, N., and Peutz, N. (2010). The deportation regime: Sovereignty, space, and the freedom of movement. Duke University Press. Duschinsky, R. (2013). Childhood innocence: Essence, education, and performativity. Textual Practice, 27 (5), 763–781. Estin, A. L. (2018). Child migrants and child welfare: Toward a best interests approach. Washington University Global Studies Law Review, 17 (3), 589– 614.

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Gash, A., Tichenor, D., Chavez, A., & Musselman, M. (2020). Framing kids: Children, immigration reform, and same-sex marriage. Politics, Groups, and Identities, 8(1), 44–70. Goffman, E. (2009). Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Prentice Hall. Golash-Boza, T., and Hondagneu-Sotelo, P. (2013). Latino immigrant men and the deportation crisis: A gendered racial removal program. Latino Studies; London, 11(3), 271–292. Hernández, D. M. (2008). Pursuant to deportation: Latinos and immigrant detention. Latino Studies; London, 6 (1–2), 35–63. Hopkins, L. (2013). Innocence, protection and failure: Bringing the child subject to the centre of the politics of the family. A Response to Cristyn Davies and Kerry Robinson. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood , 14 (1), 66–71. Jenkins, H. (1998). Introduction: Childhood innocence and other modern myths. In H. Jenkins (Ed.), The children’s culture reader (pp. 1–40). NYU Press. Jenks, C. (1996). Key Ideas: Childhood . Routledge. Kasinitz, P. (2008). Becoming American, becoming minority, getting ahead: The role of racial and ethnic status in the Upward Mobility of the Children of Immigrants. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 620 (1), 253–269. Lazo, R. (2018). Trajectories of ExChange: Toward histories of Latino/a literature. In J. Morán González and L. Lomas (Eds.), The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature (pp. 190–215). Cambridge University Press. Pechtelidis, Y., and Stamou, A. G. (2017). The “competent child” in times of crisis: A synthesis of foucauldian with critical discourse analysis in Greek pre-school curricula. Palgrave Communications; London, 3(1), 1–11. Rehfeld, A. (2011). The Child as Democratic Citizen. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 633(1), 141–166. Rigby, T. (2012, August 9). Sin País. In POV Season 25. PBS. Robinson, K. (2011). In the name of ‘childhood innocence’: A Discursive Exploration of the Moral Panic Associated with Childhood and Sexuality. Cultural Studies Review, 14 (2). Robinson, K., & Davies, C. (2008). ‘She’s Kickin’ Ass, that’s what She’s Doing!’: Deconstructing Childhood ‘Innocence’ in Media Representations. Australian Feminist Studies, 23(57), 343–358. Rollo, T. (2018). Feral children: Settler colonialism, progress, and the figure of the child. Settler Colonial Studies, 8(1), 60–79.

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Santa Ana, O. (2002). Brown tide rising: Metaphors of Latinos in contemporary American public discourse (1 edition). University of Texas Press. Schuster, L., & Majidi, N. (2015). Deportation stigma and re-migration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 41(4), 635–652. Silin, J. G. (1995). Sex, death, and the education of children: Our passion for ignorance in the age of AIDS. Teachers College Press. Simón, L. (1997, July 1). Fear and learning at Hoover elementary. In POV Season 10. PBS. Sin País (Without Country). (2013, June 30). New Day Films. https://www.new day.com/film/sin-pa%C3%ADs-without-country Smith, K. (2012). Producing Governable Subjects: Images of Childhood. Old and New. Childhood, 19 (1), 24–37. Thompson, A., Torres, R. M., Swanson, K., Blue, S. A., & Hernández, Ó. M. H. (2019). Re-conceptualising agency in migrant children from Central America and Mexico. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45 (2), 235– 252.

7 The Group Experience of Migrant Citizens

In Made in LA (Carracedo & Bahar, 2007) and Don’t Tell Anyone (Shwer, 2015), documentary makers Almudena Carracedo, Robert Bahar, and Mikaela Shwer zoom in on undocumented Latinx immigrants who come up for their rights thanks to grassroots initiatives in their sanctuary cities. In Made in LA, the undocumented seamstresses Maura, María, and Lupe decide to sue Forever 21 for labor malpractices, despite their own precarious legal status. Don’t Tell Anyone, on the other hand, focuses on the difficult coming-of-age process of undocumented New Yorker Angy, a Youtubing DREAMer1 with college ambitions.

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The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (DREAM Act) was first introduced in 2001 as a bipartisan bill aimed at students “with good moral character” who had arrived in the United States before the age of 16 and who intended to attend college. The Act was meant to allow eligible undocumented students to obtain legal status. Since 2001, multiple versions of the bill have been introduced. So far, none received enough votes to be passed.

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Sanctuary jurisdictions2 emerged in the 1980s, when certain cities, counties, and states began declining federal detention requests made by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) related to undocumented migrants. Over time, these spaces became something resembling a national network of movements that argued for the protection of the basic rights of all those fleeing for safety, including undocumented people (cf. Hintjens & Pouri, 2014). After 9/11, this network of movements picked up again when the PATRIOT Act made it possible for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to ask local police to not only call the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) if they suspected that interviewees were in violation of any immigration-related regulations but also to detain without bond anyone found guilty of such offenses (cf. Ridgley, 2008). A number of so-called sanctuary cities refused to cooperate, thus openly questioning the power of the US nation-state over its urban polities. Their attitude was in line with a growing unease in blue states—liberal bastions such as California and New York—surrounding the nationalistic and protectionist behavior of the US government after 9/11. In an age of prolonged international capitalism and ever-expanding globalization, the manifest desire of sanctuary cities to glocalize the nation-state coincided with a growing awareness that the rights of documented citizens should extend to all economically active social actors (cf. Habermas, 2003). Post-national discourses of this kind contend that human rights should be universal and, therefore, applicable to immigrants on the basis of personhood rather than membership in a political unit (cf. Soysal, 1994). Shot post-9/11 in two sanctuary cities, Made in LA and Don’t Tell Anyone give voice to Latinx migrants who not only promote this kind of thinking, but who also embody it and put it into practice. Both films are children of their time in their insistence on the supranational 2 It is unclear how many boxes a city/county/state needs to tick in order to qualify for the title of “sanctuary jurisdiction,” but some cities proffer their intention to become or remain a city of sanctuary independently, such as New York City (cf. Ferreras-Copeland & Menchaca, n.d.). However, certain jurisdictions operate as sanctuaries for years without any formal declaration. Los Angeles, for example, only recently declared itself “a city of sanctuary,” even though this resolution only reaffirmed the city’s existing policies (cf. Smith & Ormseth, 2019).

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universality of human rights, the multiple transnational memberships of immigrants, and the subnational social networks and practices that function as alternatives to traditional state-based citizenship models.

Transnational Urban Citizenship The opening scenes of Made in LA and Don’t Tell Anyone set the tone for their narratives by emphasizing the transnational, hyphenated existence of their protagonists. Angy, the protagonist of Don’t Tell Anyone, as well as Lupe, María, and Maura of Made in LA are depicted as being neither here, in their US sanctuary cities, nor there, in their Latin American countries of origin, but somewhere in between. Their nation is a hyphenation: “a spiritual bilocation, the sense of being in two places at once” (Pérez Firmat, 2012, p. xi). Made in LA opens with a frame of the glowing sun, slowly rising above the streets of a still empty, yet visibly very large urban center: the city of Los Angeles. As Carracedo and Bahar’s camera continues rolling, early risers are seen crossing the street, shop owners are opening their stores, workers are sweeping the sidewalks, vendors are rolling their merchandise out onto the streets. When a disembodied female voice starts speaking Spanish, it suddenly becomes clear that these sleepy Angelenos are Latinx. They are depicted as being surrounded by a plethora of English traffic signs, street names, and billboards. The English subtitles that accompany the woman’s Spanish speech only strengthen the already overwhelming sense of bilingual bifurcation that is evoked by these first few seconds of film: “When everything started, we didn’t know what was going to happen, we just knew what we had to do” (00:00:20; translation in the original). Cutting the woman off before she has time to explain herself, the camera then discloses her identity: Lupe, who is getting ready for work—like the people in Carracedo and Bahar’s B-roll. On her way there, the camera hovers for a split second over a street sign that reads “Fashion District.” Eventually, Carracedo and Bahar lose track of Lupe and, instead, cut to a kaleidoscopic sequence of various anonymous hands slaving away behind sowing machines, the whirring sound of which Carracedo and Bahar superimpose over images of the shop owners

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shown earlier. Whereas before Lupe’s appearance it was not clear what these vendors were selling, the camera is now retracing its own steps and giving us a better look at what the vendors are exhibiting: cheap-looking, flimsy garments that have been “made in LA” by the likes of Lupe. The next protagonist that Carracedo and Bahar introduce to us is Maura. As she is walking to work, she tells the camera in Spanish: “We were scared, but we couldn’t let fear paralyze us” (00:00:56; translation in the original). Third protagonist María, on the other hand, is already sitting behind her sowing machine, working on some multicolored zippers, as she confides in Spanish: “Our only option was to fight” (00:01:03; translation in the original). Once again, a dizzying assortment of images overwhelms the spectator: nameless, faceless people—some of whom seem to have brought their infant children to work—cutting, sowing, and ironing away at an array of fabrics. The nauseating repetitiveness of these frames turns into panic when the camera walks in on the owners of this sweatshop-like place. Their faces blurred, they are heard saying in broken Spanish, which signals their non-Latinx background, “What is going on?” before slamming their door shut (00:01:51; translation in the original). As the narrative of Made in LA slowly unfolds, it becomes clear that what these women have been cryptically hinting at in the opening scene is the lawsuit that they have filed via the grassroots organization Centro de trabajadoras de costura (Garment Worker Center) against the owners of Forever 21, an LA-based international clothing brand that sells midend clothing for extraordinarily low prices. As it turns out, these prices are only made possible by imposing inhumane working conditions and salaries that are well below minimum wage on undocumented workers like Maura, María, and Lupe. Once the harsh reality of Carracedo and Bahar’s main characters has been made clear, the documentary makers begin to focus on the intricate, bicultural background of their three protagonists. With the help of photos, videotapes, and oral accounts of their pre-LA pasts, Carracedo and Bahar allude to who these women were before they crossed the border—illegally. María was born on a Mexican ranch, where she met her current husband at the age of 14. Together, they fled to the United States when María turned 18 and settled in LA, where their children

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were born. Lupe, however, is single and childless. After the death of her mother in Mexico, she decided to run away to her sister in LA, who had been living there illegally for some time already. Finally, Maura reveals that she left three little children behind in El Salvador 18 years ago. At 22, she was a single mother who could not make ends meet in her wartorn country. To explain the desperation of her situation, Maura plays an old VHS of her aging, ailing parents urging her to make enough money before they pass away, for the sake of her toddlers: “Maura, start working. We need your help. Because if any of us die, who will take care of these kids?” (00:07:26; translation in the original). The parallel between all three of these accounts is that when the women talk about coming aquí (“here”), they are referring to Los Angeles—not the United States. Their past may be set in the nationstates of Mexico and El Salvador, but their present is very much confined to their current city of residence. Their movements are limited between home and work, all within the periphery of LA. Over the course of Carracedo and Bahar’s film, it becomes clear that their illegality regulates their mobility: they are only safe within the borders of their sanctuary city (cf. Chauvin & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2014). However, this urban confinement also offers them a grassroots network that provides them with just enough agency to sue Forever 21, for example. A similar grassroots activism empowers undocumented New Yorker Angy Rivera, Shwer’s protagonist in Don’t Tell Anyone. For a long time, Angy’s life largely consisted of an imposed house arrest, as the opening scene of Don’t Tell Anyone seems to suggest. Moving around the different rooms of her family’s condo, Angy appears sandwiched between the rooms where we find her mother Maria, her little sister Gaby, and her two younger brothers Luis and Saul. Angy provides us with a heartfelt voice-over—in General American English—as the camera hovers over her bedroom, focusing every so often on one of her colorful drawings, handmade bracelets, or meaningful objects, such as her yellow, blue, and red handbag, imprinted with the word COLOMBIA:

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Being undocumented isn’t something we can put in the back of our heads. When I wake up, it’s the first thing I think about. Sometimes, in my dreams, I’m undocumented too. This is more than a legalization struggle, but a psychological war that measures character and patience. They want to see who will break down first. My mom raised me in an environment where speaking out about your status is wrong. She taught me the same fear. No le digas a nadie, she would say. Don’t tell anyone. But I started seeing things differently. (00:01:51)

Next, Shwer cuts to a room where nearly all members of this singleparent family unit are gathered. For the first time, they are pictured together—not out of necessity or lack of space, but because they actually seem to want to spend time with each other. As Angy’s sister is eating her breakfast, Angy is sharing something funny on her smartphone with her mother, while one of her brothers is typing away on a laptop. When some Latin music starts playing in the background, mother and daughter begin dancing with each other, joking around on what appears to be another slow morning (00:03:31). Like Made in LA, whose Spanish-speaking cast finds itself moored in an English-speaking environment, Don’t Tell Anyone centers on a hyphenated protagonist, as implied by the consistently bilingual interactions between the members of her household. With the help of photographs, Angy explains in English that she was born in Colombia. At the age of three, her mother sold everything that she owned to finance a one-way trip, not to the United States but “to New York” (00:04:13). As it turns out, Angy belongs to a mixed-status family: the three children Maria had after Angy were all born in the United States and are, therefore, US citizens—unlike their foreign-born mother and older sister. Hence, the threat of deportation hangs over this family like the sword of Damocles. As Angy explains: In New York, we don’t have to drive, so none of us have ever had to drive without a license. But in other states, you have mixed-status families where parents work and they need to drive without a license and their children are citizens. So a routine traffic stop could be deportation for the undocumented people. The children are put in foster care or are deported with the parents. So I think, for a mixed-status family, the biggest fear

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is always deportation. My siblings are citizens but my mom and I could still be deported. (00:05:10)

Like the Angelenos of Made in LA, Angy also makes a clear distinction between the United States, a country with which she has little affiliation, and the city of New York—the space in which she dwells because of the sanctuary it offers. In this case, New York City’s well-connected transportation system saves Angy from having to drive without a license and possibly be deported for that offense. Her kind of “transnational urban citizenship” takes place between the urban nodes of her transnational, global city network (cf. Varsanyi, 2006). Despite their cross-cultural ties and their transborder membership to their sending and receiving countries, all these women are citizens of Los Angeles and New York first, and noncitizens of the United States second. When the protagonists of No le digas a nadie and Made in LA are forced to travel to other places in the United States for their activism, they are forced to do so illegally. Only in their cities of residence can they find relative safety because of the freedom they are given to roam around, undocumented, in search of schooling, jobs, housing, entertainment, and socialization. Hence, they are living proof that de facto citizenship can be conducted on both a trans- and subnational level. One can be mentally torn between countries but physically anchored in an urban center.

Cultural Citizenship and Bare Life Transnational discourses often encounter skepticism because a prerequisite sine qua non for political, democratic participation is social solidarity fostered within a particular affective community (cf. Calhoun, 2007; Turner, 1993). Historically, “citizenship romanticism” imagined the bordered nation-state as the only propitious fosterer of social solidarity, premising its “state of democratic belonging or inclusion […] on a conception of community that is bounded and exclusive” (Bosniak, 2008, p. 6). However, when citizenship is understood as a set of institutionally embedded social practices, the affective community does not have to be provided by borders that include some and exclude others:

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Rather than a body of rights granted “ready-made” by the state and attached to individual persons, however, citizenship rights are only one potential outcome of a configuration of national membership rules. These rules are normalized and transmitted via national laws and institutions (common law and statutory law, courts and judicial offices). Whether or not these rules are converted into actual universal rights depends fully on the local contexts—the social and political place—in which they are activated. (Somers, 1993, p. 589)

In this sense, Made in LA and Don’t Tell Anyone can be seen as their protagonists’ journey of discovery of the transformative potential of associational citizenship. The films abound with examples of how the rights-claiming potential of collective action lies dormant until their protagonists “speak up” and stand up for themselves, thus proving that “collective action can enable marginalized communities to make claims on the state and society which can then expand the boundaries of the political community” (Zimmerman, 2010, p. 45). As a matter of fact, over the course of Don’t Tell Anyone, Angy transforms into one of the most well-known spokespeople of the New York State Youth Leadership Council—an “undocumented youth led organization” that strives “to give undocumented youth the tools and space to organize and create change in [their] communities” (About Us, n.d.). By contrast, Made in LA captures how Maura, María, and Lupe become more and more actively involved in their local Centro de trabajadoras de costura (Garment Worker Center) once they realize, as Lupe puts it, that “when people start to organize, they stop being victims” (00:16:50; translation in the original). In both films, organizations such as the New York State Youth Leadership Council and the Centro de trabajadoras de costura are presented as platforms for a plethora of associational activities (e.g. meetings, rallies, protest marches, boycotts) that transform the noncitizenship of their protagonists into cultural citizenship. Especially common in the Latinx community, cultural citizenship refers to cultural practices that create social spaces where all kinds of anti-hegemonic, oppositional, and redressive social movements are active (cf. Flores & Benmayor, 1998). In Don’t Tell Anyone, Angy’s involvement in the Council and her viral success on

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Youtube brings much-needed public attention to the DREAMers movement and to the plight of undocumented, noncitizen college students like herself. In Made in LA, the social space and affective community created by the Centro de trabajadoras de costura allows the seamstresses of Forever 21 to bring their former employer to trial, based on the belief that even noncitizens have inalienable, supranational human rights. Indeed, Carracedo and Bahar present the Centro and its rallies, protest marches, and meetings as the only social space where undocumented, solitary nobodies can become oppositional, unified somebodies. As Lupe explains: Most immigrants come to this country and we think that there are many jobs. Well, there are many jobs, but they’re jobs of exploitation. They do all the jobs like domestic work, garment work, day laborers, janitors. All the jobs that are badly paid and strenuous and that other people won’t do. But if you’re undocumented and don’t know English, you can’t do anything else. You basically don’t exist. And I tell you, because for me it was 13 years. (00:09:01; translation in the original)

Walking through the streets of Los Angeles, Maura reveals that she too ended up as a seamstress “because they don’t ask for papers or experience” (00:10:09; translation in the original). Passing by a random wire fence, she draws the camera’s attention to pieces of paper hanging from the fence: job offers whose mediocre pay and substandard working conditions are obvious from the sloppy and irregular handwriting of the ads. After showing the camera in which buildings these continually hiring, semi-clandestine sweatshops are located across LA’s Fashion District, Maura bumps into a couple of former co-workers, who corroborate Maura and Lupe’s stories of low wages, insecure working conditions, verbal abuse by their employers, and so on (00:10:30). In a reflective voice-over, Maura reveals that, like her former co-workers, for a long time she also “put up with it” until she was fired without any notice or pay (00:11:24; translation in the original). Thinking “That’s enough! I am not stealing! I am working!” (00:11:35; translation in the original),

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she “armed [herself ] with courage” and “found help” at the Centro de trabajadoras de costura (00:11:41; translation in the original). María also feels that, at the Centro, “all [her] problems go away” because it brings her “peace, calm” to be able to “[share] with others everything you experience at the factories and at home” (00:24:58; translation in the original). Lupe adds: “At protests, no one sees you as inferior because you are a simple worker. They make you feel like, for the first time, you are important” (00:25:26; translation in the original; Fig. 7.1). Carracedo juxtaposes her protagonists’ accounts with that of Joann Lo, the lead organizer of the Centro. As a second-generation Asian American whose immigrant parents did not speak English either, she sees “a connection to the workers here” and knows “the difficulties that they face” (00:13:12). To illustrate the urgency and necessity of Joann’s activism, Carracedo and Bahar splice in a meeting at the Centro, where Joann is pictured eagerly listening to harrowing testimonies: stories of people earning less than $200 a week for 12-hour work days, bosses who unexpectedly lower wages, rats and cockroaches crawling around the factories, and so on (00:13:30). Using the Centro to teach “undocumented workers” that the policy of the State of California is to “protect the rights of all workers, documented or undocumented” (00:12:51), Joann and her co-workers encourage the attendees of the Centro to stand up for themselves. Eventually, they even manage to convince 19 ex-employees to testify against Forever 21 in a collective lawsuit—the culminating event of Carracedo and Bahar’s film. Particularly interested in Lupe’s political awakening, Carracedo and Bahar follow her during an educational trip to New York City. Walking around the reconstruction of a nineteenth-century sweatshop, Lupe catches sight of a historical black-and-white picture of a crowd of exploited workers picketing in the streets. Exclaiming: “This crap continues the same!” (00:37:23; translation in the original), she grabs pen and paper to write down “what the banners [on the photograph] say” for the Centro’s upcoming rallies: “UNITY IS STRENGTH,” “ORGANIZE,” and “WE CONDEMN CHILD LABOR” (00:37:29). Indeed, the Centro’s rallying cries and mottos are reminiscent of their predecessors’ Marxist chants: “United we will win!” (00:16:41), “SI SE PUEDE ” (00:16:54), “Pay Your Workers” (00:18:38), and “el pueblo unido jamás

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Fig. 7.1 Made in LA (Carracedo & Bahar, 2007; screenshots by the author)

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será vencido” (00:27:11). Curiously, the approach that Lupe and the other members of the Centro adopt in their journey to cultural citizenship is very different from that of the youth activists of the Council. In Shwer’s documentary, filmed about a decade after Carracedo and Bahar’s, cultural citizenship is no longer about claiming one’s rights by daring to become visible but about becoming publicly visible in order to trigger a rights-claiming debate. Like Carracedo and Bahar, Shwer chronicles how her protagonist learns to overcome her fear of speaking out and drawing attention to herself. As it turns out, prior to joining the New York State Youth Leadership Council, Angy had appeared in the New York Daily News for creating a fundraising webpage where she sold “education bracelets” (00:10:32): handmade friendship bracelets meant to pay for her college tuition. The article was read by a “random stranger” who offered to cover Angy’s tuition for an entire semester (00:11:20). Thanks to the stranger’s act of kindness, Angy had an epiphany: “That action reaffirmed that saying your story and sharing it with people does make an impact, because if I wouldn’t have spoken out, if I wouldn’t have said anything, this wouldn’t have happened” (00:11:31). She then started gathering information about organizations, attending events, and eventually joined the New York State Youth Leadership Council, where she met “other people [her] age, who were also undocumented, who understood what it was like to be rejected from these opportunities” (00:12:08). Shwer goes on to rely on a wide range of audiovisual material—from Angy’s viral Youtube videos about her plight as an undocumented college student (00:13:39; 00:18:28) to handheld, low-quality recordings of her protest rallies with the Council (00:30:20), and animations of her drawings (00:35:30)—so as to supplement her own footage of Angy’s growing assertiveness. Unlike Carracedo and Bahar’s protagonists, Angy and her fellow DREAMers seem to be relying on “re-articulatory practices” (cf. NegrónGonzales, 2014): to critique the structural exclusions imposed on them because of the metric of citizenship, they recast their apparent “insider” status when they disclose during rallies that they are actually—in the eyes of the law—outsiders. Whereas the Centro insists on its separation from the rest of society by presenting itself as a modern-day proletariat, the

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members of the Council organize “coming out events” where they reveal publicly that they are undocumented, thus proving their resemblance and closeness to the—presumably documented—crowd. This queering of immigrant rights (cf. Beltrán, 2014) has, in recent years, become an established discursive method to denounce the state’s criminalization of undocumented youths and promote a queer democracy—a political model that rejects secrecy in favor of more aggressive forms of nonconformist visibility, voice, and protest. As Angy explains, “like you have coming out of the closet for LGBTQ, you have coming out of the shadows with your immigration status” (00:12:58). Shwer uses older footage to disclose that the Council’s members first “came out” in 2010 in front of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Office in Manhattan (00:12:38). Wearing a white T-shirt with the word “UNDOCUMENTED” spray-painted in red block letters, Angy can be seen standing in the street, mic in hand, addressing the people inside the ICE building with the following words: What does coming out mean? Coming out means to publicly reveal or acknowledge something about yourself that nobody knows. […] Undocumented is just a label, but it doesn’t define me. I know what it feels like to not go to school, to feel like you can’t even afford it, I know what it feels like to be stuck between two cultures where none of them is yours. So for all those reasons, I stand here today and tell everybody that my name is Angy and I’m undocumented. (00:13:50)

Angy reveals to us that her coming out was a personal affair; it was about exposing all the hidden truths in her life. On the day of her public coming out, she managed to “be real” and finally be able to free herself from the shame of her “big secret” (00:14:39)—which she discloses shortly hereafter. Although the linkages that connect sexuality and migration and that are typical of today’s queering immigrant discourse (cf. Beltrán, 2014) were not yet part of the picture in the early 2000s, the liberating power of speaking out is also a central concern in Carracedo and Bahar’s film. In intimate exchanges with Carracedo and Bahar’s camera, all three of their protagonists make deeply personal confessions in an effort to speak

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up—albeit not too loudly. Lupe, it turns out, did not leave Mexico right after her mother’s passing: she suffered years of abuse at the hands of her father and six brothers before attempting suicide, surviving, and eventually fleeing to the United States (00:20:51). Maura, in turn, discloses that she could have died while crossing the border: her coyote hid her in the trunk of his car and, throughout the entire journey, Maura feared she might suffocate (00:41:09). Shockingly, she admits having just hired a coyote herself so as to facilitate her sons’ impending crossing (00:41:33). Shortly after her confession, we learn that the coyote in question has disappeared, along with her children. Maura is shown spending more than two weeks fretting, not knowing whether her sons are dead or alive, before finally receiving a phone call from El Salvador. It turns out the boys were arrested and detained in Mexico, long before reaching the US–Mexico border, and were deported back to their country of origin, where they were able to notify their mother (00:46:53). Finally, Carracedo and Bahar turn to María, who explains that the husband to whom she lovingly referred at the beginning of the film has, in fact, been consistently drinking up his paychecks, thus putting additional financial and emotional strain on his wife. One day, María decided to stand up for herself, partly thanks to the assertiveness training she received at the Centro: “He didn’t have any right to keep me at home obeying him. I also have rights. At least I can defend myself now […]. So we’re separating. We’re not living together. It’s better to be alone with my children than to be with him. So now I’m taking action, not crying!” (00:52:20; translation in the original). However, most of the other members of the Centro are depicted as struggling to speak up. Lupe, whose exceptional dedication is rewarded with the paid position of “Latino organizer” at the Centro, even has to reprimand them at a meeting: [Lupe] Since no one wants to take the megaphone, and we are all plaintiffs against Forever 21, we’re going to ask for 5 volunteers. If no one wants to do it, we’ll pick from the sheet. [Woman 1] That’s just a way to pressure us! [Woman 2] Some of us shout, and others don’t. [Man] Why don’t we look for those who can shout? [Lupe] You won’t lose your voice

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if you shout for 5 minutes. [Man] You’re saying that now with a little bit of arrogance, right? There are leaders among us with that ability. [Lupe] It’s easy for you to say because you haven’t spent years shouting over the megaphone, and when we lose our voices, no one wants to take it on. (00:43:00; translation in the original)

What seems to be at stake here is the “politicization of bare life”— a state-imposed public revelation of that part of human life that should remain private (cf. Agamben, 1998). For legal citizens, bare life is “perennially and incessantly banned from the political and legal order” (De Genova, 2010, p. 37; emphasis in the original). State power roots itself in the production of a distinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion, so as to produce and then safeguard the privacy of the bare lives of documented citizens, as opposed to the forced exposition and therefore politicization of the bare lives of deportable noncitizens. Seen in this light, Made in LA appears ambiguous as to the validity of the Centro’s insistence on the rewards of speaking out. After all, the Centro’s case was initially dismissed and Forever 21 countersued the 19 plaintiffs for defamation. However, they appealed and waited for 26 months before the court revived their appeal. Forever 21 agreed to an out-ofcourt settlement, but because the case did not go to trial, the plaintiffs never managed to set a precedent in US law; they failed to have the court admit that “the systematic use of sweatshops by somebody who calls themselves a retailer is a violation of the law,” as per the Centro’s attorney Julie Su (00:19:40). Carracedo and Bahar do imply, however, that the lives of their protagonists improved after the lawsuit, despite its disappointing outcome. María, now a single mother, is still working as a seamstress, but she never puts in more than eight hours a day (01:04:26). After the lawsuit, Maura had a hard time finding work in the garment industry, so she decided to focus on improving her English: “I’m studying to get my citizenship to bring over my sons, who are still there” (01:05:28; translation in the original). Finally, Lupe is revealed to have become a full-time activist. She has been traveling all over the United States to speak at events and was even flown out to Hong Kong to protest against the World Trade Organization. However, the documentary closes with Lupe’s ambiguous

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confession: “The more I learn, the lonelier I feel. Ignorance somehow protects you… But then I realize I’ve come this far, and no one can take that away from me” (01:07:12; translation in the original). If Made in LA’s ending still seems to hold some hope for the future, Don’t Tell Anyone does not share the same level of enthusiasm. Thanks to her associational activities, Angy succeeds in enrolling in college for another semester after she learns that DREAMers are eligible for in-state college tuition and financial aid within the state of New York (00:38:00). However, this optimism is short-lived when we learn of the sexual abuse that she suffered at the hands of her mother’s ex-boyfriend. The only reason for which we are made privy to this information—which Shwer illustrates with a stop-motion animation of Angy’s childhood drawings (00:35:30)—is because Angy discovers that it is her abuse rather than her achievements that nominates her for a U-visa, a document that could lead to the legalization of her status (00:40:00). Since this visa is only issued to “victims of certain crimes who have suffered mental or physical abuse and are helpful to law enforcement or government officials in the investigation or prosecution of criminal activity” (Victims of Criminal Activity, 2018), it essentially rewards Angy for having been raped, as she is filmed telling her counselor Aditi. In the comfort of Aditi’s office, Angy lets her emotions loose: [To Aditi] I knew from the beginning that I was gonna feel angry. And sad. And hurt. Like, I have to look at this and think about everything. That’s the only way they’re gonna recognize me? [To the camera] It kind of feels like it didn’t really matter how much you worked or gave back or contributed. It makes me mad that being abused makes you eligible. Being raped makes you eligible but not just living here and having a family and giving back. Like that doesn’t matter, you know? (01:05:46)

In this scene, Angy seems to become fully aware of the fallaciousness of her activism so far—and, by, extension, her entire belief system. By rehashing typically American culture codes that emphasize hard work, academic achievement, and self-determination, Angy and her fellow DREAMers have actually been endorsing the notion that being Latinx and undocumented is a “deficit” (cf. Chuang & Roemer,

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2015) that needs to be surmounted. With this “rhetoric of deservingness” (cf. Chauvin & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2014), they have only been confirming that there is indeed a moral gradation in illegality between migrant noncitizens who somehow deserve legalization and those who do not. Yet, when push comes to shove, nothing comes of this deservingness, as Angy’s story demonstrates.

Mitigating Activism Even though Made in LA and Don’t Tell Anyone subtly flesh out the ambiguity surrounding the act of speaking out, they both seem to end on a rebellious, and therefore somewhat positive, note. Lupe concludes by comparing her fate with her late mother’s cooking: “It’s like when we didn’t have any food in Mexico, if my mom had any scraps of food, she’d make a yummy omelet. So you take what you have, and from something bad you can create a masterpiece” (01:07:36). Angy follows suit and, instead of focusing on the seeming uselessness of her activism, rejoices at her mother’s decision to publicly come out as well: My daughter who is among you today, Angy. You came out in public three years ago. I personally refused to support her coming out. I was more than scared; I was terrified that we would be deported. Thank God I am no longer scared. She did not listen to me, but rather found the courage to come out. That courage has helped many people today. If she had the courage, why couldn’t I? Undocumented and unafraid, I am Maria Yolanda Rivera. (01:10:43; translation in the original)

Maria’s deeply personal yet public declaration of love and support for her daughter is, first and foremost, a declaration of self-acceptance. In this sense, both films succeed in underlining how fine the line between civic life and bare life, the public and the private, the political and the personal is for their protagonists. In both films, documentary makers Carracedo, Bahar, and Shwer emphasize the importance of speaking out—not for rights-claiming

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purposes but rather to undo their protagonists’ “epidermalization of inferiority” (cf. Fanon, 2000). Made in LA and Don’t Tell Anyone actively participate in tearing down their protagonists’ oppression by creating a supportive atmosphere in which dialogue helps them overcome their feelings of shame and guilt and acquire an enhanced critical understanding of their experiences (cf. Irizarry & Raible, 2014). In the end, all four protagonists seem to come out stronger after their ordeals, not as much thanks to their somewhat successful rebellions, as to the faith they have gained in themselves throughout their process of political, legal, and mental emancipation.

References About Us. (n.d.). NYSYLC. Retrieved August 17, 2019, from https://www.nys ylc.org/what-we-do Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life (D. HellerRoazen, Trans.). Stanford University Press. Beltrán, C. (2014). “No papers, no fear”: DREAM activism, new social media, and the queering of immigrant rights. In A. Dávila & Y. M. Rivero (Eds.), Contemporary Latina/o media (pp. 245–266). NYU Press. Bennett, C., Harden, J., & Anstey, S. (2017). The silencing effects of the childhood innocence ideal: The perceptions and practices of fathers in educating their children about sexuality. Sociology of Health and Illness, 39 (8), 1365–1380. Bosniak, L. (2008). The citizen and the alien: Dilemmas of contemporary membership. Princeton University Press. Calhoun, C. (2007). Nationalism and cultures of democracy. Public Culture, 19 (1), 151–173. Carracedo, A., & Bahar, R. (2007, September 4). Made in LA. In POV Season 20. PBS. Chauvin, S., & Garcés-Mascareñas, B. (2014). Becoming less illegal: Deservingness frames and undocumented migrant incorporation. Sociology Compass, 8(4), 422–432. Chuang, A., & Roemer, R. C. (2015). Beyond the positive-negative paradigm of Latino/Latina news-media representations: DREAM Act exemplars,

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stereotypical selection, and American otherness. Journalism, 16 (8), 1045– 1061. De Genova, N. (2010). The deportation regime: Sovereignty, space, and the freedom of movement part one: Theoretical overview. In N. De Genova & N. Peutz (Eds.), Deportation regime: Sovereignty, space, and the freedom of movement (pp. 33–68). Fanon, F. (2000). Black Skin, White Masks (C. L. Markmann, Trans.). Pluto Press. Ferreras-Copeland, J., & Menchaca, C. (n.d.). New York: A sanctuary city with a plan. Gotham Gazette. Retrieved August 14, 2019, from https://www.got hamgazette.com/130-opinion/6660-new-york-a-sanctuary-city-with-a-plan Flores, W. V., & Benmayor, R. (Eds.). (1998). Latino cultural citizenship: Claiming identity, space, and rights. Beacon Press. Griffith, B., & Vaughan, J. M. (n.d.). Maps: Sanctuary cities, counties, and states. Center for Immigration Studies. Retrieved August 14, 2019, from https:// cis.org/Map-Sanctuary-Cities-Counties-and-States Habermas, J. (2003). The future of human nature. Polity. Hintjens, H., & Pouri, A. (2014). Toward cities of safety and sanctuary. Peace Review, 26 (2), 218–224. Irizarry, J. G., & Raible, J. (2014). “A hidden part of me”: Latino/a students, silencing, and the epidermalization of inferiority. Equity and Excellence in Education, 47 (4), 430–444. Negrón-Gonzales, G. (2014). Undocumented, unafraid and unapologetic: Rearticulatory practices and migrant youth “illegality.” Latino Studies, 12(2), 259–278. Pérez Firmat, G. (2012). Life on the hyphen: The Cuban-American way (Rev. ed. and 2nd ed.). University of Texas Press. Ridgley, J. (2008). Cities of refuge: Immigration enforcement, police, and the insurgent genealogies of citizenship in U.S. sanctuary cities. Urban Geography, 29 (1), 53–77. Shwer, M. (2015, September 21). No le digas a nadie. In POV Season 28. PBS. Smith, D., & Ormseth, M. (2019, February 8). It took a while, but LA formally declares itself a “city of sanctuary.” Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-city-of-sanctuary-ced illo-20190208-story.html Somers, M. R. (1993). Citizenship and the place of the public sphere: Law, community, and political culture in the transition to democracy. American Sociological Review, 58(5), 587–620.

