Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration: Heroes, Martyrs and Saints 3030374084, 9783030374082

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Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration Heroes, Martyrs and Saints Ana Elena Puga · Víctor M. Espinosa

Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration

Ana Elena Puga · Víctor M. Espinosa

Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration Heroes, Martyrs and Saints

Ana Elena Puga Departments of Theatre and Spanish & Portuguese The Ohio State University Columbus, OH, USA

Víctor M. Espinosa Department of Sociology The Ohio State University Newark, OH, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-37408-2 ISBN 978-3-030-37409-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37409-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 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. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

A nuestros sobrinos y sobrinas: Anna Maria, Pete, Robert, Hunter, Edgar Oswaldo, Jonathan Rene, Joselyn Lucía, Luis Carlos, Erik Rubén, Diana Cristina, Alicia Viridiana, Jessica Lizette, Juan José, Cristian Alexis, Ana Elena, Alexia, Roberto Esaú, Brenda Verónica, Edward Miguel, Carla Karina, Pablo Isaac y Claudia Andrea.

Acknowledgements

This book project began while Ana was teaching in the Department of Theatre at Northwestern University and Víctor was a graduate student in the Department of Sociology there. We benefitted from the support of many Northwestern University colleagues, especially Frances R. Aparicio, Carolyn Chen, Susan Manning, and Harvey Young. In 2002, a colleague at Northwestern, performance studies scholar Dwight Conquergood, told Ana that she really ought to go see the Albany Park Theater Project. Since it wasn’t until after his death that she did so, she never got to tell him how much she enjoyed it or how refreshing it was to see undocumented migrants portrayed with such complexity. We got our first toehold in the summer of 2009 with a research grant from Northwestern that allowed us to visit shelters for migrants in Mexico. In Ixtepec, Oaxaca, the founder of the Hermanos en el Camino shelter, Father Alejandro Solalinde Guerra, drove us around to get the lay of the land, took us for coffee, and helped us begin to grasp the dimensions of the exodus of Central American migrants. We are grateful to him for his intelligence, openness, and generosity. The coordinator of the Hermanos en el Camino Shelter, Alberto Donis Rodríguez, was a courageous advocate for migrant rights whose untimely death in 2017 was a great loss to the migrant-rights movement. The directors and staff of all the shelters where we conducted fieldwork were unfailingly supportive. Doña Olga Sánchez Martínez and Father Flor María Rigoni welcomed us

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and allowed us to volunteer and “hang out” as much as we needed to for the purposes of our research. Our niece Jessica B. Espinoza accompanied us during some of our fieldwork and worked alongside us as a shelter volunteer; her warmth and conviviality helped us make several valuable connections with migrants and volunteers from different parts of the world. Our nephew Edgar Ultreras assisted with the transcription of interviews. In Guadalajara, we volunteered with a drop-in center for migrants that later grew into a shelter, FM4 Paso Libre (also known by its official name Dignidad y Justicia en el Camino A.C.), which gave us the opportunity to participate in a community of energetic, dedicated activists. We are especially grateful to Rafael Alonso Hernández López for his patience with our many questions and his knowledge about transit migration and the care of migrants in Mexico. Under extremely difficult circumstances, at all of our research sites, migrants themselves were remarkably generous in being willing to share their experiences. Ana’s fellowship to the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University allowed her to work very happily and productively in 2010–2011. Two wonderful friends and colleagues from that year, Dolores Inés Casillas and Sergio de la Mora, carefully read and commented on early versions of what evolved into Chapter 4. In Honduras in the summer of 2016, Rosa Nelly Santos, the president of the Comité de Familiares de Migrantes Desaparecidos del Progreso, provided invaluable assistance both by introducing us to other migrantrights activists and migrants, and by helping us understand certain dimensions of Honduran politics in the wake of the 2009 military coup. Another generous and knowledgeable guide was the psychologist Alang Rodríguez, a volunteer for the Comisión Nacional de Apoyo a Migrantes Retornados con Discapacidad, who introduced us to several disabled returned migrants and offered great insight into Honduran culture and political history. At The Ohio State University, where Víctor is now an assistant professor in Sociology and Ana holds a joint appointment in the departments of Theatre and Spanish & Portuguese, yet another group of colleagues has been extremely supportive, both professionally and personally. In the Department of Sociology, Víctor has had the opportunity to discuss this work and received helpful suggestions from Reanne Frank, Hollie Nyseth Brehm, and Joe Dixon. In the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Ana

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received helpful comments on portions of this work from Anna M. Babel, Paloma Martinez-Cruz, and Lisa Voigt. Katherine Borland (Folklore Studies) thoughtfully edited a draft of the book proposal. Vera BrunnerSung (Theatre), Wendy Hesford (English), and Kendra McSweeney (Geography) offered assistance with various portions of the manuscript. Despite her many duties as chair of Spanish & Portuguese, Laura Podalsky took the time to read a draft of the manuscript and join Heather S. Nathans (Tufts University) in a Performance Studies Working Group manuscript workshop that was invaluable for how it helped us distinguish the forest from the trees. Heather and Laura’s careful and insightful comments on the manuscript helped us to both focus on details and gain perspective on the project as a whole. The graduate students who organized that workshop, Eric Brinkman, Aviva Neff, Joshua L. Truett, and Lyndsey Vader, have our gratitude, not only for that single workshop but for making the Performance Studies Working Group into a vibrant interdisciplinary intellectual community on campus. The chairs of both the departments of Theatre and Spanish & Portuguese have been very supportive of grant applications and leave time for Ana to write: in Theatre, Dan Gray, Lesley Ferris and Janet Parrott; in Spanish & Portuguese, Fernando Unzueta, Glenn Martínez, Eugenia R. Romero (interim), and Laura Podalsky. An OSU Research Enhancement Grant made it possible to conduct research in Mexico in 2012. The bulk of the research and writing was done with the support of a Fulbright García-Robles research fellowship that Ana received in 2013–2014. We are very grateful to Jorge Regalado Santillán, former director of the Departamento sobre Movimientos Sociales of the Universidad de Guadalajara for his unconditional support. Víctor was able to conduct research during the same year thanks to an invitation to teach at El Colegio de Jalisco. We thank José Refugio de la Torre Curiel for making this possible. A one-semester sabbatical from OSU for Ana in 2018 allowed us to complete the work. Colleagues and friends at other universities read and commented on many portions of the manuscript. Laura Edmondson (Dartmouth College) made many useful suggestions on a draft of the Introduction; Javier Villa-Flores (Emory University) incisively commented on multiple drafts of Chapter Two and Chapter Three; Paola S. Hernández (University of Wisconsin, Madison) offered helpful suggestions on a draft of Chapter Four; Patricia A. Ybarra (Brown University) invited Ana to present on the work-in-progress. We also benefitted from presentations at the Newberry

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Library Seminar on Borderlands and Latino Studies, the Migration Working Group and the Latino Cultures Seminar at the University of Chicago, and from participation in many professional conferences, especially the American Society for Theatre Research, the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, the Inter-University Program for Latino Research, and the Latin American Studies Association. Several research assistants contributed mightily to this effort: Nic Flores at the beginning; Aubrey Helene Neumann and Anisa Kline at the end. Víctor also received assistance from Maria Walliser-Wejebe. Finally, Ana would like to thank Ignacio Corona, Harry J. Elam Jr., Jorge Huerta, Joseph Roach, Diana Taylor, Tamara L. Underiner, and Vicky Unruh for their guidance and mentorship over the years. Víctor would like to thank Douglas S. Massey and Gary Alan Fine for their inspiration, support, and mentorship.

Contents

1

Introduction

Part I 2

3

1

Rescuers

Heroic and Empathic Rescuers in Foundational Migrant Melodrama

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Rescuers as Saints and Martyrs in Contemporary Migrant Melodrama

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Part II Mothers and Fathers 4

Madre Dolorosa: Casting Competitions in Mother-Activism

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5

Wounded Warriors: Corrective Castings in Male Activism

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Part III 6

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Children and Youth

Unaccompanied Migrant Children: Orphan-Martyrs in Motion

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DREAMer Youth Artist-Activists: Queering Migrant Melodrama

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Epilogue

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Bibliography

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.3

Map: Fieldwork locations: 1. Tegucigalpa, Honduras; 2. San Pedro Sula, Honduras; 3. El Progreso, Honduras; 4. Tenosique, Tabasco, Mexico; 5. Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico; 6. Arriaga, Chiapas, Mexico; 7. Ixtepec, Oaxaca, Mexico; 8. Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico; 9. Tijuana, Baja California Norte, Mexico; 10. Chicago, Illinois, United States 30 Father Flor María Rigoni and painting of Bishop Giovanni Battista Scalabrini. Casa del Migrante Albergue Belén, Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico (Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa, January 9, 2014) 61 Father Flor María Rigoni, founder and director of shelter Casa del Migrante Albergue Belén, Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico (Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa, January 9, 2014) 63 Olga Sánchez Martínez, founder and director of shelter Jesús el Buen Pastor, with photo of Saint Teresa de Ávila, Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico (Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa, August 8, 2009) 91 Olga Sánchez Martínez, selling pan dulce outside of a chapel in Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico (Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa, January 19, 2014) 103 Celso, migrant from Honduras, selling donuts in Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico (Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa, January 7, 2014) 107

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Fig. 3.4

Fig. 3.5

Fig. 3.6

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 5.1

Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2

Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2

Father Alejandro Solalinde, founder and director of Hermanos en el Camino shelter, detained in prison in Ixtepec, Oaxaca, Mexico (Photo by Martha Izquierdo, February 2, 2006) Migrants resting in the chapel of the shelter Hermanos en el Camino, Ixtepec, Oaxaca, Mexico (Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa, August 12, 2009) Irene and Marcos cast as the Holy Family during Christmas Eve mass at the Shelter Hermanos en el Camino, Ixtepec, Oaxaca, Mexico (Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa, December 24, 2012) Elvira Arellano and her son, Saul Arellano, in the Adalberto United Methodist Church, Chicago (Photo by M. Spencer Green, September 30, 2006. Courtesy of Associated Press Images) Photo of Elvira Arellano on the wall of Adalberto United Methodist Church, Chicago. Church members watch a documentary film about Arellano (Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa, October 25, 2009) Elvira Arellano by Javier Chavira. Acrylic and oil on a panel, 24 inch by 24 inch (Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa) Elvira Arellano by Javier Chavira. Acrylic and oil on a panel, 24 inch by 24 inch (detail) (Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa) José Luis Hernández and members of AMIREDIS in Holy Cross Church, Chicago (Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa, July 31, 2016) Our Dad Is in Atlantis [Papá está en la Atlántida] by Javier Malpica. Remy Ortiz as Little Brother and Todd Garcia as Big Brother. The 16th Street Theater production, translated by Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas and directed by Ann Filmer, Chicago 2011 (Photo by Anthony Aicardi. Courtesy of The 16th Street Theater) Our Dad Is in Atlantis [Papá está en la Atlántida] by Javier Malpica. El Rinoceronte Enamorado Theater production, directed by Jesús Coronado, San Luis Potosí, Mexico, 2011–2012 (Photo by Fernando López. Courtesy of El Rinoceronte Enamorado) Nine Digits, Albany Park Theater Project production, directed by David Feiner and Maggie Popadiak, Chicago, 2007 (Photo by Amy Braswell. Courtesy of Albany Park Theater Project) My Parents Are Courageous and Responsible. That’s Why I’m Here!, digital artwork by Julio Salgado (Courtesy of Julio Salgado)

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167 171 172

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 7.6

I Exist, Yo existo, digital artwork by Julio Salgado (Courtesy of Julio Salgado) I’d Rather Be Undocumented Than Die for Your Acceptance, digital artwork by Julio Salgado (Courtesy of Julio Salgado) Fuck Your Borders, Part 2, digital artwork by Julio Salgado (Courtesy of Julio Salgado) Undocumented and Awkward, Episode 2. YouTube video still (Courtesy of Julio Salgado)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

My story is better than a Mel Gibson movie! Honduran schoolteacher who survived kidnapping in 2009

On August 24, 2009, on our second day of participant observation at a shelter for migrants in southern Mexico, the administrator told us in a hushed tone that he would be seeking psychological counseling for a new arrival to the shelter, a young woman from El Salvador who had been kidnapped and raped by one of her captors. From the office area where we spoke, he discreetly pointed out a tall, attractive woman in her twenties with a long dark ponytail. She stood outside in the shelter’s central patio, behind a fortyish woman who sat on a folding chair, drying her freshly washed hair in the sun. The administrator explained that the older woman was an elementary school teacher from Honduras, and that the two women had been kidnapped and held hostage together, along with the teacher’s nine-year-old son, a little boy who crouched down on the concrete to play with a toy car while keeping one eye on his mother. In what seemed like a touching display of Central American and intergenerational solidarity, the younger woman gently wielded a plastic comb to detangle the hair of the older woman. On the surface, this was yet another account of the Central American migrant victimization in Mexico that was already being widely documented by journalists, scholars, and human rights advocates. For instance, in 2009, a Mexican National Commission of Human Rights report concluded that more than 10,000 © The Author(s) 2020 A. E. Puga and V. M. Espinosa, Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37409-9_1

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migrants had been kidnapped in a six-month period. Yet as we spent the day at the shelter and spoke with the two women for hours, the categories of victim and victimizer soon became less distinct. The younger woman told us that she was fleeing violence in El Salvador and wanted to seek asylum in the United States. After her journey was interrupted by the kidnapping, she had been held prisoner for several weeks in a house in the city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas near the U.S. border, across from McAllen, Texas. When we spoke separately and privately to the older woman, however, she told us that the younger woman was an accomplice to the kidnappers, who eventually identified themselves as part of a major drug cartel. The two women had met at a shelter for migrants in the north-central state of San Luis Potosí, where the schoolteacher had stayed the night as she traveled north with her youngest son to try to join her two adult sons in Houston. The young woman lured the older woman onto a bus with the offer of a cheap smuggler, a guide to help cross the Mexico–U.S. border. Yet after a couple of heavily armed men suddenly refused to let anyone off the bus for any reason and later imprisoned the passengers together with dozens of other migrants in the house in Reynosa, it became clear to the schoolteacher that her smugglers were in fact also her kidnappers. As the days went on, it also became obvious that the young woman was given privileges that the other hostages did not receive, such as better food and more freedom of movement. She seemed to be the girlfriend of one of the kidnappers. It was only when the Mexican army suddenly descended on the house and released the migrants that the younger woman began to present herself as a victim, the schoolteacher told us. Still, she acknowledged, to win her own release, the kidnappers had told her that she would also have to visit shelters for migrants to recruit at least ten new victims. If she refused, they said, they would kill both her and her youngest son, even though her adult sons in Houston had already sent five thousand dollars in ransom for her release. She was pondering this dilemma when Mexican soldiers burst into the house and rescued the hostages. Fearing for her life and for that of her son, the schoolteacher swore us to secrecy. She asked that we not report any of what she had said to the shelter authorities but that instead in our book we tell “the truth” about the real buenos and malos, the good guys and the bad guys. Yet the truth felt slippery. As scholars, not police investigators, we weren’t qualified to determine the degree of complicity or coercion between the kidnappers and the young Salvadoran woman. And might the schoolteacher, had she

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not been rescued just in time, also have been forced into recruiting new kidnapping victims, thus shifting her from the category of victim to the category of villain? Is anyone essentially a victim, villain, or hero, or do those labels just describe the roles that people play under specific circumstances? As we mulled over these questions, we found ourselves haunted by something else that the schoolteacher had said with a smile: “My story is better than a Mel Gibson movie!” By this she meant that she had experienced a violent ordeal with elements of adventure, yet like the hero of a Hollywood movie, she had survived to tell the story. Her boast also pointed to another truth that we felt more qualified to explore: Her story had a value to us as scholars of performances surrounding migrants, and potentially to others—journalists, artists, activists, humanitarian workers, and other scholars who might take an interest in her life and if not reward her materially, at least show her kindness and pay attention to her suffering. As Sidonie Smith notes in her analysis of the circulation of stories of ethnic suffering, witnesses often know that their stories have a value on a global human rights marketplace. Yet to get their stories out they must turn them over to “journalists, publishers, publicity agents, marketers, and rights activists.” Such intermediaries, including scholars, also frame stories and performances by and about migrants so as to participate in what Smith identifies as “the commodification of suffering, the reification of the universalized subject position of innocent victim, and the displacement of historical complexity by the feel-good opportunities of empathic identification.”1 In other words, when we sell stories of suffering on an international market we reinforce the notion of the innocent victim and entertain consumers of such narratives by encouraging them to identify with victim-heroes. Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration: Heroes, Martyrs and Saints is intended for scholars and activists who want to better understand how Latin American migrants to the United States grapple with a global market in performances of suffering. We argue that artists, advocates, journalists, and yes, scholars, often tend to highlight migrants’ status as victims, encouraging migrant victims to perform their suffering—not to fake it, but to express it publicly on demand—in return for respect for rights that in fact are often already theirs, at least on paper. As we detail in the chapters to follow, migrants themselves sometimes collaborate in such performances and sometimes resist, to varying degrees. We encourage scholars, activists, humanitarian workers, and other advocates for migrants to reflect on how their practices sometimes resemble those

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of directors of theater, in that they craft scripts, assign certain roles to certain actors, and supervise the design of mise-en-scène. What are the consequences of casting certain migrants, or helping certain migrants cast and stage themselves (often in response to others casting them as villains) as pitiful victims or triumphant heroes? Strategies that involve casting migrants in what are essentially melodramas, we argue, are often used to try to win respect for the rights of the oppressed. As Jon D. Rossini has noted, however, melodrama is a double-edged sword that runs the risk of perpetuating the stereotyped marking of victims-as-victims.2 While we stress that melodramatic castings can undermine agency, the potential to carve one’s own course through the world, we also acknowledge that performances of suffering sometimes seem like the only way to move the migrant from outsider to insider, from undeserving to deserving of rights, from criminalized “illegal alien” to celebrated model citizen. Supporters of migrant rights might be surprised or even offended to hear us contend that they are using melodramatic strategies to represent and protest the suffering of migrants. Readers, especially readers who are not scholars of theater, readers who have seen close-up the physical and psychic pain that migrants are forced to undergo, might understandably dismiss the term “melodrama” in its everyday usage as a derogatory expression that questions the truth of migrant hardship and mocks as false exaggeration advocates’ efforts to make it legible. Nothing could be further from our intention. On the contrary, with respect and admiration for migrants and their advocates, in order to further understanding of both performance and of migrant-rights advocacy, we maintain that a scholarly term drawn from theater and film studies, melodrama, accurately describes not only the genre of much contemporary cultural production focused on migrant suffering but also the mindset with which we represent and comprehend such suffering. Melodramatic performances of migrant suffering, we argue, are especially valued and earn rewards on a global market in cultural production, which in turn reinforces how we perceive future suffering. Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration asks readers to take a step back to reconsider how we think about migrant suffering, how we stage it, and how we circulate it. Our study explores the following questions: What is gained and what is lost by our reliance on spectacle and melodrama in performances by and about migrants? Can the suffering of migrants serve a redemptive purpose, as much melodramatic performance would have it? Or does

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migrant melodrama merely construct communities of privileged sentimental audiences who indulge in fantasies of egalitarian participation with the undocumented? Does the tendency to perpetuate an economy in which suffering is exchanged for human rights then ultimately serve a conservative agenda that naturalizes migrant hardship as inevitable and unavoidable, the “price you pay” for belonging? Or are certain ways of deploying melodrama more efficacious than others in representing the lives and promoting the rights of the undocumented? Can there be such a thing as strategic, efficacious melodrama?