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Soysal, Y. N. (1994). Limits of citizenship: Migrants and postnational membership in Europe. University of Chicago. Turner, B. S. (1993). Citizenship and social theory. SAGE. Varsanyi, M. W. (2006). Interrogating “urban citizenship” vis-à-vis undocumented migration. Citizenship Studies, 10 (2), 229–249. Victims of Criminal Activity: U Nonimmigrant Status. (2018, June 12). USCIS. https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/victims-human-trafficking-other-cri mes/victims-criminal-activity-u-nonimmigrant-status/victims-criminal-act ivity-u-nonimmigrant-status Zimmerman, A. M. (2010). Contesting citizenship across borders: Identity, rights, and participation amongst Central Americans in Los Angeles (PhD). University of California.

8 The Group Experience of Bicultural Migrants

In La Boda (Weyer, 2000) and Escuela (Weyer, 2002), documentary maker Hannah Weyer follows the Mexican-American Luis family as they migrate back and forth between their home in Texas and the labor camps in California. Delving into the Luises’ attempts to integrate into US society, Weyer chronicles their struggle to acculturate to an environment that looks down on their “barbarism” (cf. Nail, 2015)—their supposed ethnic and linguistic inferiority. In La Boda, the focus is on Eliazar and Juanita’s twenty-two-year-old daughter Elizabeth and her upcoming wedding to Artemio—a Mexican bracero she met while working in the fields. The first of her siblings to graduate from high school, Elizabeth is nevertheless quite down-to-earth about her perspectives, needs, and wishes: all she wants is to get married, find decent housing, and make sure Artemio’s papers for legal residence come through. Her little sister Liliana takes over in Escuela and follows in Elizabeth’s footsteps to become the second Luis sibling to study beyond the 8th grade. For the This chapter was originally published as an article in Cadernos de Tradução (cf. Sanchez, 2020).

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duration of an entire schoolyear, Weyer shadows buoyant and cheeky Liliana as she makes her debut as a high-school freshman. Since her migrant family follows the harvests across state borders and moves several times a year, Liliana has to experience the novelty and anxiety of being “the new kid” over and over. In both documentaries, Weyer seems to use her protagonists’ angst as an entry point for a discussion of how receiving countries tend to equate the process of immigration with that of reaching adulthood. With her unobtrusive camera work, Weyer invites the viewer to gain awareness of the disturbing parallel between the coming-of-age of the Luis sisters and the assimilation process imposed on them as second-generation immigrants in the United States. Navigating through different stages of adolescence, Liliana and Elizabeth struggle as much with the transition from childhood to adulthood as they do with the unspoken cultural expectation that, in order to climb the socioeconomic ladder, they have to leave their Mexican roots behind. Being real-life examples of the “immigrant paradox” (Coll & Marks, 2012), “the second generation revolt” (Gans, 1992), or “the second generation decline” (Perlmann & Waldinger, 1997), the sisters do not seem to achieve complete, straight-line assimilation. Predicting upward mobility for each generation that issues from immigration, this “straight-line assimilation theory” is based on the expectation that descendants of immigrants will attest to an increase in their patterns of intermarriage with mainstream society and a decrease of their ethnic distinctiveness in terms of language use (cf. Waters et al., 2010). However, as Weyers’s protagonists Elizabeth and Liliana go through financial, legal, and educational turmoil, they do not simply poke holes in this overly enthusiastic theory. They demonstrate that minority demographics like theirs are destined to be marginalized in today’s societal setup (cf. Marks et al., 2014).

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Mexican–American Biculturalism Being a documentary tandem, La Boda and Escuela play Elizabeth and Liliana’s sisterly characters off against each other by commenting on their lives, highs and lows, dreams, and fears. If Elizabeth’s marriage functions as the catalyst of La Boda (00:47:16), Escuela builds on La Boda’s momentum by means of Liliana’s narrative. Hence, it could be argued that Escuela serves as a sequel to the older sister’s nuptials, turning La Boda into a prediction of the younger sister’s future. Essentially a frenzied build-up to Elizabeth and Artemio’s wedding ceremony, La Boda places Elizabeth firmly at the heart of the plot. Her family members are cast by Weyer in the role of Elizabeth’s unsuspecting Greek chorus, interviewed and highlighted only to enhance the bride’s actions, words, and cogitations. In Escuela, however, Weyer takes a different approach by regularly digressing from Liliana’s storyline. Her cumbersome high-school experience echoes Elizabeth’s, who often makes guest appearances in Liliana’s film, interrupting her little sister’s teenage life with dramatic glimpses of what Lili’s future might hold. The mood in Escuela is therefore more somber than in La Boda, as Elizabeth’s outdrawn struggle to legalize her husband’s status, find decent housing, and hold on to a job outside of seasonal fieldwork underpins Liliana’s bleak prospects. La Boda begins by setting a distinctly ambiguous, neither-here-northere tone that is carried through in both films. For an uncomfortably long while, Weyer only focuses on the actions of her cast, not on their words. For as long as possible, she delays the moment that her characters speak and give away who they are. In doing so, she seems to be implying that language and identity will be inextricably intertwined in her storyworld—a motif that runs through both documentaries. The first images of La Boda are almost voyeuristic (00:02:20– 00:05:50). As the captions announce, it is 4.30 a.m. in a migrant labor camp in Shafter, California. Meanwhile, the camera mimics the shaky movements of a Peeping Tom lurking from behind the bushes, eyeing a one-story house that seems to glow in the dark, its indoor lights beaming through the windows. Still hiding outside, the camera catches a glimpse

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of a middle-aged woman slowly turning on her feet—the only inhabitant of the house who seems to be awake at such an ungodly hour. The camera then cuts to the woman’s hands and hovers over them as they swiftly turn over tortilla after tortilla on a scorching hot griddle. Again, the camera cuts abruptly to the other members of this sleepy household: apparently, the woman is not alone. Now filling the tortillas with a nondescript mixture, the woman is left in the kitchen as the camera explores the tiny house. An older man is struggling with his wristwatch in one corner. In another, a young woman is getting dressed, while a second is still fast asleep on a bunkbed. Back in the kitchen, a young man is filling up an ice box as he tiptoes around a third sleeping girl, whose bed is placed in the middle of a room that seems to serve as a kitchen, bedroom, dining room, and living room. By withholding all commentary in these first few moments, Weyer disarms her viewers before unleashing a sensory overload of sounds and images meant to confuse and disorientate them further, inviting them to look for contextual clues in this sea of conflicting signals. With the car radio on full blast, the groggy group hops into a large van and starts driving into the sunrise. Even though the radio host can be heard reading the weather forecast in Mexican Spanish, the van appears to be driving on a US highway, following an all-American, green signpost that reads County Line Road . On arrival, with traditional Mexican music still blaring in the background, the passengers descend, put on hats and gloves, swaddle their faces in colorful neckerchiefs, and walk out into miles and miles of grape vines, which they nimbly begin picking. Suddenly, everything turns dark. With the title “La Boda (The Wedding)” popping out of the screen, Weyer makes the surprise announcement that this film will be about something quite different from what has been shown so far. Or will it? In the introductory sequence of Escuela (00:00:07–00:02:16), Weyer more directly evokes the bilingual and bicultural limbo that has become standard living for the Luis family. Sitting in an empty row at the back of a yellow, typically North American school bus, Liliana drives by the camera, seemingly oblivious to her surroundings. In the meantime, her family is shown at home, frantically packing, folding, and stacking all kinds of clothes, small furniture, and lightweight items. The Luises are on

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the move again. This time around, from the very beginning of the film, the cast is not only heard talking to themselves—the parents in Spanish and the children in Spanglish or English—but also to the camera. As in La Boda, Weyer’s audiovisual juxtapositions evoke a sense of vacillation and equivocation. By contrasting Liliana’s peaceful school bus scene with the family’s hustle and bustle, Weyer seems to suggest that, despite their attempts at a sedentary lifestyle, the Luises are moored in a mental and physical no man’s land whose territory is perpetually shifting. Their home has no anchor point. In the first few minutes of Escuela, reading between the lines of mother Juanita’s short interaction with Weyer, it becomes clear that she is very much aware of how her nomadic existence ties in with her migrant identity. As uncomfortable as it may be, migrancy is the Luises’ baseline and their lifeline, but one that they would happily swap for something more secure and stable. Still tirelessly sorting through clothes, Juanita describes her unease with her family’s hybridity—and the limitations it imposes—to the camera as follows: Every year it’s the same thing. Every year we have to pack our bags because I can’t get work just anywhere here in Texas because I don’t know English. I need to speak English for them to give me work. That’s why I need to go to California to do field work. Over there, in the cotton fields, in the grapes… I have to work where I can. It’s a compromise we have to make to live better. […] I say to my kids – I want them to stick with school so they don’t end up like me. If I had an education, I would stay right here. (00:00:44; translation in the original)

In La Boda, Juanita and her husband Eliazar also allude to how the family’s migrant background forces them into permanent migration—a way of life that is so precarious and undesirable that it is usually associated with undocumented Mexicans, as Elizabeth implies (00:08:08). Put together, Elizabeth’s irritation with people who assume that she is not American, Eliazar’s concern with making enough money to support his wife and children, and Juanita’s lament about her lack of English

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proficiency testify to the Luises’ unconscious incorporation of the ageold saying upon which the United States were built: “one country, one language” (Adams, 1856). This all-American motto began gaining ground in the colonial and early independence period when, on the one hand, growing American nationalism popularized the idea that “American English both reflected and constituted the democratic and rational nature of the country” and, on the other, the acquisition of English began to be seen as “the litmus test of citizenship” (Portes & Schauffler, 1994, p. 642). The use and knowledge of English became an essential part of Americanism because it went hand in hand with the idea that a melting pot nation like America could only truly come together and become one if a single language was used consistently throughout the country (cf. Gramling, 2018). That language had to be English, since “the ability to think logically, seen as necessary for democracy, was only possible on the basis of fluency in English” (Portes & Schauffler, 1994, p. 642). Slowly but surely, the American expectation of English-only monolingualism began seeping into classrooms. In the first half of the twentieth century, bilingualism was either frowned upon or banned entirely. In certain areas, school children who were considered to be at risk of acquiring another mother tongue than English were even made to take “language loyalty oaths” (cf. Dillard, 2015). Starting from the 1960s, however, a plethora of studies began disproving the folkloric assumption that bilingualism went hand in hand with intellectual failure. Yet, the United States were slow to recognize the benefits of multilingualism, mainly because of their tendency to equate monolingualism with democracy, national unity, and allegiance to the country (Portes & Schauffler, 1994). Up until the 1970s, the US were quite dedicated to their “linguistic intrusion” in private homes (cf. Lieberson et al., 1975). No other nation was so successful in eradicating non-native mother tongues among its immigrant population. Additionally, around the time of Eliazar and Juanita’s crossover to the United States, the nature and the reception of incoming immigrants rapidly started to change, which affected the language skills and ethnic-racial identity of their offspring (cf. Christophe et al., 2019). The immigrants who began arriving from

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the 1960s onward were mostly non-European nationals from divergent socioeconomic backgrounds, who settled in large enclaves across the West of the United States (cf. Portes, 2010). Moreover, the economic conditions that these new migrants encountered were nothing like what their European predecessors had known. Owing to America’s emerging hourglass economy—in which opportunities for social mobility were consistently shrinking, even among born Americans—and to a welfare state that was increasingly being contested by the general public, the adaptation of these newcomers and their children became much more troublesome than that of previous generations (cf. Zhou, 1997a). In this sense, Weyer’s portrayal of the Luis family could be interpreted as a textbook example of these “new” immigrants. Trying their best to adapt to a nation that abounds with subliminal messages relating the American dream to monolingual-cum-monocultural integration, the family is very much aware of their failure to achieve straight-line assimilation. Hence, in Weyer’s films, the Luises are depicted as Sisyphean laborers, stuck in a vicious cycle that withholds them from climbing the social ladder. In Escuela, for example, Eliazar and Juanita explain that they were so worried about not being able to make ends meet on two wages alone, that they felt they had no other choice but to pull their oldest children from school after the 8th grade (00:04:17). The camera then turns to Liliana, who announces that she is nervous and curious about entering 9th grade (00:05:40). Her young enthusiasm is palpable and contagious: for a short while, the optimism that characterizes a large part of La Boda appears to sneak into Escuela. Yet, by interweaving Liliana’s teenage life with short segments of Elizabeth’s adult worries post-La Boda, Weyer subtly raises the question of whether Liliana’s future really will be all that better, now that she has been given the opportunity to finish high school. After all, her older sister Elizabeth did so too. However, when Elizabeth’s job at a bra factory falls through, she and her husband—who is still trying to legalize his status (00:33:15)—are forced to migrate with her parents in search of seasonal fieldwork (00:42:50). It would seem that for these non-European immigrants, who already belonged to the lower socioeconomic classes of their sending country and who ended up settling in ethnic enclaves in the receiving country, education and English proficiency is no guarantee for upward mobility after all (cf. Zhou & Gonzales, 2019).

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Adulthood as Assimilation For decades, the default position on assimilation in the United States was that for immigrants to gain equal access to “the opportunity structure of society” a gradual desertion of their “old cultural and behavioral patterns in favor of new ones” was imperative (Zhou, 1997b, p. 976). This “painful bipolar process” (ibid.) is reminiscent of the kind of language that is often applied when referring to adolescence. Essentially an identity synthesis, adolescence is usually defined as the internal organization of certain drives, abilities, and beliefs that are acquired by exploring a variety of options and committing to only a number of them (cf. Marcia, 2001). Consequently, adulthood corresponds to a consistent reliance on a set number of drives, abilities, and beliefs that remain after the elimination of other choices during the transitional, experimental stage of adolescence—a phase during which certain behavioral and identitarian options (all hypothetically available during childhood) are considered, explored, and either discarded or maintained (cf. Bogaerts et al., 2019). Similarly, according to classical assimilationists (e.g. Warner & Srole, 1945), distinctive ethnic traits (e.g. culture, language, geographical concentration) are perceived as sources of disadvantage that have to be eliminated for the attainment of sane, fully fledged assimilation. Like adolescents who must discard childlike traits in order to reach adulthood, so must immigrants lose their ethnic characteristics in order to attain “true” assimilation (cf. Gordon, 1964). In this framework, immigrants are expected to “free themselves from their old cultures in order to begin rising up from marginal positions” (Zhou, 1997b, p. 977)—a path similar to the coming-of-age process of adolescence. However, from the 1960s onward, the classical assimilation perspective upon which America’s belief in the “one language, one culture” axiom was based no longer added up. An oppositional culture started gaining terrain among hyphenated US Americans, especially among those who felt generationally oppressed by and excluded from the American mainstream (cf. Zhou, 1997a). The Luis sisters can easily be classified as belonging to that demographic, judging from their portrayal in Weyer’s documentary tandem. For example, Elizabeth disavows the assimilationist ideal of intermarriage with the majority population (cf.

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Gordon, 1964) when she explains how important it was for her that Artemio was from Nuevo León—the Mexican home state of her parents: [Elizabeth] As soon as I found out he was from Chivo Leon, I was like, “Sit down!” [Artemio] I sat down and from that moment I didn’t let go. I got to know her and we started to go out. And thanks to God… [Elizabeth] But was it important for you…? [Artemio] Yeah. [Elizabeth] …That we were both from Nuevo Leon? [Artemio] No, not really. For me it’d be fine to meet a woman from another place as long as she understood me. (00:33:52; translation in the original)

Interestingly, Mexican-American Elizabeth’s origins were trivial for Mexican Artemio—who, within the confines of Mexico, barely had to think about his identity. Therefore, background and self-labeling seem to matter much less to him than to Elizabeth, whose entire life is built around the ambiguity of who she is (cf. Rodriguez et al., 2010). In Escuela, it could be argued that her little sister Lili testifies to the same need to construct a hyphenated identity that allows her to maintain self-esteem and value her Mexicanness, almost in resistance to the dominant, Anglo society (cf. Zhou, 1997a). Eating a hotdog in the back of a car, playfully joking around with her younger sister Yesenia and her cousin Janet, fourteen-year-old Liliana declares that Mexican men “know how to treat a girl”—unlike “white boys” (00:11:47). What in another instance could have passed for harmless teenage banter, becomes quite a grave matter in Weyer’s film. Despite their marginality in a cultural context that equates Whiteness with Americanness, the Luis sisters refuse to aspire to the American “one language, one culture” ideal (cf. Devos & Mohamed, 2014). In cases where they are tempted to “act white” (cf. Zhou, 1997a), for example by listening to English music

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and dating white boys in Escuela (00:11:47) or by toying with the idea of birth control in La Boda (00:23:00), they end up proclaiming their preference for Mexican men, music, and morals. Here, Weyer gives proof of the fact that the insidious parallel established between adolescence and assimilation by the “one culture, one language” credo does not hold up for her protagonists. Their adolescence might be a matter of leaving unconstructive behaviors and beliefs behind, but their assimilation is not. Rather than a “zero-sum experience” that forces them to lose one cultural identity to acquire another (cf. West et al., 2017), the individuation that the sisters undergo in front of Weyer’s lens is a transformative and dynamic moment because it results not only from the direct influences of each of their cultures but also from the processes they use to negotiate these cultures. Thus, Weyer’s protagonists confirm that the second generation of the post-1960s immigration wave—and its offspring—acculturates selectively (cf. Portes & Rumbaut, 2001). In less than favorable receptive circumstances, these newer immigrants hold on to their ethnic networks and identities in order to establish a certain amount of social capital and group solidarity in an otherwise hostile societal environment (cf. Zhou, 1997b). Their segmented assimilation has therefore been dubbed a “second generation revolt” (Perlmann & Waldinger, 1997), because of their demographic’s reluctance to work for the same wages and in the same conditions as their parents. It has also been called a “second generation decline” (Gans, 1992), owing to their inability to do better than their parents in terms of job opportunities, skills, and connections. Tellingly, Weyer’s framing of the Luis family does not point fingers at their attachment to Mexico or at the Mexican Spanish accent of their English. On the contrary, the camera seems to celebrate their biculturalism and bilingualism by capturing the refreshing ways in which they respond to situations where their Mexican and American worlds collide. That being said, as much as Escuela and La Boda mitigate the demonizing accounts of barbaric Latinxs that have entered the American collective unconscious (cf. Huntington, 2004), they also refrain from romanticizing the counterhegemonic notion according to which juggling two languages and two cultures results in a balanced mestizaje (cf. Moreman, 2005).

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For the Luises, their segmented assimilation is part and parcel of their imbalanced mestizaje. In La Boda, Juanita explains that the family’s strong ties to Mexico have proven to be a necessary relief in the face of the adversity they experienced in the United States (00:50:34). Although she is aware of the fact that her family is far from attaining the ideal straight-line assimilation so emphatically advertised in American society, Juanita nevertheless remains unrepentant. Within their means, they have achieved as much as they possibly could. Their receiving country may never fully accept them as one of theirs because of their continued sense of belonging to Mexico, but it is precisely thanks to their MexicanAmerican social capital that they are empowered to keep striving for a better quality of life, if not for themselves, then for the generations to come.

Assimilation as Resignification Weyer’s documentary tandem gives the floor to a Mexican-American family who, from an assimilationist perspective, appears to confirm all the immigrant clichés: they look, act, talk, and think differently to what is perceived as the US standard. However, over the course of La Boda and Escuela, Weyer demonstrates that her protagonists’ realities do not coincide with the stereotype of the barbaric immigrant (cf. Nail, 2015). With the help of evocative images, heartfelt interviews, and clever editing, she conveys a sense of awareness within the Luis family that they are expected to excel in a society that marginalizes them on account of their supposed ethnic and linguistic inferiority. The Luises remain undeterred and undefeated, despite everything. Across the US–Mexico border, their bicultural family is their fortress, and their assimilation into American society happens on their own terms, in their own time: not out of stubbornness, unwillingness, or incapability, but out of a pragmatism imposed on them by the dire socioeconomic circumstances of their reception. Interestingly, Weyer never romanticizes the Luises’ hybrid existence. In doing so, she follows a growing desire among Latinxs to cease presenting liminality as a desirable state of mind and a celebratory expression of selfacceptance. Rather than promoting the bicultural borderland existence of

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Anzaldúa (1987) and Gómez-Peña (1996), Weyer stresses its pitfalls—a perspective that echoes the dissatisfaction of younger Latinxs with their marginal place in US society (cf. Vila, 2003). In Weyer’s films, hybridity is no longer a playful space, conveniently stripped of its marginalizing character and its capability to deconstruct and reconstruct racism (cf. Valdivia, 2004). Rather, she presents her protagonists’ segmented assimilation as being energized by their continuous resignification (cf. Moreman, 2008). As a matter of fact, because of this need to resignify her liminality and mold it to her own liking, Liliana exteriorizes her internalized marginality by donning goth outfits in the final scenes of Escuela: [Liliana] Si Dios quiere, I’m gonna do my hair all blonde. Every single inch of my hair is gonna be blonde with red or black streaks. Or black hair, all my hair black, with blue or red streaks. [Weyer] And why did you… How did you come up with the idea? [Liliana] I came up with the idea coz I wanna become a civilized freak. They’re giving like this big clue that I’m a freak, just because of my makeup and my skull but I don’t care what they think. At least I know that I’m a smart, integ… intennigen… person! (00:41:04)

Who are “they”? Is Liliana truly referring to her peers? Or is she perhaps addressing the world at large? Whatever the answer may be, her attitude is illustrative of her unwillingness to be swallowed up by a bulldozing, homogenizing culture—be that in high school or in US society. In this sense, Weyer’s protagonists can be seen as epitomes of the “second generation revolt” (Perlmann & Waldinger, 1997) rather than the “second generation decline” (Gans, 1992). Their refusal to “drop their hyphen” (cf. Portes & Schauffler, 1994) is more an act of conscious defiance and resistance than it is the consequence of their supposed helplessness and defeat in a matrix that only applauds straight-line assimilation.

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References Adams, J. (1856). The works of John Adams, second president of the United States: Life of John Adams (C. F. Adams, Ed.). Little, Brown. Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books. Bogaerts, A., Claes, L., Schwartz, S. J., Becht, A. I., Verschueren, M., Gandhi, A., & Luyckx, K. (2019). Identity structure and processes in adolescence: Examining the directionality of between- and within-person associations. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 48(5), 891–907. Christophe, N. K., Kiang, L., Supple, A. J., & Gonzalez, L. M. (2019). Latent profiles of American and ethnic-racial identity in Latinx mothers and adolescents: Links to behavioral practices and cultural values. Journal of Latinx Psychology. Coll, C. G., & Marks, A. K. (Eds.). (2012). The immigrant paradox in children and adolescents: Is becoming American a developmental risk? American Psychological Association. Devos, T., & Mohamed, H. (2014). Shades of American identity: Implicit relations between ethnic and national identities. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 8(12), 739–754. Dillard, J. L. (2015). Toward a social history of American English. Walter de Gruyter GmbH and Co KG. Gans, H. J. (1992). Second-generation decline: Scenarios for the economic and ethnic futures of the post-1965 American immigrants. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 15 (2), 173–192. Gómez-Peña, G. (1996). The new world border: Prophecies, poems, and loqueras for the end of the century. City Lights. Gordon, M. M. (1964). Assimilation in American life: The role of race, religion, and national origins. Oxford University Press. Gramling, D. (2018). The invention of monolingualism. Bloomsbury Academic. Huntington, S. P. (2004). Who are we? Simon and Schuster. Lieberson, S., Dalto, G., & Johnston, M. E. (1975). The course of mothertongue diversity in nations. American Journal of Sociology, 81(1), 34–61. Marcia, J. E. (2001). Identity in childhood and adolescence. In International encyclopedia of social and behavioral sciences (pp. 7159–7163). Elsevier. Marks, A. K., Ejesi, K., & Coll, C. G. (2014). Understanding the U.S. immigrant paradox in childhood and adolescence. Child Development Perspectives, 8(2), 59–64.

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Moreman, S. T. (2005). Performativity and the Latina/o-white hybrid identity: Performing the textual self (PhD, University of South Florida). http://schola rcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3969andcontext=etd Moreman, S. T. (2008). Hybrid performativity, south and north of the border. In A. N. Valdivia (Ed.), Latina/o communication studies today (pp. 91–114). Peter Lang. Nail, T. (2015). The figure of the migrant. Stanford University Press. Perlmann, J., & Waldinger, R. (1997). Second generation decline: Children of immigrants, past and present: A reconsideration. International Migration Review, 31(4), 893–922. Portes, A. (2010). Migration and social change: Some conceptual reflections. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36 (10), 1537–1563. Portes, A., & Rumbaut, R. G. (2001). Legacies: The story of the immigrant second generation. University of California Press. Portes, A., & Schauffler, R. (1994). Language and the second generation: Bilingualism yesterday and today. International Migration Review, 4, 640–661. Rodriguez, L., Schwartz, S. J., & Whitbourne, S. K. (2010). American identity revisited: The relation between national, ethnic, and personal identity in a multiethnic sample of emerging adults. Journal of Adolescent Research, 25 (2), 324–349. Sanchez, A. J. (2020). Bilingual barbarians in La Boda and Escuela: The adolescence and assimilation of two migrant sisters. Cadernos de Tradução, 87–112. Valdivia, A. N. (2004). Latinas as radical hybrid: Transnationally gendered traces in mainstream media. Global Media Journal, 3(4). http://www.global mediajournal.com/open-access/latinas-as-radical-hybridtransnationally-gen dered-traces-in-mainstream-media.php?aid=35058 Vila, P. (2003). Ethnography at the border. University of Minnesota Press. Warner, W. L., & Srole, L. (1945). The social systems of American ethnic groups. Yale University Press. Waters, M. C., Tran, V. C., Kasinitz, P., & Mollenkopf, J. H. (2010). Segmented assimilation revisited: Types of acculturation and socioeconomic mobility in young adulthood. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 33(7), 1168–1193. West, A. L., Zhang, R., Yampolsky, M., & Sasaki, J. Y. (2017). More than the sum of its parts: A transformative theory of biculturalism. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 48(7), 963–990. Weyer, H. (2000, June 27). La Boda. In POV Season 13. PBS. Weyer, H. (2002, August 27). Escuela. In POV Season 15. PBS.

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Zhou, M. (1997a). Growing up American: The challenge confronting immigrant children and children of immigrants. Annual Review of Sociology, 23(1), 63–95. Zhou, M. (1997b). Segmented assimilation: Issues, controversies, and recent research on the new second generation. The International Migration Review: IMR, 31(4), 975–1008. Zhou, M., & Gonzales, R. G. (2019). Divergent destinies: Children of immigrants growing up in the United States. Annual Review of Sociology, 45 (1), 383–399.

9 The Group Experience of Migrant Criminals

In Al otro lado (Almada, 2006) and The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández (Fitzgerald, 2008), documentary makers Natalia Almada and Kieran Fitzgerald delve into the criminalization of the US–Mexico border. Through Mexican corridista (balladeer) Magdiel and defunct MexicanAmerican high-school student Esequiel, both documentary makers point out how life-threatening today’s militarized border can be for those who come to cross it—whether legally, like Esequiel, or illegally, like Magdiel. As Magdiel and Esequiel’s transnational narratives unfold according to the classic corrido formula of risking it all in search of a brighter tomorrow, their portrayal becomes increasingly paradoxical. Criminals to some, martyrs to others, the young men appear as contradictory as the US–Mexico fault line that dictates their lives.

Societal Ambiguities at the Border Documentary maker Kieran Fitzgerald frames the first few moments of The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández by exploring the parallels between his film’s storyline and that of traditional corridos—ballads that began © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Sanchez, Discourses of Migration in Documentary Film, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06539-2_9

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as tributes to the heroes of the Mexican Revolution before they were appropriated by the antiheroes of Mexico’s underbelly. Underlining his protagonist’s cultural, moral, and legal liminality, Fitzgerald introduces Esequiel Hernández as neither hero nor antihero by stringing together a collection of news footage about “an American […] killed by US Marines” (00:01:54). Additionally, he ushers in voice-over narration to point out the ambiguous accounts that circulate surrounding Esequiel’s suspicious killing. Tellingly, his narrator is actor Tommy Lee Jones, whose signature voice evokes the intricacies of the US–Mexico border (cf. Moerk, 2005). Jones’s initial description of the event at the heart of this documentary seems clear enough: “In 1997, an American high school student was shot and killed near his home in West Texas by a team of United States Marines. After the shooting, all armed military operations were immediately suspended” (00:02:26). However, this apparently straightforward case of military overreach soon muddles when the victim’s MexicanAmerican identity is revealed. Overlapping with B-roll of a norteña music band, Fitzgerald gives the floor to local historian Enrique Madrid, who explains that the corrido is a “musical form like the ballads of the English and of the Scots” used “on the border, in Mexican-American culture” as a “method of telling history, of remembering events” (00:02:55). Perhaps in an effort to allude to Esequiel’s dubious death, Madrid also mentions that a happening can be made into a corrido when it runs the risk of being “covered up” or “buried” (00:03:16). To lend weight to Madrid’s words, the camera switches back to footage of the band, right when the lead singer embarks on a corrido that sets the scene for the documentary: “Voy a cantar un corrido / No se les vaya a olvidar / Esto pasó en Redford, Texas / Quién se lo iba a imaginar ”1 (00:03:26). Using this vocalization to draw us into the corrido storyworld, Fitzgerald embarks on his own— audiovisual rather than lyrical—rendition of what happened in Redford, Texas. Fitzgerald’s inclusion of norteña music is not coincidental. Unlike historical corridos written for Mexican freedom fighters or modern-day 1 “I’m going to sing a ballad / Not to be forgotten / It happened in Redford, Texas / Who would have thought?” (00:03:26; my translation).

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narcocorridos paying tribute to the realities of narcos, the focus of the border community’s corrido norteño is on the experience of bordercrossing, migration, work, and marginalization. Developed alongside the Tejano and Chicano border identity, this kind of music builds on the Mexican ballad’s premise of glorifying the underdog by singing the praises of “the border hero (who was also the first migrant worker)” (Ragland, 2009, p. 99). The corrido norteño preserves the basic sentiment of the historical corrido: disdain for outside authority based on the belief that mal gobierno (abusive or absent authority) turns good people into social bandits who, contrary to the government, uphold a code of honor and display a heroic ethos (McDowell, 2015). In Al otro lado, the corrido formula plays an even greater role. More specifically, Natalia Almada’s documentary deals with the narcocorrido, which evidences a twist on the traditional theme of rebellion by presenting drug smugglers, human traffickers, and other outlaw personas as a new kind of “social bandit” (cf. Edberg, 2009). Like Fitzgerald, Almada starts off by framing what a corrido is but, contrary to Fitzgerald, she relies on a collage of definitions given by Mexican and MexicanAmerican interviewees—a treatment which appears to suggest that this musical form is transnational and varied: [Woman 1] It’s a story. It’s a story being told in a song, that’s what a corrido is. [Man 1] Since the Mexican Revolution corridos have been the way to explain… of translating to… one person to another, you know what I mean? [Man 2] Rap tells stories about things that happen on the streets and so do corridos. They talk about things that really happen. It is a form of street communication. [Man 3] It’s a chronicle. You’re spreading the news. [Man 4] Well it can be real or imaginary as long as it has a nice arrangement.

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[Man 5] For the first time, the voice of the drug traffickers was being heard indirectly through the corrido. [Man 6] It’s a protest. It’s a very direct expression of the people. [Man 7] In 15 minutes, you come to me and say, “Write me a corrido. My name is… I like women, I like to drink now and then… I go to this and that place…” In 15 minutes I can get $1,500 out of you, in 15 minutes. If you’re a friend $1000, but no less. (00:03:00; translation in the original)

Having summoned an image of corridistas as Latinx, trigger-happy gangsta rappers, the camera cuts to Sinaloa, the birthplace of the narcocorrido. Here, Almada introduces us to her protagonist: corridista Magdiel, whose youthful naivety and bright-eyed cheekiness implicitly contradict what we have just been told about people like him. Far removed from the “blingy” hip-hop lifestyle evoked by the previous segment, Magdiel’s lyrics testify to a harsh reality: “La pobreza que traigo en mi sangre / Todo esto ya quiero que cambie / Somos pobre, no puedo negarle…” (00:04:45).2 What follows is a poignant portrait of Magdiel’s dilapidated present contrasted with the glitz and glam emanating from narcocorridistas who became superstars al otro lado after crossing the border3 or who were born al otro lado 4 and “made it big” by adapting the corrido to American 2 “The poverty that runs in my blood / I wish all of this would change / We are poor, I can’t deny it…” (00:04:45; translation in the original). 3 In the film, there is mention of Chalino Sánchez (00.22.20) and Jorge Hernández (00:09:21), among others. The latter is the lead singer of Los Tigres del Norte , one of the most successful norteño bands in the United States. The former gave shape to the most violent style of narcocorrido, merging the figure of the narco with that of the corridista. Chalino was known for his tumultuous lifestyle, which led to his murder in 1992. He is generally considered to be at the root of the artistic movement in the United States that would liken the corrido to gangsta rap. 4 In the film, there is mention of Jenni Rivera (00:26:16), a.k.a. Jenny from the Barrio, and Jessie Morales (00:29:15), a.k.a. El Original de la Sierra, among others. The former was one of the first Mexican-American women narcocorridistas. She died in a private jet crash in 2012, about six years after the release of this documentary. The latter is an LA-based corridista. He belongs to a wave of Mexican-American artists who, following the death of Chalino Sánchez, popularized the narcocorrido among their peers by complementing it with hip hop aesthetics and sensibilities.

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tastes. The effect achieved by opposing the haves with the have-nots of the narcocorrido scene is less one of reassurance that success and wealth are, potentially, within everyone’s reach and rather one of sympathy for those who, like Magdiel, are in such dire straits that they are willing to risk their lives by crossing the border. To further emphasize this point, the camera shows flashes of Magdiel hauling a meager catch into his father’s ramshackle fishing boat (00:05:40), Magdiel’s mother defeatedly admitting that her son has to leave their fishing village because “there is no future here” (00:06:29), and Magdiel’s fellow fishermen joking about how selling drugs has become the “only option” to earn a decent wage (00:06:41). Finally, the camera circles back to Magdiel himself. First shown working on a song that was, most likely, commissioned by a narcotraficante (00:07:03) and then chatting with his mother about an old flame who got married to one of those drug traffickers (00:07:42), Magdiel eventually turns to the camera to explain matter-of-factly that the only way for him to make an honest living and stay away from drugs is “running away” (00:08:01; translation in the original)—to the United States, illegally. Magdiel’s plans to combat illegality with illegality might have sounded naïve had it not been for Almada’s choice of following his confession up with a fragment on how the illegal entry into the United States of Los Tigres del Norte allowed them, many years later, to sell out entire stadiums (00:09:19). Hiding among the crowd, Almada’s camera captures a snippet of the Tigres’ live performance of their legendary corrido “Somos Más Americanos,” which she pairs with B-roll of the US–Mexico border: Ya me gritaron mil veces que me regrese a mi tierra, / Porque aquí no quepo yo / Quiero recordarle al gringo: Yo no cruce la frontera, la frontera me cruzo. / América nació libre, el hombre la dividió. / […] Ellos pintaron la raya, para que yo la brincara / Y me llaman invasor / Es un error bien marcado nos quitaron ocho estados / Quién es aquí el invasor. / Soy extranjero en mi tierra, / Y no vengo a darles guerra, soy hombre trabajador.5 (00:11:25) 5 “They’ve yelled a 1000 times that I return to my country, / because there is no room for me here. / I’d like to remind the Gringos, I didn’t cross the border, the border crossed me. /

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Expanding on the corrido tradition of questioning good and bad by opposing “the mythic original and authentic ‘cowboy’ or settler that we find in Westerns” with “the mythic Mexican revolutionary and valiant farmer” (Muniz, 2013, p. 64), Almada echoes this reversal of morals by delving deeper into Magdiel’s drug ties. Having given the Tigres the opportunity to play one of their tunes, she now allows Magdiel—who aspires to attain the grandeur of artists like the Tigres—to show off his singing abilities: Yo soy un lobo marino porque navego en el mar. / Manejo bien los motores, se lo puedo asegurar / […] Conozco bien el camino, de Sinaloa to La Paz, / De Acapulco a San Felipe, y nunca me ha de fallar / y si algún día algo me pasa, en la cárcel me hallarán / […] Si mi patrón me responde, otro gallo cantará, / ay me verán mis amigos por El Guamuchil pasar / con mis motores 200 con hierba, polvo y cristal.6 (00:14:21; Fig. 9.1)

As Magdiel is vocalizing, Almada weaves in fragments of interviews on the topic of the corrido. These snapshots seem to serve as indirect commentary on Magdiel’s explicit lyrics, corroborating his earlier claim that his songs are about “the truth, never fiction” (00:14:13; translation in the original). From corridista Jorge Hernández, we learn that “the economy of certain parts of our Mexico moves because of the traffickers” (00:14:37; translation in the original). According to historian Luis Astorga, struggling sinaloenses seek salvation in drug trafficking in order to access “what other sectors of society have, for example, a refrigerator, a washing machine, a stove…” (00:15:32; translation in the original). Finally, novelist Elmer Mendoza mentions the corridistas’ adoration of America was born free, man divided it. / […] They painted the line for me to jump over it, and now they call me an invader / It is a well-known mistake, they took 8 states from us, / Who here is the invader? / I’m a stranger in my country, I didn’t come to cause trouble, I’m a working man” (00:11:25; translation in the original). 6 I’m a “lobo marino [sea lion/drug smuggler] because I navigate the ocean. / I’m good at driving the motors, I can assure you. / […] I know the way well, from Sinaloa to La Paz, / From Acapulco to San Felipe, and I’ll never go wrong/and if one day something happens to me, you will find me in jail. / […] If my boss pays me, another rooster will sing, / and all my friends will see me passing by El Guamuchil [a nearby island] / with my 200 horsepower engine with pot, coke, and crystal” (00:14:21; translation in the original).

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Fig. 9.1 Al otro lado (Almada, 2006; screenshots by the author)

the figure of Jesús Malverde. Like Robin Hood, he stole from the rich to give to the poor and, therefore, became a saint-like “protector of those who work in illicit activities” (00:20:13; translation in the original). Almada emphasizes this paradoxical pairing of crime and religion with footage of sinaloenses praying to pseudo-religious effigies of Malverde (00:19:35), followed by images of impressive tombstones at a sinaloense cemetery that appears to be popular with the families of defunct narcos 7 (00:20:50). All of these constatations crystallize in Magdiel’s narcocorrido, which resounds in the streets of his village (00:18:40) as well as 7

After Al otro lado, Almada completed El Velador (The Night Watchman). There, she further explored the symbolism behind Sinaloa’s campy cemeteries reserved for narcotraficantes. El Velador was also picked up by POV and premiered nationally on PBS in 2012.

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in nearby jails (00:18:29). His seemingly farcical ballad reveals grave matters: mal gobierno creates structural poverty, which is countered by a makeshift sub-society at the helm of crooked drug lords, whose “paradise persists […] in the hell of those on whose backs that paradise [was] built” (Stanger, 2016, p. 73). To collapse the drug-trafficking narco and the border-crossing mojado, two figures that often appear as each other’s alter egos in narcocorridos (cf. Ragland, 2009), Almada relies on the testimonies of corridistas to suggest that it is “a Sinaloan custom” to take risks, such as selling drugs or pursuing unauthorized entry into the United States, because there is “no other path to take” (00:16:16; translation in the original). This blurring of the boundaries between right and wrong echoes a dialectical strategy often used by illegal immigrants to contest their criminality: pointing out the “societal ambiguities” of their supposed crime (cf. Coutin, 2005). In Al otro lado, neither the narcos nor the mojados are portrayed as morally reprehensible criminals. Rather, they are portrayed as being forced to engage in above board as well as illegal activities out of necessity, such that their legal and illegal practices are not always as distinct as they might seem.

Spatial Ambiguities at the Border Another strategy used in illegal immigration debates to contradict the offenders’ criminality is to point out the “spatial ambiguity” of their social exclusion (cf. Coutin, 2005). Indeed, since the “punitive turn” (cf. McDowell et al., 2013) in Western legal thinking, criminality has come to be seen as a condition of personhood rather than the product of particular actions. In his film, Fitzgerald dismantles the mechanisms behind these punitive logics of social exclusion and demonstrates how they caused an innocent US citizen—who happened to live at the border—to be shot and killed by patrolling Marines. To emphasize the constructedness of the concept of (il)legality, Fitzgerald begins by signifying the rigidity of certain social and ethnic stereotypes that are deeply ingrained in American society and that assign illegality to bodies “based not on legal documents but on ascribed or

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achieved characteristics, such as national origin or occupation” (Flores & Schachter, 2018, p. 840). Having already hinted at the enigma behind the death of “an American high-school student” (00:02:28) in his introductory segment, Fitzgerald now deconstructs the clichés that go hand in hand with such a description by sketching the outline of the said student: Esequiel. Esequiel’s friend David Marquez, donning a ranchero outfit and joyfully interacting with his farm animals, tells us that his parents once bought him and Esequiel horses, which they used to ride “all day, till it got dark” (00:04:12). David confesses he cannot believe that his friend, who was “like a brother to [him]” (00:04:20), is gone: “I still feel like he’s still somewhere around here, herding his goats or up on his horse somewhere, that’s how I feel” (00:04:30). Over slow norteña music, Fitzgerald adds footage of horse-riding teenagers wildly galloping through vast prairies, young boys playing soccer between some boulders, and lanky high schoolers congregating on their sandy campus squad (00:04:35). As home footage of Esequiel performing a traditional Mexican folk dance begins rolling, his former school teacher Christine Manriquez is heard describing him as a shy student who loved dance class so much that he used to stay behind to help her “carry the tape-recorder and the… the costumes that the girls had to wear” (00:05:05). At his Texan home residence, which according to the captions is “200 yards from the US–Mexico border” (00:05:37), we find Esequiel’s family gathered for a BBQ meal: while Margarito—one of his brothers—is cooking some sausages and tortillas over hot coals, his father is playfully teaching his grandchildren how to throw a lasso, surrounded by his remaining children (00:05:43). Hereafter, Margarito is shown guiding the camera around a nearby derelict building, introduced to us by the captions as the “Old Redford Cavalry Fort” (00:05:54). As it turns out, Margarito’s goal in bringing the camera there is to show off a drawing of a horse, traced by Esequiel in the chipping paint of one of the crumbling walls. Suddenly, the horse on the wall transforms into a pencil drawing of a campesino with his mule, signed by Esequiel Hernández (00:06:29). As the camera zooms in on Esequiel’s handwriting, the image changes again to show some more handwriting but, now, in a small notepad held by an unknown hand. The camera then reveals the face of this new person,

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who is hesitantly heard saying “That’s what we scribed out there, that’s… this is the book we had out there with the… the log” (00:06:51). What follows is a segment that runs parallel to what was just shown in terms of content, look, and feel: a suggestive sequence of mood shots, archival footage, and on-camera exchanges meant to give a human face to the people involved in this tragedy. This time around, however, the protagonists are those who were previously intimated to be the antagonists: the team of (currently retired) Marines who ended Esequiel’s life. Among them we find Corporal Roy Torrez, who reveals his field activity log to the outside world for the first time (00:07:02), Lance Corporal James Blood, who admits that neither he nor his fellow Marines were honest with each other as to their feelings about the shooting (00:07:31), and Lance Corporal Ronald Wieler, who confesses that the event gave him nightmares (00:07:43). Notoriously absent from the documentary is the triggerman: Corporal Clemente Bañuelos, leader of the Marine team who—as we learn later— declined to participate in this film. Bañuelos’s face is only shown in photographs (00:08:36; 00:57:32; 00:01:48) and his disembodied voice is only heard in military recordings of the team’s radio-to-radio exchange with the Marine Command leading up to Esequiel’s shooting (00:27:01– 00:29:45). Hence, neither Esequiel nor Clemente has agency in this documentary: they are channeled through their friends and foes as, interchangeably, the victims and culprits of what happened. Like Al otro lado, The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández is also carried by a corrido-like subversion of norms and expectations. The “good guys” and the “bad guys” are at odds with each other. Both contend they have been wronged when they were doing everything right and yet both rely on a communicative method reminiscent of “corpse messaging” (cf. Lantz, 2016): cartels displaying their victims’ bodies to appropriate their agency by figuratively—and, at times, literally—putting words in their mouths. This sense of moral confusion is echoed early on in the film when it becomes clear that Esequiel’s demise comes down to nothing other than a case of mistaken identity. As Tommy Lee Jones explains: In May of 1997, a Marine Corps mission based in Presidio County, Texas, sent Marine teams to various locations along the Rio Grande as part of a

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covert operation to watch for drug traffickers coming across from Mexico. (00:07:53)

The Marines confirm that, when they arrived in Texas, they were “excited” (00:11:00) and expecting “an adventure” (00:11:03) where they would catch “someone drug trafficking” (00:11:09). However, as Lance Cpl. Wieler admits, “that never happened” (00:11:14). Resorting to the legend of Robin Hood to describe the nature of their mission, an allusion that also comes up in narcocorridos to signify that the social bandit is, in fact, a noble robber (cf. Hobsbawm, 2010), Cpl. Torrez reveals that the team referred to “the hole” where they were on the lookout for drug traffickers as “Sherwood Forest” (00:12:40). Coming from an official, the reference is mystifying: in which role did the Marines cast themselves? Did they see themselves as representatives of Robin Hood, the noble outlaw, or rather the Sheriff of Nottingham, the devious lawmaker? Additionally, Lance Cpl. Blood recounts that in order to remain motivated despite the heat, the bugs, and the boredom, the team members would boast to each other about how they would be the ones to “catch a mule with 200 pounds of coke on his back” (00:16:50). Historian Enrique Madrid also suggests that the Marines were fed overdrawn clichés: they were briefed that “Redford was an unfriendly area where 70 to 75% of the local population was involved in drug trafficking” (00:17:21). Finally, Danny Dominguez, the current Presidio County Sheriff, crowns this sequence of testimonies by divulging that his predecessor is currently serving time in prison—for drug trafficking. Over news footage of the man’s arrest, Tommy Lee Jones adds to Dominguez’s diplomatically worded description: In 1992, Presidio County Sheriff Rick Thompson was caught at the port of entry in Presidio with 1.2 tons of cocaine – an estimated street value of $1 billion. Thompson had been using the County trailer for years to smuggle his loads through Customs until he was turned in by his own Deputies. During the eight years that the military patrolled the deserts and farming towns along the border, Thompson’s arrest was by far the largest drug bust in Presidio County. He was sentenced to life in prison, without parole. (00:18:25)

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To further highlight Redford’s liminal ambiguity, Fitzgerald juxtaposes images of Thompson with footage of Esequiel’s home front. As it turns out, the American boy who was mistaken for a Mexican narco by US Marines—whose peer was convicted for drug smuggling—is remembered by his relatives as pious (00:14:01) and studious (00:15:15). Building on the symbolic imagery evoked by these memories, Fitzgerald collages fragments in which people who knew (of ) Esequiel talk of his legal status, civic integration, and youthful vulnerability—frames of deservingness that are regularly used to prove a migrant’s “good citizenship” (cf. Chauvin & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2014). Earlier on, historian Enrique Madrid had already indicated Esequiel’s vulnerability by mentioning that he came from the poorest part of one of the poorest counties in the nation: a county in dire need of educators and doctors instead of the Marines and border patrol officers that the government was sending there (00:08:47). Then, Fitzgerald gives the floor to Esequiel’s father. Addressing us for the first time, Esequiel Hernández Senior reminds us that he may have “worked all [his] life as a laborer in the fields and with livestock on ranches” but “all of [his] children were born in the United States” (00:14:26). With this seemingly odd pairing of thoughts, father Hernández testifies to a common occurrence within the community of migrants whose legal status is questionable— or often comes into question. Latinxs for whom fear, exclusion, and vulnerability have been defining presences tend to “exhibit extremely low self-reporting of discrimination” and have lower “expectations of acceptance” based on their awareness of their perceived lack of acculturation (Macia, 2016, p. 112). Thus, Esequiel’s foreign-born father seems to suggest that, unlike himself, his American-born son deserved reverence and protection. To further emphasize Esequiel’s deservingness, but this time based on his economic performance (cf. Chauvin et al., 2013), his former teacher Randall Cater testifies: I don’t have any reason whatsoever to believe that Esequiel was involved in the… in the drug trade at all. What Esequiel was into was his… his goats because he was… He was a capitalist. He wanted… was a small businessman. He wanted to invest his time and effort and money into his goats. And he wanted to develop a… an outstanding goat heard and…

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and make cheese and… and profit. Uh. He was just the kind of kid that, uh, you want in America. (00:20:04)

However, in the footage that follows—a press conference given by Bañuelos’s lawyer Jack Zimmerman—we discover that Esequiel’s economic integration, like his legal status, did not matter. As Zimmerman explains to the press, because Esequiel was carrying a rifle while herding his goats at the border, he fit the profile of a smuggler, causing the Marines to see him as “an armed man, on foot, walking behind a herd of goats” (00:20:35). Fitzgerald counters Zimmerman’s statement with a comment by Esequiel’s teacher Christine Manriquez, in which she reminds us of her student’s “cultural deservingness” (cf. Chauvin et al., 2013) by stressing that, contrary to the “goat-herder” he was made out to be in the press, Esequiel was in fact “a student… that had goats – there is a difference” (00:21:06). Finally, in an effort to definitively prove the boy’s integration into the Texan cultural matrix, Fitzgerald has David Castañeda—a retired US border patrol chief—disclose two facts about Esequiel that are highly symbolical in US culture (00:21:17). Firstly, the boy was going to take his driver’s test—an all-American rite of passage—the day after he was killed. Secondly, the reason why Esequiel had decided to take a rifle with him was to protect his goats from predators, in accordance with the Second Amendment of the United States. “This is Texas,” Castañeda adds (00:25:36)—a place where, as Presidio County Judge Jake Brisbin explains, “guns are part of life” (00:25:34). Later on in the documentary, Brisbin appears again. This time around, however, he shares his surprise at the public’s reaction to Esequiel’s death. Despite his understanding—as a judge—of the obviousness of the young man’s wrongful death, he was “shocked” to discover during a talk show to which he was invited that “the tone of the talk show and the callings that night […] were pro-military” (00:50:14). Fitzgerald accentuates the inherent contradiction in the public’s attitude by juxtaposing Brisbin’s TV appearance with Zimmerman’s on-camera exposure of how, the day after the abovementioned press conference, he “took a lot of the wind out of the sails of people who were saying that this dashedly guy from… from California came in here and murdered this young, innocent kid”

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(00:57:50). Apparently, as Presidio County Attorney Teresa Todd states, Zimmerman decided to be “extremely affective with the media” when he realized that his defendant was “also a young man, that also had his whole life ahead of him” (00:57:10). Zimmerman never directly acknowledges that, contrary to the other Marines on the team, Esequiel Hernández and Cpl. Bañuelos shared the same phenotype. Instead, he implies their ethnic resemblance by remarking that “they looked like they’re brothers” (00:57:45). By giving out photos to the media of Bañuelos “in his Marine Corps dress uniform” and “in a golf polo overshirt” (00:57:32), he hoped to exploit that similarity to exonerate his client in the public’s eye. Sure enough, the press took the bait and printed Clemente’s informal picture side by side with Esequiel’s high-school portrait (00:57:42), visually undoing Clemente’s suspicion of guilt by implying that both parties could have suffered the same fate. To confirm this fact, Fitzgerald adds in a snippet of Enrique Madrid’s interview, in which he mentions that “one of Esequiel’s dreams was to join the Marine Corps and become a Marine” (01:01:45). Holding up a photograph taken of Esequiel’s bedroom shortly after his death, he reveals that there is one telltale item missing in that photo: a Marine Corps recruiting poster that Esequiel’s younger brother had ripped off the wall when he heard of his passing (01:12:10). Placing the blame on the government rather than on powerless pawns such as Clemente or Esequiel, Madrid alludes here to the paradox of the US immigration policies. Because of their presupposition of a hierarchy between the very deserving and the undeserving, they produce a moral gradation in illegality (cf. Chauvin & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2014). As Brisbin’s TV experience proves, the gradual criminalization of federal immigration law has, on the one hand, shifted the public discourse from one of empathy to indifference—or possibly disgust—and, on the other, allowed for the condoning of cases where law enforcement is tempted to overreach and offend constitutional safeguards of individual liberty (cf. Romero, 2010). Additionally, the slow but steady evolution of the United States into a “crimmigration nation” (Stumpf, 2006) brought about “social illegality” (Flores & Schachter, 2018)—a condition written upon the bodies of individuals who are believed to be “illegal” based on social stereotypes and not on legal realities.

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This, in turn, explains why the Marines mistook Esequiel for a narco. Since the punitive turn in Western legal thinking, criminality has been approached as a condition of personhood that should be punished by the offender’s social exclusion. Such a stance implies that, since society itself is supposed to be criminal-free because of its punitive treatment of criminal behavior, there must be some kind of “mythical, and naturally closed off world outside of society where the criminals reside” (Schinkel, 2002, p. 139)—such as whatever lies beyond the US–Mexico border. However, on the border itself, the boundary between criminality and social illegality has blurred, resulting in spatial ambiguity. Rick Thompson’s smuggling and Esequiel Hernández’s killing are prime examples of crimes that, in a space like Redford, have become indistinguishable from law and order. The border as understood by the US “crimmigration policy” (cf. Stumpf, 2006) made it possible for Esequiel Hernández to be mistaken for a criminal because of the social illegality written on his body, while enabling a criminal like Rick Thompson to use his social standing as a façade to conceal his illegal activities for years on end. Consequently, as Tommy Lee Jones narrates, the Texas State Grand Jury refused to indict Cpl. Bañuelos, thus forcing the Department of Justice to drop its federal investigation (01:04:05). In other words, the authorities treated Esequiel’s death as collateral damage that, according to US Congressman Tom Tancred, “you have to bounce […] off against the security of the nation” (01:15:23). In archival news footage, an unnamed reporter explains the logic behind this decision in a nutshell: in a legal framework that considers the social exclusion of criminals to be a nonnegotiable necessity, “accidents will happen” (01:15:14). In the end, thanks to its corrido-inspired alternative rearrangement of supposed facts, The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández proves that Clemente and Esequiel could have indeed suffered the same fate, not because of their perceived undeservingness but, rather, despite their factual deservingness. Increasingly restrictive migration control has turned the “right to deserve” effectively into “a civic privilege” (Chauvin & GarcésMascareñas, 2014, p. 429), which Clemente was lucky enough to access because, as Lance Cpl. Wieler states, “the military was behind [the

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team]” (00:56:15). Behind Esequiel, on the other hand, there was nobody—nobody powerful enough to stand up to the military, that is.

Legal Ambiguities at the Border Contrary to Al otro lado, where the focus is on interrogating the morality of illegal border activities, in The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández it is the immorality of supposed legal border activities that is put to the test. However, even in Al otro lado, the legal ambiguities of the border come to the fore. In one particular scene, Almada films a confrontation between perceived legality and illegality, when US minutemen—that is, civilians who voluntarily patrol the border—come across Mexican border crossers in the Arizona desert and denounce them to the authorities (00:43:48–00:47:07). Leading up to this somewhat anticlimactic— because blatantly unjust—showdown is a contradictory amalgam of testimonies from, on the one hand, Mexican traffickers boasting about their exploits and, on the other, US border patrol agents scouting the border for illegal activity. What triggers this sequence is Magdiel’s joyous on-camera revelation—one year after filming began—of his impending crossover al otro lado. It would seem that a coyote liked a song Magdiel wrote for him so much that he promised the corridista he would “cross [him] for free” (00:36:09; translation in the original). Here, by means of her editing, Almada resorts to a tactic generally used to signalize the legal ambiguities of illegal immigration: drawing on resemblances or interconnections between law and illegality to suggest that laws themselves are illegitimate (cf. Coutin, 2005). In order to deduce who it is that truly has “the common good” (cf. Diggs, 1973)— that is, a political philosophy concept that designates the well-being of the people as the core motivation of the law—at heart, she pits the motivations of the coyotes against those of border patrol officers. Somebody introduced in the captions as “head coyote” admits, with his back to the camera, that he doesn’t like to be called a coyote because “it implicates [him]” (00:36:25; translation in the original). He would rather be seen as “the one who helps people cross over” (00:36:35; translation in the

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original) since, from his perspective, he is a small cog in a large wheel—a “chain of people” who pick migrants up, cross them over, and drop them off (00:36:42; translation in the original). Giving off a very different vibe than the calm and collected head coyote is the man who will be in charge of Magdiel’s crossing. Swinging in a rocking chair, surrounded by some of his fellow coyotes, he is filmed laughingly sharing his trade secrets, seemingly undeterred by the presence of Almada’s camera. He confidently tells Magdiel that his chances of making it al otro lado are 100% because, as a coyote, he knows “different ways” and “many places to cross” (00:37:03; translation in the original). Contrary to the head coyote, who goes by the corrido-like philosophy that he is not committing “a crime” but “helping people” (00:41:28; translation in the original) while outwitting the American authorities who “think they’re so smart” (00:37:52; translation in the original), Magdiel’s coyote seems more of a loose cannon. From his boastful interactions with the other coyotes, it becomes clear that his incentive for undertaking such a dangerous endeavor is economic rather than altruistic: in one journey across the border, he can make up to $800—the equivalent of two monthly salaries (00:38:10). Nevertheless, Magdiel’s coyote also mentions a “cute” three-year-old girl he recently crossed over. He assures the group that, as a father himself, he would not “leave [border crossers of that kind] behind” because he “feels sorry” for them (00:39:27; translation in the original). Shortly after, however, he jokingly threatens Magdiel: “You better treat me well or I’ll leave you in the desert. I left a guy the other day” (00:42:25; translation in the original). Almada further accentuates how thin the coyotes’ line is between helping and using border crossers by interspersing the abovementioned footage with images of the border patrol’s experience on the terrain. Driving around in a hefty vehicle, an officer tells Almada’s camera that human trafficking has become “a numbers game” where “there is always more of them than there are of us” (00:37:40). This statement confirms the head coyote’s earlier allegation that, on average, he guides up to 15 people across the border in one go (00:37:32). From another border patrol officer, we then learn that the “loads are very profitable”

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(00:39:32). As it turns out, the officer is not referring to loads of drugs but loads of humans: [The coyotes] can make more money out of smuggling people than out of smuggling drugs. […] They even abandon people that can’t keep up with the pace. They will basically go by a mathematical calculation of how many people they can get through and not they… and what they can get paid for. They’ll just drop ‘em behind and leave ‘em in the middle of desert. And after that, it’s just… pure endurance of how long you can take it. (00:39:09)

However, just as Almada’s audiovisual argumentation is about to sway in favor of the law, she gives the floor to a border crosser who was recently apprehended by border patrol, along with many others. His stance is one of resentment and disbelief at the unfairness and illogicality of the law. Along with footage of rescuers tending to the group of exhausted migrants, he is filmed saying: We came here to work for you. To pick your crops – pick tomato, eggplant, oranges… All the work we do stays here and the taxes we pay do too. Who are they for? The government. In Mexico, there is no work. In Mexico, the government just steals. (00:40:05; translation in the original)

A faceless border crosser, of whom we only get to see the blistered feet, chimes in by purporting that despite his arrest or the injuries he incurred during this crossing, he will “try again” because he is driven by necessity and has “no other option” (00:41:07; translation in the original). Almada bottles these people’s determination by setting them off against images of, on the one hand, a third border patrol officer sharing with us that he comes across about two casualties a month (00:41:25) and, on the other hand, the head coyote alleging that people like him are needed at the border because “[if ] we don’t cross [these people], they cross alone, and they […] die” (00:41:34; translation in the original). This sequence begs the question: who is the true villain? The border patrol officer—the law—who is paid to make border crossing so difficult that it forces people to take increasingly dangerous routes? Or the coyote—the outlaw—who

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is paid to protect these people from the harm that the law inflicts on them? With this query, Almada summons the image of a US–Mexico border that is far vaster than its physical avatar. In her documentary, the border begins in Sinaloa and ends somewhere in Arizona. To the people who pay or are paid to either have or block access al otro lado, the border is a mental fault line created by the violent logic of neoliberalism (cf. Pugliese, 2009). As one of the Tigres puts it, this migratory flow is “convenient” to “the governments on both sides” because one wants the “cheap labor” that the other is trying to “get rid of ” (00:42:03; translation in the original). In fact, during the group conversation between Magdiel and the coyotes, the latter do indeed blame “the crisis” for their unemployment and their subsequent pursuit of human trafficking (00:38:30). Their ruminations about the economic considerations that come with legal versus illegal activity culminate in footage Almada shoots in the Arizona desert, about “30 miles north of the border,” as per the captions (00:42:39). Tagging along with a Civil Homeland Defense Group that, in their leader Chris Simcox’s words, is “a neighborhood watch group […] reporting suspicious, illegal activity to the proper authorities” (00:42:55), Almada highlights an entirely different and much more controversial side of the immigration debate. Oblivious to Arizona’s historical attachment to Mexico or America’s relatively recent annexation of the territory, Simcox refers to the border zone as a “war zone” (00:43:02) and the site of “an all-out invasion” (00:42:07). Pointing out the impressive amount of “human waste” left behind by border crossers, he openly acknowledges the “absolute disgust” he feels when he is confronted with tangible signs that “this many people have broken into [his] country” (00:42:40). Continuing his tour of the desert for the sake of Almada’s camera, Simcox suddenly comes across a group of Spanishspeaking people hiding behind a bush, whom he proceeds to verbally coax out of their hideout and round up—with the help of the other minutemen—before calling border patrol on them (00:44:09–00:46:49). Although private civilians have the right to make a citizen’s arrest, they can only do so in case they can catch an offender red-handed. However, a private civilian has no right to ask for identification, let alone

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make a presumption of guilt of any crime based on racial profiling, as is the case here. To go about apprehending people—30 miles away from the border, no less—based on the assumption that they may have crossed illegally is in itself illegal. Judging by the footage, no force was used to hold the people hiding in the desert. That being said, the border crossers—who appear not to speak any English—are never made aware that they are dealing with armed vigilantes rather than law enforcement officers. Even though they have every right to get up and walk away, they stay put because of the powerful aura of authority emanating from the minutemen. As such, contrary to the people who are presumed to be border crossers and who do nothing wrong by hiding in the desert, the Americans apprehending them could be accused of a number of serious offenses, ranging from police impersonation to false imprisonment. However, as Almada’s footage suggests, the latter remains unpunished. It could be argued that this is the most iconic scene of the documentary, as it enacts the corrido’s clash between the forces of malevolent good and benevolent evil. However, Almada seems to insinuate that injustice prevails in real life, as shown by the supposed outlaws’ helplessness in the face of the self-righteous minutemen, who do not hesitate to take the law into their own hands. Hence, once more, the border is portrayed as turning norms, laws, and morals topsy-turvy. To the Civil Homeland Defense Group, these individuals are not people; they are undistinguishable from the waste their predecessors left behind. To the Group, the border crossers’ “trash” (00:43:28) does not belong in the Arizona desert any more than they do. As undocumented migrants, they are perceived as deviations from the documented norm—unlawful, illegal, and unauthorized because they have failed to go through the proper institutional channels (cf. Pugliese, 2009). To flesh out this notion, Almada asks the people apprehended by Simcox why they did not “try to get visas” (00:45:38; translation in the original). One of them answers with a meaningful question: “If I had all [the prerequisites necessary for a visa application], why would I come here?” (00:45:41; translation in the original). Somewhat aware of the conversation Almada is having in Spanish, Simcox draws her attention with a statement that befits his stance, leaning confidently on the car

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door of his impressive truck as he is looking over the group of border crossers, who are hunching on the side of the road: “Same story, can’t find work in Mexico, right? Looking for work here. And I wish we had a way for them to come legally. And work. But… no más illegal” (00:46:03). His body language gives proof of his disdain for these outlaw “bodies” (cf. Pugliese, 2009), who—in his eyes—do not possess any proper claim to the category of “human” subject. Simcox’s cowboylike demeanor also betrays his incorporation of a deep-rooted nostalgia for the Old West— a physical place that runs parallel with the corridista’s Old Mexico and that functions as a void onto which the dreams and desires of any wouldbe settler can be projected. In Simcox’s post-Western era, however, this romantic vision of the past only ends up Disneyfying the Far West, turning it into a Baudrillardian hyperreality filled with caricatures rather than characters—“a fantastical world that intrudes on the real one until it becomes established as reality itself ” (Muniz, 2013, p. 65). Attesting to the same caricaturesque behavior and discourse are the Marines from The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández . Although toward the end of the documentary they appear to be hinting at their partial acknowledgment of (their involvement in) Esequiel’s unlawful death (01:07:00–01:13:19), they remain immutable in their defense of team leader Bañuelos. However, their words sound hollow as they keep resorting to clichés that have no place in the context of a documentary that makes a point of exposing the bare bones of what truly happened. Despite having ended up with PTSD-like symptoms (00:07:43) or having developed an addiction to crystal meth (01:08:34) as a result of their tour of duty, the retired Marines are still adamant they “loved every minute of it” (01:10:01). Notwithstanding their admittance of having been “trained […] for warfare” rather than for the reconnaissance with which they were tasked in Texas (00:26:10), they still refuse to accept criticism of anybody belonging to the military institution—their “brothers” (01:10:09). In Torrez’s words: Talk to me. Tell… tell him, while he’s sitting next to me, tell my team leader that he’s a murderer… and he did this… and… I’m a murderer and I did that. And then the other two guys… the same thing. You can say that, say all you want, go ahead, talk to me, tell me that. And then

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when you’re done, Imma tell you to take a nice, deep breath and say “You enjoyed that deep breath, right? Cos that’s the freedom that we give you. That we gave you. That the Marines that are out there and the… soldiers and the Navy… the guys out there that are dying right now… give you to do. That’s your right because we do our job. Do all you want! It means two squirts of piss to me right now what you frickin’ think about what I did. Until you man up, earn that EGA [Eagle, Globe, and Anchor – the Marines’ official emblem], put that uniform on, and go lay in the dirt with me. Then you come talk to me. Until that day comes around, enjoy all that air you’re breathing into your lungs right now. Cos there’s a guy out there dying for you. (00:49:49)

Torrez is also eager to display the values he supposedly took away from his time in the Marine Corps by revealing an “eagle globe tattoo” on his arm (01:10:50). He assures the camera that he is also “raising [his] son the right way” (01:10:40) because he is basing the boy’s upbringing on the ideals behind that symbol. The child even has a music box featuring the Marines’ Eagle, Globe, and Anchor in his bedroom, as Torrez proudly shows the camera. When he asks the toddler whether he knows what the words printed on the music box are saying, the boy blindly replies: “Honor, courage, commitment” (01:11:10). With these images, Fitzgerald begins dropping the curtain on his documentary. Building on the little boy’s innocence toward his father’s nostalgia for a lost referential (cf. Baudrillard, 1994), Fitzgerald goes on to challenge the very grounds on which the likes of Torrez distinguish legality and illegality. Following this interview, Fitzgerald comes back to Enrique Madrid, who is shown holding up old photos of Noel, Esequiel’s little brother, who appears to be of a similar age as Torrez’s son. Over home footage of young Noel staring at his brother’s open casket, Madrid is heard commenting: “You do not abuse uh… the liberty of Americans with your own soldiers, because we pay for those soldiers and those soldiers are our children and our brothers and our fathers” (01:12:27). Suggesting that Torrez’s belief in the righteousness of his acts is flirting with the roguery of the bandits he sees as his nemeses, Fitzgerald opens up Torrez’s sophism by making it apply to the entire US government. By means of a string of archival news reports featuring, among others, the Secretary

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of Defense Kenneth Bacon, his Deputy Assistant Capt. Mike Doubleday, and President George Bush Sr. (01:13:19–01:16:17), Fitzgerald intimates how rapidly the employment of the military on US soil has grown in recent years. As Tommy Lee Jones explains in another voice-over, President Bush Sr. started the current trend of trying to “find ways around” the Posse Comitatus (00:16:34)—a law dating back to the end of the Civil War that prohibited the military to “act as law enforcement within the United States” (00:16:14). After 9/11, however, the precedent set by President Bush Sr. allowed the military to expand its mission and “use [its] counter-drug expertise to deal with all transnational threats trying to enter [the] country, particularly terrorists” (01:17:10). Fitzgerald’s exposition of these “legal double standards” (cf. Coutin, 2005) reaches its climax thanks to yet another photo that Enrique Madrid shows the camera, this time of Madrid’s own mother giving reading proficiency classes to young Esequiel and his sister Becky. With the help of 1992 footage of a White House Awards Ceremony during which Madrid’s mother was given a medal for her services to the nation as a librarian (01:18:00), Fitzgerald uses Enrique’s photo to allude to the hypocrisy of the US government. He films the historian describing the picture in the following way: “[…] in the center, […] Esequiel Hernández Jr., who was to be killed in… 5 years by American Combat Marines brought to the border under the authority of the legal framework that the same president set up” (01:19:44). As Madrid’s photo proves, the US government will applaud the same people it murders, depending on what is more convenient. Equally invested in showing how distinctions between legal and illegal actions are sometimes arbitrary is Almada. She, too, finishes her documentary on a note very similar to Fitzgerald’s. As Simcox’s watch group is filmed acting on their “civic duty” by rounding up the Mexican migrants that they found during their “neighborhood watch sweep” (00:45:18), she indirectly comments on the event by splicing in footage of Magdiel writing another corrido, which she laces with haunting images of the Arizona Pauper’s Cemetery: Unos luchan brincando fronteras, / y los gringos matan mexicanos, / caminando, nadando si pueden / pa’ lograr el pan de los hermanos. / En mi mente traigo mi familia, mi esperanza no se ha terminado. / […]

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Mucha gente ha ido y no ha vuelto, unos llegan y otros quedan muertos. / La desgracia, el maldito desierto. / Dicen que el otro lado es bonito, mucha gente ha ido y no ha vuelto, unos llegan y otros quedan muertos. / La desgracia, el maldito desierto. / Las esposas se quedan sufriendo, / y sus madres quieren su regreso.8 (00:44:46)

After a black screen (00:47:51), the documentary makes a time jump and reveals a nervous Magdiel, bustling around his room while stuffing a large gym bag with items he presumes he will need on his journey al otro lado. In front of Almada’s camera, spurred on by her questions, he comes to the realization that he has not put aside any money for after “the trip”—nothing “for when [he gets] there” (00:48:21). However, Magdiel is quick to shrug off Almada’s inquiries with a swift reply: “No, that would be too difficult. No one does that” (00:48:28). After bidding an emotional farewell to his parents, who make sure to warn him that the people “over there” are “not the same” (00:48:50), he jumps in a car—driven, presumably, by his coyotes—and sets off into the sunset (00:50:55) Contrary to his mother, who is left looking at Magdiel’s car disappearing into the distance, we do catch one more glimpse of him (Fig. 9.2). In the dead of the night, without any sign of the oversized bag he loaded into the car earlier, carrying a bottle of water in one hand and holding onto a pendant of the Virgin Mary in the other, Magdiel is filmed walking behind a number of other migrants. Trailing him until the actual border, Almada captures Magdiel’s final words before crossing over: “God willing and the Virgin, we’ll make it” (00:53:02; translation in the original). As the credits begin rolling, footage of the Tigres performing another corrido plays in the background, their lyrics hinting at Magdiel’s fate: “That’s how the story ends, there is nothing left to tell. / Another brother risks his life and dies an illegal. And Jose who 8 Some struggle jumping the border, / and the Gringos kill Mexicans, / walking, swimming, however they can, / To make enough to feed our brothers. / My family is in my mind, I haven’t lost hope. / […] Many people have gone and not returned, some make it and others are left dead. / Their disgrace the terrible desert. / They say the other side is nice, / Many have gone and not returned, some make it and others are left dead. / Their disgrace the terrible desert. / Their wives are left suffering, / And their mothers are left longing for their return. (00:44:46; translation in the original).