Migrant Suffering: From South America, Central America, and Mexico to the United States Undocumented migrants have become an emblem of human suffering in the age of neoliberal globalization. As many scholars have noted, at the same time that capital and information flow ever-more freely around the globe, many nation-states have doubled down on their efforts to monitor and control migrant bodies, as well as close borders to them. Nevertheless, migration has reached historically high levels, leading to ever-more stark discrepancies in treatment between the documented and the undocumented. As Dwight Conquergood put it in his oft-quoted rhetorical questions from 2002: “For whom is the border a friction-free zone of entitled access, a frontier of possibility? Who travels confidently across borders and who gets questioned, detained, interrogated, and stripsearched at the border?”3 To which we might add, given the accumulating horrors of the past two decades: Who gets kidnapped, tortured, raped, massacred, and dumped in a ditch or dissolved in acid at the border? Who is greeted at the border by a deployment of thousands of U.S. troops? We focus on cultural production by and about migrants who live and die under what has been called “necropolitics” and “gore capitalism.” As Sayak Valencia has shown, building on Achille Mbembe, the extreme precarity created by an economic system in which violence is not only tolerated but generated by nation-states in collaboration with multinational corporate interests is highly marketable in art, literature, television, and videogames.4 Our study focuses on another dynamic in the same economic web: the commodification and circulation of migrant suffering through cultural production. By focusing on performances by and about undocumented migrants, those who do not carry the papers that make them legible and acceptable to the nation-state, we illuminate how certain

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performance practices incorporate displays of suffering as mechanisms to promote social inclusion and exclusion, to define who belongs in a community and who does not, who merits our respect for their human rights and who is beyond the pale of our concern. Performances of suffering, we argue, rely heavily on strategies rooted in melodrama to navigate the conflicts and crises bred by neoliberal globalization and make its negative consequences palpable to those who have the power to ameliorate them. Analysis of certain key performances—in daily life and in art—helps better understand how performances of suffering shape perceptions of migrants and their allies and thus intervene in a wide range of processes associated with migration, including the journey, reception in the host country, and return to the country of origin. This study could focus on cultural production about any one of many examples of contemporary migrant suffering from around the world: Africans who migrate to Europe; Asians who migrate both within their continent and to other parts of the globe; people from around the world who migrate, or attempt to migrate, to Australia. We hope that others with expertise in those areas will undertake such studies. Yet we, a Mexican-American specialist in Latin American and U.S. Latinx theater/performance and a Mexican-born sociologist specialist in art and migration, focus on Latin American migration to the United States, specifically on performances by and about people from those countries and regions that either send the most migrants or have created some of the most compelling performances: Mexico, Central America (Honduras and El Salvador), and to a lesser extent South America (Ecuador and Colombia). Their suffering has captured the imagination of journalists, novelists, playwrights, filmmakers, photographers, and other visual artists who create performances out of the violence and hardship these migrants endure. Many of us, the authors included, are fascinated by the details of journeys that may entail thousands of miles of travel, high levels of risk, and anachronistic means of transportation. For instance, Latin American migrants sometimes travel aboard freight trains from the south to the north of Mexico then cross the Arizona desert on foot, all the while risking the dangers of falling from the train, falling prey to kidnapper-traffickers, getting lost, or running out of water. Migrantrights advocates and migrants themselves contribute significantly to the cultural production about these kinds of journeys and their aftermath in the United States. Because of long melodramatic traditions in both the United States and in Latin America this corpus of work coheres

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transnationally, across media and genre, allowing us to compare the recycling of nineteenth-century stage melodrama conventions in a wide variety of settings and cultural production. Across the American continent, frustrated dreams of forging a better life through migration have long fueled a steady stream of artistic production. As Sabine Haenni has shown, in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century New York, German American, Yiddish, and Italian theater created by migrants themselves provided “testing grounds where people could experiment with new forms of collective and individual identity.”5 Many such plays, as well as novels, films, and other visual culture have depicted migrant suffering so as to establish the migrant as a good person, not a threatening invader but a hard-working human being, a potentially upstanding citizen of an adoptive homeland. Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890), with its shocking photos of tenement life and sensationalist prose, is the classic example of an attempt to humanize migrants by depicting their suffering, implicitly arguing that migrants have suffered enough and in the right ways to earn their right to belong, to deserve housing and labor reforms that would help integrate them into the national fabric.6 In order to evoke sympathy, or empathy, and to advocate for human and citizenship rights, much cultural production by and about migrants today continues to portray migrants as suffering heroes, or even as martyrs and saints. Premiered more than a century after Riis’ expose, Cherríe Moraga’s play, Heroes and Saints (1992), loosely inspired our subtitle. Written in response to pesticide poisoning of Mexican migrant agricultural workers in the 1970s and 80s, the play’s central motif is a striking image of undeserved suffering: the bodies of dead children hanging from little crosses. Activist mothers have unearthed the bodies of their children and displayed the consequences of their poisoning for all to see. One activist, Amparo, says, “If you put the children in the ground, the world forgets about them. Who’s going to see them, buried in the dirt?” That impulse to excavate fully, to expose, and to assign moral responsibility motivates much of the cultural production we analyze.7 Latin American–U.S. migration must be understood in the context of the long history of United States colonialism in the region. As Patricia A. Ybarra notes in her study of Latinx theater under neoliberalism, the establishment of maquiladora systems that began in Mexico in the 1960s, the anti-communist economic experiments in Chile in the 1970s, the consequences of the North American Free Trade Agreement since its inception in 1994, and the vast market for narcotics in the United States have

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all contributed to the conditions that encourage violence, displacement, and forced migration.8 Because of the geographical scope of our study, we also note the history of U.S. intervention in Central America: the exploitation of agricultural workers beginning in the early twentieth century, the toppling of elected leaders such as Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz (1954), the expansion of Central American maquiladora programs in the 1990s, the deportation of gang members from Los Angeles to El Salvador in that same decade, and the support of violent authoritarian governments from the 1950s to the 2000s. While we will discuss some elements of this one-sentence historiography in more depth later, we bring it up very briefly now to underscore what makes performances of suffering in Latin American migration to the United States distinctive— their emergence from a long history of conflict between an imperialist power and what it considers its rightful sphere of influence, its “backyard.”

The Time of the “Latino Threat” In a sense, our study begins twice, once in the late nineteenth century and once in the late twentieth century. Because melodrama is a quintessentially nineteenth-century phenomenon, in Chapter 2 we delineate what we view as the roots of migrant melodrama: the model of migrant care developed by the Scalabrinian order, founded in 1887. Though we consistently point out how melodramatic tropes from the nineteenth century are recycled in contemporary migrant melodramas, we do not attempt a step-bystep proof of their genealogies. The bulk of our analysis instead focuses on performances developed between 1986 and the present moment, as we conclude this study in 2018. This period spans five U.S. presidential administrations—Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, from the late 1980s, after the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was signed into law by Reagan, until the family-separation effects of Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy became public in 2018. For more than three decades, what Leo R. Chavez dubbed the “Latino threat narrative” has dominated U.S. political discourse, to lesser and greater degrees depending on the specific historical moment: criminalizing undocumented migrants, characterizing their arrival as an invasion or a disease, encouraging ever-harsher punitive measures against them, forcing them to take ever-greater risks to enter and remain in the United States, yet at the same time ensuring that they will remain

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a vulnerable source of cheap labor for their U.S. employers.9 The performances on which we focus all respond to the increased intensity of the suffering inflicted upon Latin American migrants to the United States during this period of time. By legalizing the status of 2.7 million undocumented immigrants, yet at the same time reinforcing the U.S.–Mexico border, IRCA unintentionally spurred rather than decreased migration; it encouraged people to abandon longstanding circular migration patterns and instead remain permanently in the United States, along with additional immigrant family members.10 To the dismay of some, the number of unauthorized migrants increased from 3.2 million in 1986 to 12.4 million in 2007, stabilizing at 11.1 million in 2011.11 The Clinton administration made matters more difficult for migrants with Operation Gatekeeper in 1994, sealing off border areas near San Diego and beginning a militarization of the U.S.–Mexico border that has steadily intensified.12 Since it became more difficult to move back and forth across the border, migration became more permanent, family reunification became more difficult, and the smuggling industry was soon dominated by criminal mafias connected to the business of drug trafficking, kidnapping, and sexual trafficking. At the same time, Clinton also signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which imposed harsher penalties on migrants who were found to be in the United States unlawfully. Under George W. Bush, together with Mexican President Vicente Fox, a guest-worker program was proposed but in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, anti-immigrant sentiment surged, and the talks were halted. Bush tried again in 2004: his “Fair and Secure Immigration Reform Program” passed the Senate but failed to come to a vote in the House. When Obama came into office in 2009 hopes ran high that he would be able to pass either comprehensive immigration reform or at least legislation that would regularize the status of the millions of undocumented young people who had been brought to the United States by their parents as children, legislation known as the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. Under Obama, Immigration and Customs Enforcement initially steppedup deportations, deporting an all-time high of about 438,000 people in 2013, as compared to a previous of high of 360,000 in 2008 under his predecessor.13 Though the increased enforcement was seen as a “down payment” on comprehensive immigration reform, neither comprehensive reform nor the DREAM Act passed Congress. During his second term, as

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it became clear that Congress was not going to pass any sort of immigration reform, Obama used his executive powers to create the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provided deferment of deportation and approval to work for some 800,000 youth between the ages of 15 and 30 known as DREAMers. Their parents, however, were not included in the program and Obama’s last-ditch attempt to enact such relief for older adults in late 2014, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA), collapsed under the weight of court challenges. Soon after Trump came into office in 2017, he attempted to end DACA, though he has been unable to shut it down entirely due to various court challenges. While Trump has demonstrated hostility toward migrants in general, for instance, ordering a ban on immigrants from Muslim countries, he has singled out Latin Americans for condemnation as gang members, rapists, and “bad hombres” that must be expelled from the national territory. One of his most publicized campaign promises was to build a wall that would span the entire 1954-mile length of the U.S.–Mexico border. Over the years, due primarily to improvement in the Mexican economy, the pattern of migration from Latin America has shifted from one in which Mexico was primarily a sending nation to one in which Mexico has become primarily a transit nation for migrants from countries further to the south. For impoverished Central Americans, as well as a minority of poorer South Americans and Mexicans hoping to reach the United States, the journey from the southern to the northern Mexican border constitutes an excruciatingly long crossing that can take months to complete. Coupled with the militarization of the long and permeable U.S.–Mexico border, as well as the trade in human smuggling and human trafficking now controlled by Mexican drug cartels, human suffering has increased exponentially among migrants and nonmigrants alike in Mexico. The “war on drugs” initiated by former Mexican president Felipe Calderón in 2006, has led to the disappearance and deaths of tens of thousands of people. As mentioned above, in 2009, a Mexican National Commission of Human Rights report found that more than 10,000 migrants had been kidnapped in a six-month period. A 2011 report by the same commission found that in a subsequent six-month period, 11,000 migrants were kidnapped.14 After 2011, though the kidnappings continued, the reports ceased. By 2012, according to the federal government, there were 40,000 killed in the war on drugs and 8898 unidentified bodies.15 In 2013, in response to a report published by Human Rights Watch, the Mexican Interior Ministry acknowledged the existence of a list compiled

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by the Calderón administration of more than 26,000 people reported disappeared or missing. In August of the following year, the government of Calderón’s successor Enrique Peña Nieto revised the figure downward, saying that 22,000 people had been reported “not found,” including the people disappeared both during the Calderón and Peña Nieto presidencies. In recent years, however, the government has issued a series of contradictory statements regarding the people that remain missing and those who have been found.16 Though the exact number of the missing is unknown, as of this writing the government estimates that about 37,000 people are missing and 250,000 have died since 2006 as a consequence of the war on drugs.17 Since 2014, unprecedented surges in the number of migrants from Central America led the United States to pressure Mexico to crack down harder on the undocumented in its territory, including more arrests, detentions, and deportations. In short, the variety of biopolitical measures to monitor and control migrant bodies, taken by both the Mexican and U.S. governments since Operation Gatekeeper and 9/11, has increased the number of ways in which migrant bodies are placed at risk.

Spectacles of Migrant Suffering The spectacles of migrant suffering on which we focus can be divided into three phases: during the journey, in the destination country, and after return to the home country. During the journey, the migrant’s body is often displayed after it has suffered some grievous injury: a freight train accident or an assault that leads to the amputation of an arm or a leg, an encounter with a criminal gang or a corrupt official that ends in robbery, beating, or rape. Migrants and their advocates display the physical evidence of such encounters: scars, wounds, and mutilations, bellies distended by illness, feet destroyed by excessive walking in bad shoes or no shoes. Then there are the bodies of migrants who don’t make it. Their suffering often functions as a metaphorical tableau vivant to warn others not to undertake the journey or as a powerful symbol of social injustice. For instance, the body of Noemí Álvarez Quillay was found hanging from a shower curtain in a Ciudad Juárez shelter for children in 2014. The 12-year-old undocumented girl from Ecuador had been sent to the shelter after her trafficker was arrested, interrupting her second attempt to reunite with her parents in New York City. Her death was deemed a suicide by the authorities, who subsequently revealed that she had been

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raped by her traffickers.18 Though the media did not publish photos of Noemí’s lifeless body, journalists and activists attempted to provide sensory details that would allow us to imagine the dead girl. Many emphasized the smallness of her size and how she looked even younger than her twelve years. Some transformed her ordeal into a morality tale featuring unwise parents and their victim-children, thus hoping to discourage other Ecuadorean girls from attempting the journey.19 The Ecuadorean consul in Monterrey, Francisco Torres Bueno, attempted to assign a meaning and a value to her short life: “We are not going to allow this case to remain in impunity, since she is a girl martyr of immigration. If they had allowed her to make a telephone call, if they had given her the necessary support…” Besides implying that the shelter was at least partly to blame for her death, by calling her a girl martyr of migration, Torres essentially cast her as a kind of character type that we discuss at length in Chapters 3 and 5, the martyr, in this case a child-martyr. Spectacles of suffering are a crucial part of creating martyrs, who in turn can serve as witnesses to political injustices. In Noemí’s case the injustice was typical of the obstacles to family reunification faced by the undocumented–unscrupulous guides, corrupt police, inadequate social services, and a legal system that criminalizes migrants even as it forces them to rely on criminal networks. By contrast to bodies in precarious situations, such as Noemí’s, that make an impression through their vulnerability, sometimes it is a large number of bodies found together during an aborted journey that makes the spectacle: the massacre or the mass grave. In 2010, for instance, 72 undocumented migrants held captive together on a San Fernando, Tamaulipas ranch were executed en masse.20 From his hospital bed, one of only three known survivors of the San Fernando massacre, 18-year-old Luis Fredy Lala Pomavilla provided journalists with the sensory details of the ordeal the others suffered before they were murdered. The accompanying photos testify to his body in pain—a bandaged torso and arm, neck in a brace, eyes closed. In the end, despite all that his body had been through, he was returned to his native Ecuador. And he was fortunate compared to almost all the others with whom he had been held hostage. Though suffering itself, as well as displays of that suffering during the migrant journey, are often metaphorically construed as a kind of toll necessary to earn safe passage, in fact the highest tolls of all bring the journey to an abrupt end. One of the most salient examples of migrant suffering of spectacular proportions that achieved no gain for those who endured it came to light in April and May of 2011, when new mass graves

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were discovered in San Fernando. The total number of bodies reported to have been found in the graves varies, but reports coincide in that the total was close to 200. The people murdered included Mexicans and Central American migrants traveling north on buses in an attempt to reach the United States. They were robbed of whatever cash they held on their person but were not held for ransom; their lives were sacrificed for very little material benefit to their murderers and no benefit at all to the victims or their families back home.21 In the destination country, spectacles of suffering often take place around exploitative working conditions, the threat of deportation, detention, family separation, and the violence of deportation itself. Undocumented mothers go on hunger strikes and seek sanctuary in churches, as we shall discuss in Chapter 4. Women recount how they were forced to give birth in detention centers while shackled. Children weep on camera at the thought of the possible deportation of their parents. Undocumented youth, whose cultural production we discuss in Chapter 7, dramatize their stunted futures with “die-ins” in which they lie down in the halls of Congress. In 2011, an undocumented youth, 18-year-old Joaquin Luna Jr. of Mission, Texas, took his own life. Media reports dwelled on the sensory details of the spectacle. The Latino television network Univision broadcast images of the shower stall where Luna’s body was found by his brother. The Los Angeles Times described the blood trickling out of Luna’s ears and the “metallic, like firecrackers” smell in the room where the gun went off. Media debate focused on the question of whether or not Luna’s suicide constituted an act of protest against the failure to pass the DREAM Act, legislation that would have provided a path to citizenship for undocumented youth.22 Whether a death is ultimately interpreted as an act of protest, from the moment that public debate about it starts, the spectacle of suffering is imbued with political significance. In the context of the fraught immigration debate, the attempt to declare the spectacle of suffering empty of sociopolitical meaning, to depict it as simply the sad action of a psychologically disturbed individual, is in fact a highly political act. After return to the home country, spectacles of suffering tend to focus either on the ordeals of the deported and the struggles of those who attempt to reintegrate into their societies, or on the ordeals of those who are forced to embark on yet another migration journey. Deportation has its humiliations, such as the U.S. practice of handcuffing the undocumented during air travel as if they were dangerous criminals or armed terrorists who might somehow seize control of the flight. Equally humiliated

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and additionally endangered are the Central American migrants deported from Mexico by ground and dumped in isolated areas of their countries without money or transportation to return to their homes.23 If migrants return with serious injuries or with permanent disabilities sometimes a burst of media attention leads to donations from a sympathetic public. Yet in the long run, after the media attention moves elsewhere and the donations dry up, returned migrants with disabilities face questions of whether and how to display their bodies as a strategy for survival. As we analyze in Chapter 5, as people with low levels of education, inadequate social safety nets, often facing employment discrimination and a lack of jobs, returned migrants may collaborate in spectacles of suffering staged by others for them in exchange for charity, or stage such spectacles themselves—both as an income-producing tactic and as an act of social protest. Scholars have often linked spectacle, as the word’s etymology suggests, to the experience of looking and being looked at.24 Yet the seminal theorist of spectacle, Guy Debord, also suggests, in perhaps his most oftenquoted observation, that spectacle exceeds the visual: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.”25 In order to more fully understand those image-mediated social relations, it is important to keep in mind that spectacle exceeds the image perceived by the sense of sight to engage all of the senses, even smell, as the Los Angeles Times account of the scene of Luna’s suicide suggests. The complex sensory experience of spectacle creates visceral affective responses that we name and claim as emotions, then attach to narratives that justify how we treat one another, with kindness or coldness, acceptance or disgust, inclusion or exclusion. Affect theorists have given us the important insights that emotions are both individual and social, that they can “stick,” as Sara Ahmed puts it, and that they circulate within groups through our senses of sound, touch, and smell, as well as sight.26 In The Transmission of Affect, philosopher Teresa Brennan speaks poetically of the “wounding smell of sadness,” venturing into biochemistry, endocrinology, and neurology to back up such poetic phrases with hard science that theorizes how hormones and pheromones transmit affects such as fear and anxiety so that groups composed of individuals behave “as of one mind.”27 Though we do not demonstrate it on the level of hormones and pheromones, we gather evidence from social performance and cultural production to show how social relationships that have been mediated by images marshal many of our senses to delineate the boundaries of community.

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Like many scholars, we define spectacle in part by the intensity of the experience, by what Baz Kershaw has called “the WOW! factor.” The specific WOW! factor in many spectacles of migrant suffering is similar to what Vivian M. Patraka has described in the propaganda of Holocaust museums as an orchestration of visitors’ emotions so as to “command attention, transfix spectators, and narrativize in advance the experience of those who approach it: ‘You will watch, horrified’ and ‘you will weep’ over this ‘heroic and tragic story’.”28 Spectacles of migrant suffering are often crafted along these lines by advocates who have more power than undocumented migrants—religious leaders and laypeople who run shelters, human rights organizations, documentary filmmakers, journalists, scholars, and national governments—for others who also have more power than the migrants—middle-class citizen-consumers of popular and “high” culture in arts and media. As in the case of the Holocaust museum exhibits that Patraka so insightfully analyzes, attempts to depict the reality, the truth, the convincing details of the horrors of migrant suffering, inevitably fall short of conveying the actual experience. Patraka surmises: “Perhaps this consuming desire for the real in representation, for the convincing spectacular, is inversely proportionate to the process of genocide itself, which includes the production of silence, disappearance, dispersal, and concealment as the underside of its fascistic public spectacles.”29 The process of migration from Latin America to the United States, particularly during the last two decades, has also been characterized by silence, disappearance, and concealment of the sources of violence. The desire to reveal the unseen and give voice to the supposedly anonymous voiceless is evident in some of the titles of the many recent fictional and documentary films about undocumented migrants: María en tierra de nadie [Maria in the Land of No One] (dir. Marcela Zamora Chamorro, 2011), The Invisibles (dir. Marc Silver, 2010), Sin Nombre [Without a Name] (dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2009), and De nadie [No One] (dir. Tin Dirdamal, 2005). Through spectacle’s intensity of impact, the filmmakers attempt to make the invisible visible, bestow a name upon the nameless, and transform the “nobodies” into somebodies. The intensity of the experience, the WOW! factor for the spectator is inextricable not only from the visual experience of witnessing a revelation, but also from the aural experience of listening to a previously unheard account, and the exciting sensation of being privy to something previously concealed. Effective spectacles of suffering may have tangible impacts on spectators’ bodies: unease, nausea, tears, an elevated heartbeat, a clenched stomach, and shortness of breath.

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Migrants themselves, to a variety of degrees, sometimes collaborate in spectacular displays of the body intended to provoke such impacts. Some will openly relate their physical ordeals, describe how they bled, how they fainted, reenact how they fell, display their mutilated limbs. Others refuse to cooperate with their interlocutors: despite what appear to be the best efforts of an interviewer to get them to break down, they flatly refuse to cry on camera; they wear long pants to hide their prosthetic legs; they disappear without letting the documentary filmmaker know what became of them; and they decline to tell their story to an academic or a journalist. These moments of refusal demonstrate an important dimension to migrant agency: migrants can and do sometimes refuse to participate in spectacle and melodrama, a decision that comes with costs and benefits, as we shall detail later.

Migrant Melodrama Influenced by the work of Peter Brooks, Linda Williams, and Lauren Berlant, we argue that what was traditionally thought of as a dated popular genre is in fact also a vital contemporary mode of thought, a conceptual structure that cuts across genre and media to order our perceptions and help us organize our world.30 The conventions of the melodramatic mode include: (1) a reformulation of collective political conflict as personal, individual experience; the individual embodies a just cause, (2) a confirmation of the justness of the protagonist’s cause, and of his/her virtue based upon how much undeserved violence he/she suffers, (3) a Manichean world view that tends to divide the world into the virtuous who suffer and the evil villains who make them suffer, (4) a narrative structure built on suspense created by a complicated interplay between pathos (weeping, embracing, and lashing out in anger) and action (for instance, scenes of attempted escape, chases, or rescues), and (5) a culmination of the narrative in exposure and recognition of villainy and virtue, sometimes, though not always, accompanied by respective reward and punishment. Migrant melodrama describes a contemporary mode of thought that includes the five elements listed above in both cultural production and in everyday perception of migrants. Like melodrama in general, migrant melodrama is both a genre and a habit of thought that may sometimes come to us through fiction, but also structures many of our ideas about

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nonfictional people and events, which in turn fuels further cultural production. Migrant melodrama is often transnational, taking place on both sides of and across many U.S.–Latin American borders, and thus requires cultural and historical situation on both sides of multiple borders. We offer here a definition and description of the operations of migrant melodrama as a mode of imagination: 1. Migrant melodrama assumes virtuous suffering as the price of inclusion in the nation-state, or even to win rights within the state. When migrants are denied rights, it is often implied that they have not suffered enough or not suffered in the right ways necessary to merit inclusion. 2. Migrant melodrama is often demanded or deployed to access rights that should be universal and are in some cases guaranteed by international law. We construe rights broadly here, as articulated by Article 25 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has a right to a standard of well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” Yet demands for performances of suffering are written into the language of some international and national laws that mandate, for instance, that one prove a “well-founded fear of persecution” in order to be granted asylum. 3. Migrant melodrama involves a power imbalance between performer and spectator. It may constitute either a command performance required by authorities or a persuasive performance crafted by undocumented migrants and their advocates, or some complex combination of the two. When crafted by undocumented migrants and/or their advocates, the power imbalance structures performances intended to satisfy individuals or institutions that have the authority to grant basic residency, citizenship, or human rights. When crafted by opponents, the power imbalance may contribute to a casting of the migrant as a villain. 4. Migrant melodrama is dynamic: the roles can shift. What we call “casting competitions” follow from attempts to peg individuals or institutions as certain character types. Thus, migrant melodrama can be deployed as a strategy to claim rights; or it can be deployed as a

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strategy to deny rights. For one period of time, or for one audience, a performance might involve a suffering mother, a wise child, and an evil state persecutor. At another moment, and/or for a different audience, the same individuals might be represented as a criminal mother, an abused child, and a heroically protective state. Migrant melodramas take place not only across the Mexico–U.S. border, but also across Central American and Mexican borders, as the journey north through Mexico provides the ideal setting for sensation scenes, complete with the classic image of the train and all its associations with romance, adventure, and danger. If at one time the train was emblematic of the anxieties of new technology and modernity, in today’s migrant melodramas the train often seems emblematic of anxieties about the atavistic invading the contemporary, the developing world invading the developed world. The undocumented migrant heroes featured in recent cultural production ride Mexican freight trains plagued by kidnappers and marauding gangs. When impoverished migrants, from both Mexico and Central America, try to catch a free ride and evade the immigration checkpoints more common on highways, they face both intentional assaults and accidents. They may be thrown overboard by assailants or fall from the top or be sucked under the wheels as they try to board a moving train. The disabled victim whose dream of making it to the United States has been crushed along with his or her limb often makes the perfect tragic hero for a narrative or film. Such victim-heroes have been created by writers and filmmakers from the United States, Mexico, Central America, and Europe; they appear in both fictional and nonfictional works alike.31 Current deportation practices in the United States provide ready-made melodramatic plot lines, as family members separated by deportation seek reunification. Family separation—parents from children, brothers from sisters, and husbands from wives—is a classic melodrama theme, from nineteenth-century French theater to U.S. abolitionist novels and plays to telenovelas broadcast today throughout Latin America and the Spanishspeaking United States. Increased border security and punitive legislation has unfortunately made this melodramatic device all too verisimilar: circular migration has become more expensive and dangerous, leading to longer and more traumatic separations between children and their parents. According to one survey, the majority of unaccompanied minors over the age of twelve are seeking work; the majority of unaccompanied minors under the age of twelve are seeking reunification with a parent.32

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The title of a 2012 human rights report from the nongovernmental organization The Women’s Refugee Commission echoes the titles of Victorian novels: “Forced from Home: The Lost Boys and Girls of Central America.”33

The Family, Its Characters, and Their Casting Migrant melodrama tends to depict migrants as members of families in need of rescue, defining its characters on the basis of their individual role within the family unit—mothers, fathers, and their children. The family unit can be construed as above politics, as important to conservatives and liberals alike, as a universal good which ought to be defended rather than torn apart by overly zealous enforcement of nation-state borders. Just as some abolitionists, rather than simply denounce slavery as morally wrong, opposed the institution on the grounds that it ripped apart couples and separated parents from their children, many migrant-rights advocates focus less on how the criminalization of human mobility violates human rights and more on how the cruelty of the separation of family members, especially mothers separated from young children or infants, affects those individuals displaced, detained, and deported. More than two centuries of domestic and sensation melodrama provide a deep well of inspiration for the construction of deserving victims. People who attempt to help these deserving victims are cast as rescuers, a character type that typically disregards its own well-being to take bold action on behalf of downtrodden others. In the nineteenth century, rescuers ran into burning buildings to save women or children, or grabbed an axe to cut loose the victim tied to the railroad tracks in the path of the oncoming train. In today’s sensation melodramas, rescuers are more likely to free hostages from terrorists, find the serial killer before he can kill again, or secure the release of a kidnapping victim from a gang of drug traffickers. Because kidnapping for ransom is quite common in contemporary migration from Latin America to the United States, the directors of shelters for migrants are often viewed as defenders of families and rescuers from kidnappers and other villains on the journey, including corrupt officials and vicious gang members as well as from “natural” evils such as heat, hunger, and exhaustion. The mothers, fathers, and children that the rescuers try to protect, on the other hand, are often cast as powerless victims. In many studies of melodrama, character is subordinated to plot and theme. In fact, for some scholars, melodrama characters are almost by

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definition uninteresting. Martha Stoddard Holmes’ assessment of melodrama character is typical of this view: Melodramatic characters have little “character” per se; their Manichean moral states can be seen in their bodies and heard in the tenor of their words. The emotions they express and inspire are physical and unalloyed: the villain performs pure malignity (we hiss at him); the victims, pure pathos that brings our tears.34

Yet we have found that the characters in contemporary migrant melodramas display many different varieties of villainies and virtues. We focus most on the construction of virtuous characters because they stand in for the people trying to win some degree of fair treatment, tolerance, or inclusion during a moment in history in which they are often construed as invaders and possible terrorist threats, and then subjected to criminalization, imprisonment, and deportation. Spectators may identify with and empathize with character types that seem to show them how to cope with particular social crises. Much recent cultural production attempts to intervene in the global migration crisis by creating migrant and rescuer characters designed to win empathy from middle-class spectators who are presumably in a position to influence hearts and minds, policy and laws. When they are cast more as heroes than as victims, such characters often display not only exterior pathos but also interior character, in the sense of personality, mettle, pluck, spunk, and strength. By interrogating character types, we interrogate the contemporary construction of subjectivities. As Elinor Fuchs notes in The Death of Character, a chain of identification from character to actor/director to community at large manifests “the perception of self and the perception of self and world. ‘Character’ is a word that stands in for the entire human chain of representation and reception that theater links together.”35 The characters that most interest us for how they link protagonists to spectators are familiar archetypes, both in the sense that they derive from families (and their rescuers) and in the sense that they are instantly recognizable to spectators because of their resemblance to their ancestors from nineteenth-century theater and twentieth-century film: the elderly priest who undertakes heroic rescues even at the risk of martyrdom, the angelic female rescuer clad in white, the saintly young mother slavishly devoted to her son, the heroic father who struggles to provide despite his disabilities,

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the innocent children searching for their parents, and the rebellious-yettalented youth who “come out,” as undocumented or as undocumented and queer, to fight for the inclusion they so richly deserve. Our emphasis on the above character types allows us to examine different types of bodies and embodiment in migrant performance. Costume, movement, posture, gesture, facial expression, and the arrangement of bodies in space all produce meaning in both theater proper and in social performances in everyday life, from the relatively minor command performances necessary to advance one’s body from place to place to the overt political protests that question the rules of the transnational migration system. Bodies construed as vulnerable are especially well-suited for generating suspense and excitement when they face the extreme situations of melodrama’s sensation scenes. The body in melodrama is subjected to heightened emotions, shocks, reversals of fate, and intense physical punishment, including death. Matthew S. Buckley has noted of some nineteenth-century melodrama that it produced great intensity more than redemptive social vision.36 Yet at least some of the endangered bodies in the migrant melodramas that we analyze serve as sites of resistance: they attempt to escape immobility, exploitation, and stagnation; they cross nation-state borders in order to work without official permission (though with ample unofficial encouragement from business and agriculture), an action that can be construed as both a desperate survival strategy and an act of civil disobedience of unjust laws. In this sense, some migrant characters recall “bodies in dissent,” such as that of Henry Box Brown, who mailed himself out of slavery.37 The bodies of these characters are both in the spectacle and as the spectacle, as Amy E. Hughes theorizes the human figure in spectacles of reform. In the spectacle of migration today, just as in the nineteenthcentury melodramas that Hughes analyzes, the body is in the spectacle when it is imperiled by trains, rivers, accidents, and bandits.38 When a child’s body or a woman’s body is in dangerous circumstances, the assumption of increased vulnerability raises the stakes to make the affective responses aroused by the spectacle much more intense. When a man’s body faces such dangers, gendered expectations raise the question of whether he will heroically overcome the threat, creating suspense for spectators. For men who return from an interrupted migrant journey with a disability, the capacity to conform to the ideal of a heroic male is compromised. The disabled migrant body becomes the spectacle itself, unfortunately, once it has suffered visible, direct violence. The less dramatically

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visible effects of structural violence—malnutrition (before it gets to the point of the distended belly), exhaustion, and shortened life expectancy— rarely make for satisfying spectacles of suffering. By contrast, injured bodies as the spectacle in migrant melodramas today build to climactic displays in contemporary tableaux intended, just as in the nineteenth century, to provide audiences with thrills and chills. Our emphasis on character archetypes leads us to consider casting and to theorize, particularly in Chapters 4 and 5, the power dynamics of casting in both cultural production and daily life. Most theories of casting in theater/performance studies focus on issues of race, gender, age, and other factors that influence who gets to play what role, with particular attention to the ethics of what Brandi Catanese has called transcendent, or color-blind, casting versus a transgressive approach to casting so as to develop an “oppositional gaze” that encourages critique of how certain bodies are culturally represented.39 The castings we look at are color, gender, and ability-conscious, though not necessarily in an attempt to transgress; instead, they often attempt to harness stereotypes in the service of tolerance, inserting brown working-class bodies in plots familiar to white middle-class spectators who seek to identify with the protagonist’s quest. What particularly interests us is how those cast interact with those who do the casting: embrace and elaborate on their role (activist mother Elvira Arellano, in Chapter 4), or shape the assigned roles into something different (some of the disabled Honduran men in Chapters 3 and 5), or try to reject the assigned role altogether (the DREAMer activist youth in Chapter 7). Whether directly oppositional, as in the battle over Arellano or the DREAMer activists, or more subtly corrective, as in the case of the disabled, casting can be a competitive process, not only between the caster and the cast but also as a dynamic struggle among two or more potential “casting directors” who seek to assign different roles to the same individual: for instance, victim, hero, villain, reformed-villain-turned-hero, or villain-posing-as-victim. This is important because the force that wins in this sort of competition, the side whose casting sticks, often gets to determine who merits inclusion and good treatment and who must be punished and excluded.

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The Political Economy of Suffering We close this section with a clarification of the term political economy of suffering. While our study is primarily cultural and we do not undertake a political or economic mode of analysis, we do aspire to approach what anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo said of performance studies scholar Dwight Conquergood’s work, when she called it “performative political economy,” using the words of another anthropologist, William Roseberry, to help define her term: “to place culture in time, to see a constant interplay between experience and meaning in a context in which both experience and meaning are shaped by inequality and domination.”40 While we use economic and demographic data sparingly, we consistently point out connections between the local contexts in which suffering is produced and performed, made legible to others, and the realm of global capital in which such performances subsequently circulate and create profits. Though we make little or no attempt to quantify those profits, we think most readers will agree that when, for instance, a television network or a Hollywood film uses migrants’ sagas to create news-entertainment or entertainment-entertainment they participate in an economic exchange that involves the commodification and circulation of displays of suffering for profit. We use the term economy in the sense of Merriam-Webster’s definition 3b of “economy”: “a system especially of interaction and exchange,” to highlight what we see as a trade in displays of suffering.41 The term “political economy,” for us, primarily describes the object of our study—a system of exchanges that has significant political consequences—not our methodology, though as we say above, our perspective does ally with that of scholars on the left who interrogate inequality and domination. We follow the lead of some excellent studies of clandestine migration which have noted that migrants are often commodified in the process, treated as cargo, “objects to be smuggled,” as Susan Bibler Coutin describes it, or as valuable goods to be fought over and destroyed by rival groups of kidnappers and human traffickers.42 Anthropologists like Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock have noted, moreover, that suffering itself can also be commodified and that “collective suffering is a core component of the collective global economy.”43 In the global economy, however, some sufferers fare better than others. As anthropologist Didier Fassin demonstrates, a new moral economy that emerged in the late twentieth century sidelines the social origins of suffering in order

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to focus on a few individual sufferers who are deemed worthy of humanitarian assistance.44 David B. Morris, drawing on the philosopher Tom Regan, describes how moral economies rely on the formation of moral communities, which include some and exclude others: We do not acknowledge the destruction of beings outside our moral community as suffering; we detach ourselves from their pain as if it were an incomprehensible behavior encountered on some Swiftian island. Within a moral community, we employ names like martyr or hero and inscribe the suffering of our own people within narratives of hallowed sacrifice and epic achievement.45

Our contribution to this line of thought—the idea of a political economy of migrant suffering—helps explain why and how certain types of performances commodify not only migrant bodies but also their displays of suffering, and circulate those displays among local and global marketplaces. These marketplaces exert a sometimes-unperceived pressure on the formation of community, as they help to create the insiders whose suffering matters and the outsiders whose suffering does not concern us. Our aim is to raise awareness and understanding of how and why those performances of suffering take place, as well as to interrogate their political efficacy. It is helpful to think of displays of suffering as what sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild famously dubbed “emotional labor.” Hochschild’s research focuses on people who draw actual salaries or formal payments for their displays of emotion—from flight attendants to surrogate mothers.46 Performances of migrant suffering tend to operate in an informal economy in which it is not easy to calculate the difference between the value of the laborer’s work and what he or she is paid for it, as a Marxist analysis of capitalist exploitation might have it. No one pays a formal wage for displays of actual suffering. And no one (except maybe a Method actor) declares that his or her job is to display his or her actual suffering. Yet when one observes, for instance, migrants seeking admission to a shelter as they make their case to the volunteer who stands at the door and decides who to allow in and who to turn away, there is little doubt that those migrants who are more effectively able to communicate their suffering are more likely to be rewarded with a hot meal and a shower, regardless of the organization’s formal criteria for admission.47 Undocumented migrants are often aware that they must expend time and effort

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into communicating their suffering. Effective displays of suffering constitute labor in the sense that they require conscious, focused energy and can earn material benefits. They are a survival tactic every bit as necessary as the emotional labor behind the mandatory smile used to be for a “stewardess” who wanted to keep her job. Still, there is an important difference between these two situations: though real joy may have been rare behind the mandatory smiles, in our experience, the physical and psychic pain behind displays of migrant suffering is usually all too genuine. Though conscious work goes into many displays of migrant suffering, some displays result from accidents, at least initially. As noted above, sometimes the actual suffering is so intense that it results in the migrant’s death, leaving it to others to labor to stage its display. The world-famous photo of the body of a three-year-old Syrian migrant boy washed up on a Turkish beach exemplifies such a posthumous performance of suffering. The photographer, Nilüfer Demir of Dogan News, took advantage of happenstance to capture the image of Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body, which quickly became emblematic of the suffering of all Syrian refugees. In an interview on CNN, Demir said: “I thought, ‘This is the only way I can express the scream of his silent body.’”48 Note the auditory dimension to this spectacle, which as in many others created after-the-fact of suffering, “give voice to the voiceless,” as the cliché goes, as concerned photographers, journalists, academics, activists, filmmakers, visual artists, novelists, and theater artists turn their attention to the suffering of others. Is this impulse, however well-intentioned, necessarily exploitative? Let’s consider an example closer to the geographical heart of our topic, the Honduran school teacher who gave us a detailed account of her kidnapping and time spent in captivity. She was consciously working in the sense that she was expending energy to create and convey a story that she knew had a value, even if she wasn’t certain if or how that value would be rewarded. Though we didn’t pay her, we were moved enough by her story, and by the presence of her very quiet son, who seemed traumatized by their recent ordeal, that we bought some coloring books and crayons to donate to him and the other children staying in the shelter at that time. Later we donated money to the shelter and worked as volunteers there. And now, as promised, we have related a sliver of the truth of the mother and son’s experience. Sometimes payment for displays of suffering is difficult to quantify (an anonymous recounting of one’s story at the beginning of an academic book) or can be measured in pesos and cents (the cost of coloring books and crayons at the local supermarket, a

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donation to a shelter). Though it was not part of a prearranged, formal exchange, the school teacher performed labor—displaying the suffering of herself and her son in the telling of her story—in exchange for small benefits. The benefits were of course incommensurable with the terror and risk of death that she had survived. If in order to use her story we had had to pay her what she herself jokingly declared it was worth— the cost of a Hollywood script option—we would have been unable to appropriate it. Now her story is part of a scholarly book that may further our careers and perhaps even earn us royalties. Does this mean that we exploited her and continue to exploit her, even as we declare ourselves advocates of respect for migrant rights? And yet, would it be any more ethical to ignore her travails and instead research a topic closer to home, say, the displays of suffering staged by academics in the United States? Drawn to the more compelling suffering of the less privileged other, we scholars also participate in the political economy of suffering, even as we seek to better understand its mechanisms. In what follows, we do not seek to give voice to the suffering voiceless; we try to understand how those who do seek to give voice to them, including sufferers themselves who defy the perception that they are voiceless, craft narratives and performances that in turn shape migrant subjectivities. Though it is difficult to disentangle suffering from its expression, we try to keep our focus on representations of suffering rather than on actual suffering itself. We do not presume to interpret the meaning of suffering, if suffering has a meaning; we instead interpret the meanings that others implicitly or explicitly ascribe to suffering. As we delineate the role of recycled melodramatic strategies in performances by and about the undocumented, it seems difficult to avoid writing our own melodrama: yet another account of the evils of neoliberal globalization and the commodification of everything trapped in its grip, even the performances of suffering undocumented migrants. Yet this dilemma points to one of the key questions we raise through our analyses: Is melodrama an unavoidable strategy in a world dominated by what Hannah Arendt called the “politics of pity,” a world in which affect-triggering victimhood counts more than seemingly cold, abstract human rights? After all, less than a week after a photo of Alan Kurdi’s lifeless three-year-old body on the beach hit the internet on September 2, 2015, Prime Minister David Cameron announced that Britain would be accepting 20,000 additional Syrian refugees. He was cited as saying he was “very distressed” and “deeply moved” by the image of the dead boy.49 The photo came

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soon after German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a more lenient policy toward Syrian refugees and provided moral justification of her decision. Melodramatic representation remains undeniably efficacious, though only up to a point, as Merkel’s subsequent difficulties in enacting her policy demonstrate.50 We thus remain alert to equally efficacious, or more efficacious, strategies that subvert melodrama or give it a queer twist (Chapter 7), especially strategies such as irony, satire, parody, and other forms of humor, which do not share melodrama’s tendency to produce pity in the spectator. Strategies that at least partially subvert or diverge from melodrama do not necessarily avoid participation in the political economy of suffering but do in some cases refuse the trade, or at least make its operations more transparent.