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Fig. 9.2 Al otro lado (Almada, 2006; screenshots by the author)

had a million dreams, / will never return home” (00:53:25).9 Echoing Fitzgerald’s insinuation that Esequiel’s border experience went awry because of Disneyfied “frontier fantasies” (cf. Muniz, 2013), Almada seems to conclude that Magdiel’s crossover will also be marked by the uncertainty and violence of which his—and the Tigres’—hyperreal corridos are replete.

9 Natalia Almada disclosed bits and pieces of Magdiel’s fate in a number of interviews. He did, in fact, make it to the United States but returned to Mexico shortly after, once he secured a number of small recording deals.

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Criminalizing the Nation-State Funneled through Magdiel’s ambitions and Esequiel’s memory, the border in Al otro lado and The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández manifests itself as beyond good and evil, like the people who (aim to) cross it. Laying bare the societal, spatial, and legal ambiguities of the border zone, the documentary makers of both films seem to suggest that liminal figures like Magdiel and Esequiel are not the villainous masterminds they are made out to be in the popular imaginary. Rather, they are victims of the US-Mexican “crimmigration crisis” (cf. Stumpf, 2006)—criminalized by both nation-states to diverge the public’s attention from these nation-states’ own deviousness. Both the border and the corrido, then, are to be seen as repositories of “an unfolding mythos that attempts to bury its ghosts as well as resurrect a historical period where the struggle of life and death was imagined to have a level of meaning and importance not conferred in current transnational discourse” (Muniz, 2013, p. 67). Thanks to the parallel Almada and Fitzgerald draw between the border and the corrido, they reveal “the ‘real’ scandal that the system conspires to mask” (ibid.), namely that the system itself is immoral and unscrupulous.

References Almada, N. (2006, August 1). Al otro lado. In POV Season 19. PBS. Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation. University of Michigan Press. Chauvin, S., & Garcés-Mascareñas, B. (2014). Becoming less illegal: Deservingness frames and undocumented migrant incorporation. Sociology Compass, 8(4), 422–432. Chauvin, S., Garcés-Mascareñas, B., & Kraler, A. (2013). Employment and migrant deservingness. International Migration, 51(6), 80–85. Coutin, S. B. (2005). Contesting criminality: Illegal immigration and the spatialization of legality. Theoretical Criminology, 9 (1), 5–33. Diggs, B. J. (1973). The common good as reason for political action. Ethics, 83(4), 283–293.

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Edberg, M. C. (2009). El Narcotraficante: Narcocorridos and the construction of a cultural persona on the U.S.–Mexico border. University of Texas Press. Fitzgerald, K. (2008, July 8). The ballad of Esequiel Hernández. In POV Season 21. PBS. Flores, R. D., & Schachter, A. (2018). Who are the “illegals”? The social construction of illegality in the United States. American Sociological Review, 83(5), 839–868. Hobsbawm, E. (2010). Bandits. Hachette UK. Lantz, A. (2016). The performativity of violence: Abducting agency in Mexico’s drug war. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 25 (2), 253–269. Macia, L. (2016). Experiences of discrimination in an emerging Latina/o community. PoLAR: The Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 39 (1), 110–126. McDowell, D. E., Harold, C. N., & Battle, J. (2013). The punitive turn: New approaches to race and incarceration. University of Virginia Press. McDowell, J. H. (2015). ¡Corrido!: The living ballad of Mexico’s Western Coast. UNM Press. Moerk, C. (2005, December 11). An actor, a writer and the silent border between them. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/ movies/an-actor-a-writer-and-the-silent-border-between-them.html Muniz, C. (2013). Narcocorridos and the nostalgia of violence: Postmodern resistance en la Frontera. Western American Literature, 48(1/2), 56–69. Pugliese, J. (2009). Crisis Heterotopias and border zones of the dead. Continuum, 23(5), 663–679. Ragland, C. (2009). Musica Norteña: Mexican Americans creating a nation between nations. Temple University Press. Romero, V. C. (2010). Decriminalizing border crossings. Fordham Urban Law Journal, 1, 273–302. Schinkel, W. (2002). The modernist myth in criminology. Theoretical Criminology, 6 (2), 123–144. Stanger, A. (2016). Heterotopia as choreography. Performance Research, 21(3), 65–73. Stumpf, J. (2006). The crimmigration crisis: Immigrants, crime, and sovereign power. American University Law Review, 56 (2), 367–420.

10 The Individual Experience of Migrant Queers

In The Transformation (Aiken & Aparicio, 1996) and Memories of a Penitent Heart (Aldarondo, 2017), documentary makers Susana Aiken, Juan Aparicio, and Cecilia Aldarondo deal with the “queer trauma” (cf. Cvetkovich, 2003) that the AIDS crisis brought about in the United States. They focus specifically on Latinx queer trauma by pointing their cameras at two HIV-positive Caribbeans: in The Transformation, Cuban Ricardo/Sara, a former drag queen, and in Memories of a Penitent Heart, Puerto Rican Miguel/Michael, a perfectly bilingual stage actor. Set in the early nineties, Aiken and Aparicio’s film follows Ricardo’s journey as he goes on a soul-searching mission to find God before passing away from AIDS. Two decades later, Aldarondo attempts to resuscitate her late uncle Miguel with the help of photos, testimonials by friends and family, and voice-overs of his letters. Along the way, Aldarondo exposes her pious family’s cover-up of Miguel’s queer life and AIDSrelated death. As her film morphs from a tribute into a whodunnit, she confirms the cliché that in the Latinx community “there are always ‘coming out’ stories about recognizing the late queer uncle” (Roque Ramírez, 2010, p. 109). These ambiguous “naming practices” (cf. Howe, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Sanchez, Discourses of Migration in Documentary Film, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06539-2_10

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2015) are inextricably intertwined with the problematic process of recognizing Ricardo and Miguel for who they are. They testify to how—in the United States—there is a tendency to think of “life as we know it” as “a social ideal” that is necessarily “threatened by the existence of others: immigrants, queers, other others” (Ahmed, 2015, p. 144). It should not come as a surprise, then, that once Ricardo is diagnosed with HIV, he is offered help by a church of Born Again Christians on the condition he renounces the supposedly ungodly life he led as Sara. On the other hand, Miguel is desperate to reconcile his Puerto Rican mother’s strict Catholicism with the libertarian values of those who know him as Michael in NYC—two parties who are equally convinced of the other’s supposed barbarism. From lucky Caribbeans who have escaped from their homophobic countries of origin to live happily ever after in the United States, Ricardo and Miguel steadily transform into figures of hate at the hands of the supposedly freethinking society that lured them in with its promise of freedom, equality, and democracy.

Naming Practices In The Transformation, Aiken and Aparicio open their film not with their queer protagonist, but with somebody who tells us about them.1 Terry, as the captions introduce him, is a mustached man whose Southern accent accentuates his cowboylike, hypermasculine demeanor. Facing the camera, sitting comfortably on a white couch, he begins a lengthy monologue: When I met Ricardo, he was Sara. He was the gang leader, the… mentor of all the drag queens out there. He got most of ’em into drag, onto crack, showed’em how to work… the streets… and everything else. […] The thing that makes him unusual… is that he is enormously… uh… charismatic. […] But there was something missing. And what was missing… is that he never knew what it was to be a man. (00:00:07) 1 Ricardo/Sara’s correct pronouns are either misused or confused throughout the documentary. In instances where it is unclear how Ricardo/Sara would have preferred to be addressed, the pronouns they/them are used.

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In a voice-over accompanying archival footage of a group of people living in squalid conditions in New York City, Terry reveals that he was watching TV one day when he heard of “Salt Mine kids” who “were living in a garbage dump where they stored the salt for winter” (00:01:20). As he lived only a few blocks away from them, he decided to see for himself whether he could be of any help to “these drag queens” (00:01:41). Among the first people Terry met there was a Cuban immigrant who, in a flashback snippet, tells the camera: “Yo soy cubana, cubano. Me llamo Ricardo, me titulo Sara”2 (00:02:20). Since then, Terry announces, Ricardo has “made the change and come off the street” (00:02:04). To clarify what this change entails, the camera cuts to a scene where we are introduced to a seemingly new character somewhere in Dallas, Texas. Stripped of Sara’s cheekiness, her feminine haircut, her skillfully applied make-up, Ricardo—who is filmed praying in English, standing in a circle of devotees (00:02:50)—emerges as serious and demure. This person who now, judging by his external appearance, identifies as a man bears no resemblance to the blonde Latinx woman who cheerfully told the camera in Spanish that she was imprisoned in Cuba before defecting to the United States in the hope of finding “el país de las maravillas” (00:02:30).3 However, she quickly came to realize that “here, if you have no money you are nothing” (00:02:40; translation in the original)—especially when you belong to an already marginalized demographic with no secure network on which to fall back. The prayer circle elucidates that the change to which Terry alluded earlier does not so much refer to Ricardo’s altered gender expression as to a transformation of a different kind: Father, we just thank you for the change in Ricardo and in his life. Father, we thank you that you have brought him from such a… from such a deep and a dark hole, Lord, but that you have lifted him out of that place. Father, you have set him up, Lord. You have stuck him in the Devil’s face and you’ve said “Look what I can do with one who has a heart” […]. We see the transformation taking place even now. Thank you for that transformation in his mind and in his heart […]. (00:02:58) 2 3

“I am a Cuban woman… man. My name is Ricardo, I go by Sara” (00:01:20; my translation). “wonderland” (00:02:30; my translation).

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As it turns out, Ricardo’s change seems to be more than skin-deep. In finding God, Ricardo rediscovered the “true”—masculine and heterosexual—version of who he once was. At least, that is what both he and his entourage of Born Again Christians seem to be implying on camera (00:28:03). Yet, as the documentary advances, Aiken and Aparicio keep surprising us with suspicious conversations that Ricardo has with his friends and ambiguous confessions that he makes to their camera, which surreptitiously invites us to question the authenticity of Ricardo’s newfound identity and faith. Similarly, Aldarondo begins Memories of a Penitent Heart by casting a shadow of doubt over her uncle’s faith and identity. She, however, lets her protagonist speak directly to us rather than through a spokesperson. In a recording of what seems to be an audition for an unnamed role, Aldorondo’s uncle Miguel is heard telling the casting agent in impeccable General American English that he comes from the “lush” and “very lovely” island of Puerto Rico where he has parents, siblings, nieces, and nephews (00:02:27). Aldarondo follows this up with a succession of family photos. She tells us in a voice-over of a “surprise visit” Miguel paid the family six months before his unexpected death in 1987 (00:02:51). This, as it turns out, would be Aldarondo’s only memory of the “fun, charming, seductive guy” her uncle was (00:03:00). As the colorful family photos start making way for black-and-white shots of Miguel in a hospital ward, Aldarondo splices in a phone call with her mother Nylda about Miguel’s suspicious passing. Their mother Carmen, who features extensively in those final pictures, was seemingly more upset about her son’s unwillingness to “repent” for his as-yet-undefined “relationship with Robert” (00:04:44) than she was about Miguel’s cancer—a diagnosis of which Nylda does not seem convinced when she mentions “some spots he had on his legs” (00:04:23). Yet, according to Carmen, Miguel eventually “went to confession before he died” and “was received in heaven” (00:04:50)— to his mother’s great relief. Nylda also mentions that she recalls the said Robert being present at Miguel’s funeral. However, because she never “saw or heard from Robert again” (00:06:05), she claims she forgot all about him, including his last name. Yet, in the phone call, Aldarondo seems dubious about the authenticity of her mother’s oblivion. The

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documentary gains momentum hereafter, when she begins digging up her uncle’s past and, in doing so, slowly undoes the image Carmen had manufactured of “the son she wanted, not the one she had” (00:03:38). This desire to fill in the blanks left by their protagonist drives Aiken and Aparicio as well. Initially, all three documentary makers seem to premise their films on the idea that queer identities are essentially codified mysteries that can be cracked with the necessary detective work. Such an understanding of identity falls in line with “descriptive representation” (Duong, 2012)—a paradigm that approaches the multiple dimensions of identity as a puzzle to be disentangled and solved. The primary idea behind this approach is that by describing those who are nameless and marginalized, they can be “hailed” (Butler, 2011) into existence and their stories can supposedly serve as a corrective to our vision of society. The notion of queerness itself testifies to how empowering naming can be. Originally an insult, the term “queer” became a category of belonging and a designation for many alternative configurations of sexuality, gender, and desire when it was reclaimed by organizations such as Queer Nation (Howe, 2015). However, both Ricardo’s and Miguel’s life stories predate the emergence of queerness as a celebratory concept. Ricardo, in particular, is depicted throughout The Transformation as pressured by US society—embodied by the figure of Terry—to conceal his ambiguous (“queer”) sense of self. Lost in a whirlwind of words that fail to cover him, Ricardo begins his process of self-discovery and self-affirmation by relinquishing the moniker “Sara” and reverting to the name he was given at birth. As images flash by of his wedding to Betty, their first dance, and their wedding night, Ricardo tells Aiken and Aparicio in a talking head interview that what caused him to “come off the street” was his AIDS diagnosis (00:06:10; translation in the original). Shockingly, he admits he is thankful for the disease because it triggered him to devote himself to God. It made him realize that “it doesn’t matter if you are a hooker or a crook” (00:06:35; translation in the original) as long as you celebrate who God made you to be: I’m not a homosexual anymore. It’s hard to understand… but from what I’ve learned you are not born gay… It’s the environment in which you

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develop. I was always told I was a faggot and that’s what I grew up like. As a kid I liked women. But I always lived a gay life. Which, by the way, I enjoyed very much. (00:07:08; translation in the original)

Interestingly, Ricardo seems to collapse his previous criminal deviance, transgender identity, and homosexual4 orientation into one by opposing it to his current pious homeliness, cisgender identity, and heterosexual orientation, which he also considers to be inextricably intertwined. As he explains: “I have lived a life of homosexuality, I lived as a woman for a long time, I still have breasts and I also have AIDS” (00:11:00; translation in the original). His “transvestite” alter-ego Sara may have been lauded for being “beautiful,” but nobody knew “how hurt [she] was inside” and “how much [she] wanted to have a home” (00:09:00; translation in the original). He admits he “tried it with men” but “it never worked” (00:09:05; translation in the original). However, with Betty—a fellow Born Again Christian—he admittedly found true love: The difference between the love I feel for my wife and the love I felt for my gay lovers, specially for Mantilla who was one of my deepest loves, the difference is that gay love was more carnal, there was a lot of sex and fighting. It was very passionate love that I enjoyed immensely but I also suffered immensely. Now I don’t suffer with my wife, it’s very sweet and affectionate. It’s very different… (00:18:52; translation in the original)

Ricardo seems to imply here that cisgender heterosexuality is a necessary condition for the stability he currently enjoys with Betty, but his words are replete with nostalgia for his past—supposedly unstable—life. The underlying reason for his current conviction becomes clear when his friend Hugo, formerly known as Gina, stops by for dinner. To the camera, Hugo confesses that Gina spiraled out of control when her boyfriend “started wanting a family” (00:15:54; translation in the original) and left her “for a real woman” (00:16:10; translation in the original). Like Sara, Gina was approached by Terry when she was homeless in New York City and selling her body for drugs (00:16:40). When 4 It goes without saying that Ricardo’s self-labeling here as “homosexual” draws on his entourage’s transphobic refusal to acknowledge Sara as a woman.

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they met, she “didn’t care anymore” (00:16:28; translation in the original)—until Terry took out a Bible and showed her Isaiah, Chapter 56 (00:16:48). The camera then cuts to a previously recorded interview of Terry, in which he explains the passage further: “Let no eunuch say that I am a dry tree,” in other words I can’t have kids. It says “to those eunuchs who keep my covenant and do what I ask, to them I will give an everlasting reward within my walls in his temple. A reward better than the sons and daughters.” So to Christians, when you die and go to heaven, your name may be in the Book of Life but Hugo Rafael Rodriguez, his name is going to be on the very walls of the temple. For all eternity. (00:16:57)

Focusing on Hugo’s plotline again, the camera brings us back to Ricardo’s home, where we find him comfortably chatting to Hugo on a double bed. Backed up by Ricardo’s approving silence, Hugo explains to the camera that going to “a regular rehab” was not as enticing as “the Christian proposition,” which promised him “an eternal future” (00:17:50; translation in the original). In this short sequence lies the answer to why Ricardo and Hugo renounce who they once were. Terry’s fundamentalist teachings are so polarizing that they offer a sense of belonging and security to which neither Ricardo nor Hugo has ever had access before. Terry’s line of faith also underlines how descriptive representation can be a doubleedged sword. As much as naming all the different ways in which gender and sexuality deviate from normativity can serve to hail, perform, and celebrate queerness, it can also be used by the same token to insert it into heteronormative discourse (Butler, 2004). Rather than acknowledging and accepting Sara and Gina’s difference from the Biblical ideal, Terry relies on the practice of naming to incorporate them in “church history” (00:13:50) and reinvent them as “eunuchs”—beatific figures who, according to the Bible, are “born without the desire for the opposite sex” (00:14:20). Terry’s take on visibility colludes with his policing of Ricardo’s and Hugo’s identities; his effort to include them in the Bible functions as a pretense for sustaining the operative system of discipline

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that classified their sexual identity as ‘deviant’ (cf. Duong, 2012) in the first place. However, in The Transformation, nothing is what it seems. Aiken and Aparicio suggest that Hugo and Richard may be willing participants in Terry’s rhetorical game when they capture a shred of conversation between them, seemingly questioning Terry’s true motivations: [Ricardo] Don’t you think Terry is obsessed with drag queens and faggots? [Hugo] Yes, a little too much. [Ricardo] He must have a special calling for drag queens because there are many other people who are not gay and need help. There are many homeless in Dallas, you know. (00:18:03; translation in the original)

Suddenly, the tables turn and it is Terry’s identity that is under scrutiny—a man whose interest in so-called sexual deviance is so farreaching that it calls his own sexuality into question. Ricardo’s exchange with Hugo seems to point at his suspicion that Terry—who is consistently pictured as physically, mentally, and emotionally intrusive of his disciples—is struggling with his own sexual (and possibly gender) identity. His rigid religious beliefs make him so intent on keeping his own possible ‘deviance’ under lock and key that he sublimates his supposedly ‘unnatural’ desires by suppressing them in the likes of Hugo and Ricardo. It becomes undeniable that Ricardo is aware of Terry’s charade—and his own participation in it—when he is summoned by him to return to New York City and convert more of his Salt Mines friends. There, he is accused himself of denying who he truly is when he reunites with Gigi. Unwilling to follow in his footsteps and give up her life as a woman, she reproaches Ricardo for suppressing his gender identity—“something so strong” (00:34:00; translation in the original). Taken by surprise, Ricardo breaks character for a split second and says “Gigi, I couldn’t take it any more… I was lonely… I had no help…” (00:34:20; translation in the original) before getting ahold of himself again. Jovanna, another Salt Mines friend he revisits in New York, is not fooled by his and Hugo’s transformation either. She even suggests

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to the camera that they should take “a lie-detector test or something” (00:46:12). However, separating right from wrong, victim from oppressor, truth from lie is not what motivates Ricardo’s terminal pursuit of happiness, as Aiken and Aparicio appear to suggest toward the end of their film. With some clever editing, they juxtapose a scene where a still healthylooking Ricardo openly rejects his life as Sara (00:46:23) with a contradictory declaration that he gives in the last throes of his disease. Clearly struggling with his health, a weak and pale Ricardo is filmed climbing into a minivan to visit “friends in New York” (00:49:12). During the car ride, Ricardo reveals “the real truth” to the camera: had he not been destined to die so soon, he would have chosen “to be a woman” after all (00:50:39; translation in the original). Echoing Gigi’s words from an earlier interview (00:23:24), Ricardo confirms what his longtime friend knew all along. Terry’s church was “the only way out… the only chance [Ricardo] had to take care of himself… because in the street it would have been impossible” (00:23:40; translation in the original). In their closing scene, Aiken and Aparicio circumvent the temptation to assign a conclusive label to Ricardo. Although Ricardo’s nostalgia toward his life as Sara points at a certain level of regret for having been forced to pretend to be someone he was not, in this last interview he is also given the opportunity by Aiken and Aparicio to pay homage to Sara and, thus, triumph over those who pressured her to become Ricardo— which is the narratological opposite of the documentary’s first scene. Hence, Aiken and Aparicio’s final depiction of their protagonist is not one of a victim or a martyr but rather a survivor who, within the limited range of identities available to him/her/them, simply shapeshifted into the form that made the most of a desperate situation.

Structures of Injustice If The Transformation centers on the description of queerness, Memories of a Penitent Heart seems more concerned with the dialectical options that were available to its protagonist rather than with his particular labeling. The description of Miguel’s queerness is, in and of itself, never

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a point of contention in Aldarondo’s film. What is contentious, however, is the Catholic guilt with which his environment saddled him for being gay. Aldarondo’s representation of her uncle’s life could be considered critical rather than descriptive (cf. Duong, 2012) in that she explains his marginalization by pointing out the underlying, historical structures of injustice that patterned out the limited identity expressions to which he had access. Initially, Memories of a Penitent Heart seems quite decided on which structure of injustice is to blame for Miguel’s marginalization. In the introductory sequence of the film, Catholicism appears to be the obvious culprit—in the figure of Miguel’s mother Carmen. Using super 8 camera footage and old family photos to introduce her grandmother, Aldarondo has us travel back in time to an age where religious fervor and motherly love were indistinguishable. Accompanying these images is a phone call between Aldarondo and her mother Nylda in which Carmen emerges as a concerned—rather than bigoted—parent who was simply worried about her son’s afterlife (00:05:00). In their follow-up interview, however, the righteousness of Carmen’s affection toward Miguel becomes questionable when Nylda discloses her mother’s treatment of Miguel’s lover: It was sad to know that Robert was there [at the funeral]. My mom wasn’t too happy about it, but… But papi insisted that… that it was the right thing for Robert to be there. […] But he kept off, to one side. […] I don’t remember him being part of our group, for some reason. So that was it. (00:05:30)

Unhappy with the sparse information that Nylda provides, Aldarondo launches a search for the elusive Robert—her most direct link to Miguel, outside the family. After a slew of emails, Facebook posts, and online chats, Bob comes forward and contacts Aldarondo himself. In the email he sends her, he mysteriously signs off with “Robert or Father Aquin” (00:07:52). Aldarondo does not give us much time to dwell on this new piece of information, however. Immediately hereafter, she edits in her first phone call with Robert as she leaves her camera to hover over polaroids of Miguel, undeveloped negatives, and framed pictures (Fig. 10.1). It

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becomes clear from this brief conversation that Robert has been craving for somebody to ask for his side of the story: I was always the outcast, you know? I was the devil, I was the person who made him turn gay, and all this kind of stuff, you know? Miguel was my best friend. The best friend I ever had in my life. And when he died, it punched a hole in my heart. Oh my god, I can’t believe this. This is too much, there is so much to talk about. What did you want to know? (00:08:02)

Eager to find out more, Aldarondo travels to Pasadena, California, which is where Robert appears to reside. There, she adds a new layer of complexity to Miguel’s story by her particular framing of their meeting. Before allowing us to catch our first glimpse of Robert, Aldarondo splices in some telltale audio recordings. While the camera’s panoramic shots of the Hollywoodesque outside and inside of Robert’s condominium ooze wealth and decadence, Robert himself is the picture of modesty as he is heard soberly answering his intercom as “Father Aquin” (00:08:58). To Aldarondo’s quirky “Hi! It’s Cecilia, I’m downstairs,” he calmy replies “I’ll be right down” (00:09:00). Yet, when they meet off camera, it is as if they switch roles. Cecilia sounds aloof and expectant in contrast to Robert’s buoyancy and his unexpected code-switching to Spanish: [Robert] ¡Hola! [Cecilia] Hi. [Robert] ¿Qué tal? [Cecilia] It’s really great to meet you. [Robert] Oh my God. [Cecilia] You alright? [Robert] Yeah. (00:09:05)

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Caught off guard by Robert, Aldarondo continues conversing in English. Once again, she does not allow her viewer to process the meaning behind this verbal trade-off just yet. Instead, she cuts to the next scene, which stands in stark contrast to the footage of the look and location of Robert’s palatial residence. As the camera switches to a new shot, the interviewer and interviewee are still heard fidgeting somewhere off camera. All we see is a sparsely decorated bedroom: magnolia walls, a wooden wall bed, demure bed linen. One spot, however, stands out in this Spartan place: hanging on the righthand wall is an impressive collection of crucifixes (Fig. 10.1). As the camera remains immobile, Robert finally appears from behind the lens. His outfit exudes Christianity, from the large religious medallion around his neck to his clerical blouse and dog collar. Sitting down in front of Aldarondo’s camera to talk about his relationship with Miguel, it becomes obvious he will not be telling her a story but his side of the story of Miguel’s life and death. Every now and again Robert drops hints of his suspicion that what he is sharing with Cecilia does not correspond with what she was told at home. He reveals that, unbeknownst to Miguel’s relatives, he attended Miguel’s graduation: “What they don’t know didn’t hurt ’em” (00:11:06). The family also did not know that Miguel and Robert had been in a relationship from 1975 to 1987—“a long time, longer than people thought” (00:10:48). Most importantly, he discloses that the “last time [Miguel] went to the island, right before he died,” was “the only time [they] did not spend Christmas together” (00:11:14). With this seemingly innocuous piece of information, Robert suggests that Miguel was torn between “the island” and “the mainland” (00:15:18). Expanding on the idea that Miguel was torn between two countries, Aldarondo mentions a box containing some of Miguel’s stuff that Robert owned. Filming the trinkets that she found in there, Aldarondo pauses on the contents of Miguel’s wallet. In it, she comes across the identification cards of a certain Michael Dieppa—not Miguel. Bringing us back to Robert’s interview, Aldarondo asks him about Miguel’s name change: He didn’t wanna be called Miguel . He wanted to be called Michael […] because he didn’t wanna be associated with his parents. At that point,

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when he first moved, when I first met him, he was really angry at his parents. Really angry at his parents. (00:12:15; Fig. 10.1)

After this claim, a voice-over of a monologue follows, which appears to have been written by Miguel for a play entitled Island Fever. Over B-roll footage of the colorful streets of an unnamed Caribbean town, a voice actor impersonating Miguel is heard reciting: Island Fever. I guess that’s a diagnosis for my case. It’s that feeling that creeps up on those who have known wider spaces or long to do so. It is a fear that one’s brain will be surrounded by water if one stays here too long. Those who are not natives and catch Island Fever either leave and return to the mainland or they stay and become alcoholics. Those who are, can expect a fate worse than death. They move to New York. (00:12:48)

Agreeing with Miguel’s words, Aldarondo admits in a voice-over that Puerto Rico is a “schizophrenic place” that drives its natives insane (00:14:05). Miguel tried to flee from it but, as Aldarondo suggests, the island’s schizophrenia simply followed him to New York. Once there, he kept struggling with the same questions: “Who did Miguel want to be? A straight guy? The Puerto Rican with no discernible accent?” (00:14:50). Suddenly, Miguel’s identity crisis mutates from a generational conflict between mother and son to a cultural issue. Now, Robert’s earlier addressal of Aldarondo in Spanish becomes emblematic of the schizophrenia mentioned in Miguel’s monologue, a state of mind quite reminiscent of W.E.B. Du Bois’ double consciousness: “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (2005, p. 8). Off camera, when Robert first saw Cecilia, he hailed her—in Butler’s sense of the term—as a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican rather than a bilingual, bicultural Puerto Rican-American. On camera, when Robert speaks of Miguel, he summons the image of a man who belonged to a community whose morals, values, and language were alien to him. Even Miguel and Carmen’s supposedly “Puerto Rican” Catholicism is something from which this American man of the cloth dissociates. In a way, the paradox in Robert’s attitude toward Miguel and

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Fig. 10.1 author)

Memories of a Penitent Heart (Aldarondo, 2017; screenshots by the

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his family echoes the contradiction between the earlier-shown frugality of his apartment and the decadence of his apartment block’s exterior. To further explore this paradox, Aldarondo goes on to sketch a vivid outline of Miguel’s “gay” life in New York with Robert. By means of a selection of interviews with his former clique, she reveals that Miguel was “a creature of the night” (00:18:32) who complemented his domestic relationship with Robert with visits to gay bars where he explored his “dark side” (00:18:42). In the public eye, however, Miguel pretended he was “a bachelor” (00:19:20). According to Robert, Miguel was “homophobic about himself ” and intent on playing a “straight role during the day” (00:19:30). This seems to have amused Robert, because he could relate: he had been a Catholic priest prior to working in a gay bar and, eventually, meeting Miguel on one of his nights out. The mention of Robert’s faith allows Aldarondo to circle back to Carmen. When Robert tells her that “he found comfort in prayer,” Cecilia replies without missing a beat “So did my grandmother” (00:20:27). Robert, however, disagrees: “[…] she took it to another level. […] She had such a twisted, contorted view of gay people and what God is. And hatred. God doesn’t hate. God is the god of love” (00:21:40). Hereafter, Aldarondo splices in archival B-roll of Puerto Rico in accompaniment to an old recording of a religious radio show, which Carmen seemed to host. In this way, Aldarondo appears to suggest once more that Carmen’s conflict with Miguel should perhaps better be ascribed to the times, rather than the country, in which Carmen was brought up. Assuring us that Carmen was “the spiritual center of [her] family” and the person who taught her “how to be good” (00:22:30), Aldarondo adds in an interview with Nylda in which the latter explains that, in her eyes, Carmen simply wanted “all souls to be saved for Jesus Christ” (00:26:25). Interestingly, after Aldarondo presents strong evidence to Nylda that her father Jorge—Carmen’s husband—had also secretly frequented gay bars (00:32:50), she initially—like Robert—seems to blame this Janusfaced attitude on Puerto Rican culture: You could say that [my father] was a hypocrite. But then again, look where he’s coming from. In his culture, he would have never had the success he did in life, if he had come out. He would have never become

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the Director of College Board. He would have never been received as well as he did […]. (00:33:04)

In response to her mother’s claim that homophobia was a Puerto Rican commonality, Aldarondo suggests that the fear and hatred of homosexuals was, at the time, very much present on “the mainland” as well. She does so by putting together an audiovisual collage of black-andwhite images of anti-gay demonstrations and shreds of her conversations with different people on the subject. As historical footage begins rolling of protesters waving American flags and holding banners in support of Jesus and the cardinal, and against the myth of safe sex and the sin of homosexuality, an avalanche of voices provides commentary: [Voice 1] … at the time that Miguel came under my care was, really, the dawn of the AIDS epidemic, both in the country but certainly here, in New York City. And, of course, nobody knew what it was. One of the names of this new disease was “wrath of God syndrome”… [Voice 2] … it was interpreted by the church that… this was, you know, this was God’s punishment. I think there was a big… period of time that that was… what we deserved… [Voice 3] … homosexuals say AIDS victims are being discriminated against, evicted by landlords, and feared by health workers… [Voice 4] … more controversial are proposals to find and segregate those exposed to AIDS. [Voice 5] … ambulance drivers have refused to take AIDS patients… [Voice 6] … hospital workers have refused to take care of AIDS patients… [Voice 7] … every year, for 15 years, the New York City Council has considered a Homosexual Rights Bill and then rejected it… [Voice 8] … Catholic leaders have gotten involved…