Feeling Migrant Pain The spark that led to this book ignited while watching the documentary film De nadie (dir. Tin Dirdamal, 2005) together in the winter of 2006. Or trying to watch it. The suffering experienced by the protagonist of the film was so intense that it took Ana several attempts to make it all the way through to the end. Víctor thought the film might make a good teaching tool to sensitize undergraduate sociology students to the undocumented Central American migrant experience. Ana was just curious, but her curiosity about the undocumented migrant experience quickly turned into curiosity about her own reactions to the film. What made them so visceral? When María weeps over her separation from her husband and children it was too uncomfortable to view head-on; Ana found herself feeling knots in her stomach, looking away and suddenly finding other things to do that took her to other rooms, away from the screen. After a while, she came back. Then it is revealed that María was raped as she tried to ride the freight train north through Mexico. She seems to feel embarrassed about the rape and says she doubts whether she can bring herself to return to her family in Honduras. When she stops submitting to Dirdamal’s oncamera interviews and breaks off contact with him, Ana almost cheered aloud. Yes! The woman was taking matters into her own hands, exercising agency, refusing to perform her pain for the camera any more. What a relief from the sensation of horror at what María had lived through and from the tangible evidence of her suffering, her on-camera tears, which threatened to produce off-camera tears in the empathic viewer, impotent and self-indulgent tears, since there was absolutely nothing we could

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do to help her. “This is just melodrama!” it was easy for Ana, a theater scholar, to say in a huff of self-protective indignation, resisting the urge to cry. “What is melodrama, exactly?” Víctor, a sociologist, replied. And we began to talk. Migration is an area in which Víctor has focused much of his career, using ethnographic and qualitative methodologies. He suggested readings to help Ana begin to get to know the field, designed several series of open-ended questions for migrant-rights advocates and for migrants. We co-conducted dozens of interviews in Mexico and Honduras, then transcribed and analyzed them for patterns that indicate a preference for ways of expressing migrant suffering. This enabled us to take note of tropes that came up repeatedly, such as fleeing from violence, or wanting to get ahead and achieve the American Dream, or needing to provide something for one’s children—education, health care, subsistence. Between 2009– 2016, we conducted thirty-two interviews with migrant-rights advocates, including shelter directors and staff members, activists, human rights officials, and journalists; and ninety-seven interviews with migrants. Víctor provided much of the historical information on the Scalabrinian order in Latin America, researched social protest in Mexico, and gathered data on migration to the United States. Though Ana is responsible for the bulk of the analysis of cultural production, we conferred on every aspect of the research and writing. Since this is an interdisciplinary project, a certain amount of ethnographic research was necessary to better understand how people “stage” migrants in daily life and how migrants perform themselves. Because people focused on migrants and involved in staging them in social life performances for many different purposes, pass through shelters for migrants— volunteers, religious workers, social workers, political leaders, human rights investigators, prosecutors, journalists, artists, activists, doctors, and scholars—they provided an invaluable research site. For Part I of the book, “Rescuers,” we spent a total of six months volunteering and conducting other participant observation in shelters for migrants: we baked cookies for migrants to sell (and sometimes helped sell ourselves), prepared countless meals of rice and beans, handed out clothing and shoes, kept injured migrants company in their sick beds, accompanied others to interviews with immigration or asylum officials, sat in on many meetings and trainings of the shelters’ staff, attended trainings for volunteers, participated in group meetings of migrants with the staff, and attended religious services, sometimes as many as four masses in one day. As we

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volunteered, we were careful to observe how migrants interacted with all those who passed through the shelters. While we sometimes went to the locations where the freight trains stopped, and migrants jumped on or off, we never felt tempted to endanger our lives by riding the trains ourselves (Fig. 1.1). We focused primarily on shelters for migrants in the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, returning five times for research trips: two weeks in August 2009, Christmas week of 2012 and 2013, eight weeks in January–February of 2013, and three months in 2014. Thanks to a Fulbright, in 2013–2014, we spent eleven months in Mexico, during which we divided our time between volunteering for the Center for Migrant Care (Centro de Atención al Migrante) FM4 Paso Libre in Guadalajara, and visiting three shelters in southern Mexico: Bethlehem (Belén) Shelter and the Shelter of Jesus the Good Shepherd for the Poor and the Migrant (Jesús el Buen Pastor del Pobre y del Migrante), both in Tapachula, Chiapas; and the Brothers on the Road (Hermanos en el Camino) shelter in Ixtepec, Oaxaca. We volunteered and conducted participant observation at the shelter of Jesus the Good Shepherd for the Poor and the Migrant for a total of about eight weeks, mostly in January–February of 2013 and again in January–February of 2014. We spent two weeks in August 2009 at the Good Shepherd, observed and participated in Christmas celebrations between December 24–January 6 of 2012–2013 and 2013–2014 at Brothers on the Road Shelter in Ixtepec, Oaxaca where we also participated in the life of the community, primarily by informally conversing with people, attending meetings and religious services. We conducted interviews and conversed informally with migrants for a total of about a month at the Bethlehem Shelter, during several visits between 2009 and 2014. We also interviewed the directors of two shelters in the northern border city of Tijuana: Casa Refugio Elvira, named for activist Elvira Arellano, and the Casa del Migrante, a Scalabrinian facility. We visited additional shelters in Tenosique, Tabasco; Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz; and Irapuato, Irapuato. Finally, we also observed Father Solalinde during his visit to Mexico City on December 9, 2013, and his visit to Chicago’s Latinx Community in Pilsen with a Caravan of Hope on March 7–10, 2013 to publicize violence against migrants. For Part II of the book, “Mothers and Fathers,” we conducted interviews and participant observation in Mexico, Honduras, and Chicago. Our very first interviews were with Rev. Walter Coleman and Rev. Emma

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Fig. 1.1 Map: Fieldwork locations: 1. Tegucigalpa, Honduras; 2. San Pedro Sula, Honduras; 3. El Progreso, Honduras; 4. Tenosique, Tabasco, Mexico; 5. Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico; 6. Arriaga, Chiapas, Mexico; 7. Ixtepec, Oaxaca, Mexico; 8. Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico; 9. Tijuana, Baja California Norte, Mexico; 10. Chicago, Illinois, United States

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Lozano in Chicago, for what later became Chapter 4. While in Mexico, in November–December of 2013, we followed a caravan of Central American mothers who had come to search for their disappeared children and youth (Caravana de Madres de Migrantes Desaparecidos: “Emeteria Martínez”).51 We realized by chatting with the organizers of the caravan, especially Rosa Nelly Santos, that our study would not be complete without some research in Honduras in order to gain a grasp on performances of suffering by returned migrants. During six weeks in July and August of 2016, we conducted fieldwork in Honduras, primarily in the cities of El Progreso, San Pedro Sula, and Tegucigalpa, where we interviewed grassroots organizers, including Santos, returned migrants, church workers, and government officials. We attended a large gathering and a weekend retreat for returned migrants with disabilities, both organized by the Catholic Church, and conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with ten members of the Association of Returned Migrants with Disabilities (AMIREDIS), sometimes interviewing the same person several times. In July–August 2016 we spent ten days observing AMIREDIS’s performative protests in Chicago, and reviewed the extensive media coverage of their protests, which began in Honduras in 2012 and continued on-andoff for at least eighteen months in the United States (June 2015–December 2016). For Part III of the book, “Children and Youth,” since the focus is on analysis of cultural production, no interviews were necessary. We did however participate in the immigrant marches in Chicago in 2006 and 2007, where DREAMer youth had a very visible presence. On January 5, 2011, we attended an event in Oakland, California at the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights in which an undocumented young college student testified about his ordeal at being detained at home by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. His testimony helped us grasp the importance of in-person performances by undocumented youth as part of migrant-rights activism. While in the shelters in Mexico, moreover, we spoke with two different young men who had been deported from the United States after spending most of their lives there, which gave us an appreciation for the trauma and injustice of that sort of deportation. While this project is rooted in sociology and theater/performance studies, rather than limit our analysis to theater, we instead took a cultural studies approach in which we follow a theatrical mode of imagination, melodrama, and a topic, undocumented migration, into many genres and media. Our delineation of how archetypal characters are recycled led us

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to consider poetry, political discourse, documentary film, fictional film, television news, journalistic narrative accounts, fictional narratives, photography, painting, a YouTube video series, and last but not least, theater. This approach allows us to highlight intersections of aesthetics and politics in a wide variety of cultural production, with particular attention to how people at a power disadvantage engage in performance both as a creative outlet and as a strategy for survival. Each of the book’s three parts—Rescuers, Mothers and Fathers, and Children and Youth—includes two chapters. In each part, we undertake case studies that exemplify subject positions typical of migrant melodrama. In Rescuers, we explain how and why migrant melodrama developed in nineteenth-century Italy and how it has manifested itself in Mexico in at least three different types of contemporary rescuer heroes: empathic companion, saintly angel mother, and potential martyr. Chapter 2, “Heroic and Empathic Rescuers in Foundational Migrant Melodrama,” introduces Bishop Giovanni Batista Scalabrini and the order he founded, known as the Scalabrinians, as an early example of melodrama in migrant advocacy. We argue that Scalabrini’s casting of migrants as “unfortunate people” in need of rescue began to create and circulate migrant melodrama in a political economy of suffering that helped establish the Scalabrinians. His prolific writing and public speaking were infused by a melodramatic imagination that still structures many aspects of migrant representation today. In the second half of the chapter, we analyze the staging-of-self and writings of one of the seven hundred Scalabrinian clerics now working on behalf of migrants in thirty-two countries around the world: Father Flor María Rigoni, who opened the first Scalabrinian shelter in Tijuana, Mexico in 1987 and who since 1998 has headed a Scalabrinian shelter in the city of Tapachula. We examine Rigoni’s poetry, prose, and daily-life social performances as an advocate for migrants with national and international stature, arguing that while he demonstrates a twenty-first-century ironic disdain for media exploitation of spectacles of suffering, he nevertheless creates such spectacles and embeds them in melodramatic scenes involving pitiful migrant victims and their compassionate companion rescuers. Chapter 3, “Rescuers as Saints and Martyrs in Contemporary Migrant Melodrama,” considers two relative newcomers to migrant humanitarian assistance in Mexico: Olga Sánchez Martínez, a layperson who runs a Tapachula shelter focused on the care of sick, injured, and disabled

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migrants; and Father Alejandro Solalinde, who in 2007 established a shelter to try to protect migrants passing through Ixtepec, Oaxaca from corrupt local officials and drug traffickers alike. We argue that Sánchez’s self-presentation and life story, as written by her daughter and published online, cast her as a saintly, angelic figure who nevertheless defied convention, and even Catholic Church officials, to take her domesticity to the streets on behalf of migrant rescue. In order to illuminate how rescuers depend on the rescued for the instantiation of their roles, how what Sánchez calls “the photo of pity” is sometimes a crucial part of the mutual constitution of the rescuer/rescued dyad, we look closely at two performances featuring migrants “rescued” by Sánchez: the first centers on her adoptive six-year-old disabled son during a church service; the second involves a 31-year-old injured migrant who participates in the shelter’s donut-selling program. In the second half of the chapter, we analyze how Solalinde has staged himself and migrants as potential martyrs. As with Rigoni and Sánchez, we find that while melodramatic imagination by no means infuses all of his performances, it does significantly inform his worldview and structure his appeals to spectators. In the decade since he established his shelter, Solalinde has catapulted to international fame and was even proposed as a candidate for a Nobel Peace Prize. He has been dubbed the “Mexican Romero,” after the Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar A. Romero, who was assassinated while conducting mass in 1980 and canonized in 2018. With help from sympathetic journalists and scholars, Solalinde has effectively staged both himself and some of the migrants who pass through his shelter as potential martyrs. While still working within the conventions of migrant melodrama and putting his own life at risk through a dangerous route to build his reputation, he strengthens the transnational migrant-rights movement in which he participates by opening a space in his religious services for migrants to express not only their pain but also other affective states, such as relief, gratitude, courage, pride, and family love. Through the examples of Rigoni, Sánchez, and Solalinde we develop the concepts of spectacles of suffering and migrant melodrama to describe how rescue, charity, and humanitarian relief work figure in the political economy of suffering. In Part II, Mothers and Fathers, we shift our focus from the rescuers to the rescued. Chapter 4, “Madre Dolorosa: Casting Competitions in Mother-Activism,” illuminates the travails of one famous migrant activist from Mexico, Elvira Arellano, who in 2006 took sanctuary in a Chicago church for a year together with her U.S.-born son rather than accept

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her deportation order. Our analysis of the journalism and artistic work depicting Arellano shows how quickly castings of migrants as good, selfsacrificing, and even saintly mothers, can be flipped to portray the migrant mother as abusive, criminal, and evil. We detail how attempts to associate Arellano with the Virgin Mary and the Virgin of Guadalupe, as well as with civil rights heroine Rosa Parks, unintentionally made her vulnerable to charges that she was a lawbreaker, an unfit mother, and an inadequate role model for undocumented migrants. Supporters responded with even more images—photographs and paintings—that implicitly canonized Arellano. Delineation of this cycle of casting and recasting demonstrates how castings are anchored in a rich history that can be instantly summoned to arouse emotion and quickly shift perceptions about who should be included in our moral communities: A “criminal” might become a “good mother”; or a “good mother” might become someone who is “pimping the system.” Besides contributing to an understanding of the production and circulation of emotion through performance in social movements, we explain why some melodramatic strategies can be at least partially efficacious while others backfire altogether, leading to demands for ever-more intense displays of suffering. Chapter 5, “Wounded Heroes: Corrective Castings in Male Activism,” considers casting in performances of suffering about and by some Honduran men in the AMIREDIS who embarked on a collective journey back through Mexico and the United States to demand meetings with the presidents of both countries, highlight violations of the rights of migrants, and press for an end to what they view as a forced migration. We contrast the casting of the men by Univision, the largest Hispanic television news network in the United States, in a four-part series, Los mutilados: la travesía de un grupo de indocumentados hacia Estados Unidos (The Mutilated: Journey of a Group of Undocumented toward the United States), as feminized father-victims unable to properly provide for their families in accordance with traditional masculine norms, with the men’s own self-casting as wounded soldiers in a war against the poor waged by the governments of Honduras, Mexico, and the United States. Rather than construct outright counter-castings as in the competition between supporters and detractors of Arellano, the disabled activists constructed an alternative in-person performance that they toured across the United States to universities and churches. Though it continues to trade in displays of pain, their performance breaks out of melodrama in certain respects, reappropriates the stigma of “mutilation,” and casts the

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men in a dignified collective masculine subjectivity that resists conformity with neoliberal ideals of individual striving in competitive isolation. In Part III, Children and Youth, we compare two sets of young people, young children or teens construed as children, who have almost no say in how they are cast by journalists and filmmakers, with older youth who have either found allies who will help them stage their stories or who are using social media and the internet to cast themselves with as little mediation as possible. Chapter 6, “Unaccompanied Migrant Children: Orphan-Martyrs in Motion,” analyzes three well-known and influential works that illustrate the wide range of media and genres spanned by migrant melodrama: the 2006 journalistic narrative Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother, by Sonia Nazario; the 2007 fictional film Under the Same Moon, directed by Patricia Riggen; and the 2005 play Our Dad Is in Atlantis [Papá está en la Atlántida], by Javier Malpica. Created by authors from both the U.S. and Mexican sides of the border, these works nevertheless share a construction of child migrant protagonists as innocents who are entitled to rights not by virtue of being human but by virtue of suffering and sacrifice, including sometimes the suffering of others on their behalf. We argue that while directorial choices in the film adaptation of Enrique’s Journey only heightened the book’s conservative “just stay home” message, excluding migrant parents from the realm of those who deserve rescue, both Moon and Atlantis combine sentiment with humor to help spectators imagine the possibility of a world without violent nation-state borders. We contrast two stagings of Atlantis, moreover, one in Mexico (dir. Jesús Coronado, 2011–2012) and one in the United States (dir. Ann Filmer, 2011), in order to show how directorial choices can make the difference between staging suffering as a lament for family separation and staging suffering as a condemnation of political injustice. Chapter 7, “DREAMer Youth Artist-Activists: Queering Migrant Melodrama,” looks at the representation of what has been called undocutime and undocuspace in a one-act devised dance theater work by the Albany Park Theater Project, Nine Digits (dir. David Feiner and Maggie Popadiak, 2007), and the YouTube video series written and protagonized by Julio Salgado, Undocumented and Awkward (2011–2013). Nine Digits and Undocumented and Awkward demonstrate how artist-activists can push the limits of melodrama, and even react against it, while nevertheless still working within some of its conventions. In contrast to many of the works discussed in the previous chapters, these examples of cultural

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production exhibit facets that might seem to disqualify them from the category of melodrama, including humor, satire, defiance, and anger. Yet we argue that rather than reject melodrama entirely, these works take melodramatic imagination in nonnormative directions, what theorists have called queering.52 We argue, furthermore, that queering migrant melodrama, subverting some of its conventions in order to challenge normative ideals, loosens the strictures of melodramas that would confine undocumented migrants to the role of pitiful victims who deserve respect for their rights on the basis of how much they have suffered. Queer migrant melodrama changes the terms of engagement with the market in pain that we have called the political economy of suffering. Nine Digits , we conclude, works within the tradition of melodrama yet queers it by refusing to portray human suffering as redemptive and by interrogating dominant values such as nationalism and the American Dream. Salgado’s video series similarly refuses the trade in suffering-for-rights, and queers melodrama in a different direction by purposely subverting spectators’ expectations of melodramatic conclusions. Our epilogue notes that since we began this book, new extremes of melodrama have been mobilized by both migrant supporters and persecutors. President Trump’s policies have criminalized migrants to such an extent, and created so much additional migrant suffering, that political commentators and artists have responded with innovative attempts to promote empathy with migrants. We analyze how filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu used virtual reality technology to create an art installation, Carne y Arena [Flesh and Sand] (2017), which immerses participants so intensely in the migrant experience that some for a moment believe they are in the desert fleeing from border patrol agents. We close by comparing the reactions of political commentators Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart to the Trump administration’s 2018 policy of separating children from their parents and confining both to separate detention centers. Maddow almost broke down in tears as she attempted to read an account of babies and toddlers held in detention centers, thus conflating migrant suffering with her own distress. Stewart took a more self-aware, distanced approach to create a satiric counter-casting of Trump as melodrama villain, which we interpret as another instance of using humor to queer migrant melodrama, in this case before an audience of millions of viewers. We use these final comparisons to bring together some of the strands from previous chapters and provide some answers to our initial research questions.

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Notes 1. Sidonie Smith, “Narratives and Rights: ‘Zlata’s Diary’ and the Circulation of Stories of Suffering Ethnicity,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 34, no. 1/2 (2006): 134. 2. Jon D. Rossini, Contemporary Latina/o Theater: Wrighting Ethnicity (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 79. 3. Dwight Conquergood, “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research,” TDR 46, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 145. 4. Sayak Valencia, Capitalismo gore: Control económico, violencia y narcopoder (México: Paidós, 2016). 5. Sabine Haenni, The Immigrant Scene: Ethnic Amusements in New York, 1880–1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 6. 6. Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York [1890], ed. David Leviatin (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1996). 7. Cherríe Moraga, Heroes and Saints and Other Plays: Giving Up the Ghost, Shadow of a Man, Heroes and Saints (Albuquerque: West End Press, 1994), 94. 8. Patricia A. Ybarra, Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 5–9. 9. Leo R. Chavez, The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); Otto Santa Anna, Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); and Nicholas De Genova, “The Production of Culprits: From Deportability to Detainability in the Aftermath of ‘Homeland Security,’” Citizenship Studies 11, no. 5 (2007): 421–448. 10. Douglas S. Massey and Karen A. Pren, “Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America,” Population and Development Review 38, no. 1 (2012): 1–29. 11. Ruth Ellen Wasem, “Unauthorized Aliens Residing in the United States: Estimates Since 1986,” Congressional Research Service Report for Congress RL33874, December 13, 2012, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33874. pdf. 12. Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); Pablo Vila, Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Frontier (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000); and Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (New York: Routledge, 2002).

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13. Ana Gonzalez-Barrera and Jeans Manuel Krogstad, “U.S. Deportations of Immigrants Reach Record in 2013,” Pew Research Center, October 2, 2014, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/02/u-sdeportations-of-immigrants-reach-record-high-in-2013/. 14. The National Commission for Human Rights (La Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos, CNDH) published the first “Informe Especial Sobre Secuestro de Migrantes en México” in 2009. According to the report, between September of 2008 and February of 2009, there were 9,758 kidnappings of migrants. The kidnappers received a total of about 25 million dollars in ransoms. According to the second report published by the Commission in February of 2011, in another six-month period between April and September of 2010, there were a total of 214 mass kidnappings that involved 11,333 kidnapped migrants. 15. See report by Organización de los Estados Americanos, Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, “Situación de las personas migrantes no localizadas y restos no identificados en México,” March 23, 2012, http:// fundacionjusticia.org/cms/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ANEXO-17INFORME-CIDH-Migrantes-no-localizados-y-restos-no-identificadosen-Me_xico.pdf. 16. See “Mexico: ‘Disappearances’ Response Falls Short. Inexplicable Delays, Contradictory Statements, Limited Results,” Human Rights Watch, October 8, 2014, https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/08/mexicodisappearances-response-falls-short. 17. José de Córdoba and Juan Montes, “It’s a Crisis of Civilization in Mexico. 250,000 Dead. 37,400 Missing,” The Wall Street Journal, November 14, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/its-a-crisis-of-civilization-in-mexico250-000-dead-37-400-missing-1542213374. 18. Months after the consul referred to her as a “girl martyr of immigration,” the U.S. embassy confirmed that Álvarez had been raped. A ring of 42 people accused of involvement in the trafficking of Noemí and others were arrested in February 2015. Yet no individual has been charged with her rape. After serving eight months in prison, the man initially accused of smuggling and raping Noemí was released by a judge for lack of evidence. Rubén Villalpando, “Se acatará exhorto por suicidio de niña: Duarte,” La Jornada, August 8, 2015, https:// www.jornada.com.mx/2015/08/08/estados/024n1est. See also Martín Coronado, “Sí violaron a Noemi: EU,” El diario de Juárez, February 26, 2015, diario.mx/Local/2015-02-26_0e0f740e/si-violaron-a-noemi-eu; Ana Langner, “Fiscalía ocultó que Jhoselín fue violada: embajador,” El Economista, March 3, 2015, https://www.eleconomista.com.mx/ politica/Fiscalia-oculto-que-Jhoselin-fue-violada-embajador-201503030049.html. Noemí’s first name was Jhoselín. Yet she seems to have been known by her middle name, Noemí, a practice that we follow here.

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19. See for example, Judy Blankenship’s blog entry, “Lives of Cañari girls and women,” Cañar Chronicles: Life in the Andes of Ecuador, posted on May 15, 2014, http://judyblankenship.com/?s=girls. See also Daniela Aguilar, “Tráfico de niños: de Ecuador a EEUU: Pasando por el infierno,” La Historia, July 14, 2014, http://lahistoria.ec/2014/07/14/trafico-de-ninosde-ecuador-al-infierno/. 20. Dudley Althaus, “Survival of Mexico Slaughter Details Immigrants’ Final Moments,” Houston Chronicle, August 25, 2010, http://www.chron. com/news/nation-world/article/Survivor-of-Mexico-slaughter-detailsimmigrants-1697438.php. 21. See Nick Miroff and William Booth, “Mass Graves in Mexico Reveal New Levels of Savagery,” The Washington Post, April 24, 2011, https://www. washingtonpost.com/world/mass-graves-in-mexico-reveal-new-levelsof-savagery/2011/04/23/AFPoasbE_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_ term=.976943164e98. 22. Molly Hennessy-Fiske, “Immigrant Teen’s Death Touches Off a Charged Debate,” Los Angeles Times, December 4, 2011, http://articles.latimes. com/2011/dec/04/nation/la-na-texas-suicide-20111204. 23. In 2013 the International Committee of the Red Cross opened a reception center in Corinto, Honduras, on the border with Guatemala, in response to the needs of Honduran citizens deported from Mexico who had no resources to return home. In September of 2015, the Honduran government finally opened a reception center further inland, on the northern coastal town of Omoa for migrants arriving by land, with bus service to San Pedro Sula and some funding for transportation costs for migrants who have no money to go home. “Honduras expande capacidad de recepción de migrantes retornados desde México,” Departamento 19, February 11, 2016, http://www. departamento19.hn/index.php/portada/69-actualidad/35729-hondurasexpande-capacidad-de-recepcion-de-migrantes-retornados-desde-mexico. html. Since July of 2014, when Mexico announced a Plan for the Southern Border (Programa Frontera Sur) it has been deporting great numbers of Central Americans. In fiscal year 2015, Mexico deported more Central Americans from the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) than the United States did: 166,503 versus 134,572. See Muzaffar Chishti and Faye Hipsman, “Increased Central American Migration to the United States May Prove an Enduring Phenomenon,” Migration Policy Institute, February 18, 2016, http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/increased-central-americanmigration-united-states-may-prove-enduring-phenomenon. Increased apprehensions of migrants, however, led to increased human rights violations. See Luis A. Arriola Vega, “Mexico’s Not-So-Comprehensive

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24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

Southern Border Plan,” Issue Brief, Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, August 15, 2016, http://www.bakerinstitute.org/media/ files/files/329273a1/BI-Brief-080516-MEX_Border.pdf. Diana Taylor, for instance, stresses the economy of looking and being looked at in her analysis of spectacle under dictatorship in Argentina, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997). Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), 12. Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 79, no. 22.2 (2004): 117–139. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004), 42–53. Vivian M. Patraka, Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism, and the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 115. Ibid., 115. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976); Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton University Press, 2002); and Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). Besides Which Way Home, documentary films featuring Latin American children or adolescents who face the horrors of the migrant journey north, often on freight trains, include: De nadie [No One] (dir. Tin Dirdamal, 2005), Asalto al sueño [The Assaulted Dream] (dir. Uli Stelzner, 2006), La Bestia [The Beast] (dir. Pedro Ultreras, 2009); and Amnesty International’s four short films, The Invisibles (dir. Marc Silver and Gael García Bernal, 2010). Fictional films include El camino [The Path] (dir. Ishtar Yasin, 2008), Sin Nombre (dir. Cary Fukunaga, 2009), La vida precoz y breve de Sabina Rivas [The Precocious and Brief Life of Sabina Rivas] (dir. Luis Mandoki, 2012), and La jaula de oro (dir. Diego QuemadaDiez, 2013). Prominent contemporary narratives, besides Enrique’s Journey, include Óscar Martínez’s journalistic account, The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail, trans. Daniela Maria Ugaz and John Washington (London: Verso, 2013); Alejandro Hernández’s novel, Amarás a Dios sobre todas las cosas [Thou Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me] (Mexico City: Tusquets, 2013); and Luis Alberto Urrea’s narrative non-fiction The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (New York and Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2004). Gustavo López Castro, “Niños, socialización y migración a Estados Unidos,” in El país transnacional: Migración mexicana y cambio social

1

33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

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a través de la frontera, eds. Marina Ariza and Alejandro Portés (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México/Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, 2007), 545–570. Exemplifying how images of suffering children circulate between different media, the cover of Forced from Home is illustrated with a still image taken from the documentary film Which Way Home of a group of adolescent migrant boys lying atop a moving freight train. The October 2012 report uses data from the U.S. government to detail the increase in the numbers of unaccompanied migrant children apprehended in the United States: in 2011 the total for the entire year was 6475; in just the first seven months of 2012 the number was 7306. Many of the children are held in inadequate, understaffed facilities without recourse to complaint when their human rights are violated. See Women’s Refugee Commission, Forced From Home: The Lost Boys and Girls of Central America, October 1212, https://www.womensrefugeecommission. org/uncategorized/2057-forced-from-home-the-lost-boys-and-girls-ofcentral-america-background-and-report. See also Elizabeth G. Kennedy, “Unnecessary Suffering: Potential Unmet Mental Health Needs of Unaccompanied Alien Children,” JAMA Pediatrics 167, no. 4 (April 2013): 319–320. Kennedy reports that the number of children detained in fiscal year 2012 totaled 14,500. Ninety percent of them were from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 16–17. Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 8. Matthew S. Buckley, “Refugee Theatre: Melodrama and Modernity’s Loss,” Theatre Journal 61, no. 2 (May 2009): 175–190. Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). Amy E. Hughes, Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in NineteenthCentury America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 13– 45. Brandi Wilkins Catanese, The Problem of the Color[blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). Micaela di Leonardo, “Dwight Conquergood and Performative Political Economy,” in Dwight Conquergood, Cultural Studies: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis, ed. E. Patrick Johnson (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 304. Merriam-Webster Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/economy.

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42. Susan Bibler Coutin, “Being En Route,” American Anthropologist 107, no. 2 (June 2005): 199. Also see Wendy A. Vogt, “Crossing Mexico: Structural Violence and the Commodification of Undocumented Central American Migrants,” American Ethnologist 40, no. 4 (November 2013): 764–780. 43. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, Social Suffering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), xi. 44. Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present, trans. Rachel Gomme (Berkley: University of California Press, 2012). 45. David B. Morris, “About Suffering: Voice, Genre, and Moral Community,” in Social Suffering, eds. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 40. 46. On flight attendants, see Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) and for her more recent analysis of the outsourcing of emotional labor, see Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2012). 47. We observed the importance of convincing displays of suffering during three months (April–June) in 2014 that we volunteered for the nongovernmental organization FM4 Paso Libre (also known as Dignidad y Justicia en el Camino A.C.) in Guadalajara, Mexico. In the attempt to allocate scarce resources fairly, the question of assessing whether and how much a particular person was in fact a migrant (or just a poor Mexican outside the scope of the organization’s mission) in need was a constant source of tension at the door of the shelter, where workers made the decisions about whom to allow entry and whom to turn away. Once inside, there were more decisions to be made: Who would be given donations from a limited supply of clothes and shoes? Who would be allowed to make a first, or a second long-distance telephone call? Who would be given a package of food to take away? Who might be allowed an exceptional fourth day of services, despite the official three-day rule? Attempts to assess need could not help but be affected by effective performances of suffering on the part of the migrants. 48. Brandon Griggs, “Photographer Describes ‘Scream’ of Migrant Boy’s ‘Silent Body’”, CNN, September 3, 2015, http://www.cnn.com/2015/ 09/03/world/dead-migrant-boy-beach-photographer-nilufer-demir. 49. Matt Dathan, “Aylan Kurdi: David Cameron Says He Felt ‘Deeply Moved’ by Images of Dead Syrian Boy but Gives No Details of Plans to Take in More Refugees,” The Independent, September 3, 2015, http:// www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/aylan-kurdi-david-cameronsays-he-felt-deeply-moved-by-images-of-dead-syrian-boy-but-gives-no10484641.html.

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50. “An Ill Wind: In Europe and at Home, Angela Merkel’s Refugee Policy Is Being Blown Away,” The Economist, January 23, 2016, http:// www.economist.com/news/europe/21688896-europe-and-home-angelamerkels-refugee-policy-being-blown-away-ill-wind. 51. For information on the caravan, see Caravana de Madres de Migrantes Desaparecidos “Emeteria Martínez,” https://caravanamadres.wordpress. com/english/, blog accessed November 24, 2018. 52. Michael Warner, “Fear of a Queer Planet,” Social Text 29 (1991): 3–17.

PART I

Rescuers

CHAPTER 2

Heroic and Empathic Rescuers in Foundational Migrant Melodrama

What can we do? If charity, equality, brotherhood are not empty words, my dear friend, we must try to rescue these unfortunate people from so many and such bitter misfortunes. [Che fare pertanto? Se carità, uguaglianza, fraternità non sono vane parole, bisogna pure, amico mio, tentar qualche cosa, per sottrarre que’ miseri a tante e sì acerbe sventure.] Bishop of Piacenza, Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, in an open letter to the Italian parliament, (1888) A few days ago, when a documentary filmmaker who wanted to film the train and the amputees realized that the train no longer leaves from Tapachula and the number of amputees has gone down, she said: it’s not worth it anymore. [Cuando hace unos días una documentalista que quería filmar el tren y los amputados, se enteró de que el tren ya no salía de Tapachula y los amputados se habían reducido, dijo: ya no vale la pena.] Father Flor María Rigoni, director, Bethlehem Shelter, The North Becomes the South (2010)

The train is back, together with its victims, villains, and rescuers. That favored vehicle of nineteenth-century sensation melodrama has reemerged in yet another context: contemporary undocumented migrants from Latin America in need of rescue. Today, global distribution networks make it possible for audiences in Latin America, the United States, and around the world to be entertained by the pain of others, by the dangerous ordeals © The Author(s) 2020 A. E. Puga and V. M. Espinosa, Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37409-9_2

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endured by those who ride the freight rails, risking life and limbs, literally, as they try to make it north through Mexico to the United States. The solemn tone of even the most highbrow theater, film, and journalistic narrative thinly veils the promise of thrills and chills as audiences absorb the spectacle of small children, pregnant women, and sometimes entire extended families forced to climb aboard the villainously nicknamed “The Beast” or “The Train of Death.”1 Besides anthropomorphizing the train-as-villain, a menace to those who suffocate in its boxcars, fall from its rooftop, or are pushed under its wheels, much cultural production features additional villains: corrupt officials who take whatever money or valuables migrants may have with them, machete-wielding gangs who slash migrants for the sport of it, and rings of kidnappers equipped with automatic firearms who sometimes hold victims for ransom and sometimes simply massacre them.2 Between the character types of villains and victims, enters the rescuers, the extraordinarily courageous characters who perform the twenty-first-century equivalent of grabbing the axe and cutting loose the person tied to the railroad tracks.3 In the context of Latin American migration through Mexico today, the rescuers are mostly priests, nuns, a few secular nongovernmental organizations, and the understaffed arm of the Mexican government known as the Beta Group, which provides humanitarian assistance to migrants with one hand while the other hand of the government composed of immigration agents detains and deports them. As rescuers conduct their humanitarian work, they contend not only with the spectacle of the train that has dominated U.S. and Mexican media accounts of migration, but more broadly with the melodramatic mindset that Father Flor María Rigoni highlights in his encounter with the documentary filmmaker, as cited in the above epigraph. Though Rigoni does not label it so, what the filmmaker is looking for is what we call a spectacle of migrant suffering, images of migrants that highlight their physical or psychic pain for public consumption. Spectacles of suffering are the building blocks that filmmakers, journalists, scholars, or activists may use to create melodramatic narratives in which the suffering is often depicted as the result of a contest between good characters and evil characters. The most melodramatic of such narratives focus on the horrors endured by the individual innocent victim, say, an injured child or a woman who was gang raped. In such migrant melodramas rescuer and rescued roles are clearly delineated: rescuers take selfless, heroic actions that may put them at risk; the rescued are powerless victims who passively wait for a helping hand. This dramatic dichotomy often

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mutes more seemingly mundane structural issues: the legacy of U.S. imperialism and Central American wars, systemic violence, income inequality, and transnational maquiladora industries that offer wages just high enough to make people want to earn a real living. The fact that Honduras and El Salvador are experiencing some of the highest rates of violence in the world tends to come up as a side note. Though melodramas appeal for more humane treatment of migrants, their focus on individual pain and individual rescue, while downplaying structural injustice, unintentionally naturalizes the very suffering that their creators seek to ameliorate. The foundational model for migrant care that continues to influence much charitable assistance and human rights work on behalf of migrants in Latin America today dates back to nineteenth-century Italy. From at least the nineteenth century, when Bishop Giovanni Battista Scalabrini (1839–1905) took up the cause of Italian migrants to the American continent, migrant advocacy has involved a degree of performative labor. In the course of their work, religious leaders who provide humanitarian relief to migrants adopt costumes, write scripts, and create scenic designs that sometimes include a set, music, lights, and props. In a sense, they serve as theatrical directors for social performances in which migrants exercise varying degrees of control. The staging of migrants as what Scalabrini calls “unfortunate people” in need of “rescue” in the above epigraph is a slippery slope that can end in the kind of callous search for spectacles of suffering that Rigoni denounces. Though Rigoni puts an ironic distance between himself and the filmmaker looking for amputees to film, we contend that the hunger for such spectacles has in fact also been fed by advocates like him, who follow in the steps of Scalabrini to stage displays of suffering in order to earn spectators’ empathy and support for migrants. Advocates create such scenes in texts and in performances, in essays and poems, as well as in material spaces such as migrant shelters, churches, and town squares—public spaces where sympathetic spectators might be expected to better appreciate the migrant experience, or where journalists might broadcast migrant suffering by following conventions within the horizon of expectations, to use Hans Robert Jauss’s term, of a national or international audience familiar with the subgenre of migrant melodrama. In this chapter, we analyze the writings and social performance of Scalabrini and Rigoni, which take place about a century apart from each other yet share a melodramatic imagination that we argue infuses many contemporary migrant advocacy efforts. Both Scalabrini and Rigoni are

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charismatic figures who dedicated their lives to improving conditions for migrants; yet as part of that effort, we contend, they helped create and circulate migrant melodrama in the political economy of suffering. We first examine the nineteenth-century roots of melodrama in migrant care in the writings of Scalabrini, the founder of the Scalabrinian order, known more formally as The Missionaries of St. Charles Borromeo. Originally founded to care only for Italian migrants, today the order has a global reach and tends to migrants from anywhere in the world. Because of its long experience and well-established structure, the order’s framing of migrants and the migration experience has been a highly influential model for migrant care among a wide variety of nongovernmental organizations.4 Scalabrini’s prolific writing and public speaking, we argue, was infused by a melodramatic imagination born of European Romanticism that still structures many aspects of migrant representation today.5 We analyze his writings as a foundational model of migrant melodrama that helps us understand many subsequent performances by and about rescuers and rescued. After discussing Scalabrini, we look next at Rigoni and the shelter he directs, Casa del Migrante, Albergue Belén [House of the Migrant, Bethlehem Shelter] in the far southern Mexican city of Tapachula, from where he has maintained an influential public profile for more than two decades. In contrast to some contemporary shelter leaders who openly challenge the Mexican nation-state, such as Father Alejandro Solalinde, whom we discuss in Chapter 3, Rigoni continues the Scalabrinian tradition of working hand-in-hand with governmental authorities, both from Mexico and the United States. His published writings on the migrant experience include historical and analytical essays as well as poetry. Some of his writing provides extremely useful facts, figures, and historical accounts of the Scalabrinian order’s activities in Mexico; taken as a whole, however, his poetry and prose reveal a paradoxical ambivalence toward spectacle and sentimentality that simultaneously rejects yet also relies on melodramatic imagination. We explore this ambivalence for what it tells us about contemporary rescuers and their performances of rescue. Before looking more closely at the writings of Scalabrini and Rigoni, it is important to briefly note that the tropes of rescuer and rescued from nineteenth-century melodramatic conventions have roots in much earlier Christian ideas about the redemptive nature of suffering. Judith Perkins suggests that in Western history early Christian authors, by contrast to

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the Greeks and the Romans, developed a cultural discourse and a cultural subject that valued suffering as a source of power, transcendence, and proximity to the divine.6 In this century, religion, politics, charity, humanitarian relief work, and human rights advocacy in Latin America are tangled in a dense web of social performances that draw heavily on both Christian iconography and popular melodrama, which in turn has long borrowed Christian tropes and recycled them; in dialectical fashion, contemporary Christian performances then often once again absorb popular melodramatic tropes into religious expression. Because melodrama has so long been suffused by a Christian worldview, it is often impossible to discern where Christianity ends, and melodrama begins. Literary critic Peter Brooks’ assertion that melodrama’s function is to nurture a “moral occult,” a half-hidden realm in which a religious distinction between good and evil lives on in a secular world has been questioned by some who argue that the modern world is not in fact secular. In “Melodrama and the Historians,” Rohan McWilliam writes: We might also ask at this point whether Peter Brooks’ formulation of melodrama as the product of a post-sacred order is correct. Historians have taken this on board uncritically. Yet it is debatable whether western society in the hundred (or even two hundred) years after the French Revolution can be adequately described as a post-sacred order. While few would deny the general trend towards secularization, religious historians have rightly highlighted the continuing importance of religion and, indeed, of some sense of the sacred. It might be helpful in the future to examine the intersections between melodrama’s morality and that of religion. The former was not a replacement for the latter. This mixture of religion and melodrama demonstrates how difficult it is to disentangle melodrama from other aspects of nineteenth-century life.7

Or of twentieth and twenty-first-century life.8 It is no longer possible to assume that a thoroughly modernized world will somehow outgrow either religion or melodrama. Instead, we try to understand more about how the melodramatic imagination in religious performance aimed at humanitarian assistance and human rights advocacy today affects the contemporary world, how it shapes an incipient transnational migrant-rights movement in the Americas, and how that movement participates in a political economy of suffering. Because we are conscious that what to a secular worldview may seem like constructed performances, from a Christian perspective may appear as

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expressions of essential truth, we do not question the faith or the sincerity of the actors whose social performances we analyze here. When we speak of “casting” and “staging” we do not mean to imply duplicity; instead we refer to the myriad of details, consciously or unconsciously arranged during any public event, including the assignment of roles.9 We look closely at such staging in the construction of social performances—for the media, for politicians, for scholars, and for a wide range of potential supporters in the general public who might be considered an “audience”—phenomena that might otherwise be taken for granted as transparent reality. By looking at how migrants and their advocates are in a sense staged, and stage themselves, we hope to alienate, in the Brechtian sense of spurring reflection by making the familiar strange, how the community of people who support undocumented migrant rights—including some journalists, activists, and scholars, religious and secular advocates alike—imagine and represent the undocumented. What do we take for granted when we stage migrant suffering? When we feel migrant pain by enabling displays of injury, or by displaying our own empathy in melodramatic ways, how do we implicitly position migrants in relationship to more powerful actors, including international and nation-state bureaucracies with the power to restrict human mobility across nation-state borders? If we inspire pity, either for migrants or for ourselves as surrogates for suffering migrants, how do such performances further, or not, migrant claims for respect and for the right to human mobility? How do displays of suffering, along with the pity they may inspire, sometimes function as a last recourse, a currency that can be exchanged for any number of things, from a handout to a visa? Finally, how do performances of suffering figure in efforts to create a transnational network of humanitarian relief, or even a social movement that furthers migrant rights?

“Father to the Migrants” From the first pamphlet Scalabrini published on the subject of emigration in 1887 to one of the last speeches he delivered, in 1899, the migrant is consistently described as suffering, wretched, weeping, in short, the very picture of the miserable “helpless and unfriended” protagonist that populates melodramatic novels and plays across Europe and the American continent in the nineteenth century. Such an image was famously deployed in the stanza chosen for the 1903 plaque on the Statue of Liberty taken from Emma Lazarus’s 1883 sonnet “The New Colossus”:

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Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.