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[Voice 9]… we strongly believe that such a result would seriously undermine the moral education and values of our youth and the stability of family in our society… (00:34:19)

What Aldarondo seems to be intimating here is the sophism behind the common assumption that immigrant queers are victims of the supposed backwardness of their country of origin. In a settler state such as the United States, modern-day immigration tends to be thought of as illegitimate unless the receiving country can frame itself as a knight in shining armor that protects the marginalized and oppressed from the barbarism—in this case, homophobia—of the global South (cf. Nail, 2015). However, such victimization and essentialization of immigrants’ identities and experiences tend to produce a discursive erasure of the very real forms of heterosexism, racism, and hate crimes toward all Others that can occur in the receiving country as well (cf. Fobear, 2014). This fallacy of Western moral superiority is also evident in The Transformation. There, the elephant in the room is the ethnicity of all its transgender characters. They are all Latinx: Ricardo is Cuban (00:02:22), Hugo is Colombian (00:14:46), and Gigi and Jovanna’s Spanish sounds Caribbean—possibly Puerto Rican. They have all traveled from elsewhere to the US mainland in the hopes of finding, as Ricardo says, “wonderland” (00:02:30; my translation). However, once there, they inadvertently began to turn into embodiments of the “Northern fantasy” (cf. Schramm, 2012) of Latin America as a feminized, sexualized, and exotic Other. In the context of Terry’s church, both campness and hispanism appear interchangeable and equally unworthy attributes of the kind of God-fearing man Sara is expected to become. Consequently, Cuban immigrant Sara is not only encouraged by Terry to relinquish her femininity but also her Latinidad . Hence, it is not surprising that when Terry asks Ricardo to join him on his travels “to raise money for the buildings” (00:29:32), he cannot help but chortle at Ricardo’s faulty English (00:31:00). Moreover, instead of thanking Ricardo for agreeing to preach with him, he admonishes him by demanding that he “practice [his] English” before their departure (00:30:30). In this instance, it becomes painfully obvious that, to the likes of Terry, “figures of hate” (cf. Ahmed, 2015) such as queers and

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immigrants are a common threat that needs to be acculturated in order to safeguard their social ideal of life. However, Terry’s inherently discriminatory attitude is not something for which he is criticized by the Salt Mines group. They all seem to accept his self-proclaimed pre-eminence, as if his disdain for them were not unfamiliar to them. Of course, it is not. The same forced invisibility and expectation to adhere to a codified set of norms pushed them into a perverse subject position in their country of origin as well (cf. Massaquoi, 2015). Paradoxically, back home, only their queerness was problematic. In the United States, however, it is their “queer foreignness” (cf. Chávez, 2009) that seems to be the issue. As a matter of fact, so-called “queer liberation” (cf. Valdes, 2002)—the freedom to lead an openly queer life—was already possible back then, but only for those who also had access to male privilege, class privilege, and white privilege—unlike queer, Latinx sex workers Sara, Gina, Gigi, and Jovanna. In Memories of a Penitent Heart , Aldarondo seems to come to the same conclusion. Having carefully listened to Robert’s version of the facts, she confronts her mother Nylda with his depiction of Carmen as a fanatic and a “fool” (00:40:26). Through a collage of Aldarondo’s own memories of Miguel’s funeral, Robert’s recollections of Carmen covering Miguel’s dead body with a man-sized cross, and B-roll of oil paintings and stained glass depicting Jesus’ crucifixion, the documentary maker audiovisually evokes the mounting evidence against Carmen (00:41:00–00:45:15). Her demonization is so convincing that, eventually, Nylda ends up admitting that her mother “made so many people suffer” (00:46:37). Interestingly, Nylda suggests that Carmen’s conduct may indeed have been backward rather than outdated—as Robert has been claiming all along—when she refers to her mentality in evolutionary terms: “I would like to think that her thinking would have evolved but I don’t know if it would have, ever” (00:46:40). Taking the blame for her Puerto Rican mother’s alleged barbarism regarding Miguel’s relationship with Robert, Nylda even proposes that she and Robert attempt to reconcile (00:47:04). However, their reunion does not result in the bilateral catharsis for which both parties had been hoping. Robert, who on meeting Nylda exclaims “It is like seeing Carmen!” (00:47:43), seems to equate Nylda’s public acceptance of him with

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Carmen’s expiation from beyond the grave. To Aldarondo’s camera, he reveals that meeting Nylda gave him “lots of happiness” (00:48:45) and allowed him to finally forgive his lover—to whom he still refers as Michael (00:49:01). However, in a phone call that Aldarondo adds in after her final conversation with Robert, Nylda and her daughter discuss “how ridiculous” and “staged” that encounter felt to them (00:50:55). Over silent footage of their get-together, Nylda confesses that she did not feel that she benefitted from seeing Robert again. Instead, she implies that the meeting left her feeling as overlooked as during Miguel’s lifetime: “Why didn’t [Miguel] take care of me? Why did I have to take care of him?” (00:52:00). Expanding on Nylda’s insinuation that Miguel was no victim (00:50:02), Aldarondo steps away from her previous portrayal of her uncle. Instead of framing him, like Robert does, as some kind of tragic byproduct of his mother’s supposedly primitive religiosity, she concludes her film with a voice-over of one of Miguel’s writings: I guess I’ll never really know how things would have turned out for me. That’s the road never taken. I only wish I could share in this with others. Although I know it is impossible to transfer the whole of my experience, I feel that I have somehow seen the face of God. And having stared at Death, I must admit, I much prefer his to Death’s – whatever and whoever God turns out to be. Sincerely, Miguel. (00:52:55)

In choosing this excerpt, Aldarondo seems to imply that Miguel was religious on his own account. Thus, she evokes the futility of the “family war” (00:39:10) that sought to appropriate his legacy—only to realize, over time, that this endeavor was as impossible as it was unjustifiable. Sadly, Miguel’s ongoing feud with both Carmen and Robert over the meaning of love is not unheard of in the queer community. For queers, this kind of “battling over the relations between signifiers and signifieds” is a common dialectical turf war—one that always turns out to be pointless because it leaves “the structures of [discriminatory] signification itself intact” (Halberstam, 2018, p. 16).

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Acknowledging Queer Otherness Like Cecilia in Memories of a Penitent Heart , in The Transformation it is Jovanna who seems to have understood the uselessness of battling over these signifiers and signifieds. Her dream, as she tells the camera in a flashback segment, is “not the American Dream” but “to one day, have a job and a home that [she] can go to, to be looked and be treated like a regular human being” (00:48:00). Years later, it turns out that Jovanna is the only one of the Salt Mines group to have realized that dream. She is the only one who managed to kick off the drugs, find a stable home, and gain acceptance from her family. As her sister explains to the camera, this metamorphosis only crystallized when Jovanna “suddenly found herself in charge of [their brother’s] two daughters” (00:42:20) and “got completely involved with the two little girls” (00:42:29). Her life seems to be a successful example of queer culture as a “world-making project” (cf. Berlant & Warner, 1998), one that can create not just a safe zone for queers but also change the possibilities of identity, intelligibility, culture, and sex that appear when the heterosexual couple is no longer the reference or the privileged example of sexual culture. In the end, what Aiken, Aparicio, and Aldarondo seem to be implying is that it does not matter what the underlying structures were that patterned out the injustice Miguel, Ricardo, and their peers faced during their lifetime. Whether it was overbearing motherly love, fanatic religiosity, cultural backwardness, or Western chauvinism, it does not change anything about the fact that these structures did saddle the queer community with tremendous injustices. However, what does matter, as Aldarondo implies in the final moments of her film, is what remains of the memory of those people. Using B-roll of a dead but still majesticlooking crane as a symbolic reference to Miguel’s untimely passing, Aldarondo splices in audio of a phone call that she made to her mother: I’ve, I’ve been feeling all along like you were a bystander to this… conflict and that you, you didn’t do enough for your brother. And, and I’m, I’m realizing that I’m, I’m here telling this story about all these people and I’ve been struggling all along to figure out… How do I… How do I forgive everyone? And how do I forgive my grandmother for the choices

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she made? How do I forgive [Robert] for the horrible things he said about her? And I’ve never… And I’ve never forgiven you! (00:49:54)

Here, Aldarondo seems to reinterpret Robert’s assertion from their last interview that “life is for the living” because they are “the people who suffer” (00:49:29). It is not those who—like Robert or Carmen in Memories of a Penitent Heart or Terry in The Transformation—lay claim to a particular version of the facts who carry the heaviest burden; rather, it is Aiken, Aparicio, Aldarondo, and everybody else who try to make sense of the past in its entirety—us, viewers, included. It is up to the latter to acknowledge the immigrants, queers, and other Others who suffer from their Otherness and turn their struggle into a corrective of “life as we know it” (cf. Ahmed, 2015).

References Ahmed, S. (2015). The cultural politics of emotion (2nd ed.). Routledge. Aiken, S., & Aparicio, J. (1996, July 9). The transformation. In POV Season 09. PBS. Aldarondo, C. (2017, July 31). Memories of a penitent heart. In POV Season 30. PBS. Berlant, L., & Warner, M. (1998). Sex in public. Critical Inquiry, 24 (2), 547– 566. Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. Psychology Press. Butler, J. (2011). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge. Chávez, K. R. (2009). Exploring the defeat of Arizona’s marriage amendment and the specter of the immigrant as queer. Southern Communication Journal, 74 (3), 314–324. Cvetkovich, A. (2003). An archive of feelings: Trauma, sexuality, and lesbian public cultures. Duke University Press. Dubois, W. E. B. (2005). The souls of black folk. Simon and Schuster. Duong, K. (2012). What does queer theory teach us about intersectionality? Politics and Gender: Cambridge,8(3), 370–386.

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Fobear, K. (2014). Queer settlers: Questioning settler colonialism in LGBT asylum processes in Canada. Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, 30 (1), 47–56. Halberstam, J. (2018). Trans: A quick and quirky account of gender variability. University of California Press. Howe, C. (2015). Queer anthropology. In J. D. Wright (Ed.), International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences (2nd ed., pp. 752–758). Elsevier. Massaquoi, N. (2015). Queer theory and intersectionality. In J. D. Wright (Ed.), International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences (2nd ed., pp. 765–770). Elsevier. Nail, T. (2015). The figure of the migrant. Stanford University Press. Roque Ramírez, H. N. (2010). Gay latino histories/dying to be remembered. In G. M. Pérez, F. Guridy, & A. Burgos (Eds.), Beyond El Barrio: Everyday life in Latina/o America (pp. 103–126). NYU Press. Schramm, C. (2012). Queering Latin American coloniality and the crosscultural production of racialised sexualities. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 33(3), 347–362. Valdes, F. (2002). Mapping the patterns of particularities: Queering the geographies of identities. Antipode, 34 (5), 974–987.

11 The Individual Experience of Migrant Adoptees

In The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez (Ryan & Weimberg, 1999) and Discovering Dominga (Flynn & McConohay, 2003), documentary makers Catherin Ryan, Gary Weimberg, Patricia Flynn, and Mary Jo McConohay follow Mexican adoptee Ernesto (né Guillermo) from Puerto Rico and US adoptee Denese (née Dominga) from Guatemala in their search for transnational belonging. As they return to their countries of origin, the adoptees are pictured undergoing a gradual “disidentification” (cf. Kim, 2003) with adoption paradigms that cast them as “ideal immigrants” (cf. De Graeve, 2015). By capturing their protagonists’ complex process of “cultural fusion” (cf. Croucher & Kramer, 2017) between their sending and receiving matrices, the documentary makers end up exposing the phenomenon of adoption as an imperfect model for migrant integration (cf. Leinaweaver, 2013) on account of its taxing expectation of acculturation to one mother/country and deculturation from the other.

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Rooted and Freestanding Adoptees The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez and Discovering Dominga are coming-of-age narratives that begin with the “coming out” of their protagonists—not as queer but as transnational adoptees (cf. Eng, 2010). However, as the titles of both documentaries imply by means of the names they feature, there is a significant difference in the point of departure of these films. Ernesto Gomez Gomez is Ryan and Weimberg’s protagonist’s adoptive name, whereas Dominga is the birth name of Flynn and McConohay’s main character. Hence, The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez deals with how a “healthy young man, strong, intelligent… cultured” (00:46:45) learns to incorporate “two mothers, two fathers, two countries” in order to become “one boy” with “two souls” (00:13:44). The film follows how the previously carefree adoptee Ernesto Gomez Gomez—who was only told about his adoption as a teenager—tries to “grow into” his birth name Guillermo Sebastián Morales Pagan, which comes with quite a political legacy. On the other hand, in Discovering Dominga, Flynn and McConohay focus on how Dominga Sic Ruiz, adopted at the age of 11, slowly emerges from the repressed memories of adoptee Denese Becker, whose goal had been to “cover things up, and try to live a normal life, and walk around like [she was] this perfect person” (00:02:50). Here too, Denese’s acknowledgment of her birth name results in her discovery of an overwhelming political heritage. Ryan and Weimberg start their film by cutting to a blank screen, punctured by the words: “This is a true story about a mother and son” (00:00:24). Having emphasized the centrality in their film of this particular relationship, they continue with a flashforward of the scene with which they will conclude their film, namely that of a crying young man being covered in hugs and kisses by a middle-aged woman, who is heard saying: “What a glorious moment this is. Oh my. Oh my god. Look at me. Come look at my face. Let me look at that beautiful face. Oh, the love of my life. Oh, oh, oh, oh my…” (00:26:00). Overlapping with this scene are captions that somewhat contextualize the reunion. Over B-roll of President Clinton giving a televised speech (00:01:02) and a jubilant crowd rushing through the street toward the mother-and-son

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duo (00:01:09), a series of captions informs us that this woman is Dylcia Pagan (00:00:47). She and 10 of her co-defendants were given executive clemency in 1999 by President Clinton after having spent almost 20 years in prison (00:00:58). However, this film’s narrative actually starts “5 years before [Dylcia’s] release,” when her son “came to prison to meet the mother he had never known” (00:01:25). Before we can make sense of this avalanche of information, the screen grows darker and the crowd’s joyful chanting (“Dylcia! Dylcia! …”) makes way for more sinister music. Segueing into a new section of the story, the captions transport us to 1994, when a 15-year-old Ernesto “moves from Mexico to the US on a journey to discover the secret truth about his own life” (00:01:32). With his back to the Golden Gate Bridge, sitting on the beach, a younger version of the man we saw earlier begins sharing his story with the camera. Filmed talking in Spanish, his voice is also heard repeating his interview in dubbed English. The echo effect created by this mix of audio tracks enhances the message conveyed by Ernesto’s interview, in which he hints at how the revelation of his adoption added a second, unrequested layer to what already was a full life: No sabía que era adoptado, yo creía que… For ten years, I didn’t know I was adopted. I thought my parents were my parents. Pero que tengo otra madre y otro padre, que uno está exilado en Cuba y que […] mi madre está en prisión… But I have another mother and father, one in exile, and the other in prison. (00:01:54)

Briefly interrupted by Dylcia Pagan’s talking head interview, in which she describes herself as “Guillermo’s mother” (00:02:20) and a “Puerto Rican prisoner of war” (00:02:42), our now double-monikered as well as bilingual and bicultural protagonist expounds: Como la… la vida, a veces, de… de injusta o de loca… Life is sometimes so unfair, so crazy. Viviendo con diferentes familias… Living with different families. Con otro nombre… With another name. Viviendo clandestino… I lived in secret. Como muy poca gente sabe la… mi verdadera historia… Almost no one knows my real story. (00:02:48)

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Here, he employs the language of the closet and the vocabulary of shame with which transnational adoptees come out in order to stop feeling invisible (cf. Eng, 2010). Inspired by “queer performativity” (Sedgwick, 1993), this dialectical strategy allows adoptees to confront “the social stigma of adoption” (March, 1995). There is a discrepancy, however, between Ernesto’s fragility in this fragment and the sturdy voice-over by Piri Thomas that succeeds his musings. Regularly making an appearance as a narrator in The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez , the acclaimed writer, poet, and activist is somewhat of a legend in the Nuyorican community. His involvement in this seemingly private event between mother and son stresses the activistic undertone of Ryan and Weimberg’s film, thus undoing the feeling of intimacy that was fostered so far. The theatricality of Thomas’s voice-over reflects the politicalness of his public persona, his formulaic words underlining the staged nature of his account: He thought he was Mexican. He thought his name was Ernesto, but by age 10 he learned that he was really somebody else. At the age of 15, he left his home in México to come to the United States to get to know his mother in prison—a mother that he had never even known. (00:03:27)

Through the juxtaposition of Thomas’s narration with minimally manipulated images of Ernesto’s search for a sense of rootedness, Ryan and Weimberg seem to hint in these first few moments of their film at the rhetorical direction they wish to take. Abstract idées reçues surrounding the story of the adoptee as a “rooted child” (cf. Yngvesson, 2003), symbolized by Piri Thomas’s formal voice-over, will be regularly measured up against the real-life experiences of an adoptee in search of rootedness, symbolized by Ernesto’s personal confession on the beach. More focused on the recovery of the past than The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez , Discovering Dominga starts with a dramatization of one of Denese’s memories prior to her adoption. In what looks like a rainforest, villagers in Maya clothing are pictured crossing a river with baskets on their heads, cooking over an open fire, chopping wood (00:00:26–00:01:08). Coinciding with menacing background

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music, the voice of our yet-to-be-revealed protagonist emerges to provide commentary. Dating back to “about a month before Rio Negro was attacked by the military soldiers” (00:00:55), this particular recollection involves Denese’s father, evoked by the silhouette of a man swinging in a rocking chair (00:01:10), and herself, played by a young girl in traditional dress playing by the riverside (00:01:12–00:01:46). Only briefly interrupting this scene with a cut to Denese’s headshot to signalize that this ethnographic footage is in fact a scripted flashback (00:01:48), Flynn and McConohay rely on Denese’s disembodied voice to frame the events leading up to her adoption. Her father had left for the market, promising to be back very soon. The next day, however, only a woman returned, bloodied and with torn clothes. She told the villagers that “the men of the Rio Negro have been killed” (00:01:40). From her devastating message, little Dominga derived that she no longer had a father. That day, as grown-up Denese explains, that girl “died […] inside” (00:01:50). After making their film title Discovering Dominga briefly appear in the muddy reflection of the little girl’s face in the Rio Negro, Flynn and McConohay cut to “Algona, Iowa” (00:02:03), as per the captions, where they give us a quick impression of who this girl grew up to be. There seems to be very little left of the colorful Guatemalan childhood described in the earlier memory sequence (00:00:25–00:02:00) when we discover that the little girl is a woman now, who goes by the name of “Denese Becker” (00:02:43) and works as a beautician somewhere along the Bible Belt (00:02:02–00:03:02). This contrast foreshadows the kind of narrative Flynn and McConohay have chosen to tell. Contrary to Ryan and Weimberg, who are set on exploring the veracity of the paradigm of the rooted child, Flynn and McConohay will put the story of “the freestanding child” (cf. Yngvesson, 2003) to the test—another prevailing paradigm of transnational adoption. This second narrative is about international adoptees’ loss and the transformation of that loss into “a clean break” (cf. Duncan, 1993) with their past. The paradigm of the freestanding child presupposes that adoptees can only transfer their previous sense of belonging onto a new family and nation if they do away with old identity. By way of their editing, Flynn and McConohay seem to imply that their film will be centered on exploring this logic—that is,

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that adoption should call for a total separation of the child from its origins, only so that it can be connected to a new family, a new name, a new nation. To paint a clear picture of this discourse of complete absorption of the adopted child into its new matrix, Flynn and McConohay rely on telltale interview excerpts of Denese as well as her adoptive mother, Linda Burch, and husband, Blane Becker. Over a slideshow of Denese’s childhood photos, Linda recalls the first time she saw her daughter at the airport in Guatemala: “She was real excited to have a family again. But many times she would get quiet and she would cry. And so, all I could do was put my arms around her. That was the only thing I could do” (00:03:02). Linda’s seemingly innocent reminiscence turns into a facile, preemptive absolution from her involvement in Denese’s trauma when Flynn and McConohay follow it up with a scene in which Linda shows Denese and Blane the photos that she was sent of her daughter-to-be in Guatemala. Smilingly, Denese proceeds to read the text under one of the photos, a deceivingly lighthearted description of herself as “sweet, helpful, and affectionate” but not one to “verbalize [her] feelings easily” (00:03:45), before being interrupted by the menacing music from the flashback sequence. Sure enough, Flynn and McConohay bring us back to Denese’s memories, thus symbolically giving her the opportunity to finally verbalize her feelings—a need of which her adoptive mother had seemingly been neglectful.

Adoptive Traumas In her testimony, which is yet again accompanied by a dramatic reenactment, Denese picks up where she left off. About a month after her father’s death, a group of soldiers appeared in her village. Her mother quickly strapped Denese’s newborn sister onto her back and told her to run: “I hid and I watched them round up the women and the children. They tied their hands behind their backs and they marched them up this mountain. And then, after a couple of hours, I could hear these gunshots. Just… lots of gunshots” (00:04:48). Denese’s trembling voice dies off and the heart-wrenching images that illustrate her words slowly

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fade to black (00:05:10). Then, the most unexpected sound appears out of the blue: children’s laughter (00:05:11). To symbolize the “clean break” (cf. Duncan, 1993) that Denese’s adoption entailed, Flynn and McConohay now supplement her talking head interview—the audio of which they used as a voice-over in the dramatization—with present-day footage of an all-American school that could not be further removed from Denese’s past. By using the same interview of Denese throughout her tale but having it overlap with diametrically opposite B-roll, Flynn and McConohay visually evoke the absurdity of the paradigm of the freestanding child—namely, that adoptees should be encouraged to switch off who they were before their adoption. Moving on to Denese’s post-adoption story, the documentary makers recur to a photographic time-lapse to insinuate the deception behind their protagonist’s seemingly seamless acculturation. On the surface, as exemplified by her photos, Denese effortlessly reached every milestone that typifies the American Dream: she finished elementary school, then high school, fell in love with an all-American man, got married, and had two sons (00:05:52). In reality, she had been struggling all along. After attempting to “tell [her] story” and having others dismiss her as being “crazy” and having a “vivid imagination” (00:05:32), she decided to “close up” and abstain from saying “anything to anybody, even the people [she] knew” (00:05:45). Being forced, at the age of 11, to go back to second grade and interact with children who “called [her] Chink,” she decided to “[try] really hard to fit in” (00:05:18). From then on, she organically aligned herself with the story of the freestanding child by trying very hard to re-embed herself in her new home. For a while, she thought she had reached that goal in high school, where she began to “feel like a typical American teenager” (00:06:00). Her husband, on the other hand, gives us an insight into a different facet of Denese. To the camera, he discloses that Denese was “very slow to open up” but that, eventually, he became the first person with whom she shared “her real name, Dominga” (00:06:20). After their marriage, when she truly began letting him in, she also started having nightmares (00:06:38). In reality, as Blane explains, these were repressed memories: “A lot of these things that she was remembering, she thought that she had to be making up. They were so terrible that they couldn’t have really

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happened” (00:06:39). Finally, Denese reached a breaking point when her oldest son began asking about her life at his age, forcing her to realize that she couldn’t tell him that, when she was nine, her parents were “massacred” (00:07:36). That is when she became determined to “step on [Guatemalan] land, to complete [her] memories, to make sure that [she] was not insane” (00:09:08). Ryan and Weimberg also rely on interviews with Ernesto’s adoptive parents to clarify the circumstances that led to his “roots trip” (cf. Homans, 2006), a common practice in transnational adoption, referring to the adoptee’s journey to the places where their origin might be reconstructed. Dividing their film into three chapters, they dedicate the first to “his mother in prison,” as per the captions (00:03:53). Using a mixture of old news reports on Dylcia’s sentencing, excerpts of a recent interview with her in prison, and faded photos of her son prior to his adoption, Ryan and Weimberg sketch the outline of a figure that turns out to be just as controversial as enigmatic. We find out that, at the time of her arrest, Dylcia belonged to the FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional )—a “clandestine organization seeking Puerto Rico’s independence” whose members were “to the government, […] terrorists but to others, […] heroes who were willing to give up their lives to see Puerto Rico free, independent, and sovereign” (00:03:58). As we learn throughout the documentary, the Spanish-American War of 1898 led to the US acquisition of—among others—the former Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico and Cuba, which “did not arise from any great economic or military necessity” but “from the desires of some US leaders to win a war, build a larger empire, and prove to the European powers that Americans, too, were one of ‘the great masterful races,’ as Teddy Roosevelt put it” (Smith, 2001, p. 375). After Cuba’s Revolution of 1959, only Puerto Rico remained under US control, which is why it became a symbol of American supremacy in that geopolitical region. Consequently, in the 70s and 80s, there was a resurgence of pro-independence political action by resistance groups such as the FALN, whose “anti-colonial struggle” (cf. LeBrón, 2019) the United States stifled by sentencing them to an excessive amount of time in maximum security federal penitentiaries. This being said, throughout the

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90s, most Puerto Rican political prisoners—among whom was Dylcia— received presidential pardons in an effort to appease the tensions between Puerto Rico and the United States. Nevertheless, President Clinton’s key advisor on Puerto Rican affairs, Jeffrey Farrow, took advantage of this temporary meltdown to reiterate their official position: Puerto Rico was not a nation but a territory of the United States (cf. Duany, 2003). Because of this legal paradox, the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States remains fraught. After more than one hundred years of US presence on the island and over half a century of being an American Commonwealth, Puerto Rico is still less developed and poorer than any state of the Union. Famously described by Congress as “foreign in a domestic sense” (cf. Burnett et al., 2001), Puerto Rico has never been represented in Congress and has, consequently, evolved into a stateless nation that has not assimilated into the US mainstream (cf. Duany, 2003). Despite a number of efforts to relaunch discussions about Puerto Rico’s status during subsequent presidential administrations, the unofficial 51st state of the United States is still in legal limbo (cf. Fonseca, 2019). Right at the heart of this ongoing political feud, we find Ryan and Weimberg’s characters. As it turns out, for having attempted to liberate her home country from what she perceives as an invasion, Dylcia was accused of a slew of crimes ranging from “seditious conspiracy” and “trying to overthrow the United States government by use of force” to “stealing cars and making bombs” (00:04:20). Eventually, she was sentenced to 55 years in prison, along with 11 other “comrades” (00:02:32), as she refers to them. Leaving out how she managed to hide her 13-month-old son Guillermo from Child Protective Services, Dylcia tells the camera that she and her son were separated in the hope that “someone would arise that would raise him” (00:05:10). Similar to the way Flynn and McConohay visually alluded to the abruptness of Dominga’s “clean break” adoption (cf. Duncan, 1993), Ryan and Weimberg abruptly cut away from Dylcia’s interview—filmed indoors against a darkened background—to an oxymoronic visual: the mountainous and sunny outdoors of “Chihuahua, Mexico” (00:06:18). Gearing up for the second “chapter” of their film, dedicated to “La Familia Gomez-Gomez” (00:07:40), Ryan and Weimberg give the floor

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to Alma and Gabino, the people who became Guillermo’s adoptive parents. From their account, it becomes clear that the little boy’s “clean break” with his past had been an unavoidable necessity, meant to protect him from possible harm. Staying just as tight-lipped as Dylcia about the details of their son’s adoption, Alma explains that “they” came, one night, with the request to take care of “a child who needed parents” (00:06:24; translation in the original). She and her husband allowed the boy to “join” them because they had “wanted children but were having problems” (00:06:28; translation in the original). According to Gabino, they understood that—for some reason—the boy’s identity had to remain “a secret for many years” (00:09:08; translation in the original). They only found out much later that their son was “the child of two fighters for Puerto Rican independence… that his parents were in hiding, wanted by the US police… and that the US police were looking for the child” (00:06:36; translation in the original). However, they do testify to a certain affinity with Dylcia’s left-wing ideals, as demonstrated by their willingness to “work,” from Mexico, “for the freedom of the Puerto Rican POWs” (00:09:14; translation in the original). This is further confirmed by the name that they chose for the baby: Ernesto, in honor of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, whom “[they’ve] always admired” (00:08:50; translation in the original). Here too, like in Discovering Dominga, Ryan and Weimberg perform a time-lapse by having baby Ernesto’s passport picture fade into presentday footage of him as a young adult, goofing around in front of the camera (00:09:30). Like Flynn and McConohay, they use this technique to imply the absurdity of their protagonist’s adoption story—in this case, “the story of the rooted child” (cf. Yngvesson, 2003). After a video in which Ernesto, without much ado, introduces himself as “Guillermo Sebastian Morales Pagan” (00:09:55) and explains that he came to San Francisco “to get to know [his] mother better” and “develop a real relationship between mother and son” (00:10:10), Ryan and Weimberg splice in shots of him in “McAteer High School” (00:10:25). In those images, Ernesto appears sullen and unbothered, even during a conversation with a student counselor about “what [he’s] gonna do after high school” (00:10:36). This high school—sequence eventually culminates in

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previously unseen footage of Ernesto’s beach confession. Looking forlorn, he is pictured stating in a downtrodden manner: I almost always have to lie because no one believes me… that I’m Puerto Rican, born in New York, raised in Mexico… now living in the US… and my mother is in prison, my father is in exile… It’s difficult because people never believe me. (00:11:14; translation in the original)

In the next “chapter” of their film, titled “Ana Maria” (00:11:44), Ryan and Weimberg give their protagonist the opportunity to unpack these words. Contrary to transnational and transracial adoptee Denese/Dominga, who confessed that her adoption was marred by incidents such as people thinking “[she] was Chinese” (00:05:30), Ernesto was brought up in an “as if family” (cf. Hearst, 2012): a home in which he passed for the biological offspring of the adoptive parents as well as a national of his adoptive country. However, in the United States, he received a baptism of fire, where he not only had to learn how to be an adoptee but also a minority. Consequently, like Denese, he prefers to mitigate people’s reactions to his identity—in his case, by lying about it. In Mexico, he blended so easily into his adoptive family as well as country that he never had to question his belonging to either. Now, in the United States, he is doubly estranged, at a loss about his national as well as biological ties, and incapable of using his roots trip as a corrective to his feelings of loss, which is usually the primary goal of such journey (cf. Hearst, 2012). On the one hand, having been made aware of the reason why his birth mother gave him up for adoption, Ernesto is saddled from the beginning of his trip with the understanding that he is to develop a sense of belonging to Puerto Rico—not to the United States—while being in San Francisco. This ambiguity becomes even more obvious when he is recorded ridiculing the arrival of his US passport, screaming “Yeah! Arriba Clinton!” while holding up the V-sign (00:38:13) and sarcastically thanking “the gringos” (00:38:22) before adding—in a more serious tone—that “he is not proud of [his passport], but proud that [he] could get it” (00:38:35). On the other hand, as the film advances, it becomes clear that he is also expected to “develop a real relationship”

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(00:10:10) with his imprisoned mother by proxy—via Ana Maria, his ad hoc guardian in San Francisco. Having presented herself to the camera as an ally of the Puerto Rican independentistas and as somebody who is willing to “do whatever [she] can do to make the prisoners’ of war life… easier,” such as relocating from New York City to San Francisco in order to “take care of [Dylcia’s] son” (00:12:52), Ana Maria then subtly expresses her doubts about the odd relationship that she is developing with Ernesto/Guillermo. As her protégé is giving the camera a tour of the apartment they share, Ana Maria is seen trailing behind, approvingly watching over him as he shows off a painting of “Puerto Rican hero” Pedro Albizu Campos (00:13:27) as well as a large Puerto Rican flag hanging above his bed (00:13:42). However, in an aside, she states: “I’m always telling Guillermo: ‘You don’t need another mother, you don’t need another grandmother, maybe you need a friend?’ I’m… I’m the friend” (00:12:15). Her ambivalent attitude, which wavers between nurture and friendship, may be ascribed to her instinctive questioning of the idea of “national substance” (cf. Leinaweaver, 2013) that Ernesto, in imitation of Dylcia, is attempting to authenticate. Just like some immigrants, adoptees can conceptualize themselves as being part of and constantly pulled back to their birth mother/nation1 (cf. Yngvesson, 2003). This is due to their understanding of (national) identity as an essence that is almost biologically inheritable and intricately bound up with a wide range of other, often less palpable identity markers, such as race and culture (cf. De Graeve, 2015). Such a stance invariably positions immigrants/adoptees in a double bind, eternally oscillating between complying with the cultural identity that derives from their roots and refusing to be positioned as an outsider in their new matrix. To signify the turmoil that comes from approaching adoption as a veneer covering the adoptee’s “authentic self ” (cf. Yngvesson & Mahoney, 2000), Ryan and Weimberg conclude this third chapter with a haunting intermezzo, in which their protagonist is filmed overlooking a cemetery

1 In studies on adoption in the West, father figures—be they adoptive or biological—are rarely mentioned because affective responsibility is still highly gendered (cf. Eng, 2010).

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and, later, disappearing and reappearing in different parts of a deserted house, as he is heard saying: I was named Ernesto, not Guillermo, but Guillermo is not Ernesto. Ernesto Gomez is a Mexican teenager, Gabino and Alma’s son. He died when he was fifteen years old. Ernesto decided to commit suicide and… Guillermo Sebastián is the reincarnation of Ernesto but, now, with different parents. He’s very confused now. He would like to be Ernesto again, but now it’s too late. When Ernesto died, he had the most beautiful family in the world, best parents in the world. And now, Guillermo was… alone. With a… stranger woman in prison, that the people say that… she is his… mother. (00:14:08)

From this point onwards, the adoptee’s—and their entourage’s— growing awareness of how double-edged “return trips” (cf. Yngvesson, 2003) and other efforts at recovering or confronting the past can be will be routinely highlighted in The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez .

Disidentification In Discovering Dominga, the protagonist also comes to the conclusion that possible moments of clarity during the abovementioned return/roots trips typically turn out to be no more than blips—moments in a process of self-constitution that is ongoing, painful, and challenging of the adoptee’s sense of belonging (cf. Yngvesson, 2003). It could be argued that, like the protagonist of The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez , Denese approaches her roots trip as a journey toward wholeness (cf. Lifton, 2008): an attempt to regain immanence. Her expectation echoes the “myth of return” (cf. Yngvesson, 2003): the promise that one’s true self can be found by returning to a specific place or point of fusion. However, once in Guatemala, Denese—like Ernesto—begins doubting the veracity of this myth. Dominga’s journey back “home”—as she refers to Guatemala—seems, initially, to fulfill her desire to be reunited with her origins (00:10:21). Fresh off the plane, she is whisked away—together with her husband

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Blane and cousin Mary—to the small town of Rabinal, where a sea of people ceremoniously welcomes her back to “the land of her birth” (00:10:38). Admitting in a voice-over that she had never been “so disoriented but yet […] so excited” (00:10:42), Dominga is filmed heading toward a smaller group of visibly distraught people, introduced to her as her aunts and uncles by a disembodied, Spanish-speaking voice. At that moment, she explains, she began “floating” because “joy, sadness… it was all going through [her], all at the same time” (00:11:32). The intensity of her emotions only increases when, sometime later, she is brought to the memorial site of the massacre in which her mother perished, along with many others. This happening causes a particularly disturbing memory to “come rushing back” (00:13:06): her flight from the village with her newborn sister, her aimless wandering, her starvation, and her sister’s death (00:13:07–00:14:30). Flynn and McConohay follow this dramatized flashback scene up with archival footage of Guatemala’s civil war (1960–1996), which they accompany with captions explaining that, when Denese was orphaned in 1981–1982, “Guatemala’s military regime launched an all-out war against leftist rebels” during which “the army systematically massacred tens of thousands of unarmed civilians, most of them Maya Indians,” such as Dominga’s parents (00:14:45). After a fade-to-black, Flynn and McConohay transition into the next scene: a visit that Denese pays to her closest living relatives. Interestingly, Denese’s voice-over narration clashes with the seemingly joyous interactions caught on camera: “I have forgotten my language. I wish one day I would wake up and remember all the Q’eqchi’ and totally surprise my relatives here” (00:16:31). From the images that follow, it becomes obvious that Denese’s family is communicating with her in Spanish rather than Q’eqchi’ and this via her adoptive cousin Mary, who—as we were told earlier—played a major role in locating Denese’s birth family and followed her to Guatemala to serve “as an interpreter and as her cousin and… as a friend” (00:09:05). This distance between Denese and her kin is exacerbated in the next scene, in which Denese meets Father Roberto Avalos, the Spanish community priest of, formerly, her parents’ Rio Negro settlement and, currently, the Rabinal resettlement. It is he, and not her family, who turns out to hold the key to the mystery of her parents’ murder. Paging through a photo album of Rio Negro villagers,

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he informs Denese—through Mary—of the very simple reason why her parents were slaughtered. The Rio Negro was targeted by the military because its community “resisted” the Guatemalan government’s plans to resettle them to Rabinal in order to build a dam on their land (00:19:53). Now aware that the government succeeded in flooding Rio Negro and that her parental home is no more, Denese is filmed wandering around Rabinal and remembering her early childhood, trying to come to terms with the notion that a “true” return to her origins will be impossible (00:20:44–00:00:22:31). Despite her efforts to try “thinking about Rio Negro before this all happened” (00:21:16) and become “a normal Q’eqchi’, Mayan woman” (00:22:15), Denese does not manage to come into being at the end of her roots trip after all. Her identitarian dénouement remains forever delayed precisely because of the complex circumstances that led to her adoption—the embodiments of which are the people who, in their attempts to help her, only alienate her further from her own history. Among these people are Father Roberto—a mirage of the Spanish conquistadores whose hubris lies at the source of the marginalization of indigenes— and cousin Mary—a national of a country whose imperial ambitions first contributed to the Guatemalan conflict (cf. Hochmüller & Müller, 2016) and were then reinvented as liberal benevolence (cf. Eng, 2010) toward the resulting wave of adoptable war babies (cf. Mookherjee, 2007; Posocco, 2011). Hence, unable to reconnect physically with her home and linguistically with her relatives, Denese concludes her journey by delivering a speech—with Mary’s help—at the dedication of the Rabinal Survivors’ Community Museum, during which she expresses her wish for “a lot of answers to as to what happened” (00:24:28). Cutting to Algona, Iowa, “four months later” (00:24:00), Flynn and McConohay now switch focus by allowing Blane to elaborate on a statement that he made earlier about how Denese’s voyage to Guatemala “opened up a whole can of worms” (00:18:03). Picking up on his wife’s budding “disidentification” (cf. Kim, 2003) with the official narrative of her adoption, he admits:

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I’ve never seen myself as a political activist. I mean, I… I was pretty happy with the status quo, you know, but… Denese is constantly asking me questions. About the government as it was and as… about the government now, in Guatemala, and so… I’m trying to figure these things out. (00:24:59)

To illustrate his words, Flynn and McConohay overlap Blane’s voiceover with B-roll of how he is trying to incorporate his wife’s quest for answers into his everyday life. First, we are shown footage in which he appears to be a carefree employee, husband, and father (00:24:47– 00:25:20). Then, these peaceful images are replaced by uncanny stills and videos of Guatemala’s civil war in tandem with images of Blane looking sternly at a computer screen in search of “information about how […] the CIA had basically overthrown the [Guatemalan] government that was in power” (00:25:20). Interestingly, Denese abstains from direct commentary in this part of the documentary—even in the next scene, set in the “First Baptist Church” (00:26:16). Wearing a traditional Q’eqchi’ attire, she is shown serving food at the church’s potluck and giving a testimony to the churchgoers about the horrors that led to her adoption. Yet it is Blane who provides the voice-over in this sequence, containing commentary which is just as moralizing as the speech he is filmed giving in church: [Blane’s speech in church] Just… a little bit of history. And I guess this whole story goes to the power of the United States… uhm… good and bad. [Blane’s voice-over] I don’t know if people here will ever fully understand what happened. I still find it hard to believe what happened. (00:26:55)

Depicted standing quietly next to Blane, Denese seems to remain a passive bystander while her husband is actively denouncing the involvement of the United States in the genocide that led to his wife’s adoption. However, when a member of the church intervenes to ask for more “education like this” and share his astonishment at the idea that “something like this [happened] in North Iowa” (00:27:10), it becomes clear that Denese’s audience has caught on to her distancing from the story of the freestanding child. With her Q’eqchi’ clothing, she is denouncing

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the fact that her new matrix made her adoption look like a merciful act when it was partly responsible for the tragedy that led to it. In that moment, we are made privy to the way Denese is slowly transforming her previously private struggle into a societal debate. Hence, what may come across as passivity is in fact an incipient act of rebellion against “the racialization of intimacy” (cf. Eng, 2010) that had been imposed on her: the displacement to the intimate sphere of all public discussions about delicate subjects such as race, sex, or class. This being said, it is only when Denese returns to Guatemala for the second time that the tone and pace of Discovering Dominga truly begins shifting. Filmed traveling in a speedboat across the lake that formed as a consequence of the flooding of Rio Negro, Denese displays a combative attitude in the voice-over that accompanies these images: “This time, I think I’m here as an adult. Last time, I was just a lost child. After 18 years, I’m really ready… to… go back” (00:27:55–00:28:05). Coming into her own as an active agent of change (cf. Lee, 2003), Denese consciously begins to engage in a variety of cultural socialization strategies to manage the complexities of her transracial adoption. For example, she is pictured participating in a traditional Maya commemoration ritual (00:29:20), talking to a direct eyewitness of the massacre in which her mother perished (00:31:55), starting legal proceedings to demand the exhumation of the mass grave in which her father was buried (00:36:30), and testifying in a genocide case filed against the generals who led the massacre (00:37:14). A similar shift in tone and pace also occurs in The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez , when Ernesto begins to test the waters of political activism. Right after confessing that he was unsure how to develop a relationship with “a… stranger woman in prison, that the people say that… she is his… mother” (00:16:00), he is filmed silently marching through the streets of an unnamed city while holding up a Puerto Rican flag inscribed with the words “LIBERTAD PARA LOS PRESOS POLITICOS PUERTORRIQUEÑOS”2 (00:16:14). The footage of this march becomes B-roll when Ryan and Weimberg switch to an excerpt of 2 “FREEDOM FOR PUERTO RICAN POLITICAL PRISONERS” (00:16:14; my translation).

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Dylcia’s interview—filmed in prison—in which she explains what she hopes for her son: I want Guillermo to know that Puerto Rico is a… paradise invaded. I want him to understand… that… we believe in the self-sovereignty of our country. And… when you believe in something, then you have to be prepared to defend that. I’ve been incarcerated now for… April 4th … it will be 16 years. (00:16:20)

Most importantly, as the B-roll changes from the march to a quote by Pedro Albizu Campos (“The homeland is honor and sacrifice”) that appears over the image of a Puerto Rican flag waving behind barbed wires (00:17:14), Ryan and Weimberg splice in another tell-tale fragment of that interview. As it turns out, Dylcia’s insistence on her son’s understanding of the US-Puerto Rico relationship is not entirely idealistic. She wants him to comprehend that this issue transcended and engulfed her and, eventually, forced her to give him up: “I didn’t abandon him. Separation wasn’t something that I wanted. It’s not abandonment as we know it. It is… I think it’s… it’s part and parcel of a political… history of… of… of struggle” (00:17:15). Interestingly, Ryan and Weimberg follow this heartfelt testimonial up with a lengthy sequence on the Puerto Rican independence movement, which they piece together by means of archival footage, theatrical narration, newspaper clippings, newsflashes, and even graphs (00:17:35– 00:27:05). By juxtaposing Puerto Rico’s history with testimonials by Alma, Gabino, and Ernesto in which they discuss the very real impact that these intangible textbook facts have had on their lives (00:27:05– 00:38:36), the documentary makers seem to point out how fundamentally different the vantage points are of the parties involved in Ernesto’s adoption. Thus, the issue underlying Ryan and Weimberg’s documentary appears to be the same adoption paradox that plagues Discovering Dominga. Whereas Denese/Dominga—who was brought up with the story of the freestanding child—seems to struggle with how her adoptive, supposedly color-blind environment treated her adoption as a form of “passing” (cf. Eng, 2010), Ernesto/Guillermo—whose life reflects the story of the rooted child—seems to grapple with his birth mother’s

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dismissal of the consequences of adoption on his identity (cf. Yngvesson, 2003). Ultimately, what both stories of adoption come down to is the same Western myth about identity as a matter of exclusive belonging, which involves the same denial of adoptees as involuntary immigrants performing ideological labor (cf. Eng, 2010). As it turns out, both stories result in the same contradiction: the refusal, either by the adoptive or the birth environments, to fully acknowledge an adoption that undeniably took place, simply in order to claim the child’s exclusive belonging to themselves. Consequently, prompted by this myth, both adoptees initially seem to take an assimilationist approach to their roots trip—a perspective that equates functional fitness in society with complete assimilation (cf. Kim, 2000). Long considered to be the ultimate goal of immigrants, complete assimilation suggests that newcomers are to acculturate by means of a deculturation process whereby they unlearn their nonassimilated minority identities for the sake of adopting the dominant culture (cf. Croucher & Kramer, 2017). As The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez and Discovering Dominga demonstrate, this is also the unrealistic expectation directed at international adoptees vis-à-vis both their birth and adoptive parents/countries. To prove that adoption is an imperfect model for migrant integration (cf. Leinaweaver, 2013), the documentaries display how, in their quest for assimilation, their protagonists confront the same feelings of melancholia and loss as immigrants, who are forced to assimilate. However, immigrant parents and their children often manage to depathologize these feelings by working through them as intergenerational and intersubjective conflicts. Adoptees, on the other hand, are forced to deal with these issues in social and psychic isolation, which turns their mourning into a profoundly unconscious and intrasubjective affair (Eng, 2010). Hence, when our protagonist—adoptees’ support systems fail to offer them an intersubjective negotiation of loss and, unwillingly, pathologize rather than depathologize their feelings, both Denese and Ernesto reach a breaking point. They mark that moment by ostentatiously stepping away from those who, despite their best efforts, emphasize their in-betweennesses: Blane and Dylcia—two people who, in their inability

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to identify (with) the adoptees’ grief, only end up redoubling their melancholia.

Negotiation of Loss With the arrival of his US passport, to which Ana Maria refers as “a one-way ticket” that sets his birth name in stone (00:39:00), it dawns on Ernesto that “Guillermo cannot be Ernesto anymore” (00:39:29). Surprisingly, Ryan and Weimberg then cut to a Cinco de Mayo— parade, complete with camply decorated floats, mariachi bands, and folkloric dancers, which they use as B-roll for another significant oncamera confession of Ernesto: “[…] today I realized that my family is in Mexico… I miss them more than I knew” (00:40:20; translation in the original). After a succession of images that underscore the increasing discrepancy between imprisoned Dylcia and her waiting son, Ryan and Weimberg circle back to Dylcia’s interview. Here, she reveals that her son “broke [her] heart” because he ended up deciding that he “didn’t want to stay” (00:49:13). Similarly, Blane seems to be caught off guard by Denese’s wish to separate from him. He obliquely alludes to their separation in a voice-over that Flynn and McConohay accompany with footage of the couple in Guatemala, presumably when they were still together: I think Denese is… not sure where she belongs. She desperately wants a home and… she still doesn’t have that. Even though she found where she came from, I don’t think she felt comfortable being married to a typical, white American. I didn’t fit in and she desperately wanted to fit in. I don’t know what the resolution will be. (00:38:39)

Flynn and McConohay hint at that resolution with the next set of images, in which Denese is seen attending a family reunion in Algona, without Blane. To her cousin Mary, Denese confesses: “I feel like I’m falling apart slowly. And every time I go back, I just want to stay. But yet I’m torn because my family is here. And I want… I wanna raise my kids here. […] It’s like I want the answers right now and I can’t have

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it” (00:39:55). Denese and Ernesto’s physical separation from, respectively, Blane and Dylcia mimics their mental disidentification with the stories of the freestanding and the rooted child with which they are invariably entangled. Having disproven, through their own experience, the desirability of complete assimilation, both adoptees are now intent on doing away with their intrasubjective mourning and transforming it into intersubjective negotiation (cf. Eng, 2010) by creating sites of collective articulation (cf. Kim, 2003). In doing so, they are also striving to achieve a certain level of “cultural fusion” (cf. Croucher & Kramer, 2017) between their adoptive and birth identities. In Discovering Dominga, after succeeding in having her father’s bones exhumed during another trip to Guatemala (00:40:25–00:51:35), Denese acknowledges that “what [she has] started here, it’s going to be a lifetime… work” (00:52:52). Right before the closing titles begin rolling, she adds: “I have not come to terms with the American Denese and the Guatemalan Dominga. I don’t have an answer for that. I just know that I want to be a part of both countries. I need Guatemala to survive” (00:55:13). Similarly, in The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez , we discover that—just like Dominga/Denese, who turned her “quest for justice” (00:55:52) in Guatemala into a site of collective articulation—Ernesto/Guillermo kept “[returning] regularly to visit his mother in prison” and became “active in the international, grassroots campaign to free all the Puerto Rican Political Prisoners” (00:51:02). Ending on a seemingly more positive note than Discovering Dominga, Ryan and Weimberg caption Dylcia’s eventual presidential pardon, release, and reunion with Ernesto with the words “We began making this program when Ernesto asked ‘Could we make a video that would help free my mom?’ This happy ending was our hope, our goal, and our dream come true” (00:52:30). However, their final images of Ernesto give mixed signals. He is not heard in any of those final shots, drowned out by Dylcia’s exclamations, and the cries of the crowd that cheers her on (00:51:36–00:53:00). Dutifully walking next to his mother, encouraging her to march on, his face is overwrought with an emotion that is neither sadness nor joy. As the camera zooms in on Ernesto before freezing on his profile, we are left to wonder what this young man must be going through (00:52:53).

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Ryan and Weimberg’s final frame is significant, however, because it freezes a moment in time, which clashes with the seemingly neverending tale, full of twists and turns, that we have just come to witness. Flynn and McConohay, on the other hand, choose to end their film with images featuring the hustle and bustle of Mayas who are relentlessly burying their dead, carrying coffins, digging graves, placing flowers, and praying (00:55:40). Both sets of documentary makers allude, albeit in opposite ways, to how their film is the only true transitional third space (cf. Eng, 2010) for their protagonists’ plight—not one of obstacles and fixity, but one of psychic movement and possibility. The task of reality-acceptance of their protagonists may never be complete, but in their film—arguably one of “those privileged zones of transitional space whereby the recurring burdens of reality are negotiated,” such as “play, artistic creativity, religious feeling, and dreaming” (Winnicott as cited in Eng, 2010, p. 159)—they are provided with an interstitial plane of experience that sets them free from the strain of relating inner to outer reality. By relieving Denese and Ernesto from their otherwise relentless burden of reality-acceptance for the duration of their films, documentary makers Flynn and McConohay and Ryan and Weimberg implicitly nudge their protagonists toward a new milestone in their process of transnational belonging: one of visibility and, therefore, validation in their own eyes as well as in the eyes of their sending and receiving matrices. Hence, both sets of documentary makers hint at the anticipated ripple effect of their films on the Puerto Rican and Guatemalan communities, their diverse diasporas, and whoever feels addressed by the universal story of self-discovery and self-affirmation that they just brought to life. Ryan and Weimberg dedicate their film to “all those who seek an end to injustice” (00:53:06) before giving their protagonist extra agency by mentioning “Guillermo Morales Pagán” as their fellow filmmaker in the final credits (00:53:10). Flynn and McConohay, on the other hand, use their closing credits to inform us that, despite many obstacles, Denese did eventually bury her father next to her mother, turning her own “quest for justice” into that of all “Maya people” (00:57:13).

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References Burnett, C. D., Marshall, B., Joseph, G. M., & Rosenberg, E. S. (2001). Foreign in a domestic sense: Puerto Rico, American expansion, and the constitution. Duke University Press. Croucher, S. M., & Kramer, E. (2017). Cultural fusion theory: An alternative to acculturation. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 10 (2), 97–114. De Graeve, K. (2015). Adoptive migration: Raising Latinos in Spain. Anthropologica, 57 (2), 601–602. Duany, J. (2003). Nation, migration, identity: The case of Puerto Ricans. Latino Studies, 1(3), 424+. Duncan, W. (1993). Regulating intercountry adoption: An international perspective. In A. Bainham & D. Pearl (Eds.), Frontiers of family law (pp. 45–57). Chancery Law Publishing. Eng, D. L. (2010). The feeling of kinship: Queer liberalism and the racialization of intimacy. Duke University Press. Flynn, P., and McConohay, M. J. (2003, July 8). Discovering Dominga. In POV Season 16 . PBS. Fonseca, M. (2019). Beyond colonial entrapment: The challenges of Puerto Rican “National Consciousness” in Times of Promesa. Interventions, 21(5), 747–765. Hearst, A. (2012). Children and the politics of cultural belonging. Cambridge University Press. Hochmüller, M., & Müller, M.-M. (2016). Locating Guatemala in global counterinsurgency. Globalizations, 13(1), 94–109. Homans, M. (2006). Adoption narratives, Trauma, and origins. Narrative, 14 (1), 4–26. Kim, E. (2003). Wedding citizenship and culture: Korean adoptees and the global family of Korea. Social Text, 21(1), 57–81. Kim, Y. Y. (2000). Becoming intercultural: An integrative theory of communication and cross-cultural adaptation. Sage. LeBrón, M. (2019). Puerto Rico, Colonialism, and the U.S. Carceral State. Modern American History, 2(2), 169–173. Lee, R. M. (2003). The transracial adoption paradox: History, research, and counseling implications of cultural socialization. The Counseling Psychologist, 31(6), 711–744.

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Leinaweaver, J. B. (2013). Adoptive migration: Raising latinos in Spain. Duke University Press. Leinaweaver, J. B., & van Wichelen, S. (2015). The geography of transnational adoption: Kin and place in globalization. Social and Cultural Geography, 16 (5), 499–507. Lifton, B. J. (2008). Journey of the adopted self: A quest for wholeness. Hachette UK. López, E. D., & Yaffe, H. (2017). The deep, historical roots of Cuban antiimperialism. Third World Quarterly, 38(11), 2517–2535. March, K. (1995). Perception of adoption as social stigma: Motivation for search and reunion. Journal of Marriage and Family, 57 (3), 653–660. Mookherjee, N. (2007). Available motherhood: Legal technologies, ‘state of exception’ and the Dekinning of ‘war-babies’ in Bangladesh. Childhood, 14 (3), 339–354. Posocco, S. (2011). Expedientes: Fissured legality and affective states in the transnational adoption archives in Guatemala. Law, Culture and the Humanities, 7 (3), 434–456. Ryan, C., and Weimberg, G. (1999, July 27). The double life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez. In POV Season 12. PBS. Sedgwick, E. K. (1993). Queer performativity: Henry James’s the art of the Novel. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1(1), 1–16. Smith, R. M. (2001). The bitter roots of Puerto Rican citizenship Part IV: Membership and recognition. Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution, 1, 373–388. Yngvesson, B. (2003). Going “home”: Adoption, loss of bearings, and the mythology of roots. Social Text, 21(1), 7–27. Yngvesson, B., & Mahoney, M. A. (2000). ‘As one should, ought and wants to be’: Belonging and authenticity in identity narratives. Theory, Culture and Society, 17 (6), 77–110.

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In Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena (Portillo, 1999) and Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business (Solberg, 1995), stardom and fandom are central themes. Documentary maker Lourdes Portillo explores the ongoing debate surrounding late Selena Quintanilla, a 23-year-old Tejano singer who, at the height of her fame, was shot and killed by the president of her fan club. Documentary maker Helena Solberg, on the other hand, illustrates the impact that late recording artist and movie star Carmen Miranda has had on her transnational audience— including Brazilians like Solberg. Both documentary makers collapse the boundaries between death life and death as they give shape to their “thanatological imagination” (cf. Penfold-Mounce, 2019) of who Selena and Carmen were. By homing in on second-hand, posthumous accounts of these Latinx performers’ lives, Portillo and Solberg seem to suggest that their untimely deaths mythologized their personas and catapulted them to their current legendary status.

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Carmen’s Strategic Exoticism and Ascribed Celebrity Previously described as a “mockumentary” (McDonald, 2015) and a “fictional documentary” on Carmen Miranda’s life (Rohter, 2001), Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business is undoubtedly an unorthodox documentary, largely on account of its cynical nature. Helena Solberg’s film combines documentation, dramatization, and derision by layering Carmen Miranda’s films, photos, and songs with talking head interviews of her friends, fans, and family as well as enactments of—among others—the star’s life before her breakthrough (00:12:41–00:19:36), her arrival in New York in 1939 (00:29:11–00:32:23), and the broadcasts of fictional “radio commentator” Louella Hopper1 (00:33:06; 01:08:33). The common thread running through this audiovisual collage is documentary maker Helena Solberg herself; in her voice-overs, she positions herself as a spokesperson for the Brazilian people who witnessed Carmen Miranda’s stellar career. Hence, rather than mocking the documentary form itself, Solberg seems to mock the matrix that precipitated Carmen’s rise and fall while profiting from her legacy. What fuels Solberg’s cynicism is her—implied but unacknowledged—awareness of the hypocrisy underlying her own work, which also profits from Carmen’s tragic story, as exemplified by the song with which she opens the documentary. The Soul of Carmen Miranda by John Cale (1989) decries the irony behind Carmen’s career and, thus, foreshadows the documentary’s sardonic treatment of her life and death: Since the soul of Carmen Miranda had captured the mind of man / Dismissed with her generation for the price of a can-can / Consigned to the sideshows of history, with the patronized orphans of film / She seeded the bait and offered the faint hope of chance to innocent men / In love with the trance of her dances / And abandoned by them / And abandoned by them. (00:00:49)

1

This is presumably a portmanteau reference to Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, two gossip columnists of Hollywood’s Golden Age who were known for their rivalry.

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Overriding Cale’s dreamy ballad are flashes of images that will be repeated at the end of the film, predicting the star’s tragic end: a fictional Carmen collapsing in a dark bedroom, the blue skies and palm-lined avenues of Los Angeles, the Hollywood sign, Carmen’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, newspaper headlines announcing her death, and so on (00:00:01–00:01:23). The sequence then slowly fades, aurally, into Solberg’s first voice-over of her reminiscences of Carmen and, visually, into black-and-white footage of Carmen Miranda’s coffin being carried by a sea of people through the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Yet, despite this seeming mass of Brazilian Carmen Miranda fans, we find out from Solberg’s voice-over that the star’s “relationship with [the] Brazilians” was “complicated” (00:02:32). As it turns out, when Miranda left for the United States in 1939, some Brazilians began resenting her for “leaving them with all her fruits on her head” while others started spreading rumors that “she was a tool for US imperialism” (00:02:30) who willingly glorified the supposed North American superiority by ridiculing her “South American Way”—as one of her songs is titled. Rather than confirming or disavowing these notions, Solberg empowers Carmen by reminding us that in the United States—the haven of capitalism—Carmen had no other choice but to sell her Brazilian persona and rebrand herself as a savvy businesswoman. In fact, Carmen openly talked about her business acumen in interviews (01:04:49; 01:10:50) and in songs, such as I Make My Money with Bananas (01:05:00–01:05:50), which Solberg references in the title of her documentary. Although not explicated in Solberg’s film, Carmen did indeed play a major role in turning bananas—previously thought of as weird and tropical—into a major consumable fruit in the United States (cf. McDonald, 2015). In the Americas, the banana had long been associated with slavery because slave traders had been using this cheap African food to feed their chattel. It was only in the nineteenth century that the banana would be reinvented as an exotic delicacy that was suited for the palates of the wealthy (cf. Enloe, 2000). When popular Carmen made banana-filled fruit baskets a commonality, the United Fruit Company jumped on the occasion and rode on Carmen’s wave by creating a bright logo in her honor: the Chiquita Banana.

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Contrary to Carmen, Solberg does explicitly draw attention to the star’s indebtedness to Brazil’s African heritage. By contrasting footage “shot by an uncle of [Solberg’s] in the late twenties in Brazil” of “a day at the races” with historical photos of Afro-Brazilian women selling fruit in the Baiana attire that would become Carmen’s trademark, Solberg posits that “the Miranda family’s world” was closer to the latter than the former (00:11:03). As opposed to the upper classes who “modeled [themselves] mostly on Europe, where they also shopped for their clothes and gathered most of their opinions” (00:11:09), Carmen’s modest upbringing exposed her to “the samba that was […] coming down from the slums to invade Rio” (00:11:20), organically allowing her to develop an affinity with Brazil’s African ancestry. This willingness, as a white woman, to explore black culture made her rapidly into “an emblem of Brazil” (00:22:11). Yet, Solberg does not condone Carmen’s whitewashing of AfroBrazilian music (cf. Vargas, 2016). Over black-and-white footage of elated crowds brandishing the Brazilian flag, Solberg explains that Carmen became a favorite of President Vargas because both the political agenda of the “controversial populist leader” and “so many of Carmen’s songs” were premised on a “nationalist vision” of Brazil (00:22:25). Rather than explicitly stating what this vision entailed, Solberg relies on her editing to imply that both the president and the songstress aimed for a whitened representation of exotic blackness (cf. Schramm, 2012). She then follows her revelation of Carmen’s then-novel appropriation of blackness up with the story of how the songstress was discovered by Lee Shubert, “a very powerful Broadway impresario” (00:26:20). Over Carmen Miranda’s rendition of the Afro-Brazilian samba O que é que a baiana tem, Solberg uses stills to visualize what the “sharp-eyed American” must have seen when he laid eyes on Carmen performing in Rio, dressed like a Baiana—“an image pregnant with promise” that would be a “special attraction for his new Broadway show” (00:26:26–00:27:16). Prior to her narration of this event, Solberg included an interview with Sylvan Silva, one of Carmen’s Afro-Brazilian songwriters, in which he seemed so focused on the honor of having been the recipient of the songstress’s attention that he appeared oblivious to her usurpation of his music (00:21:10). After Solberg’s divulgation of Carmen’s encounter

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with Shubert, Silva’s intervention changes into a prediction of events to come. As we are yet to discover, Carmen will suffer the same fate in the United States that she had imposed on Afro-Brazilian musicians like Silva. Blinded by the honor bestowed on her by Shubert for inviting her to perform on Broadway, and by Vargas for suggesting that her “trip to the United States could be a Public Relations scoop that would promote Brazil’s image and music in the world” (00:28:00), Carmen began fancying herself as a “goodwill ambassador” whose American crossover was “almost […] a mission” (00:28:16). Hence, when she landed in New York, she failed to recognize the inherently degrading nature of the “Miranda fever” that was “sweeping the nation” (00:33:00). Via a kaleidoscope of audiovisual flashes of Carmen Miranda’s debut in the US media, Solberg reconstructs the first impression that Carmen left on the North American public. Trying to ignore the patronizing and implicitly sexual questions of the reporters, Carmen “[threw] around a few words [she’d] learned,” only to end up sounding like a “bimbo” (00:30:18)—an image that would stick with her until the very end. However, like Sylvan Silva who had been either unaware or avoidant of the ulterior motives behind Carmen’s interest in him (00:21:10), Carmen also appeared to have been so flattered by the media frenzy that she did not read much into it. Thanks to a voice-over actress, Solberg brings a letter to our attention that Carmen wrote to a Brazilian friend, in which the star’s naivety is palpable: My dearest […], here is a little note to let you know that, according to the newspapers, I’m the biggest hit on Broadway. My opening was really indescribable. They don’t understand the slightest thing I sing, but they say that I’m the most sensational foreign performer to ever appear here. (00:30:40; dubbed translation in the original)

Coinciding with footage of Carmen’s high-energy performance of Tico-tico no fubá, a fast-paced song replete with humorous tonguetwisters, the letter gives evidence of how unsuspecting the star had been of what truly drove her transatlantic success. Rather than her artistry, it was her caricaturesque portrayal of Latinidad that was applauded

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because it did not challenge the status quo of the US, neither in terms of its hegemonic whiteness nor its national identity (cf. Schramm, 2012). Carmen would only realize her equivocation after her return to Brazil, 18 months later. Having shown us a series of clips of Carmen’s onscreen incarnation in the United States of characters who were somewhat Brazilian, sometimes Argentinian, but South American through and through, Solberg has us travel back to Rio with Carmen. Mixing stills of people attending Carmen’s post-US debut, talking head interviews with her Brazilian contemporaries, and a dramatized re-enactment of Carmen performing in a deserted music hall, Solberg makes it clear that Carmen was not welcome in her homeland anymore. As journalist Caribé da Rocha explains in an interview: Naturally, like good Brazilians, we didn’t believe in her success despite all the reports that she was an amazing hit. No one accepted it because in those days in Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, samba was “negro music” from the slums. […] The papers attacked her […] saying she was no longer our Carmen Miranda… She was Americanised. (00:36:27; translation in the original)

Once more, rather than confirming or disavowing such claims, Solberg empowers Carmen by sharing the anthem that Carmen recorded for her Brazilian listeners in response to their rejection. While an impersonator is filmed mouthing the lyrics that the real Carmen is heard singing somewhere in the background, Solberg gives us a poetic English translation of the song’s message before allowing a Carmen impersonator to continue: [Solberg] They say I came back Americanised, full of money, riches, hell. And they say I can’t stand to hear tambourine and the cuíca just makes me yell. They say, now, I am to worry about my hands. There is a rumor that I would like to take up chess. They say I’ve lost my spice, my rhythm, my tone. And all the bangles that I used to wear. [Carmen Miranda impersonator] Why so much bitterness? / How could I ever be Americanised? / I was born with the samba / I spend the nights singing the old songs / I hang out with the hustlers / I say “Eu te amo.” / Never “I love you” / For so long there’s a Brazil… / …my heart is with my homeland still. (00:39:57; translation in the original)

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Implacable after the Brazilians’ disregard for her talent, the songstress was quick to accept a new contract with 20th Century Fox. Via a succession of interviews of Carmen’s Hollywood entourage, photo and video images of the star’s box office hits, and footage of Carmen’s unveiling of her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Solberg implies that Carmen’s second crossover to the United States started off as a monumental success (00:41:49–00:48:56). Additionally, this time around, she was not hailed as a bimbo anymore, but as the face of the Good Neighbor Policy. To introduce this new plot element, Solberg displays the headlines of a couple of newspapers that seem to allude to how Carmen monetized her marginal status, such as “Carmen Miranda Attractive Product Of Good Neighbor Policy” (00:50:44) or “Carmen Miranda Is Good Neighbor Policy in Person” (00:50:45). Solberg’s choice of paratextual material is not random, as it relates to the idea of “postcolonial exoticism” (cf. Huggan, 1994): a condition shared by those at the periphery of world capitalism who, like Miranda, build their careers on the trade of their cultural difference. To stress how vast the unfamiliar metropolitan audience was that succumbed to Carmen’s exotic appeal, Solberg has a Carmen impersonator climb in an open-cockpit plane and fly over London to symbolize how the star began to ‘fly high’ when she was “drafted into service on behalf of the Allied Forces” to “[bring] joy to one more continent” and “[win] the hearts of more and more devoted followers” (00:52:04). By comparing the star to one of the “raw materials” (00:54:03) that the Allies needed from the South to stay afloat during the war, Solberg suggests that Miranda was the first Latinx artist to reinvent herself as a synecdoche of Latin America and, as such, make room for the—as-yetinexistent—Latinx community in the Western common unconscious. Additionally, Carmen was among the first public figures to synonymize Brazil with Latin America—a claim that remains contentious (cf. Marrow, 2003). Her Hollywood version of Latin America may have contained “a lot of mistakes” but, as former Brazilian cultural attaché Raul Smandek explains in a voice-over coinciding with B-roll of Miranda’s Aquarela do Brasil , her portrayal was never meant to be realistic: it was just another “part of the war effort” (00:54:06). Solberg seems

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to toy here with the idea that Miranda’s fame was ascribed rather than attributed or achieved (cf. Rojek, 2004). Outside of Latin America, she was famous because of her biological descent—her Latinidad . However, the ambiguities surrounding Carmen’s fame go beyond the North–South binary. Delving into the star’s transatlantic routes/roots, Solberg tells us of a bizarre dream that she had. She illustrates it with fictional footage of Carmen’s effigy escaping from a museum “where they had made her a prisoner” to return to Portugal, “where she was born” (00:04:40–00:08:30). She intersperses this fantasy scene with the interview of Carmen’s Portuguese cousin, who confirms that Carmen was born in Portugal2 and sailed off to Brazil as a toddler (00:07:50). Symbolically placing Carmen at the heart of the transatlantic triangle, Solberg uses evocative B-roll of a Portuguese dock, the open sea, and Brazil’s Guanabara Bay to visualize what Carmen must have seen from the ship that brought her to Brazil, as she muses: “A woman carrying fruits in her arms and with a turban on her head was one of the first images of America to spring from the European imagination. Maybe it was predestined that she would surface again, one day in our lives” (00:08:42). Without missing a beat, Solberg quickly shatters any straightforward identifications of Carmen with the first European colonizers with the help of a retro clip of the MGM show Fitzpatrick’s Traveltalks on “The Splendorous City” of Rio de Janeiro (00:08:59). This clip foreshadows how Portuguese-Brazilian Carmen would be colonized herself by her US audience: Over 400 years ago, the adventurous Portuguese explorers who discovered and claimed Brazil for the crown of Portugal sailed into this picturesque harbor and called it Rio de Janeiro. We wonder at the white men who first saw it and could have dreamed that it was destined to become the mighty sentinel of an enchanted metropolis. (00:08:59)

To make her point clear, Solberg addresses the audience with the following tongue-in-cheek commentary, as she purposefully drowns out Fitzpatrick and the nondescript tune accompanying his clip: 2

In fact, Carmen Miranda never even became a Brazilian citizen.