Similarly, to how they are visualized in Lazarus’s poem, in Scalabrini’s writings, migrants are “poor wretches,” “desperate, abandoned, anguishing.”10 Yet from his perspective as a member of a sending nation, there was no relief in the embrace of the Statue of Liberty; on the contrary, migrants’ troubles were only just beginning upon their arrival in America. At the start, migrants were sometimes taken to a country distant from the one for which they had bought their ticket, finding themselves dumped in New York City when they had purchased a passage to Buenos Aires, or vice versa. As “easy victims of inhuman exploitation” the employment they found was often the “the meanest kinds of work,” akin to slavery, and in fact, they were sometimes used to replace the labor of freed slaves, particularly in Brazil.11 Worst of all, in Scalabrini’s view, they languished without priests to guide their spiritual life: “It is clear that such a state of affairs must imperceptibly lead those poor wretches to a frightening indifference toward religion and a dehumanizing materialism.”12 Scalabrini, like a novelist or a playwright, writes dialogue to craft scenes in which desperate migrants plead with him to send a priest to their community so that they might at least be administered the last rites: I still hear in my soul the haunting voice of a poor farmer from Lombardy who came to Piacenza about two years ago from the distant Tibagy Valley in Brazil to plead for a missionary in the name of that large settlement. “Ah Father,” he was telling me with a lump in his throat, “if you could only imagine how much we have suffered! How much we have cried at the deathbed of our dear ones, who were desperately pleading for a priest and couldn’t get one! Oh, my God, we cannot go on, we cannot live in this situation!”13

The language and gestures of heightened emotion, underscored with exclamation marks, build the affective charge typical of melodramatic lament, at the same time as it establishes the need for a rescuer priest. As he advocated for the establishment of a religious order dedicated to the care of migrants in pamphlets, letters, and speeches, Scalabrini conceptualized migration as a natural process and a sacred human right, an extremely progressive idea at a time when many condemned migrants

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as traitors to their nation. In his defense of migrants, however, Scalabrini portrays them as key to a desirable colonial expansion: a sort of colonial force from below, a force that would both promote the Catholic faith and boost Italian influence in the world. The Italian state could only benefit from the circulation of its people, Scalabrini maintains, in an earlier version of the argument used today to extol the benefits to the sending country of migrant remittances and migrant experiences garnered abroad.14 Writing and speaking publicly during the last quarter of the nineteenth-century, a time when Italy’s tenuous unification was still fairly new, Scalabrini repeatedly suggests that emigration, carried out with proper guidance, will lead to a stronger, more united Italy: “the ideas of country and nationality do not fade away across the ocean but are strengthened through continued contact with teachers, religious [sic] and priests who share with the emigrants the same sacred attitudes toward God, Church and country.”15 Still, because, in Scalabrini’s view, migrants were ignorant peasants, they were easy prey for Protestant sects and unscrupulous exploiters, “traffickers in human flesh” who would swindle them out of their meager savings and profit from their labor, treating them little better than slaves, without paying them promised wages. He alludes to the traffickers, called padrones, and to violent anarchists alike as those “who hide like snakes among the flowers.”16 With this colorful biblical image deployed during a talk delivered at the Turin Exhibition of Sacred Art in 1898, Scalabrini epitomizes the dichotomy that informs much of his melodramatic imagination: the Manichean division of the world into snakes and flowers, good and evil, virtue and villainy. Scalabrini’s description of the migrant journey touches on systemic evils such as systems of labor exploitation but focuses primarily on evil individuals, such as greedy bosses: Along the journey, which often turns into tragedy, the emigrant is shadowed by these very same evils and, upon his arrival in disease-infested areas, he finds these evils in the jobs for which he often is not fit, under bosses who have become inhuman either because of an insatiable greed for money or because of the habit of regarding workers like inferior beings. And these evils multiply a thousand times when evil people try to ambush the emigrant in a foreign country, whose language and customs he is not familiar with, while he finds himself in a state of isolation that is often the death of body and soul.17

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Scalabrini uses the word “disastrous” [disastroso] in Italian to describe the migrant journey, which the translator renders in English as “tragedy.” The translator seems to have intuited that Scalabrini was depicting migration in dramaturgical form. The migrant journey, as depicted by Scalabrini, is actually a tragic melodrama, with its three-part division of characters: victimizers, victims, and rescuers. And like many works of nineteenthcentury playwrights and novelists that denounced social injustice, the goal of Scalabrini’s melodrama is social reform.18 To counter the forces that produce greedy bosses, selfless priests must be deployed. Because nineteenth-century melodrama is more often associated with France, Germany, England, and the United States than with Italy, it may seem odd to argue that Scalabrini’s nonfictional writings are infused by melodramatic imagination. Indeed, other literary models also seem apt. Scalabrini’s patriotic fervor shares the nationalistic ideals of the literature of the Risorgimento. And his vision of a Catholic church that protects the poor and powerless recalls the Church peopled by good priests who defeat a cowardly priest in Alessandro Manzoni’s 1842 Romantic masterpiece of a historical novel The Betrothed [I promessi sposi].19 Yet the sentimentality of Scalabrini’s vision, the broad strokes of black and white in which he paints the world, have more in common with his contemporary, the novelist Edmondo de Amicis (1846–1908) and his wildly popular moralistic novel for youth, Cuore: libro per i ragazzi (1886). Translated to English in the late nineteenth-century as Cuore: The Heart of a Boy and to Spanish as simply Corazón [Heart], the narrative soon became required reading for Mexican school children throughout most of the twentieth century.20 In one chapter, “From the Apennines to the Andes,” de Amicis relates the travails of Marco, a 13-year-old boy who journeys alone from Genoa to Buenos Aires in search of his mother, who had emigrated two years earlier to work as a maid. Her letters from Argentina have mysteriously ceased to arrive back in Italy. After enduring the horrors of the long sea voyage, thanks to charitable contributions from good-hearted fellow countrymen he meets along the road, Marco travels from Buenos Aires to Rosario to Cordoba to Tucumán, just in time to save his deathly ill mother, who has resigned herself to her fate and will not allow doctors to treat her—until she is suddenly reunited with her son. With melodrama’s fortuitous timing, Marco finds his mother just in the nick of time; in its tidy happy ending, the hero’s virtue is publicly acknowledged. The doctor tells Marco, who kneels at his feet in gratitude: “Get up! It is you, heroic boy, who have saved your mother!”21 Like de Amicis, Scalabrini

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romanticizes and simplifies migrants, turning them into cardboard figures of suffering virtue. Like de Amicis’s readers, Scalabrini’s readers and audiences to his public speaking are encouraged to react with displays of empathic emotion, with sighs and tears. In Scalabrini’s writings, however, there is little room for a triumphant boy hero: since he writes and speaks to persuade others to support his missionary society, in his narratives, the role of rescuer usually goes to the priest. The figure of the priest rushes to the rescue to protect the migrant from nefarious forces and feelings of abandonment alike. Scalabrini’s response to the poor farmer from Lombardy models his ideal response to migrant suffering, the empathic response of the sensitive audience member who rushes out of the theater to eliminate the evil exposed by a moral reform melodrama: I must confess that never, like at that moment, did I wish that I were twenty years old so that I could trade in the golden cross of bishop for the wooden cross of a missionary and rush to the aid of those unfortunate, truly unfortunate people, because among all the other dangers, there is also the one of falling into despair.22

Scalabrini’s description of himself also reveals some of the key characteristics of his ideal migrant rescuer: he is young; he is male; he is willing to take bold, impetuous, courageous action to travel to wherever the victims need him; he is empathic; he feels for the victims on whom he takes pity and wants to rush to assist. Instead of taking such rash individual action, however, Scalabrini actually took a far more pragmatic route: he founded an order that over the years sent hundreds of priests to administer sacraments, celebrate masses, and provide an impressive variety of pastoral care—churches, schools, orphanages, hospitals, and, eventually, shelters—intended to uplift migrants. Scalabrini compares such priests to the “heroes who go to evangelize uncivilized peoples,” thus assigning them the dramatic character of the colonizer who saves the day, both for the colonizing nation and for the “uncivilized” people it dominates for their own good.23 The sobriquet Scalabrini came to be known by, “Father to the migrants,” betrays the religious paternalism of his approach to migrant care. In 1887, Scalabrini won approval from Pope Leo XIII to found a missionary society consecrated to the care of migrants, the Congregation of the Missionaries of St. Charles Borromeo.24 The missionaries would care

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for Italian migrants to the Americas along all the points of the journey: the port of departure, the voyage, the arrival, and the settlement in the new country, protecting them from the abuses of their smugglers and providing them with Catholic charity. Scalabrini’s powerful portraits of suffering migrants in need of rescue motivated many priests and nuns to join the new order. The first Scalabrian missionaries arrived in New York on July 22, 1888. Before too long, laypeople were also given a role in Scalabrini’s rescue plan. In 1892, he founded the St. Raphael’s Society for the Protection of Emigrants, for laypeople dedicated to providing information and guidance to migrants, guidance intended to direct them away from the more unpleasant destinations and spare innocents from unscrupulous labor brokers. In some cases, the laypeople would even counsel wouldbe migrants who had not yet left Italy against undertaking the journey. Finally, for nuns interested in contributing to migrant care, in 1895 Scalabrini helped create the Missionary Sisters of St. Charles. In addition to founding formal organizations of assistance, Scalabrini called on the upper classes to provide charity to their countrymen forced to leave the nation in search of work, some of whom returned to Italy empty-handed. In an 1888 open letter to a member of Parliament on the eve of the debate on legislative efforts to curb emigration, Scalabrini argued that charity and rescue, rather than restrictive legislation, was the path to follow: “What can we do? If charity, equality, brotherhood are not empty words, my dear friend, we must try to rescue these unfortunate people from so many and such bitter misfortunes.”25 Scalabrini provided both clerics and laypeople of means with the ability to recognize and respond to the suffering of others with charitable fellowfeeling. The structure he created fulfilled the social function analyzed by Sheila C. Moeschen in the context of U.S. nineteenth-century affliction melodramas featuring disabled protagonists: those who bestowed charity publicly demonstrated “social feelings” and participated as “saviors” in organized benevolence.26 In many U.S. and European social performances of nineteenth-century charity, the disabled ultimately depended on the intervention of able-bodied spectators; in Scalabrini’s international framework, the migrant ultimately depends on the Roman Catholic Church. The priest personifies the authority of the Church, working closely with the nation-state, as a savior. In his speech to an enthusiastic audience at the Italian Catholic Congress, held in Ferrara in 1899, Scalabrini said: “Yes gentlemen, where the people are who work and suffer, there is also the Church, because the Church is the mother, the friend,

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the patroness of the people and for them it will always have a word of comfort, a smile, a blessing.”27 At first, the Scalabrinians worked in Italian parishes primarily in the United States and concentrated on migrant settlement, with an eye toward helping their parishioners attain material success without losing their religion and their national identity.28 By 1924, the Scalabrinians had established a presence in Cincinnati, Kansas City, Detroit, and Chicago, the site of their provincial headquarters. In response to the intense migration that followed the two world wars, the Scalabrinians expanded their scope and opened other missions in Europe, Argentina, and Australia. Though it was originally founded to care for Italian migrants, today the order operates five shelters in Latin America, from Guatemala City to Tijuana, and operates in thirty-two different countries around the world.29 In the 1960s, the Scalabrinians were one of the first Catholic orders to begin to assist Latin American migrants. In Chicago, Father Alessio Peloso urged the order to work with Latin Americans and in 1968 was the first Scalabrinian to celebrate a mass in Spanish, at the parish of Santa Maria Addolorata. The Scalabrinians understood that the new immigration would transform the Catholic Church: estimates indicated that by the year 2000, fifty percent of U.S. Catholics would be Hispanics. In response to that demographic forecast, the Scalabrinians transformed the scope of their mission and began to work mostly with migrants from Mexico. In 1981, a seminary was established in Guadalajara to train missionaries from many different nationalities to work with migrants from Spanish-speaking countries. Through their participation in the Mexican Episcopal Conference, among other activities, the Scalabrinians helped change attitudes toward migration among the Mexican Church hierarchy and raised awareness of the need for more consistent pastoral work with migrants. The hierarchy’s official position up until that time had been to oppose migration because it supposedly led to familial and social disintegration.30 In 1983, the bishop of Tijuana, Emilio Carlos Berlie Belaunzarán, requested the support of the Scalabrinians in order to help the diocese attend to migrants who were trying to cross the border or who had just been deported. In his correspondence with the Scalabrinians, Berlie Belaunzarán cited an ABC news report that said 43,000 migrants were being deported every month from the United States to Tijuana. In April of 1987, the Scalabrinians created in Tijuana the first Casa del Migrante,

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a shelter that would provide migrants with pastoral care as well as with social, economic, and legal assistance.31 The Scalabrinians’ work in Mexico adapted to shifting patterns of migration. Since the mid-1980s, as a result of armed conflicts in Central America, transit migration through Mexico began to grow. Even after the wars ended, in the mid-90s, growing polarization between the wealthier northern countries and the poorer southern countries continued to exert migratory pressure. Since 1995, according to Mexico’s National Migration Institute, migration increased to a record high in 2005, when an estimated 433,000 migrants were in transit through Mexico and almost 250,000 were deported.32 Migrant flows apparently began to decrease from 2006 to 2010, but were up again in 2012, when the institute estimates that about 300,000 undocumented migrants crossed Mexico; yet 75 percent of those migrants failed in their attempt to enter the United States.33 Thousands of migrants, therefore, are now part of a new nomadic, homeless population that survives in a situation of extreme precariousness all across Mexico. Today, a fluid network of some fifty shelters in Mexico, run not only by the Scalabrinians, but also by Jesuits and other orders as well as by secular organizations attempts to provide assistance to that migrant population. The number of shelters and their locations constantly shift. While a new shelter may open in one area of Mexico in response to a perceived need, another may close in a different area in response to pressure from local authorities or threats from organized crime, or both. Our study does not attempt a comprehensive analysis of the dozens of shelter leaders involved in countless social performances every day.34 In this chapter, we focus on Scalabrini and one of his most prominent successors, Rigoni, to begin to identify varieties of what we see as a significant melodramatic trope, heroic rescue, which still exists in migrant care today.

Flor María Rigoni: Heroic Rescue Through Empathy In January of 1985, Rigoni was reassigned from Germany to Tijuana to study the situation at the border and to work on the creation of the first Scalabrinian center there. Since 1998, Rigoni has headed the Scalabrinian shelter Casa del Migrante Albergue Belén in the city of Tapachula. Located just twenty-five miles from the Guatemalan border, the city has long been a hub of migrant and immigrant activity.

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Guatemalan seasonal laborers have traditionally crossed the river in accordance with the agricultural cycles of coffee, banana, and mango crops that still dominate the economy of the Soconusco region. In the nineteenth century, German immigrants established the coffee plantations; in the early twentieth century, Chinese immigrants first came to work on the plantations but soon abandoned agricultural labor to start small businesses in the city. Today, with a population of 321,000, the urban area has been described by Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martínez as “a town that puts on city airs” [pueblo con aires de ciudad]. In fact, Tapachula has a double life as a small city with big-city problems: a tranquil surface covers a seamy underside. In the historic town center, neatly trimmed laurel trees ring a central square crowned by a Baroque ironwork kiosk with Moorish flourishes. Marimba bands and folk dancers sponsored by the city entertain residents and tourists who visit for the day from cruise ships that dock at nearby Puerto Chiapas. Yet even on the streets surrounding the town square, one can sense the problems of a large metropolis: pollution, heavy traffic, violence, and crime. Like many other cities close to national borders, Tapachula has a large number of bars and is an important area for trafficking of drugs and women, including young migrant women from Central America. According to one study, the city has about six hundred bars, only twenty of which have legal permits.35 Some of the many downtown pawnshops, according to local rumor, are actually money laundering operations. The poorest of the migrants heading through town on their way north can be seen on the sidewalks begging for spare change; sometimes they also use the services of shelters in the city such as Rigoni’s. The first thing we saw as we entered through the front gates of the Casa del Migrante was a bust of Bishop Scalabrini on a pedestal in the center of the shelter’s front patio, a tidy garden circled by benches, so that no matter where one sits, Scalabrini is always visible. Around the corner, in the facility’s chapel, a watercolor portrait of Scalabrini shaded in a wash of celestial blue occupies a position of honor up front, just to the right of the altar table (Fig. 2.1). Born in Italy in 1944, Rigoni began to study with the Scalabrinian order at the age of eleven. Following the order’s tradition of missionary service, he left his homeland and emigrated, first to Germany, then to Mexico. In 1994, he embarked on a four-year mission to Africa, to work with refugees in Mozambique and Angola. In 1998, he returned to Mexico to stay. An experienced hand at migrant care, he has been providing humanitarian relief to migrants for more than 25 years. Every year, the Casa del Migrante provides services,

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Fig. 2.1 Father Flor María Rigoni and painting of Bishop Giovanni Battista Scalabrini. Casa del Migrante Albergue Belén, Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico (Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa, January 9, 2014)

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including hot meals, medical attention, and a place to stay for at least three nights, to more than five thousand migrants. Rigoni was barefoot when we met him for the first time on the morning of Sunday, December 23, 2012, shortly before he celebrated mass in his shelter’s outdoor chapel (Fig. 2.2). His rough, thick feet slapped against the concrete floor. A tin roof, thin shades, and an electric fan held the Chiapas sun at bay in a tent-like space furnished with plastic chairs and surrounded by a lush tropical garden overgrown with giant leaves and flowers in every shade of crimson: wild pink poinsettias, orange-red “lobster claws,” and giant pinecone-like cabernet blossoms known as “Hawaianas.” Rigoni’s bare feet fit in with the exuberance of nature yet clashed with the footwear of the fifty or so congregants gathered there that day: for the women, high heels or platform sandals with pedicured and polished toenails, enameled versions of the colors of the flowers; for the men, closed-toe, well-heeled, and dark polished leather loafers. The congregants’ freshly ironed dresses and starched polo shirts also contrasted with Rigoni’s scruffy long gray beard and simple white tunic, adorned only by the large wooden cross tucked into his rope belt. The migrants themselves, who would have added a more working-class dimension to the congregation, are always segregated by Rigoni from the Tapachula residents, encouraged to attend a separate mass dedicated to them. In bare feet, Rigoni held confessions on a little bench to the side of the altar. In bare feet he then celebrated the entire mass. And in bare feet he granted us an interview after the mass. One of the first things he told us was that one day a few years ago, as he was on his way to a meeting with the then president of Mexico, Felipe Calderón, he discovered that the straps on one of his sandals had broken. He entered the meeting barefoot. Calderón insisted that his wife, Margarita Zavala, bring the priest a pair of his own footwear, a brand-new pair of leather sandals made in Brazil that fit Rigoni beautifully. “It was as if they had shock absorbers. I was walking on clouds,”36 Rigoni recalled. But just a couple of months later, when he saw the first lady again, he was once more shod in cheap sandals. “You gave them away?” Zavala guessed. “Yes, I gave them away to a Nicaraguan who had sores on his feet,” Rigoni said he replied.37

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Fig. 2.2 Father Flor María Rigoni, founder and director of shelter Casa del Migrante Albergue Belén, Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico (Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa, January 9, 2014)

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Rigoni then recounted how he was ferried to Italy on the president’s private plane to attend the beatification ceremony of Pope John Paul II in May 2011, how he later met several times with the former First Lady, and how he admires the strength of her faith and her efforts on behalf of impoverished children. During the Calderón administration, he and other migrant shelter directors were able to help shape a reformed Law of Migration, 2011 legislation that decriminalizes the efforts of those who provide humanitarian assistance to the undocumented. We consider Rigoni’s bare feet a costume choice that underscores his self-identification with poor migrants at the same time that it signals the privilege of his ability to decide whether or not to wear shoes, a privilege not shared by migrants whose shoes and feet are damaged by walking for many miles. Rigoni’s bare feet, along with his anecdote about giving away his new sandals, highlight his empathy with and allegiance to the vulnerable and undocumented. Yet they also highlight that he himself is neither vulnerable nor undocumented. Like many shelter directors, Rigoni inhabits a contradictory role in which he advocates for people who are violating nation-state laws yet nevertheless relies on nation-state leaders for material support and recognition, as evidenced by his fruitful encounters with former President Calderón and his wife Zavala. As part of his work as an advocate for migrants, Rigoni frequently participates in government-sponsored conferences and contributes essays to government publications. In 2006, he accepted the nation’s highest human rights award from the president.