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A splendorous city indeed. My city and Carmen’s city, of course. Do I have to tell you that the music playing in the background has nothing to do with us? I always wonder what gets lost when you’re seen through the eyes of a foreigner. Would that have anything to do with what would happen to Carmen? (00:09:18)

When defining Miranda within the context of the United States, Solberg’s vision of the star is closer to that of a Brazilian immigrant than a transnational superstar. A trailblazer, Carmen made space in the US imaginary for her fellow Latinx coethnics—concepts that were yet to be invented (cf. Balieiro, 2017). In this sense, Helena Solberg’s documentary runs parallel to Lourdes Portillo’s. Both films explore the ways in which their protagonists’ line of biological descent triggered an automatic respect and veneration of their persona (cf. Rojek, 2004). One crucial difference separates the singers, however. Contrary to Carmen, whose marketing was aimed at mainstream audiences, Selena catered to the margins of US society (cf. Abreu, 2007).

Selena’s Decolonial Imaginary and Attributed Celebrity Whereas Solberg began her circular documentary by stressing Carmen Miranda’s complicated relationship with the United States and Brazil, Portillo dives right into her protagonist’s perceived relatability by ingroup as well as out-group members of the Mexican–American community. Portillo starts with a simple question, which she directs at Renée Tajima-Peña3 : [Portillo] Have you ever heard of Selena? [Tajima-Peña] Selena? Oh yeah, absolutely. I saw her perform… What? Back in ’93 in San Antonio at the fairgrounds. She was great. (00:03:47) 3

Renée Tajima-Peña’s documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin? was nominated for an Academy Award in 1989 and aired on POV the same year. In 2008, Calavera Highway—TajimaPeña’s documentary about her Mexican–American husband—also aired on POV.

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To initiates of the world of independent documentary making, Japanese-American documentary maker Tajima-Peña is a household name. That being said, name-dropping does not seem to be Portillo’s primary objective: the documentary maker is more interested in Renée’s ethnicity and how it reflects on her opinion of Selena. In fact, when Portillo is heard asking about the Tejano singer, the camera is not focused on her interviewee but rather on a graffiti painting of a samurai. Only when Renée replies does the camera’s gaze slide from the samurai’s face to Renée’s, thus revealing that the graffiti is actually a house-sized mural against which Renée is leaning. This visual pairing of two Asian icons—one pictorial, one human—could have been brushed aside as coincidental or insignificant had it not been for the scene with which Portillo follows it up. In the blink of an eye, Renée’s face is replaced by another, with similar black hair and red lips. Immediately, the new visage—more heavily made-up than Renée’s, brandishing a formal updo and glittering earrings—begins to sing: No me queda más / Que aguantar bien mi derrota / Y brindarte felicidad / No me queda más / Si tu regreso hoy sería / Una imposibilidad / Y esto que no era amor / Lo que hoy niegas / Lo que dices / Que nunca pasó / Es el más dulce recuerdo / De mi vida.4 (00:03:58)

Halfway through this seemingly scripted a capella performance, the camera zooms out to reveal that the woman, introduced by the captions as “Selena Quintanilla 1971–1995” (00:04:22), was probably caught off guard; she is pictured holding a Styrofoam cup in her hand while her musicians are shown sitting idly in the back, barely aware of the camera. In these first few minutes lies the entire premise of Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena. Via Renée, Portillo foreshadows that ethnicity and representations thereof will be of major importance in her film. From the unscripted scene of Selena and her band, we can gather that the totality of the singer’s life will be scrutinized—her performances as well as what 4 I have no other choice / But to graciously accept my defeat / And to toast to your happiness / I have no other choice / Since your return today would be / An impossibility / And what was not love / What you deny / What you say / Never happened / That is the sweetest memory / Of my life (00:03:58; my translation).

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happened behind the scenes. The title of the documentary is also reflective of these themes. On the one hand, it references Selena’s hometown of Corpus Christi, Texas and Selena’s own corpus: her mediatized, racialized, and exoticized body. On the other, it reinforces the idea that we will be offered a backstage experience of Selena’s life: not only of the city where she grew up and the family unit in which she was raised, but also of the facets of her existence that did not involve performing. Renée reappears halfway through the documentary, her intervention fleshing out the point of Portillo’s specific framing of her. Still standing under the samurai mural, Renée stresses how important Selena had been in ushering in a new normal to the US entertainment industry: Selena, I really liked also because she looked normal. She was gorgeous but she had a normal look. She was just beautiful, you know. I… When I was growing up, I wish I had somebody like Selena to look up to. Somebody that looked like me, that looked normal. (00:26:00)

Portillo’s inclusion of this Asian American documentary maker voicing her identification with Selena’s Latinidad is sandwiched between two other significant scenes. Prior to Renée’s confession, Portillo showcased the talents of young Selena fans who, inspired by the star, have enrolled in the Tejano Fine Arts Academy to improve their singing skills—in English and Spanish, as the mother of one of the girls gleefully shares with Portillo (00:21:22). They too, like Renée, designate Selena’s looks as a defining feature of their admiration of her. After having individually performed Selena’s hit songs in front of the camera—a sequence that Portillo intertwines with Selena’s music videos (00:21:39–00:25:11)— the girls gather to discuss their fandom with Portillo: [Fan] From Selena, I realized that… you don’t have to be just… You don’t have to have a certain look or anything. You just got to try your best and… [Portillo] A certain look, meaning… what? [Fan] You don’t have to have blond hair. (00:25:11)

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Portillo further explores the complex sentiment that this young fan is trying to convey by giving the floor to Corpus Christi locals, who give Portillo an insight into how Selena was perceived by her peers: [Interviewee 1] Well, here, she was more… She was more Mexican than American. And over there, in Mexico, she was more American than Mexican. [Interviewee 2] You see, the majority of the stars from Mexico and Latin America are all real light complected. Blue eyes, green eyes, blonde hair. And all the… la’ telenovelas, all the stars are… look… they look more like Anglo than Hispanic. And… she had… you know the… bigger lips, big hips, the whole works. And people related to her cos she looked more like us. (00:26:12)

Put together, these testimonies suggest that Selena was understood as a concrete, real-life example of “the decolonial imaginary” (cf. Aparicio, 2003): shared, but often unspoken knowledge that allows Latinxs from various national groups to understand the conditions and experiences of their coethnics as well as all other (post)colonial communities. Whereas Solberg deplored that “the Doritas, Chiquitas, and Rositas that Carmen was playing” caused her to grow up without seeing “women on the screen that [she] could identify with” (01:00:42), Portillo emphasizes how uplifting Selena’s brand of Latinidad had been for those at the ethno-racial margins of US society—including Asian Americans like Renée. Unlike Carmen, whose trademark had been “[to make] fun of herself ” (00:59:43), Selena had made ethnic pride into her brand. Thus, she provided many Latinxs with a compelling discursive space in which to decry nativist hysteria and imagine a future wherein Latinxs could gain significant political, economic, and representational ground (cf. Paredez, 2002). This being said, Portillo is quick to mitigate the optimism of Selena’s fans by including a number of less favorable opinions of the singer. In a scene5 fittingly captioned “Intellectuals” (00:22:50), a group of 5

This dinner scene is actually an excerpt from Conversations with Intellectuals About Selena, an hourlong companion piece to Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena that POV did not air. As described on Portillo’s website, it is an “examination of the life and mythology of Selena” by Sandra Cisneros, Ruby Rich, Cherríe Moraga, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, and Rosa-Linda

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notable Latinxs are filmed having dinner as they discuss Selena’s legacy. At regular intervals, Portillo punctuates her film with some of the most noteworthy interactions between these intellectuals, presumably in the hope of achieving a nuanced depiction of the Tejano singer. In particular, author Sandra Cisneros’s comments stand out because of their vehemence: Agh! I’m not a Selena fan! I’m not a Selena fan, but I have a Selena… keychain. Because I […] I went to the… the stop-and-shop here at the little gas station there and… It’s the first time I ever saw a Chicana on a key chain… that wasn’t the Virgen de Guadalupe. And I had to buy it but… I don’t have any Selena records. And when they… asked for commentary when she died, I never listened to her songs. But I have to say, I have her here. And there are some things she stands for that, I think, is very dangerous. […] Like she dropped outta school. Her father had her working […]. He made her quit school! (00:31:40)

In a later fragment, Cisneros also decries that Selena’s success did nothing but confirm to her young fans that the only “outlet” for them was to “be [a] twelve-year old sexy child, […] this sexual being, singing” (00:33:07). Her criticism is loaded and multilayered. Not only does she reject hegemonic constructions of Latin American identity that envision the Latinx community as a homogeneous mass of Selena fans (cf. Aparicio, 2003), but she also disavows the whore-virgin-dichotomy embedded in the Latinx cultural legacy (cf. Arrizón, 2008). Cisneros seems to suggest that Selena’s celebrity was largely “attributed” (cf. Rojek, 2004) because it derived from her cultural intermediaries, who considered her concentrated representation of them to be noteworthy and exceptional. It is precisely the nature of Selena’s attributed exceptionality that Cisneros calls into question here, together with the motivations of the Latinx cultural intermediaries who catapulted her to stardom. Cisneros’ critique, aimed at Selena’s questionable upbringing, schooling, and understanding of girlhood versus womanhood, adds

Fregoso—five prominent Latinx feminists (“A Conversation with Academics about Selena,” n.d.).

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shock value to Portillo’s homage to the singer. It offers a striking counterpoint to the praise with which Selena’s fans, friends, and family have been showering her so far; so much so that, after Cisneros’s comments, all further efforts to glorify the singer in the documentary will sound tone-deaf, thanks to the sobering effect of Cisneros’s alternative reading of Selena. Prior to the writer’s intervention, Portillo’s posthumous portrayal of Selena had been wholesome. Selena was, according to her entourage and devotees, “great” (00:03:57), “a perfect person” (00:06:25), “so popular” (00:07:24), “very talented” (00:14:09), “part of our soul” (00:16:36), “beautiful” (00:18:49), “so humble” (00:18:54), and “a good daughter” (00:18:59). It is precisely Cisneros’s undermining of this cliché of ‘the ideal daughter’ that serves as a turning point in Portillo’s documentary. Right after Cisneros’s questioning of the righteousness of (the parenting of ) Selena’s father, Portillo splices in an excerpt of a talking head interview with Abraham Quintanilla himself, in which he asserts: [Selena and her siblings] were with their father and their mother, they were outta trouble. You know. And they weren’t hanging around with the wrong crowd, getting into… problems. They became successful, they enjoyed what they were doing. So… they made something outta their life. (00:32:18)

Portillo hints at her skepticism of Abraham’s account by overlapping his interview with footage of a fully made-up Selena in a short skirt and bustier, performing in a nightclublike venue. The captions reveal that, in this footage, Selena was only 15 years old (00:32:23) and still completing “High School ([sic ] through correspondence” (00:32:28)—important details of his daughter’s childhood that Abraham fails to mention in the interview. Before Cisneros’s appearance, Portillo had already introduced Abraham—a former musician—by means of a disconcerting video excerpt in which he admitted that he had seen Selena’s “talent to sing” as “a way to get back into the music world” (00:11:45). After Cisneros’s critique, the fragments that Portillo includes of Abraham’s abovementioned interview only raise further questions about the man, framing him

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as a liminal figure at the intersection between nurturing manager and self-serving father. His ambiguity culminates in his explanation of why the president of Selena’s fan club, Yolanda Saldivar, killed his daughter: “Here you have a person that… that’s not popular at school, don’t have friends, physically is not a good-looking person. All of a sudden, she get put in the limelight. She can make checks. She got a sense of power now” (00:41:34). What, in other circumstances, may have been interpreted as a grieving parent’s innocuous musing acquires a much more sinister tone because of the order in which certain facts are revealed to the viewer. Prior to this statement, Portillo had given us conflicting accounts of what may have led to Selena’s death. According to Chicana intellectual Cherríe Moraga, Selena—a Jehovah’s Witness—had lived in a “circumscribed world” held in check by “the dad” who had “very strict controls on her” and whose parenting forced her into the arms of Yolanda—the only confidante she had outside of her stifling family circle (00:39:18). Suzette, Selena’s sister, seems to confirm this line of thought when she admits that Selena was “very trusting” of other people because “[they] had always had somebody to protect [them]” (00:39:45). Radio host Vincente Carranza, on the other hand, directly blames the father: “negative energies and things like that happened” when Selena began transitioning into the fashion industry, against her father’s will (00:40:18). Cleverly, Portillo alternates these testimonials with Abraham’s interview, selecting fragments in which he seems to contradict all charges laid against him. His children may have been “naïve about a lot of things” but that was only because he “grew up with this thing in [his] mind of protecting [his] family” (00:39:55). In fact, he claims that when they became adults and “started their own thing,” he never “meddled into [his children’s] business”—a freedom which, in hindsight, he considers to have been misplaced because that is why “Yolanda didn’t see [him] going in there and helping Selena” (00:40:31–00:41:05). Consequently, when Abraham tries to rationalize Yolanda’s murderous obsession with Selena, he misses the mark. More consistent with his own behavior than Yolanda’s, his simplistic argumentation only reasserts his failure to acknowledge his own involvement in Selena’s demise.

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Portillo does not stop there, however. She opens up Abraham’s reasoning and implicitly has it apply to the entire Latinx community by following it up with outdrawn images of Selena’s massive funeral service, a slew of memorial sites and ceremonies set up by her fans, and an anonymous fangirl bursting into tears at Selena’s imposing grave— a sea of people who are just as unaware as Abraham of their role in the star’s death (00:44:58–00:47:12). Closing her film with footage of how, at Selena’s funeral, a precocious toddler is egged on to dance to Selena’s Como la flor (00:47:13), Portillo indicates that Selena’s legacy lives on. However, knowing what we know now, the little girl’s enthusiasm appears unnerving rather than endearing. Do we want another innocent soul to follow in Selena’s footsteps? With this ending, Portillo seems to imply that, over time, Yolanda was turned into more than a murderer. After Selena’s passing, she became an essential character of the “compensatory spectacle” (cf. Hurtado, 2018) set up by Selena’s father and the Latinx community at large. Their goal had been to hide the inferiority of their own existence by means of Selena’s spotless perfection—a common occurrence among Latinx women, who are often held to impossible standards of beauty in order to redress the perceived underperformance of their matrix of origin. As it turns out, Selena’s tragic end was mere collateral damage of her community’s quest to combat its inferiority complex.

Carmen and Selena’s Posthumous Celebrity Interested in the social potential of their protagonists’ deaths, Solberg and Portillo delve into the significance behind Carmen’s and Selena’s soaring posthumous careers. They give the passing of their eponymous protagonists a particular treatment. Rather than approaching their protagonists’ deaths as an end, they make it into a catalyst that triggers “the thanatological imagination” (cf. Penfold-Mounce, 2019) of the culture that enshrined them. In Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business, Solberg’s biographical account of Carmen Miranda becomes increasingly bleak, revealing disturbing details of the star’s abusive marriage, her excessive drug

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intake, and her mental breakdown (01:08:32–01:22:47), before reaching a climax with the dramatization of Carmen’s final moments (01:22:48– 01:23:22)—footage with which Solberg started the documentary. Having come full circle with her audiovisual narrative, Solberg tells us: “I end my tale here, a tale of joy and sadness, like life itself. A tale of reconciliation between Carmen and ourselves” (01:25:50). Solberg’s choice of words is significant, considering she preceded them with footage of Carmen’s gigantic funeral procession in Rio de Janeiro, which she accompanied with a statement that verbalized what Lourdes Portillo would, a couple of years later, imply in the conclusion of her documentary on Selena: Carmen had finally come back home. Her coffin was dragged with our flag. The streets of our city filled with the uncounted thousands who had always loved her and who now came out to welcome her back, even as they mourned her loss. As I learned about her life, it became clear to me that she could never possibly meet all the different expectations people had for her. She couldn’t be the perfect symbol of our national hopes and aspirations. After all, she was an artist. An artist with an incandescent craft, whose talents were used by many to further many different ends. (01:24:42)

Solberg’s understanding of Carmen’s death as a moment of “reconciliation” suggests that with the disappearance of Carmen, the controversy surrounding her physical person also disappeared. All that was left was a safe, depersonalized space that people could reimagine, rearrange, and relive however they wished (cf. Penfold-Mounce, 2019). Audiovisually recreating Carmen’s afterlife, Solberg keeps delaying the conclusion of her documentary. Having announced at the funeral scene that she would be ending her tale there (01:25:50), she keeps the camera rolling and transitions to a sequence in which she has a Carmen impersonator re-enact another dream that Solberg had, in which “[Carmen] came back to stay, to reassert her power once and for all, so her followers would perpetuate her cult all over the universe, and she would become forever part of our mythology” (01:26:28). Following this dream sequence, we are shown disorientating images of a Brazilian carnival celebration accompanied by ceremonial choir chants, which

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are interrupted by glimpses of carnival performers—some of whom are eerily reminiscent of the star—as well as video fragments of the original Carmen Miranda (01:26:34–01:27:13). Now seemingly intent on concluding her documentary, Solberg edits in a black-and-white freeze-frame of a quote by Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos: “Carmen Miranda carried her country in her luggage, and taught people who had no idea of our existence to adore our music and our rhythm. Brazil will always have an unpayable debt to Carmen Miranda” (01:27:18). However, the documentary does not end there. Solberg surprises us once more by adding another “afterthought” (01:27:31). Overwriting Villa-Lobos’s quote with the photo of an elderly woman posing with yet another Carmen impersonator, Solberg reassures us that although her mother—presumably the elderly woman on the photo—once “forbade [her] to go to Carmen’s funeral,” she eventually also “reconciled herself with Carmen” (01:27:32). Only then do the closing titles begin to roll, overlapping with archival footage of Carmen waving to the camera one last time, as her song Adeus Batucada resounds in the background (01:27:43–01:31:47). The lightheartedness of this finale, especially in light of a storyline that had grown increasingly alarming, implies Solberg’s optimism about “the morbid space” that Carmen’s passing ended up creating (cf. PenfoldMounce, 2019). In the flesh, Carmen’s body had been fragmented and cut into eroticized pieces, which transformed it into an object of desire (cf. Arrizón, 2008). In fact, in the interviews and archival audio descriptions included in Solberg’s documentary, Carmen had been regularly referred to with pars pro toto descriptions: her eyes (00:17:45), her torso (00:32:27), her mouth (01:02:38), her hair (01:01:30; 01:04:45; 01:07:39; 01:10:30). In Portillo’s documentary, Selena’s fans also focused on her anatomy: “bigger lips, big hips” (00:23:36), “her skin” (00:28:19), “perfect, white, big teeth” (00:28:32). By alluding to their protagonists with pars pro toto descriptions, Portillo and Solberg seek to reflect the dehumanization and exoticization of Selena and Carmen in the “gaze/language” of others (cf. Mulvey, 1975). Posthumously, however, Carmen and Selena’s lamentable exoticization was euphemized and reinvented as “autoexoticism” (cf. Arrizón, 2008): a strategy of cultural survival by which the exoticized use symbolic norms

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for themselves as a way to bring about performative agency. As Heitor Villa-Lobos’s quote about Brazil’s “unpayable debt” to Carmen illustrates (01:27:18), the star’s previously ridiculed exoticism was reinterpreted as strategic and intentional after her death, thus transforming her tropicalization of the South into an orchestrated master plan to educate the world about her origins (cf. Huggan, 2001). After her death, she was given “considerable agency over the supposed commodification of her [artistry]” and made into a visionary with “a well-oiled little brain” under her “basket of fruit and vegetables” (00:48:20)—a fact that is consistent with Solberg’s own empowering approach to Carmen’s life story. In other words, Solberg seems to conclude her film with the suggestion that her protagonist’s self-caricature of Latinidad was an unfortunate but, in the end, necessary step in the affirmation of the interconnectedness between Latin America and North America. The same could be said of Portillo’s take on Selena. However, Portillo goes a step further in her thanatological imagination of Selena. Like Solberg, she explores the “achieved celebrity” (cf. Rojek, 2004) of her protagonist by focusing on her perceived accomplishments, which define Selena’s legacy in terms of her representation of “embodied ambiguity” (cf. Schramm, 2012). Although Solberg does show several drag performances of Carmen Miranda’s act (01:15:02–01:16:07), she does not discuss the star’s posthumous evolution into a gay and drag icon. Portillo, on the other hand, dedicates an entire scene of her documentary to Franco Ruiz Mondini—also known as Malissa Mychaels, a drag alter ego of Selena (00:36:22–00:37:55). Disregarding the fact that, as a devout Jehova’s Witness, Selena may not have approved of Franco’s “gender creativity” (cf. Halberstam, 1998), Franco tells the camera in a talking head interview that he chooses to remember Selena as a role model nevertheless. Helped by images of him applying make-up, adding cushioning to his hips and buttocks, and performing Selena’s Como la flor as Malissa in front of an enthusiastic crowd, Franco explains his admiration for Selena: In San Antonio or in South-Texas, other than our mothers or that certain tía we had who gave people hell, we didn’t really have strong… We didn’t really have role models at all, from our own culture. […] You would never

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see drag queens speaking in Spanish, you would never hear them joking around in Spanish. All of that was a world that was invisible and was not talked about, did not exist, was kept in the closet. Maybe your sexuality wasn’t in the closet anymore but still… Your basic roots were still in the closet. And Selena had a very, very big part of it, where people were just like “I am… someone. I’m… This area I come from. I’m… I can be just as glamorous as anyone else.” (00:36:22)

His use of the word “glamorous” appears to allude to the idea that glamor is something that one assumes—a mask that changes how we appear to others (cf. Stevens et al., 2015). Posthumously, Selena came to blur the boundaries between genuine womanliness and its masquerade and, mutatis mutandis, between genuine North Americanness and its Latinx masquerade. Selena’s brand of posthumous strategic exoticism is one that transforms ethnicity, gender, and sexuality into a kind of drag for subaltern subjects—a masquerade that helps them grow into powerful actors. What both celebrities share in their portrayals by documentary makers Solberg and Portillo is their legendary transgression of all kinds of norms and conventions. Whether this was consciously done or not is secondary, as Solberg and Portillo seem to suggest. It is inconsequential because their protagonists remain the first Latinxs to have been so (in)famous during their lifetimes that, after their deaths, generations upon generations of Latinxs continued to imprint on them. In doing so, they each interpreted the glamor of their idols in ways that offered them a powerful rhetoric of escape—one that also held within it the alluring promise of their own transformation (cf. Stevens et al., 2015).

References A Conversation with Academics about Selena. (n.d.). Lourdes Portillo. Retrieved January 21, 2021, from https://www.lourdesportillo.com/a-conversationwith-academics-about-selena

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Abreu, C. D. (2007). Celebrity, “Crossover,” and Cubanidad: Celia Cruz as “La Reina de Salsa,” 1971–2003. Revista de Música Latinoamericana; Austin, 28(1), 94–124,178. Aparicio, F. R. (2003). Jennifer as Selena: Rethinking Latinidad in media and popular culture. Latino Studies; London, 1(1), 90. Arrizón, A. (2008). Latina subjectivity, sexuality and sensuality. Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 18(3), 189–198. Balieiro, F. (2017). Consuming Carmen Miranda: Dislocations and dissonances in the reception of an icon. Revista Estudos Feministas, 25 (1), 269–290. Cale, J. (1989). The Soul of Carmen Miranda: Vol. Words for the Dying. Opal and Warner Bros. https://genius.com/John-cale-the-soul-of-carmenmiranda-lyrics Enloe, C. (2000). Bananas, beaches and bases: Making feminist sense of international politics. University of California Press. Halberstam, J. (1998). Female masculinity. Duke University Press. Huggan, G. (1994). The postcolonial exotic. Transition, 64, 22–29. Huggan, G. (2001). The postcolonial exotic: Marketing the Margins. Routledge. Hurtado, S. (2018). Obsesión por la belleza femenina en Venezuela. Espacio Abierto, 27 (2), 191–208. Marrow, H. (2003). To be or not to be (Hispanic or Latino): Brazilian Racial and Ethnic Identity in the United States. Ethnicities, 3(4), 427–464. McDonald, S. N. (2015, May 11). How Sofia Vergara picked up Carmen Miranda’s legacy—and Ran with It. Washington Post. https://www.washin gtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2015/05/11/how-sofia-ver gara-picked-up-carmen-mirandas-legacy-and-ran-with-it/ Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen, 16 (3), 6–18. Paredez, D. (2002). Remembering Selena, Re-membering “latinidad.” Theatre Journal, 54 (1), 63–84. Penfold-Mounce, R. (2019). Celebrity deaths and the Thanatological imagination. In A. Teodorescu & M. H. Jacobsen (Eds.), Death in contemporary popular culture (pp. 115–129). Routledge. Portillo, L. (1999, July 13). Corpus: A home movie for Selena. In POV Season 12. PBS. Rohter, L. (2001, December 13). The real Carmen Miranda under the crown of fruit. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/13/theater/ arts-abroad-the-real-carmen-miranda-under-the-crown-of-fruit.html Rojek, C. (2004). Celebrity. Reaktion Books.

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Schramm, C. (2012). Queering Latin American coloniality and the crosscultural production of racialised sexualities. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 33(3), 347–362. Solberg, H. (1995, October 6). Carmen Miranda: Bananas is my business. In POV Season 08. PBS. Stevens, L., Cappellini, B., & Smith, G. (2015). Nigellissima: A study of glamour, performativity and embodiment. Journal of Marketing Management, 31(5–6), 577–598. Vargas, A. (2016, December 9). Stereotype or Samba pioneer? A look back at the controversial legacy of Carmen Miranda. Remezcla. https://remezcla. com/film/tbt-carmen-miranda-brazil-actress-singer/

13 Conclusion

As US immigration policy grew increasingly restrictive over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first century, public discourse became more antagonizing toward migrants. This is especially true of Latinx migrants (cf. Chavez, 2013), to whom Donald Trump even famously referred as “bad hombres” during the 2016 elections (Blake, 2016). Since, in the United States, the default media portrayal of (Latin American) migration has been largely negative, there is a wealth of literature on stereotyping and antagonizing media frames and discourses of migration. There is little information, however, on attempts by the media to approach the social issue of migration from a less prejudiced angle. The present book attempted to address this knowledge gap by focusing on positive discourses in documentary film on Latin American migration to the United States. The link between sympathetic storytelling on migration and the documentary form has been made before. For example, Demos revealed how documentaries, as performances of artivism, intervene in the politics of immigration and globalization (2013). Loustaunau and Shaw (2018) as well as Demo (2012) investigated the documentary as an act of resistance against mainstream media’s exclusionary discourse on migration © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Sanchez, Discourses of Migration in Documentary Film, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06539-2_13

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from Latin America. Schreiber covered the media strategies with which documentaries respond to the racialization and criminalization of undocumented Latinxs (2018). Finally, Köhn demonstrated the ways in which the documentary, as a disciple of visual anthropology, captures the bodily, spatial, and temporal dimensions of the experience of migration (2016). A systematic analysis of the different kinds of discourses of migration present in these counterhegemonic documentaries is missing, however. By relying on translation theory as a heuristic tool, this book not only gave an overview of the positive discourses of migration of its corpus, but it also explained why these films lent themselves to such a popularly unpopular topic as migration, and how this inclination impacted their message. More precisely, the book drew on Translation Studies to map out the transfer of real-life stories on migration to the documentary reel. By positing that documentaries and translations were prompted by the same “oscillation between the recognition of historical reality and the recognition of a representation about it” (Nichols, 2010, p. 39), the book proposed to view documentaries as “post-translations” (Gentzler, 2016), “*translations” (Tymoczko, 2014), or “translations2 ” (Hermans, 1995). Moreover, rather than amalgamating a loosely related selection of counterdiscursive documentary narratives on migration, the book took a systemic approach. It addressed 18 Latinx-oriented documentaries that were produced by independent documentary makers, and that had been broadcast over the last thirty years on the PBS series POV—the first and longest-running showcase of independent nonfiction films in the United States. Looking at these documentaries as intersemiotic translations (cf. Jakobson, 1959) and therefore as facts of their target culture (cf. Toury, 2012), the book zoned in on their contexts, agents, practices, and discourses—“basic factors relating to translation, each with its own set of methodological implications […] separated out from the messy reality of translation for methodological purposes only” (Flynn & Gambier, 2011, p. 90). Defined in function of the book’s aim to chart how independent documentary makers translate stories on migration from the real to the reel, “context” alluded to the properties of the target structure in which the documentaries (“target texts”) were meant

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to circulate; the “agents” were understood to be nonfiction filmmakerscum-translators with an agency defined by their habitus; the “practices” were the concrete translation decisions that these agents made in the said texts; and their “discourses” were the ideological choices that the said documentarists-cum-translators made in their target texts. Having established POV’s “public television ecology” (cf. Aufderheide, 2019) as a context that endorses agents who are either representative of or committed to representing “subaltern counterpublics” (cf. Fraser, 1990), the book moved on to establish a taxonomy of the most common practices (“translation decisions”) of its corpus, according to Nichols’ documentary modes of representation (2010). Thanks to this overview, it became clear that some documentaries of the corpus hovered toward explorations of universal aspects of migrancy, such as motherhood, fatherhood, childhood. There were also documentaries that dwelled on topics such as criminality, biculturalism, (non)citizenship: questionings that emerge from migrants’ group experience. Finally, a number of documentaries dealt with themes such as queerness, adoption, celebrity: identitarian issues to which only certain individuals of a migrant community can relate. These “natural meaning units” (cf. Greer et al., 2013) fit in neatly with the “tripartite framework of personal identity” (cf. Sue, 2001), which contends that all individuals belong to three concentric circles: only they belong to the first (“individual level”), only some others belong to the second (“group level”), and everybody belongs to the third (“universal level”). These universal, group, and individual themes were then used to structure the positive discourse analysis (PDA) of the 18 documentaries of the corpus. In Our House in Havana (Olsson, 2000) and My American Girls: A Dominican Story (Matthews, 2001), two mothers are filmed grappling with the meaning of their American present and their Latin American past. Both films focus on the psychological make-up of their transnational and transient Latinx protagonists as they undergo the “double transition” (cf. Challinor, 2018) of being a mother in an alien environment. Cuban-American mother Silvia and Dominican-American mother Sandra are initially depicted as nostalgic Caribbean immigrants who idealize the life that they left behind in their countries of origin. As the events unfold, however, it becomes increasingly clear that their need to

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romanticize the past is actually a coping mechanism through which they deal with the trauma of their forced emigration. In 90 Miles (Zaldívar, 2003) and Voices of the Sea (Hopkins, 2018), the documentary makers make a strong case for the arbitrariness of Cuban exceptionalism. Instead of delving into the moot point of whether Cuban émigrés deserve special treatment, the documentaries make a broader point about how deeply the rhetoric on migration in receiving and sending countries can affect the mental and physical well-being of their migrants. Trapped between the anachronistic Cuban Adjustment Act of the United States and Cuba’s own anachronistic and repressive emigration policies (cf. Henken, 2005), the casts of 90 Miles and Voices of the Sea are portrayed as unwilling participants in a mosaic of push– pull factors driving Cuban emigration (cf. Argüellová, 2017). These films are not about lone wolves dreaming of an easier life abroad, but about caballero rather than machista—that is, chivalrous rather than macho— fathers carefully considering which environment best guarantees the sanctity and sanity of their family units. In Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary (Simón, 1997) and Sin País (Rigby, 2012), the documentary makers draw attention to the discourses of deservedness that surround their protagonists, who are both immigrants and children. Throughout their films, Simón and Rigby give real-life examples of immigrant children who are regarded as undeserving of protection, resources, and care despite their best efforts to fit the “childhood innocence ideal” (cf. Bennett et al., 2017). In doing so, they expose the different ways in which migrant children are tasked with the societal responsibility of tackling inequality and disadvantage. In one fell swoop, they also demonstrate that the dominant narrative of how immigrants can overcome adversity through hard work and perseverance is inadequate because of its dismissal of a range of obstacles that are simply beyond the migrants’ control (cf. Abo-Zena, 2018). Made in LA (Carracedo & Bahar, 2007) and Don’t Tell Anyone (Shwer, 2015) subtly flesh out the ambiguity surrounding the act of speaking out and coming out, when it is performed by migrant noncitizens. Both films actively participate in tearing down their undocumented protagonists’ oppression by creating a supportive atmospheres in which dialogue helps them overcome their shame and guilt and develop an

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enhanced critical understanding of their experiences (cf. Irizarry & Raible, 2014). In the end, the protagonists of both films seem to come out stronger after their battles with the system, not as much thanks to their somewhat successful rebellions, as to the faith they have gained in themselves throughout their political, legal, and mental emancipation. Hannah Weyer’s documentary tandem La Boda (2000) and Escuela (2002) gives the floor to the bicultural, Mexican-American Luis family. From an assimilationist perspective, the family appears to confirm all the immigrant clichés: they look, act, talk, and think differently to what is perceived as the US standard. However, over the course of both films, Weyer demonstrates that her protagonists’ realities do not coincide with the stereotype of the “barbaric immigrant” (cf. Nail, 2015). With the help of evocative images, heartfelt interviews, and clever editing, Weyer conveys a sense of awareness within the Luis family that they are expected to excel in a society that marginalizes them on account of their supposed ethnic and linguistic inferiority. The Luises remain undeterred and undefeated, despite everything. Across both sides of the US–Mexico border, their bicultural family is their fortress, and their assimilation into American society happens on their own terms, in their own time: not out of stubbornness, unwillingness, or incapability, but out of a pragmatism imposed on them by the dire socioeconomic circumstances of their reception in the United States. In Al otro lado (Almada, 2006) and The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández (Fitzgerald, 2008), the US–Mexico border is funneled through corridista (balladeer) Magdiel and high-school student Esequiel. The films begin when the first is about to cross the border illegally and after the latter was shot dead by US Marines while herding his goats on the border— where he lived legally. In both films, this ominous border seems to manifest itself as beyond good and evil, like the people who (aim to) cross it. By laying bare the societal, spatial, and legal ambiguities of the border zone, the documentary makers of both films seem to suggest that liminal figures like Magdiel and Esequiel are not the villainous, criminal masterminds that they are made out to be in the popular imaginary. Rather, they are victims of the US-Mexican “crimmigration crisis” (cf. Stumpf, 2006)—criminalized by both nation-states to diverge the public’s attention from their own deviousness.

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In The Transformation (Aiken & Aparicio, 1996) and Memories of a Penitent Heart (Aldarondo, 2017), the documentary makers initially set out to identify the underlying societal structures that patterned out the injustices, which their queer, Latinx protagonists faced during their lifetime. However, both films conclude on a similar note: the pursuit of such “logic of trial” (cf. Wacquant, 1997) is meaningless. Whether it was overbearing motherly love, fanatic religiosity, cultural backwardness, and/or Western chauvinism that caused so much hurt to Aldarondo’s protagonist Miguel/Michael or Aiken and Aparicio’s protagonist Ricardo/Sara, it does not change anything about the fact that these structures did create historical injustices for all queers. However, what does matter is what remains of the memory of those people. Subtly, the documentary makers task everybody—their viewers included—with the duty to acknowledge the immigrants, queers, and all other Others who suffer from that Otherness and turn their struggle into a corrective of “life as we know it” (cf. Ahmed, 2015). In The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez (Ryan & Weimberg, 1999) and Discovering Dominga (Flynn & McConohay, 2003), the documentary makers follow Mexican adoptee Ernesto (né Guillermo) from Puerto Rico and US adoptee Denese (née Dominga) from Guatemala in their search for transnational belonging. As they return to their countries of origin, the adoptees are pictured undergoing a gradual “disidentification” (cf. Kim, 2003) with adoption paradigms that cast them as “ideal immigrants” (cf. De Graeve, 2015). By capturing their protagonists’ complex process of “cultural fusion” (cf. Croucher & Kramer, 2017) between their sending and receiving matrices, the documentary makers end up exposing the phenomenon of adoption as “an imperfect model for migrant integration” (cf. Leinaweaver, 2013) on account of its taxing expectation of acculturation to one mother/country and deculturation from the other. Finally, in Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena (Portillo, 1999) and Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business (Solberg, 1995) stardom and fandom are central themes. In her film, Portillo explores the ongoing debate surrounding late Selena Quintanilla, a 23-year-old Tejano singer who, at the height of her fame, was shot and killed by the president of her fan club. Helena Solberg, on the other hand, illustrates the

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impact that late recording artist and movie star Carmen Miranda has had on her transnational audience—including Brazilians like Solberg. What both celebrities share in their portrayals by Solberg and Portillo is their legendary transgression of all kinds of norms and conventions. Whether this was consciously done or not is secondary, as Solberg and Portillo seem to suggest. It is inconsequential because their migrant protagonists remain the first Latinxs to have been so (in)famous during their lifetimes that, after their deaths, generations upon generations of Latinxs continued to imprint on them. In conclusion, the Positive Discourse Analysis of the corpus reveals that, in their attempts at translating the lived experience of migration (“the real”) to the documentary film form (“the reel”), the documentary makers tend to zone in primarily on how their migrant protagonists conceive of their personal identity. Migration is never portrayed as a constitutive aspect of that personality: rather, the documentary makers use their protagonists’ migration to add just another layer of complexity to their universal (e.g. motherhood, fatherhood, childhood), group (e.g. biculturalism, (non)citizenship, criminality), and individual (e.g. queerness, adoption, fame) planes of experience. As they do so, they make a point of using a plethora of audiovisual means to poke holes in their protagonists’ worldviews or “matrices of intelligibility” (cf. Butler, 2011), thus instinctively harking back to the “constative fallacy” (cf. Yoshino, 2002) that characterizes US immigration policy: the misperception that actions are describing an identity that they are actually creating. As a rule, the documentary films of the corpus depart from the premise that their migrant protagonists view their identity as an immutable and real essence. This perspective then sets the stage for these migrants’ “identity failure” (cf. Ruffolo, 2009): their incapacity to live up to their own definitions of what a migrant mother, queer, criminal, etc. should or should not be. Initially setting out to document the search for such identity cores, the filmmakers consistently end up capturing their protagonists’ gradual understanding of migrant identity as a vessel of everchanging meaning that no collective identity category can adequately describe. By adhering to this logic, these documentary makers stay true to the post-identitarian refusal to romanticize alternative identities (cf.

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Downey & Fenton, 2003). It should therefore not come as a surprise that the documentary makers’ discourses of migration end up pointing out that there are no quintessential mothers, fathers, children, criminals, bicultural people, citizens, queers, adoptees, celebrities. Neither are there quintessential migrants. In other words, the counterhegemonic nature of the POV documentaries of the corpus seems to lie in their intention to prove that migration is not an identity marker in and of itself but rather an experiential phenomenon that influences the identities of their migrant protagonists. Interestingly, the documentary makers never follow these deconstructions of personal identity up with some kind of new definition. This is striking, as it goes against the documentary’s traditional promise of enlightening the viewer on “the more general processes at work in society” (Nichols, 2010, p. 201). Hence, it could be argued that the documentary makers’ mooring of their protagonists in a perpetual state of identitarian equivocation is conscious and deliberate. As posited by Halberstam, in the North American matrix of intelligibility, the pursuit of happiness—and, by extension, success—is not only desirable but also mandatory. So is the pursuit of clear-cut answers as well as well-defined “formulations of self ” (2011, p. 140). All of these pursuits neatly interlock in a system of thought that combines unbridled exceptionalism with a desire to believe that success happens to good people and failure is just a consequence of bad attitude. However, there is also an increasing endorsement of what Halberstam refers to as “the queer art of failure”: […] failure can be a style, to cite Quentin Crisp, or a way of life, to cite Foucault, and it can stand in contrast to the grim scenarios of success that depend upon “trying and trying again.” In fact if success requires so much effort, then maybe failure is easier in the long run and offers different rewards. (2011, p. 3)

This rejection of the cult of positive thinking is a matrix of intelligibility that is particularly popular among academics, activists, artists, and arguably POV’s independent documentary makers on account of their shared quest to articulate an alternative vision of life, love, and labor. In this vein, it could be claimed that, in their intersemiotic translations from

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the real to the reel of their migrant protagonists’ experience of identity failure, the documentary makers of the corpus consistently reject their expected position of ‘good teacher’ in favor of that of ‘ignorant schoolmaster.’ Having understood that the PBS audience must be led to learn rather than taught to follow (see Chapter 3), they purposefully create an experience of confusion, in the hope that it will incite their viewers to find their own way out, or back, or around (cf. Halberstam, 2011). By making their intersemiotic translations culminate in their migrant protagonists’ seeming failure to live up to their original worldviews, the documentary makers seem to subscribe to “post-subjectivity” (cf. Ruffolo, 2009): a paradigm that strives to transcend the endless cycle of significations repositioning subjects on fixed planes. Thanks to their tactical applications of Nichols’s 6 documentary modes (that is, poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflexive, and performative), they illustrate how their protagonists reach different levels of awareness of the constative fallacy of their identities. In the end, it would seem that the documentary makers of the corpus deliver translations of migration from the real to the reel that celebrate “the possibility that alternatives dwell in the murky waters of a counterintuitive, often impossibly dark and negative realm of critique and refusal” (Halberstam, 2011, pp. 1–2). That is essentially what the positive discourses of migration seem to come down to in this book: a discursive refusal to hover between cynical resignation and naïve optimism regarding the reality of migration, based on the expectation of the migrant protagonists’, the documentary makers’, and the viewers’ failure to adequately relate (to), translate, or interpret any reality—including that of migration. In the same vein, the book’s own identity journey, which started with a transversal application of translation theory on documentary films, does not pretend to offer a revolutionary solution to the many gaps and pitfalls of either Translation or Documentary Studies. Instead, it encourages both fields to venture outside their already-porous boundaries in search of queer failure—an escape from “punishing norms that discipline behavior” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 3). Like the documentary makers it discusses, this book defies the Gramscian hegemony of all interlocking systems of thought that pass for common sense. Mirroring its documentary makers’ commitment to find freedom in the failure of common

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sense, this book pleads for what Halberstam (2011) refers to as “antidisciplinarity”: ways of acquiring knowledge that lead to unbounded forms of speculation, and modes of thinking that ally not with rigor and order, but with inspiration and unpredictability. With this plea, the book opens countless new avenues. It invites translation scholars to welcome Bassnett and Johnson’s call for an “outward turn” (2019)—a new paradigmatic shift in Translation Studies—and be more adventurous in their use of the toolbox of translation. It also motivates documentary film scholars to become aware that their struggle to retain the political purchase of claiming the real while acknowledging the postmodern recognition that truth is socially constructed (cf. Gershon & Malitsky, 2010) is not stand-alone. Venturing out into other academic disciplines allows for the application of methodologies that bring forth new queries and therefore redirect what otherwise may have remained an unsurmountable dilemma. This book demonstrated how liberating such an approach can be. Rather than depending on a particular discipline as “an overtrained pied piper leading obedient children out of the darkness and into the light” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 14), the book attempted to amplify Translation Studies’ framework by approaching documentary films as a form of “assumed transfer” (cf. D’hulst, 2012). It even took the liberty of complementing the said framework with Nichols’s taxonomy of documentary modes. As it turns out, D’hulst was right in suggesting that when the “source/target” thinking of translation is used as an “umbrella concept that encompasses more techniques” (D’hulst, 2012, p. 141), it transforms into a toolbox that enables the description of all kinds of transfer processes. By redefining the contexts, agents, practices, and discourses of translation to chart how documentary makers translate stories on migration from the real to the reel, the book revealed that the target structure (“context”) of the documentary makers tasked them with a considerable amount of expectations in terms of their content. It also laid bare the dynamics between the documentary makers’ habitus (“agents”) and their modes of representation (“practices”), which in turn facilitated the mapping of their ideological narratives (“discourses”). Such a modus

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operandi can be replicated again and again, as it is applicable to all acts of communication that operate according to source/target thinking. This being said, the aforementioned four pillars of translation were arbitrarily “separated out from the messy reality of translation” and adapted in function of this specific book “for methodological purposes only” (Flynn & Gambier, 2011, p. 90). In other words, the book does not only advocate for the transversal application of these particular notions of translation theory but of all conceptual tools that can “describe transfer processes to the same extent as source/target translational relations” within a given setting (D’hulst, 2012, pp. 141–142). Finally, in terms of its corpus, the book opens a plethora of lines of investigation that future researchers may want to explore. To what extent did the documentary makers of the corpus impact public discourse on the social issue of migration? Did they influence the lives of their protagonists? Has their diversity behind the lens increased the variety of their perspectives? Should the documentary makers be called ‘independent’ when their work is largely defined by a particular ecology? These are only a handful of the many questions that can be raised thanks to this book. I leave them unanswered in the hope that they will lead to more undisciplined knowledge.

References Primary Sources Aiken, S., & Aparicio, J. (1996, July 9). The transformation. In POV Season 09. PBS. Aldarondo, C. (2017, July 31). Memories of a penitent heart. In POV Season 30. PBS. Almada, N. (2006, August 1). Al otro lado. In POV Season 19. PBS. Carracedo, A., & Bahar, R. (2007, September 4). Made in LA. In POV Season 20. PBS. Fitzgerald, K. (2008, July 8). The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández. In POV Season 21. PBS.

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Flynn, P., & McConohay, M. J. (2003, July 8). Discovering dominga. In POV Season 16 . PBS. Hopkins, K. (2018, September 3). Voices of the sea. In POV Season 31. PBS. Matthews, A. (2001, July 3). My American girls: A Dominican Story. In POV Season 14. PBS. Olsson, S. (2000, July 25). Our House in Havana. In POV Season 13. PBS. Portillo, L. (1999, July 13). Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena. In POV Season 12. PBS. Rigby, T. (2012, August 9). Sin País. In POV Season 25. PBS. Ryan, C., & Weimberg, G. (1999, July 27). The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez. In POV Season 12. PBS. Shwer, M. (2015, September 21). No le digas a nadie. In POV Season 28. PBS. Simón, L. (1997, July 1). Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary. In POV Season 10. PBS. Solberg, H. (1995, October 6). Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business. In POV Season 08. PBS. Weyer, H. (2000, June 27). La Boda. In POV Season 13. PBS. Weyer, H. (2002, August 27). Escuela. In POV Season 15. PBS. Zaldívar, J. C. (2003, July 29). 90 Miles. In POV Season 16 . PBS.

Secondary Sources Abo-Zena, M. M. (2018). Supporting immigrant-origin children: Grounding teacher education in critical developmental perspectives and practices. The Teacher Educator, 53(3), 263–276. Ahmed, S. (2015). The cultural politics of emotion (2nd ed.). Routledge. Argüellová, L. (2017). Normalization of U.S.-Cuban relations: The end of the ‘wet foot, dry foot’ policy—The end of the Cold War? Central European Journal of International and Security Studies; Prague, 11(4). Aufderheide, P. (2019). Documentary filmmaking and US public TV’s independent television service, 1989–2017. Journal of Film and Video, 71(4), 3–14. Bassnett, S., & Johnston, D. (2019). The outward turn in translation studies. The Translator, 25 (3), 181–188. Bennett, C., Harden, J., & Anstey, S. (2017). The silencing effects of the childhood innocence ideal: The perceptions and practices of fathers in educating their children about sexuality. Sociology of Health and Illness, 39 (8), 1365–1380.

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Blake, A. (2016, October 20). The final trump-clinton debate transcript, annotated. Washington post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/ 2016/10/19/the-final-trump-clinton-debate-transcript-annotated/ Butler, J. (2011). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge. Challinor, E. P. (2018). Cross-border citizenship: Mothering beyond the boundaries of consanguinity and nationality. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41(1), 114–131. Chavez, L. (2013). The Latino threat: Constructing immigrants, citizens, and the nation, (2nd ed.). Stanford University Press. Croucher, S. M., & Kramer, E. (2017). Cultural fusion theory: An alternative to acculturation. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 10 (2), 97–114. De Graeve, K. (2015). Adoptive migration: Raising Latinos in Spain. Anthropologica, 57 (2), 601–602. Demo, A. T. (2012). Decriminalizing illegal immigration: Immigrants’ rights through the documentary lens. In D. R. DeChaine (Ed.), Border rhetorics: Citizenship and identity on the US-Mexico frontier (pp. 197–212). The University of Alabama Press. Demos, T. J. (2013). The migrant image: The art and politics of documentary during global crisis. Duke University Press. D’hulst, L. (2012). (Re)locating translation history: From assumed translation to assumed transfer. Translation Studies, 5 (2), 139–155. Downey, J., & Fenton, N. (2003). New media, counter publicity and the public sphere. New Media and Society, 5 (2), 185–202. Eng, D. L. (2010). The feeling of kinship: Queer liberalism and the racialization of intimacy. Duke University Press. Flynn, P., & Gambier, Y. (2011). Methodology in translation studies. Handbook of Translation Studies Online, 2, 88–96. Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text, 25 (26), 56–80. Gentzler, E. (2016). Translation and rewriting in the age of post-translation studies. Routledge. Gershon, I., & Malitsky, J. (2010). Actor-network theory and documentary studies. Studies in Documentary Film, 4 (1), 65–78. Greer, E., Neville, S. M., Ford, E., & Gonzalez, M. O. (2013). The cultural voice of immigrant Latina women and the meaning of femininity: A phenomenological study. SAGE Open, 3(2). Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure. Duke University Press.

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Henken, T. (2005). Balseros, Boteros, & El Bombo: Post-1994 Cuban immigration to the United States and the persistence of special treatment. Latino Studies; London, 3(3), 393–416. Hermans, T. (1995). Toury’s empiricism version one. The Translator, 1(2), 215– 223. Irizarry, J. G., & Raible, J. (2014). “A hidden part of me”: Latino/a students, silencing, and the epidermalization of inferiority. Equity and Excellence in Education, 47 (4), 430–444. Jakobson, R. (1959). On linguistic aspects of translation. In R. A. Brower (Ed.), On translation (pp. 232–238). Oxford University Press. Kim, E. (2003). Wedding citizenship and culture: Korean adoptees and the global family of Korea. Social Text, 21(1), 57–81. Köhn, S. (2016). Mediating mobility: Visual anthropology in the age of migration. WallFlower Press. Leinaweaver, J. B. (2013). Adoptive migration: Raising Latinos in Spain. Duke University Press. Loustaunau, E., & Shaw, L. E. (2018). Telling migrant stories: Latin American diaspora in documentary film. University of Florida Press. Nail, T. (2015). The figure of the migrant. Stanford University Press. Nichols, B. (2010). Introduction to documentary (2nd ed.). Indiana University Press. Ruffolo, D. V. (2009). Post-queer politics. Routledge. Stumpf, J. (2006). The crimmigration crisis: Immigrants, crime, and sovereign power. American University Law Review, 56 (2), 367–420. Sue, D. W. (2001). Multidimensional Facets of Cultural Competence. The Counseling Psychologist, 29 (6), 790–821. Toury, G. (2012). Descriptive translation studies and beyond (Revised edition). John Benjamins PubCo. Tymoczko, M. (2014). Enlarging translation, empowering translators. Routledge. Venuti, L. (2008). The translator’s invisibility: A history of translation. Routledge. Wacquant, L. (1997). For an analytic of racial domination. Political Power and Social Theory, 11, 221–234. Yoshino, K. (2002). Covering. The Yale Law Journal, 111(4), 769–939. Zimmerman, P. R. (2000). States of emergency: Documentaries, wars, democracies. University of Minnesota Press.

Index

A

acculturation 176, 215, 221, 266 achieved celebrity 257 acto de repudio 99 Adams, J. 154 adolescence/adolescent 150, 156, 158 adoption 51, 56, 66, 215–226, 229–233, 263, 266, 267 adoptive matrix 220, 231 Africa 113, 241 Afro-Brazilian 242, 243 AIDS 193, 197, 198 Aiken, S. and Aparicio, J. 46, 58, 193, 194, 196, 197, 200, 201, 212, 213, 266 ajiaco 91 Albizu Campos, P. 226, 232

Aldarondo, C. 7, 45, 46, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55, 62, 66, 193, 196, 202–213, 266 Almada, N. 7, 47, 60, 66, 165, 167–172, 180–184, 187–190, 265 Al otro lado 7, 60, 66, 165, 167, 168, 171, 172, 174, 180, 181, 183, 188–190, 265 American Dream 122 American Dream 91, 102, 155, 212, 221 antidisciplinarity 7, 270 antihero 166 Anzaldúa, G. 160 Apollonian model of childhood 117 Arizona 91, 103, 180, 183, 184, 187 ascribed celebrity 240 as if family 225

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. J. Sanchez, Discourses of Migration in Documentary Film, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06539-2

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276

Index

assimilation 150, 156, 158–160, 233, 235, 265 associational citizenship 136 assumed transfer 14, 15, 270 Athenian model of childhood 117 attributed celebrity 247 authentic knowledge 54 authentic self 226 autoexoticism 256 autonomized field 45

B

backward(ness) 62, 209, 212, 266 bad hombre 2, 3, 5, 261 Baiana 242 ballad 165–167, 172, 241 balladeer 165, 265 bandido 3 barbaric 158, 159 barbarism 194, 209, 210 bare life 135, 143, 145 Baudrillard, J. 185, 186 beyond-objectivity (storytelling) 42, 54, 55 bicultural(ism) 51, 56, 66, 132, 151, 152, 158, 159, 205, 217, 263, 265, 267, 268 bigot(ry)/bigoted 202 bilingual 131, 134, 152, 193, 205, 217 bilingualism 154, 158 birth matrix 226 border-crosser 60, 180–185 borderland 159 border zone 183, 190, 265 Born Again Christian 194, 196, 198 Bourdieu, P. 21, 22 bracero 149

Bracero Program 4 Brazil 242–247, 256, 257 Bush Jr., G. 5 Butler, J. 197, 199, 205, 267

C

caballerismo 98 caballero 98, 103, 104, 264 California 54, 110, 111, 130, 138, 149, 151, 153, 177, 203 capitalism/capitalist 95, 130, 176, 241, 245 careship 81, 86 Caribbean 85, 91, 205, 209, 263 Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business 7, 53, 63, 65, 239, 240, 254, 266 Carracedo, A. and Bahar, R. 7, 49, 50, 66, 129, 131–133, 137–143, 145, 264 Castro, F. 49, 73, 74, 76, 77, 92–94, 104 Castro, F. “ 4 categorical flux 54 Catholicism 194, 202, 205 celebrity 51, 251, 254, 258, 263, 267, 268 Central America 5 Chicano 18, 167 childhood 51, 56, 66, 115, 116, 120, 144, 150, 156, 219, 220, 229, 252, 263, 267 childhood innocence 116, 121 children-citizens 117 cinema of attractions 55, 56 citizen’s arrest 183

Index

citizenship 51, 56, 66, 120, 131, 135, 136, 140, 143, 154, 176, 263, 267 civil war 187, 228, 230 clean break 219, 221, 223, 224 Clinton, B. 4, 40, 49, 73, 94, 216, 217, 223 Clinton, H. 2 code-switching 203 Colombia 49, 134, 209 colonies/colonialism/colonial 6, 80, 119, 154 come out/coming out 56, 141, 145, 146, 193, 207, 216, 218, 264, 265 coming-of-age 129, 150, 156, 216 committed (approaches of ) translation 16, 18, 26 communism/communist 82, 93, 95, 100 compensatory spectacle 254 conquistador 229 constative fallacy 3, 267, 269 convergence (culture) 41 corpse messaging 174 Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena 7, 61, 62, 66, 239, 248, 266 Corpus Christi 249, 250 corridista 165, 168, 170, 172, 180, 185, 265 corrido 165–168, 170, 174, 179, 181, 184, 187–190 corrido norteño 167 counter-publicity 44 counterpublic sphere 44 cowboy 170, 185, 194 coyote 142, 180–183, 188 criminality 51, 56, 66, 172, 179, 263, 267

277

crimmigration (nation, policy, crisis) 178, 179, 190, 265 Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) 28, 29 Cuba 73–78, 81, 82, 86, 89–95, 97, 99–104, 195, 217, 222, 264 Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA) 4, 93, 94, 104, 264 Cuban exceptionalism 93, 104, 264 cubanidad 90 Cuban Revolution 73, 76, 92, 94, 222 cultural citizenship 135, 136, 140 cultural fusion 215, 235, 266 cultural transfer 14 cultural turn 14, 20–22, 26 curiosity gap 56, 58

D

de Certeau, M. 25 decolonial imaginary 247, 250 deculturation 215, 233, 266 defection 99, 103 deportation 3–5, 59, 110, 111, 115, 134 deportation crisis 110, 111 deportation regime era 109 deregulation 41, 43, 44 Descriptive Translation Studies 197 deserving/deservingness 116, 145, 176, 178, 179 Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (DREAM Act) 129 D’hulst, L. 14, 19, 24, 270, 271 diaspora 18, 74, 236 difficult knowledge 116, 121, 122 Dionysian model of childhood 117

278

Index

Discovering Dominga 7, 66, 215, 216, 218, 219, 224, 227, 231–233, 235, 266 disidentification 215, 227, 229, 235, 266 domesticating translation 27 domestication 26, 63, 81 double consciousness 205 drag queen 58, 193–195, 200, 258 DREAMer 129, 137, 140, 144 drug smuggling/smuggler 167, 170, 176 drug trafficking/trafficker 5, 168–170, 175 Dusty Feet 93, 95, 104

E

Eagle, Globe, and Anchor (EGA) 186 El Salvador 114, 117, 124, 133, 142 Embargo 73, 74, 82, 93 embodied identity 54 embodied knowledge 48, 54, 64 empathy 60, 178 enclave 155 entextualization 17, 18, 24 Ernesto “Che” Guevara 224 Escuela 66, 149, 151–153, 155, 157–160, 265 Escuela 7 Espagne, M. 14 eunuch 199 exile 73–75, 77, 78, 81, 82, 84, 93, 217, 225 expository mode 53–55, 59, 60

F

fame 56, 65, 66, 239, 246, 266, 267 familismo 75, 83, 98, 100, 101, 103 fandom 239, 249, 266 fatherhood 51, 56, 66, 89, 98, 99, 101, 263, 267 Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary 7, 49, 53, 56, 66, 109–111, 121–124, 264 femininity 209 figure of hate 194, 209 Fitzgerald, K. 7, 45, 54, 62, 66, 165–167, 172, 173, 176–178, 186, 187, 189, 190, 265 Florida 91, 103 Flynn, P. 8, 13, 17, 19, 20, 24, 27, 262, 271 Flynn, P. and McConohay, M.J. 7, 45, 66, 215, 216, 219–221, 223, 224, 228–230, 234, 236, 266 foreignization 61, 63 foreignizing translation 26, 27 Foucault, M. 25, 29, 268 freestanding child 219, 221, 230, 232 Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN) 222

G

Gambier, Y. 8, 13, 20, 24, 25, 27, 262, 271 gender creativity 257 genocide 230 Giddens, A. 21 glamor(ous) 258 Good Neighbor Policy 245 goodwill 4, 243

Index

gringo 225 Guatemala 111, 114, 117, 119, 120, 215, 220, 227–231, 234, 235, 266

H

hailing/hailed/hail 5, 85, 197, 199, 205, 245 Halberstam, J. 7–9, 211, 268–270 heteronormative 199 homophobia/homophobic 62, 194, 207–209 homosexuality 100, 198, 208 Hopkins, K. 7, 45–47, 56, 66, 89, 90, 96–98, 102–104, 121, 264 human trafficking/trafficker 167, 181, 183 hypermasculinity 98 hyperreal(ity) 185, 189 hyphenated (identity) 48, 157 hyphenation 131

279

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) 111, 130, 141 Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) 3 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IIRAIRA) 4, 111 imperialism/imperialist 77, 92, 241 independentista 226 Independent Television Service (ITVS) 23, 42, 44 inferiority (complex) 254 integration 155, 176, 177, 215, 233, 266 intersemiotic translation 8, 17, 24, 27, 262, 268, 269 intersubjective negotiation of loss 233 invasion 223 invisibility of the translator 26 involuntary immigrant 233

J I

ideal immigrant 215, 266 identity failure 267, 269 ideological labor 233 illegal alien 4, 94, 110, 120 illegal immigrant 120, 172 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA) 4 illegality 133, 145, 169, 172, 178–180, 186 illegal migration 109 illusio 26, 60 imagology 17, 20 immigrant paradox 150

Jehova’s Witness 257 journalator 17, 18

L

La Boda 7, 66, 149, 151–153, 155, 158, 159, 265 labor camp 149, 151 La Raza 112 Latinidad 209, 243, 246, 249, 250, 257 lawful permanent resident (LPR) 93, 94 legal status 4, 109, 129, 176, 177 liminality 159, 160, 166

280

Index

logic of trial 54, 55, 266 Los Angeles 49, 111, 113, 117, 120, 123, 130, 131, 133, 135, 137, 241 Los Tigres del Norte 168, 169 love ethic 86

M

machismo 75, 98–100, 102 Made in LA 7, 49, 50, 66, 129–132, 134–137, 139, 143–146, 264 madre abnegada 81, 83 mal gobierno 167, 172 Manifest Destiny 2, 92 marianismo 75, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 99 Mariel boatlift 93 Marielitos 93, 94, 104 Marxism/Marxist 76, 77 masculinity 98, 99 masked interview 59 matrix/matrices of intelligibility 267, 268 Matthews, A. 7, 45, 66, 74, 79, 80, 83–85, 263 Maya(n) 218, 228, 229, 231, 236 media activism 46 media ecology 60, 62 Memories of a Penitent Heart 7, 49, 51, 52, 54, 62, 66, 193, 196, 201, 202, 206, 210, 212, 213, 266 mestizaje 158, 159 Mexican bandit 2, 3 Mexican Revolution 166, 167, 170 Mexico 4, 5, 112, 113, 117, 133, 142, 145, 157–159, 166, 170,

175, 182, 183, 185, 189, 217, 223–225, 234, 250 Meylaerts, R. 17, 21–24, 45 Miami 76, 89, 95, 97 militarized border 165 minutemen 180, 183, 184 Miranda, Carmen 239–247, 254, 256, 257, 267 modes of documentary representation 27 mojado 172 monocultural 155 monolingual/monolingualism 154 morbid space 256 motherhood 51, 56, 66, 74, 80–82, 84–86, 263, 267 multipositionality 22, 45 My American Girls: A Dominican Story 7, 59, 66, 74, 85, 263

N

Nail, T. 149, 159, 265 naming (practices) 193, 194, 199 narcocorrido 167–169, 171, 172, 175 narco(traficante) 169, 171 national substance 226 natural meaning units 51, 65, 263 New York City 80, 84, 130, 134–136, 138, 140, 144, 195, 198, 200, 201, 205, 207, 225, 226, 240, 243 Nichols, B. 15, 16, 19, 20, 27, 48, 53, 55, 59–62, 64, 262, 263, 268–270 9/11 5, 130, 187 90 Miles 7, 53, 56, 57, 66, 89, 92, 94, 95, 97–101, 104, 264

Index

No le digas a nadie 1, 5–7, 49, 59, 66, 134, 135 noncitizen 110, 119, 135, 137, 143, 145, 264 noncitizenship 136 norteña music (band) 166, 173 nostalgia 77, 85, 185, 186, 198, 201

O

Obama, B. 4, 5, 89, 94 observational mode 55, 58–60 Old Mexico 185 Old West 185 Olsson, S. 7, 45, 49, 66, 73, 74, 76, 77, 80, 81, 85, 263 one language, one culture 158 Ortiz, F. 91 Our House in Havana 7, 49, 59, 66, 73, 75, 77, 81–83, 85, 263 outlaw 167, 175, 182, 184, 185 outward turn 270

281

Posse Comitatus 187 postcolonial exoticism 245 post-identity 5, 42, 44 poststructuralism 5 post-subjectivity/post-subjective 269 POV 8, 13, 21–24, 41–45, 47, 48, 59, 64, 247, 250, 262, 263, 268 prisoner of war (POW) 217, 224 Proposition 187 49, 110–114, 122 Public broadcasting 23, 24, 30, 39, 40, 43, 44, 47, 48, 55, 60, 65 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) 7, 13, 21–23, 40–44, 48, 60, 62, 64, 65, 171, 262, 269 public interest 39, 40, 44, 47 public sphere 8, 23, 44, 47, 48, 53, 64 public television 40, 42, 43, 47 public television ecology 42, 47, 48, 53, 60, 62, 64, 263 Puerto Rico 92, 196, 205, 207, 215, 222, 223, 225, 232, 266 punitive turn 172, 179

P

parens patriae 109, 119 pars pro toto 256 participatory mode 58, 59, 61 paterfamilias principle 119 PATRIOT Act 5, 130 Pérez Firmat, G. 131 performative foreignization 63 performative mode 64 poetic mode 48, 53, 55, 59, 60 Portillo, L. 7, 46, 47, 61, 62, 66, 239, 247–258, 266, 267 Portugal/Portuguese 6, 246 Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA) 29, 30, 65, 263, 267

Q

Q’eqchi’ 228–230 queer/queering 58, 63, 141, 193, 194, 197, 209–213, 216, 266–268 queer (art of ) failure 268 queer culture 212 queer failure 269 queerness 51, 56, 58, 62, 65, 66, 197, 199, 201, 210, 263, 267 queer performativity 218 queer trauma 193 Quintanilla, Selena 239, 248, 266

282

Index

R

racialization of intimacy 231 rafters 93, 100 Reagan, R. 41, 44, 94 reality-acceptance 236 receiving country 155, 159, 209 reflexive mode 61, 63 religion/religious 75, 78, 85, 90, 102, 171, 200, 202, 204, 207, 211 resignification 159, 160 Rigby, T. 7, 45, 66, 109–111, 114–116, 118–121, 124, 125, 264 Robin Hood 171, 175 rooted child 218, 219, 224, 232, 235 roots trip 222, 225, 227, 229, 233 Ryan, C. and Weimberg, G 7, 45, 49, 54, 66, 215, 216, 218, 219, 222–226, 231, 232, 234–236, 266

S

safe depersonalized space 255 sanctuary city 133 sanctuary jurisdiction 130 seasonal fieldwork 151, 155 Second Amendment 177 second generation decline 150, 158, 160 second-generation immigrant 150 second generation revolt 150, 158, 160 self-erasure 60 sending country 155 shared knowledge 56

Shwer, M. 1, 5–7, 45, 49, 59, 66, 129, 133, 134, 140, 141, 144, 145, 264 signification 211, 269 Simón, L. 7, 45, 47, 49, 53, 54, 56, 58, 66, 109–118, 120–125, 264 Sinaloa 168, 170, 171, 183 sinaloense 170, 171 Sin País 7, 59, 66, 109–111, 114, 118, 121, 124, 264 social stigma 123 Solberg, H. 7, 53, 54, 65, 239–247, 250, 254–258, 266, 267 source/target thinking 271 South America 241 Spain/Spanish 2, 3, 6, 47, 92, 114, 118, 123, 131, 132, 134, 152, 153, 158, 183, 184, 195, 203, 205, 209, 217, 222, 228, 229, 249, 258 speak up/speaking up 136, 142 stardom 239, 251, 266 straight-line assimilation 150, 155, 159, 160 strategic exoticism 240, 258 suspension of disbelief 26, 60

T

talking head interview 59, 62, 76, 80, 197, 217, 221, 240, 244, 252, 257 target text’s partiality 27, 62 Tejano 167, 239, 248, 251, 266 Texas 149, 153, 166, 174, 175, 177, 179, 185, 195, 249 Tex-Mex 61

Index

thanatological imagination 239, 254, 257 The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández 7, 53, 62, 66, 165, 174, 179, 180, 185, 190, 265 The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez 7, 49, 53, 63, 66, 215, 216, 218, 227, 231, 233, 235, 266 the South 245, 257 The Transformation 7, 58, 65, 193, 194, 197, 200, 201, 209, 212, 213, 266 transitional space 236 transitional third space 236 translation decision 22, 24, 26, 61, 62, 263 translation strategy 24 translation tactic 24 translator’s reflexivity 62 transnational community 81 transnational urban citizenship 131, 135 transracial adoption paradox 231 tripartite framework of personal identity 51, 65, 263 Trump, D. 2, 3, 5, 261

283

US Coast Guard 91, 102, 103 US Marines 166, 176, 265 US–Mexico border 47, 54, 142, 159, 165, 166, 169, 173, 179, 183, 265

V

van Doorslaer, L. 13, 17, 18 Venuti, L. 15, 17, 26, 27, 63 voice-of-authority 53, 54 voice-of-God 53, 54 Voices of the sea 7, 56, 66, 89, 91, 92, 94, 95, 98, 101, 102, 104, 264

W

war on drugs 5 Western 2, 6, 116, 119, 120, 170, 172, 179, 209, 212, 245, 266 wet foot, dry foot policy 94 Weyer, H. 7, 47, 66, 149–153, 155–160, 265 white knight 209 whitewashing 242 whore-virgin dichotomy 251 Wild West 2, 3

U

undeserving/undeservingness 119, 124, 178, 179, 264 undisciplined knowledge 8, 9, 271 undocumented migrant 4, 5, 109, 130 US Border Patrol 177, 180

Z

Zaldívar, J.C. 7, 45–47, 54, 56, 57, 66, 89, 90, 95, 97–101, 104, 264 Zimmerman, P.R. 8, 13, 16, 18, 19, 26, 41, 42, 44, 53, 136