Empathy and Irony Three of Rigoni’s most widely circulated works reveal the influence of Scalabrini’s melodramatic imagination: the 2008 article “Informal Liturgy of the Migrant Journey: An Essay on the Expressions, Gestures, and Rituals of the Undocumented and Refugee Community from Central America to the North;” the 2008 book Reflexiones en el camino del migrante: expresiones, gestos y rituales del pueblo indocumentado y refugiado de Centroamérica hacia El Norte [Reflections on the Migrant Journey: Expressions, Gestures, and Rituals of the Undocumented and Refugee Community from Central America to the North]; and the 2010 book El Norte se vuelve Sur: 30 años de presencia scalabriniana en México [The North Becomes the South: 30 Years of Scalabrinian Presence in Mexico].38 We argue that through his published writings, especially his poetry, Rigoni casts and stages migrants in sentimental dramas. He has also given dozens

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of media interviews and appeared in documentary films, yet we focus here on his poetry, through which he most melodramatically stages migrants. More than one hundred years have passed since Scalabrini advocated on behalf of Italy’s downtrodden emigrants. During that century, melodramatic cultural production moved from Italian romantic novels and Victorian stages to early sensational films to twentieth-century genre films, including domestic tear-jerkers and action-and-adventure movies. Today’s contemporary cultural production recycles, often with parodic twists and winks, the old tropes in new forms as diverse as the latest railway rescues in both Johnny Depp’s film The Lone Ranger (2013) and Toy Story 3, in the film and video game versions for children (2010).39 We read Rigoni’s writing for its contradictions, for both its continuities and discontinuities with Scalabrini’s nineteenth-century melodramatic imagination. On the one hand, Rigoni clearly demonstrates a twenty-first-century ironic appreciation of how media exploit spectacles of suffering. On the other hand, we would argue that he himself, perhaps unintentionally, also creates such spectacles and embeds them in melodramatic scenes involving pitiful victims and compassionate companions. What function does this serve? Scholars of melodrama such as Peter Brooks, Nicholas Daly, and Ben Singer interpret the form as an expression of nineteenth-century anxieties about modernity, about secular modernity’s lack of a clear moral compass and about the dangers posed by modernity’s technological advances.40 Our readings of Rigoni’s nonfictional narrative and poetry demonstrate how melodrama today can instead reveal anxieties about the stubborn persistence of evils that by all accounts should have been overcome by now—such as racism, poverty, and economic inequality. Contemporary migrant melodrama expresses anxiety about how these ills have survived and thrived despite technological advances. Such melodrama often foregrounds an empathic identification between a rescuer who attempts to ameliorate the negative effects of persistent evils and a victim who must first experience them in order to subsequently win redemption in the form of acknowledgment that his or her suffering is a sign of virtue and has exchange value in the political economy of suffering. The contradiction at the heart of such melodrama is that even as it condemns suffering it reinscribes and naturalizes, even sometimes enjoys and celebrates it. The work of Saidiya V. Hartman has been crucial to our understanding of how empathy and the recognition of the humanity of the other is not necessarily always a positive force for liberation. In her discussion

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of abolitionist John Rankin and his description of how his identification with sufferers “made their sufferings our own,” Hartman notes that on the contrary to its supposed powers to remedy “the indifference of the callous,” empathy can also re-instantiate the objectification of the body since it reduces the body to evidence of humanity and subordinates what the body of the other feels to what the onlooker feels. Analyzing how the abolitionist imagines his white body in the place of the slave’s black body, she writes, “in making the other’s suffering one’s own, this suffering is occluded by the other’s obliteration.”41 This substitution of the self for the other, Hartman notes, can also occur in part because of the spectral character of suffering, its elusive quality. Moreover, if we cannot really know the suffering of the other without substituting ourselves for the other, Hartman suggests, perhaps this is due to a “racist optics in which black flesh is itself identified as the source of opacity, the denial of black humanity, and the effacement of sentience integral to the wanton use of the captive body.”42 Though migrants are not enslaved, like slaves, they are often considered anonymous, disposable, and fungible. Like slave bodies, the spectacle of suffering migrant bodies on display sometimes provides what Hartman calls “enjoyment,” a sense of pleasurable possession that can soften or efface the violence of the economic and political systems that undergird their conditions of existence. Empathy and enjoyment blur what Hartman calls the “uncertain line” between the truth-confirming witness and the fascinated spectator or voyeur.43 Like Scalabrini before him, Rigoni constructs his relationship to migrants as one of a compassionate religious leader. Under the Scalabrinian mission, his shelter provides a measure of protection to migrants, yet in his essays and poetry Rigoni almost always positions himself less as a protector and more as a witness or a friend who feels his equal’s pain: I have tried to be their ears, eyes and hearts. Sharing their hopes, dramas and tears, their suffering from failure and exclusion, their dream for a homeland which can provide their daily bread, I found myself many times celebrating a liturgy without rules, where the rituals were born from the tales of these people on the road. These celebrations were at times silent ones, where sobbing was the background music for a mystery which transcends us all. At other times, the tears of mothers or children, broken by hunger or profound wounds to their dignity caused by corruption or rape, became the holy water for a baptism or blessing.44

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While the Scalabrinian shelters dispense food and clothing, offer consultations with a doctor, and provide room and board for at least three nights, it is the emotional fusion with migrant suffering on which Rigoni repeatedly focuses. Compassion and empathy, the ability to feel with the other, is offered as evidence of Christian humanity. In Rigoni’s poetic equation, just as the body of Christ becomes the communion wafer, and his blood becomes the communion wine thanks to the miracle of transubstantiation, the migrant tears become the holy water, which places the migrant in the position of Christ-figure, who suffers and is sacrificed for us all. The limbo of the empathizer that Patrick Anderson eloquently describes as “caught between the desire-to-feel and the failure-to-be” is thus resolved by the symbolic fusion that takes place when priest and migrant commune in the rituals of the Catholic Church. Rigoni metaphorically reformulates his experiences with migrants into the series of rituals, the liturgy, that channel what Anderson calls “the anxious desire to feel with, for, and as another” into a celebration that reminds participants of Christ’s ability to embody perfect empathy, according to Church doctrine, an empathy that led to self-sacrifice for humanity.45 Empathy, as Anderson, Hartman, and Lauren Berlant among others, reminds us, can sometimes obscure its object and erase socioeconomic inequality in a rush of egalitarian sentiment.46 Rigoni’s emotional identification may not entirely erase the stark socioeconomic inequalities between himself and the migrants he serves and writes about, yet his empathy creates the illusion of closing the gap between his privilege and the lack of privilege possessed by those he refers to as his “buddies” [cuates]. The minimization of that gap in turn can lead to the construal of suffering, both by migrants and by their empathic advocates, as part of a necessary, redemptive process of virtuous sacrifice for a universal, homogeneous humanity. In a few instances, Rigoni seems well aware of how uncertain the line between witnessing and voyeurism can be, particularly in his discussion of images of the train. As the epigraph from The North Becomes the South used to introduce this chapter indicates, much recent fascination with Latin American migration journeys revolves around the struggles of undocumented migrants, mostly Central Americans, who travel north on freight trains. Thousands of images of migrants who stand or sit atop freight trains—clinging to the sides, leaping between cars, standing arms outstretched as if crucified against the outside wall of a boxcar—have now been circulated via internet, print journalism, documentary film, and have been recreated in productions of theater and dance.47 Los Angeles Times

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photographer Don Bartletti, for example, won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in feature photography for what the newspaper called “his memorable portrayal of how undocumented Central American youths, often facing deadly danger, travel north to the United States.”48 Bartletti and many other photographers from around the world have produced dozens of images of amputees who have lost limbs in train accidents or assaults, images that often highlight the horror of the loss rather than the ability to recover. In El Norte, Rigoni criticizes some journalists, such as the one who bemoaned “it’s not worth it anymore” [italics in original] upon learning that there would be no images of a train leaving Tapachula and perhaps no images of amputees either.49 Such journalists, he writes, conceive of the shelter as a zoo or a circus where they can gather exotic images of migrants “crossing on rafts, barefoot, clambering up freight trains, showing their limbs truncated by the steel guillotine of the train” before moving on and leaving the migrants and migrant advocates alike “behind the bars of the forgotten.” Such journalists, he continues, view the migrants as animals, like the lioness hunting a gazelle on a television show. “Please, it’s a circus spectacle, like the games in the Colosseum” [italics in original] the voice of the narrator objects, identifying the same phenomenon that we call a “spectacle of suffering,” a body in pain at the center of public attention.50 Yet Rigoni himself, for the cover of El Norte, the very book that makes that accusation, chose an image, by photographer Juan de Dios García Davish, of a section of a freight train traveling through the jungle loaded with migrants, many on their feet, precariously balanced on the rounded tops of cars and on the sides of the locomotive, holding on to iron pipes for support. The cover photo of Rigoni’s first book, Reflections, also taken by García Davish, similarly displays a photographic image of the top of a train crowded with migrant bodies: since these cars have level tops, however, almost all the passengers can sit rather than stand. Both images nevertheless display bodies in discomfort: the brightness of the light, the lush green jungle surround, and the fact that many migrants have covered their heads with caps, or with their shirts if they lack caps, indicates that the heat must be brutal. In an essay published in the Scalabrinian magazine Migrantes, which is distributed in Scalabrinian shelters to workers and to migrants themselves, Rigoni offered an apology for using photos of the train for his book covers. He lamented that perhaps he had inadvertently given the mistaken impression that he approves of migrant travel

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by freight train. Moreover, he expressed regret that his work has contributed to the association of Mexico with the freight train as a form of migrant transport: “We’ve made the freight train, with its bunches of people hanging all over the place, an image of folklore that we’ve exported to the whole world.”51 Rigoni’s change of heart regarding the use of this image indicates an ironic appreciation of the seductive dangers of melodrama. As he reflects upon his own use of the sensationalist train image, it is as if his current self winks at the reader at the expense of his formerly naïve self, who like the journalists he mocks was also attracted to shocking images that provoke pleasure in the ordeals of others. Yet Rigoni’s selfreflection on the implications of migrant representation does not extend to his poetry. That same issue of Migrantes, consisting almost entirely of Rigoni’s writings and featuring a cover photo of the barefoot priest conversing with migrants in front of his shelter, concludes with a poem that we would argue exoticizes migrants and conceives of them as creatures from a premodern past come to haunt a modern, or even postmodern, world.

“I Have No Face” Reprinted from Reflections, “Un amigo moreno” [A Dark-skinned Friend] assumes the voice of a male migrant who in ten stanzas of free verse admonishes a presumably white, male, nonmigrant listener in Mexico or the United States whom he addresses as “amigo” that he is no criminal and that he will overcome all barriers to migration. We analyze the poem here, not as the work of a professional poet, but for the glimpse it provides into the staging of migrants by an important migrant advocate: Friend A stranger speaks to you Someone who passes by your side And you look at him with indifference Almost a bothersome mosquito. Te habla un desconocido Alguien que pasa a tu lado Y tú miras indiferente, Casi mosquito molesto.

In the poem’s first stanza, the lyric voice is that of the migrant, who reads the look of his interlocutor as a diminishing glance at a tiny animal, not a

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human being. By the third stanza, however, the migrant turns the tables, scoffing at “your great nation” as “a space that has been reduced to a nutshell.”52 Rigoni’s lyric voice appropriates the voice of the migrant, supposedly offering readers insight into migrant self-perceptions, but actually offering us insight into how the author thinks migrants see themselves and into how he himself sees migrants: I have no face: Humanity is my features. I do have many names: Dark-skinned, wetback, illegal And for wanting to work the soil Some consider me a criminal.

No tengo rostro: La humanidad son mis rasgos. Nombres sí tengo muchos: Moreno, mojado, ilegal… Y por querer labrar la tierra Unos me creen criminal.

I don’t have a credit card nor did they give me email; the path is my home, the bridges my airplanes.

No tengo credit card ni me dieron E-mail; la vereda es mi casa, los puentes mis aviones.

Rigoni-as-migrant believes that others see him as faceless and nameless, except for the insults hurled at him. Moreover, the migrant has no credit card or email, the symbols of global postmodernity that define First World identities. Homeless, no access to modern transportation such as airplanes, he is a creature from the past, a visitor from a premodern era devoid of contemporary technology. The poem’s last lines suggest, however, that such a premodern, “natural” creature may triumph over the barriers erected by the First World “friend” to the north: I am a bird who flies above and a worm that slithers underneath… You will always find me on the other side.

Soy un pájaro que vuela por arriba y gusano que se desliza por debajo… Siempre me encontrarás al otro lado.

The migrant survives and triumphs, in a sense, because of his prehuman, animal-like qualities: He can crawl like a worm or fly like a bird. It is the very qualities that exclude him from modernity and make him anonymous that mysteriously allow him to elude capture. Actually, while credit cards are not common among migrants from rural areas, many migrants have Facebook accounts and cell phones that receive email. Some migrants use

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their cell phones to take snapshots and shoot short videos that document their journeys. Depicting the migrant as a creature from another era, however, implicitly explains why he has only his calloused hands to offer the official who requests a passport, as if the migrant’s essential nature somehow prevents him from acquiring the technology of a globalized world and the documentation required by modern global bureaucracy. By constructing them as members of a premodern racialized species, “A DarkSkinned Friend” naturalizes migrants’ suffering. Moreover, the appropriation of the migrant’s voice as the lyric “I” of the poem, like the gesture of going barefoot, once again walks the line between the truth-confirming witness and the fascinated spectator/voyeur who plays at inhabiting the sufferings of others. The supposed anonymity of migrants is stressed in this poem, as in much cultural production about them. Not only Rigoni’s poetry, but also his prose stresses: “He has no name or identity; today he is Pedro, tomorrow he is Paco…his place of origin could be Honduras or Guatemala, El Salvador or Nicaragua, Mexico or Colombia.”53 Lamenting that migrants are often considered a faceless, nameless mass, Rigoni relates that he was very moved during a visit to a mound on the Tijuana–San Diego border to commemorate those unidentified individuals who died attempting to cross the border.54 The trauma of anonymity, according to Rigoni, even accounts for some migrants’ ethically questionable behavior: Given this context, we can understand the lies, the half-truths, and the false identities. In any event, for the authorities and for his homeland that exiled him he is a faceless nobody. One name, then, is the same as another; one identity can be switched for another: I am always clandestine. Here we are reminded of the psalms of exile, for example, by the persecution of the innocent and the injustice suffered by the poor.55

Yet Rigoni himself compounds the practice of anonymizing migrants by usually referring to those whom he cites as simply “undocumented migrant” or by the country, gender, and location and year of interview, as in “Nicaraguan girl in the Cañón Zapata, Tijuana, 1986.”56 What is the function of the repeated insistence on the supposed evil of the migrant’s alleged lack of a singular identity, even while simultaneously reinscribing that anonymity? One might interpret the reinscription of anonymity as an attempt to individualize and humanize the migrant, to call our attention to the fact that he or she is in fact someone with an individual identity.

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And to a certain extent, that does seem accurate. Yet we would argue that there is also a second consequence of the insistence on migrant anonymity: the more anonymous migrants are, the easier it is for them to epitomize embodied suffering, as if their material existence were no more than a vessel for pain. Particularly in “Informal Liturgy,” the article excerpted from Reflections and published in English, Rigoni makes suffering come to life through an emphasis on its embodied experience: tears, sweat, hunger, thirst, beatings, rape, and death are dwelled on as central to undocumented migrant life. The article, like the book from which it is excerpted, offers a pseudo-anthropological typography of different categories of migrants (“the undocumented” “the refugee” “the displaced”) and describes a variety of migrant “rituals,” as if migrants constituted a primitive tribe under scrutiny by an old-fashioned First World anthropologist aiming for objectivity. Yet in fact, under the guise of anthropological analysis, like Scalabrini before him, Rigoni writes melodrama. In addition to many vivid accounts of migrants’ physical torments, Rigoni details the migrants’ psychological pain: the loneliness of the migrant journey; the homesickness; the supposed feelings of unworthiness that migration engenders; the torment of separation from family, particularly from mothers, who he fuses poetically with the home country as the motherland; and the supposed piety of the victim-migrant: They seem defeated at times, when they come to our shelters. Even their clothes have worn away, revealing their vulnerable skin, covered with fungus that goes from their toenails to their groin, and if they don’t have scars from being attacked, they have bruises from falls or beatings. Out of instinct and compassion we ask them why they want to keep on going, and if they wouldn’t be better off going back. They simply look up at the sky and answer: God willing we will make it. He can open all doors.57

The words in italics are attributed in a footnote to “Undocumented migrant in Tijuana, Baja California, 1988.”58 What is missing from this account and others like it in the essay that paint an exaggeratedly pitiful, even grotesque, picture of a generic, mostly male, anonymous migrant is the positive experiences and emotions that also shape migrant experience: a sense of adventure, of solidarity, of pride in one’s ability to survive adverse circumstances, of being able to help provide for one’s family. The

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migrant in Rigoni’s writings is often no more than an object of pity, a tragic melodrama hero in a Manichean world.

Even Without Legs One significant deviation from his standard depiction of the migrant-astragic-hero must be noted. In Reflections, Rigoni recounts the story of a Salvadoran amputee in a wheelchair who visited the shelter, pushed along in his chair by a friend. The Salvadoran tells Rigoni how in the moments after he saw that his legs had been sucked under the wheels of the train, he was about to throw his head under the wheels to kill himself. But his friend lunged at him to keep him from committing suicide. In Rigoni’s account, the friend is depicted as a figure of noble self-sacrifice who realized that solidarity was more important than materialistic ambition: “That friend who to date remains without a name, was also a foreigner, from a neighboring country, Honduras; he risked his life to save a truncated stump, according to our logic. He left his trip toward the north, losing an opportunity, and chained himself to a wheelchair that simply carries a friend, a brother.”59 The noble self-sacrifice, such as the one undertaken by the nameless friend in Rigoni’s account, is one of the hallmarks of melodrama, particularly melodrama involving the disabled. Rigoni’s account brings to mind, for example, the first Mexican drama to stage the plight of migrants, They Who Return [Los que vuelven], by Juan Bustillo Oro. Written in 1932, the drama takes place in the United States during the Depression and includes some of the same tropes that contemporary migrant melodrama relies upon, namely a train and a disabled character as an object of pity. An elderly couple searches for an offstage character, their migrant son Pedro, who has lost his right hand in an industrial accident. Because of their refusal to abandon their search for their son, they endure various humiliations, including being thrown out of their daughter’s home by their villainous gringo son-in-law, who has them deported back to Mexico. The father, Chema, learns that his son may be on a train full of deportees headed south and decides to follow the train route into the Mexican desert, in hopes of finding him. While camping out in the desert, the father learns that his son has committed suicide by throwing himself under a train. “Not everyone can take it!” [¡No todos son aguantadores!] a character known only as Lame [Cojo] tells Chema.60 After Chema confirms that his son’s body—beheaded by the train and missing a hand—is indeed mixed in among a mass grave full of

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bodies that are to be burned, he becomes so distraught that he essentially commits suicide by provoking a soldier to shoot him. The son’s missing hand and crushed head become a powerful absent-presence in the work, a symbol of the labor power and the masculinity that has been tragically lost to the capitalist empire to the North. Like Pedro, Rigoni’s disabled, suicidal Salvadoran would be reduced by others, to use Rigoni’s words, to “a truncated stump,” a victim of soulless materialism. Pedro, however, has no savior friend: his parents, while martyrs to his plight, arrive with the timing of tragic melodrama, not in the nick of time but instead too late to save him. By contrast, Rigoni’s version of the Salvadoran’s testimony ends with an affirmation of the value of life and sensual pleasure beyond wage-earning capacity: “Today I am here to tell you that even without legs I can kiss my wife, caress my children, spread the Word…”61 The happy ending to this narrative constructs a positive alternative identity for the disabled that refuses traditional markers of masculinity, particularly earning power. Rigoni thus contests stereotypes of male wheelchair users as feminized victims and recognizes the disabled body as more than a site for the production of pitiful or freakish spectacles. Othering of the disabled has been thoroughly critiqued by many scholars of performance and disability, including Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Petra Kuppers, and Moeschen. As we discuss in detail in Chapters 3 and 5, however, working-class disabled men nevertheless continue to find themselves objects of discrimination and pity.62 Rigoni resists the pitying gaze when he recrafts melodrama so as to refashion the tragic disabled figure into a subject whose identity as victim (though only through the extreme sacrifice of another) can be redeemed and reconstituted as a survivor.

Migrant Shoah In The North Becomes the South, published two years after “Informal Liturgy” and Reflections, Rigoni at times moves away from melodrama as a narrative technique. Much of the book recounts in a matter-of-fact tone the history of the establishment of the Scalabrinian presence in the United States and around Mexico, in seminaries and shelters. When he describes his own relationship to migrants, however, Rigoni once again turns sentimental. Perhaps the most extreme examples of the melodramatic imagination at work in the book are in the poems compiled at the end of the volume, particularly one titled “Our Forgotten Shoah” [Nuestra Shoah

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olvidada] that employs free verse to compare the experience of undocumented migration to the Jewish Holocaust. After five stanzas of conventional images of migrants as “a human river,” “the open veins of Latin America” (echoing Eduardo Galeano’s title for his de-colonial history of the region), and “dispensable mouths,” this sixth stanza introduces the poem’s central symbol, migration as Holocaust: As in the Shoah of yesterday there are trains and wagons and also rafts, rickety boats, and buses. And there are vultures in all kinds of uniforms. Como en la Shoah de ayer hay trenes y vagones además balsas, pateras, y camiones. Y hay buitres de muchas [sic] uniformes.63

The image of migrants as Holocaust victims at the mercy of “vultures” reduces both the Holocaust and the migration of Latin Americans to melodrama, overlooking the more structural causes of violence in favor of a Manichean division of the world into good victims and evil villains. The “Nazis” of the migrant Holocaust are presumably the corrupt officials, including immigration officials, freight train workers, and members of various police forces, hence “uniforms,” who extort bribes or assault migrants along their journey. The image of migrants-as-Holocaust refugees relies yet again on melodrama’s Manichean division of the world into good victims and evil villains, with the Nazis deployed once again as one of the most extreme emblems of evil in Western civilization. Rigoni’s metaphorical equation of migrants and Jews, corrupt officials and Nazis, also constructs a protagonist who is virtuous because he has suffered unjustly, though often for a just cause, one of the classic tropes of social reform melodrama. But of course, despite the structural and direct violence they face, there is still an element of agency in the migrants’ decision to resort to travel by freight train, a luxury that Jews did not enjoy when they were herded, with far more open coercion, into train cars and taken to concentration camps. The next four stanzas continue the comparison between migrants and Holocaust refugees through references to camps and barbed wire, walls, and the infamous number “six million,” alluding simultaneously to World

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War II concentration camps and contemporary migrant detention centers, Holocaust victims, and contemporary refugees. The next-to-last stanza brings the poem back to Latin America with a haphazard list of South American, Central American, and Mexican food and drink—pupusas, tacos, tortillas, arepas, and tequila—explicitly interpreted for the reader as “symbols of pain and nostalgia/and also of fiesta.”64 This romantic lament for lost traditions conceives of migration, which in fact is often circular, as one-way travel involving permanent loss. Despite the reality of Latinx communities around the world that reproduce and replenish their personal relationships and native cultures in new locations, the poet dwells on the supposed anguish present even within moments of celebration, invoking a stereotype familiar from Mexican ballads in which macho men drown their sorrows in liquor to forget the pain of their misfortunes. The poem’s final stanza switches from third person to first person and apparently alludes to Rigoni’s own experience as a migrant advocate: I contemplated them one day as they bathed on my shore: I asked them for a ride as a stranger among buddies. They boarded me onto a train and even now my path continues with them. Los contemplé un día pasar bañando mi orilla: Les pedí un aventón como extranjero entre cuates. Me subieron a un tren y mi camino sigue aún con ellos.65

The fraternal embrace connoted by the word “cuates,” which we translate as “buddies” for want of a better equivalent, suggests an egalitarian relationship between two social equals. But in fact, while Rigoni may be free to board the freight train with the migrants he is also free to board the presidential plane to travel unencumbered around the world. And he acknowledges as much in the prose section of the book, where he allows that despite his commitment to migrants, his suffering is not in fact commensurate with theirs. It is as if when Rigoni enters the realm of poetry he allows the intensity of his emotion to erase the intellectual knowledge of the social distance between himself and migrants. In Rigoni’s writings, villains are usually individuals rather than economic or political systems. Despite references to the “vultures” along the

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journey, and repeated references to the migrants as innocent, helpless victims, little responsibility is assigned for their predicament. On the contrary, in his latest writings Rigoni criticizes other migrant-rights advocates who he says go too far in blaming the government, specifically the Mexican National Institute of Migration (INM), for all violations of migrant human rights. He argues that it is contradictory to call on the Mexican government to relinquish control over migration yet at the same time hold it responsible for guaranteeing migrant safety. He points the finger away from Mexican and Central American governments by denouncing the structural violence of U.S. capitalism: Are corruption and violence only those associated with drug trafficking and civil wars? Why isn’t the condition that has left millions of people in the streets, without jobs, unable to pay skyrocketing mortgages for their homes, and losing their homes without any chance of saving them as a result of the financial bubble that was in the making the U.S. for years and burst leaving a situation that still has not been solved? Why, I ask, isn’t this called violence?66

Despite the many individual, albeit mostly anonymous, victims whose suffering Rigoni details in heart-wrenching detail, the perpetrators of the crime remain nebulous. Instead, Rigoni changes the subject, turning any potential accusation away from Mexican authorities, as if all of Mexico were simply a victim of its more powerful neighbor to the north. Rigoni implicitly chastises other shelter directors and migrant care advocates who have been outspoken in their criticism of the government: The service to truth and to freedom, which is essential to human rights defenders, demands from us that we remain silent, that we abandon the public forum and seek those places where nobody sees or knows us, listen to the lament of the oppressed and remain with them.67

Yet Rigoni himself continues to build his own authority by writing, publishing, and granting interviews, following the Scalabrinian tradition of working within the established political system of the host nation-state. As we have discussed, Rigoni diverges from his nineteenth-century predecessor in that he, however briefly, reflects upon his own role in the mediatization and commodification of migrant suffering. As we show in the following chapters, while migrants themselves also circulate displays of their own suffering, they usually do so from far less privileged vantage points.

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Charismatic Figures, Empathy, and the Aura of Authenticity Like Scalabrini before him, and like Olga Sánchez Martínez and Father Alejandro Solalinde after him, Rigoni displays empathy as part of an appeal to an audience of potential supporters to view him as an authentic leader in the field of migrant care. All four leaders derive their charisma in part from how well they can demonstrate that their empathy is sincere and model that fellow-feeling for readers and spectators, showing us how we might also empathize with migrants by supporting the shelters’ efforts with labor or donations. In depicting migrants, for instance, as anonymous premodern creatures of nature or as victims of a Holocaust, Rigoni both suggests ways that we might feel for migrants and models his own depth of feeling. As E. Patrick Johnson reminds us, authenticity is a trope that can be constructed to accumulate cultural capital, yet the fact that it is constructed does not necessarily make it fake or duplicitous.68 Nevertheless, the melodramatic convention of sometimes disguising moral identities (the good guy looks like a bad guy, or vice versa) until a final reveal has shaped spectators’ imagination and trained us to interrogate apparent sincerity, to look for disguised identities. A charismatic advocate can raise suspicions among some: Is this really a virtuous, selfless rescuer, or someone with a hidden, self-serving agenda? In the next chapter, we show how Martínez and Solalinde stake out positions as authentic defenders of migrant self-help and migrant rights, respectively, in different ways casting themselves in more radical rescuer roles than Rigoni, with his emphasis on migrant care. Sánchez and Solalinde both collaborate and compete, not only with Rigoni, but with many other charismatic migrant-rights activists in Mexico, whether church-affiliated or secular. There are differences in gender, nationality, social class, and political perspectives that contribute to a wide variety of styles and strategies among migrant-rights activists. We focus on Sánchez and Solalinde for how they contrast not only with Rigoni but also with each other. As a woman and a layperson with little formal education who nevertheless adopted a religious persona, Sánchez demonstrates how melodramatic tropes can be reworked to create and deploy an aura of authenticity as a rescuer in a public arena that has traditionally been closed to women who are not sex workers: the street. With little or no support from Rigoni or other Catholic Church leaders, Sánchez cast and performed

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herself as an angelic character that accorded herself the right to venture out into the streets of Tapachula in an effort to self-fund her upstart shelter for migrants who become disabled during their journey. Solalinde, another founder of an upstart shelter for migrants, resembles Rigoni in how he can enjoy the privileges of male gender, higher social class, and high level of education; yet his open denouncement of local, state, and national political leaders has led to the creation of a radical style of rescuer that we argue casts him as a potential martyr of violence. All four leaders—Scalabrini, Rigoni, Sánchez, and Solalinde—in a sense cast themselves yet are also cast by forces beyond their own control. In Chapter 4, we analyze in detail the process of casting and of what we call casting competitions. For now, keep in mind that spectators to melodrama function within a horizon of expectations mandated by the codes of the genre itself. The genre itself imposes consequences unintended by the individuals who attempt to trade in it to their advantage in the political economy of suffering: it has the potential to win certain benefits and further positive social change, yet it can also accidentally backfire. If someone is identified as a virtuous figure, for instance, spectators will begin to seek out a villain. If someone seems to be a powerful rescuer, the rescued may then be perceived as almost completely powerless. The complexities of well-intentioned-yet-constrained charismatic figures or impoverished migrants who resist victimization yet may adopt less-than-noble survival strategies exceed the melodramatic imagination. In Parts II and III, we intentionally muddy the waters, considering not only the vulnerabilities of rescuers, but also how other character types who may appear familiar and predictable—saintly mothers and tragically disabled fathers, innocent children and rebellious adolescents,—both conform to and yet sometimes defy the expectations imposed by melodrama, not by turning out to be the diametric opposite of what they seem, but by complicating their character’s performances so as to break out of the genre’s normative strictures, or at least bend them in surprisingly subversive directions.

Notes 1. Some of the most prominent examples of cultural production that feature undocumented migrants riding freight trains include the fictional films Sin Nombre (dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2009) and La jaula de oro [The Golden Dream] (dir. Diego Quemada-Diez, 2013); the documentary films De

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nadie (dir. Tin Dirdamal, 2005), Which Way Home (dir. Rebecca Cammisa, 2009), The Beast (dir. Pedro Ultreras, 2010), and The Invisibles (dir. Marc Silver, 2010), a series of four short documentary films coproduced by Amnesty International and the Mexican actor Gael García Bernal; the journalistic narrative Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother, by newspaper reporter Sonia Nazario, an adaptation and extension of her Pulitzer-Prize-winning series of articles for the Los Angeles Times (September 29–October 7, 2002). See also Ultreras’s nonfictional narrative, La Bestia: La tragedia de migrantes centroamericanos en México [The Beast: The Tragedy of Central American Migrants in Mexico] (Mesa, Arizona: Hispanic Institute of Social Issues, 2012) and Alejandro Hernández’s fictional narrative, Amarás a Dios sobre todas las cosas [Thou Shalt Love the Lord thy God Above All] (Mexico City: Tusquets, 2013). In theater see Hugo Salcedo, El viaje de los cantores [The Crossing] (Madrid: Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana, 1990). 2. The most well-known example of such a massacre to date is the mass execution of 72 migrants in San Fernando, Tamaulipas in August of 2010. For an account of the massacre that attempts to individualize each of the victims, see Alma Guillermoprieto, ed., 72 Migrantes (Oaxaca de Juárez, Oaxaca: Editorial Almadía, 2011). This massacre, however, involved migrants who traveled by bus rather than by train. 3. For an extended discussion of the railroad rescue scene in United States early sensation melodrama, see Amy E. Hughes, Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 118–154. While the railroad rescue scene did not circulate as widely, if at all, on Mexican theatrical stages as it did in the United States, train melodrama did circulate in Mexico through Hollywood film. As early as 1905, the silent film western melodrama The Great Train Robbery (dir. Edwin S. Porter) was screened in Mexico City. See Carl J. Mora, Mexican Cinema: Reflections of a Society, 1896–1988 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 8. The construction of railroads in late nineteenth-century Latin America is often said to have symbolized modernity and progress, the triumph of technology over backwardness, of state control over vast territories. Yet the potential for, and reality of, disorder on and around the train was also there almost from the start, as the railroads soon became sites of labor disputes, common crime, and social upheavals such as the Revolutionary War and mass migration to the United States. See John H. Coatsworth, Growth Against Development: The Economic Impact of Railroads in Porfirian Mexico (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1981). On life in and on top of trains during the Revolutionary War (1910–1920), see Elena Poniatowska, Las Soldaderas: Women of the Mexican Revolution (El Paso: Cinco Pinto Press, 1999);

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5.

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John Mraz, Photographing the Mexican Revolution: Commitments, Testimonies, Icons (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012). On the many Mexican songs about migrating by railroad, see María Herrera-Sobek, Northward Bound: The Mexican Immigrant Experience in Ballad and Song (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). The Jesuits also operate a significant network of migrant shelters in Mexico and offer a variety of services for migrants through the Servicio Jesuita a Migrantes (SEJEMI). We are not making any claims, however, about the leadership style of the Jesuit shelters, or of any of the other fifty or so shelters around Mexico where we did not conduct fieldwork. In fact, our participant observation in a Guadalajara drop-in center that later became a shelter, FM4 Paso Libre, also known as Dignidad y Justicia en el Camino A.C., helped us to distinguish melodramatic from nonmelodramatic leadership style, precisely because of how FM4’s leadership attempted to depersonalize migrant care and study transit migration with great attention to structural issues, as evidenced by their reports, which offer meticulous social contextualization of individual migrant narratives. See Migración en tránsito por la zona metropolitana de Guadalajara: actores, retos y perspectivas desde la experiencia de FM4 Paso Libre, Guadalajara, Mexico (October 2013); El desafio de transitar: vivir en la ciudad para las personas migrantes en Guadalajara, Guadalajara, Mexico (August 2016); Travesías migratorias: testimonios de vida en torno a la migración y la solidaridad, Guadalajara, Mexico (November 2017); and Sin lugar en el mundo: desplazamiento forzado de mujeres por Guadalajara (November 2017). We take the terms “melodramatic imagination” and “melodramatic mode” from Peter Brooks’s landmark study, which defines melodrama as more than a genre, as a “mode,” or way of apprehending experience. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (London: Routledge, 1995). Rohan McWilliam, “Melodrama and the Historians,” Radical History Review 78 (September 2000): 75. Saskia Sassen makes this point succinctly in “Organized Religion in Our Global Modernity,” PMLA 126, no. 22 (2011): 455–459. Religion is actually on the rise in modernity, Sassen argues: …“in our current global modernity the state has withdrawn partly or fully from state spheres through deregulation and privatization, and other forces are ascendant, among them organized religions,” 455. For more specific analysis of the significance to Latin American migrants of religious practices, including

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9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

some practices in shelters, see Jacqueline Maria Hagan, Migration Miracle: Faith, Hope, and Meaning on the Undocumented Journey (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959). Goffman’s seminal work deploys the terms “character,” “scenes,” “acts,” “scripts,” and “audiences” to analyze performance in everyday life in theatrical terms. We attempt to make this model more dynamic with the addition of the concepts of casting competitions and corrective casting. Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, “Italian Immigration to America: Observations (1887),” in For the Love of Immigrants: Migration Writings and Letters of Bishop John Baptist Scalabrini (1839–1905), ed. Silvano M. Tomasi (New York: The Center for Migration Studies of New York, 2000), 5. All the English citations of Scalabrini come from this translation of his works. Because some of the translations are rather loose, however, we have included the Italian original in endnotes. “l’altra [la Religione] consolando di care speranze il dolore disperato degli infelici.” Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, “L’emigrazione italiana in America. Osservazioni,” in Scalabrini e le migrazioni moderne: scritti e carteggi, eds. Silvano Tomasi and Gianfausto Rosoli (Turin: Società Editrice Internazionale, 1997), 9. Ibid., 3. Scalabrini, “Italian Immigration,” 27. “Ora è manifesto che un simile stato di cose, deve condurre insensibilmente quegl’infelici ad un’indifferenza spaventevole in fatto di religion e ad un materialismo che abbruttisce.” Scalabrini, “L’emigrazione italiana,” 30. Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, “First Conference on Italian Emigration (1891–1892),” in For the Love of Immigrants, 87. “Dentro mi suona tuttora dolorosamente la voce di un povero contadino Lombardo, venuto due anni or sono a Piacenza dalla estrema valle del Tibagy nel Brasile, per chiedermi a nome di quella numerosa colonia un missionario. ‘Ah! Padre, mi diceva egli con voce commossa, se sapesse quanto abbiamo sofferto! quanto abbiamo pianto, al letto dei nostri cari moribondi, che ci chiedevano costernati un prete… e non poterlo avere! Oh Dio! Noi, no, non si può più vivere, non si può più vivere cosi!’” Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, “Prima conferenza sulla emigrazione,” in Scalabrini e le migrazioni moderne, 86. Scalabrini, For the Love of Immigrants, 3–5. Scalabrini, “Italian Immigration,” 12. “Così le idee di patria e di nazionalità non si spengono al di là dell’Oceano, ma si rafforzano pel contatto continuo con maestri, religiosi e sacerdoti, che hanno comuni coi coloni i santi affetti verso Dio, verso la Chiesa e verso la patria.” Scalabrini, “L’emigrazione italiana,” 16.

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16. Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, “Italy Abroad. Second Conference on Emigration (1898),” in For the Love of Immigrants, 107. “…pochi delinquenti che si annidano tra loro come serpe tra I fiori.” Scalabrini, “L’italia all’estero. Seconda conferenza sulla emigrazione tenuta in Torino per L’Esposizione di Arte Sacra, 1898,” in Scalabrini e le migrazioni moderne, 122. 17. Scalabrini, “Italy Abroad,” 111. “[…]; e lo seguitano quei mali lungo il viaggio, spesso disastroso, e lo accompagnano al suo arrivo in luoghi infestati da terribili malattie, ne’ lavori a’ quali si sente spesso disadatto, sotto padroni fatti disumani o dalla bramosia insaziata dell’oro, o dall’abitudine di considerare il lavoratore come un essere inferiore; e si aggravano que’ mali sotto i mille agguati che la malvagità tende loro in paesi stranieri, di cui ignorano la lingua e i costume, in un isolamento che è spesso la morte del corpo e dell’anima.” Scalabrini, “L’Italia all’estero,” 126. 18. Most scholarship on reform melodrama is focused on nineteenth-century Britain or on the United States. See Marc Baer, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Anastasia Nikolopoulou, “Historical Disruptions: The Walter Scott Melodramas,” in Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre, eds. Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 121–143. Also, for work focused on melodrama in social performance in England, see Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–1885 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Lydia Murdoch, Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006). On reform melodrama in the United States, see Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992); Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); and Hughes, Spectacles of Reform. 19. Alessandro Manzoni, I promessi sposi: storia (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1923). For a fascinating account of mutual influences between Victorian authors and Italian authors such as Manzoni, see Alesssandro Vescovi, “Dickens and Alessandro Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi,” in The Victorians and Italy, eds. Alessandro Vescovi, Luisa Villa, and Paul Vita (Milan: Milano Polimetrica, 2009), 151–168. In the same volume see also Rita Severi, “The Italian Influence in the Plays of Charles Dickens,” 169–180. 20. Juan Domingo Argüelles, “Prólogo: Edmundo de Amicis en el corazón de los lectores,” prologue to Edmundo de Amicis, Corazón: Diario de un Niño (Mexico City: Editorial Océano, 2001), 9–22. The novel was so significant to Mexican popular culture that the nation’s largest private art collection, the Soumaya Museum in Mexico City, prominently displays a first edition of Corazón in a glass case for visitors to admire, and perhaps

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21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

for older visitors to indulge in nostalgia for the literature of their youth. The boy protagonist Marco got a new lease on life when Isao Takahata directed the animated series Haha o Tazunete Sanzenri based on de Amicis novel. The 52 episodes, lasting 25 minutes each, were aired in Japan between January 4, 1976 and December 26, 1976. Renamed just Marco, the series was broadcast in Spanish, Portuguese, Euskera, Valencian, and Catalan, becoming an instant success in Spain and Latin America. In 1977, a full-length animated movie was released under the lachrymose title of Marco: Mom, Don’t Go! [Marco: No te vayas mamá!]. See https://www. animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=436. “Levati!… Sei tu, eroico fanciullo, che hai salvato tua madre.” Edmondo De Amicis, Cuore (Mantova: Corraini Editore, 2000), 214. Scalabrini, “First Conference,” 87. “Lo confesso non mai come allora mi augurai la vigoria dei miei 20 anni, non mai rimpiansi come allora l’impossibilità di mutare la croce d’oro del Vescovo in quella di legno del Missionario, per volare in soccorso di quegli infelici, veramente infelici, perchè agli altri pericoli si aggiunge per essi quello di cadere nell’abisso della disperazione.” Scalabrini, “Prima conferenza,” 86. Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, “The Emigration of Italian Workers (1899),” in For the Love of Immigrants, 133. “…eroi che vanno ad evangelizzare popoli barbari.” Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, “L’emigrazione degli operai italiani,” in Scalabrini e le migrazioni moderne, 147. Charles Borromeo (1538–1584) was a sixteenth-century cardinal and archbishop of Milan who was canonized in 1610. He was known for his reforms, including raising the level of education of clergy and improving the level of services to the poor. See Giovanni Pietro Giussano, The Life of St. Charles Borromeo, Cardinal Archbishop of Milan (London and New York: Burns and Oates, 1884). In Manzoni’s I promessi sposi Borromeo appears as a heroic saintly figure who inspires a conversion for the good in the novel’s mysterious nefarious force known only as The Unnamed [l’Innominato]. Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, “The Parliamentary Bill on Italian Emigration,” in For the Love of Immigrants, 46. “Che fare pertanto? Se carità, uguaglianza, fraternità non sono vane parole, bisogna pure, amico mio, tentar qualche cosa, per sottrarre que’ miseri a tante e sì acerbe aventure.” Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, Il disegno di legge sulla emigrazione italiana: osservazioni e proposte,” 2nd ed. (Piacenza: Tipografia dell’Amico del Popolo, 1888), 32. Sheila C. Moeschen, “Suffering Silences, Woeful Afflictions: Physical Disability, Melodrama, and the American Charity Movement,” Comparative Drama 40, no. 4 (Winter 2006–2007): 433–454. Scalabrini, “The Emigration of Italian Workers,” in For the Love of Immigrants, 135. “Sì, o signori, dov’è il popolo che lavora e che soffre, ivi è la

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29.

30.

31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

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chiesa, perchè la chiesa è la madre, l’amica, la protettrice del popolo e per esso avrà sempre una parola di conforto, un sorriso, una benedizione.” Scalabrini, “L’emigrazione degli operai italiani,” 149. Alba Zizzamia, A Vision Unfolding: The Scalabrinians in North America, 1888–1988 (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1989); Mary Elizabeth Brown, The Scalabrinians in North America (1887 –1934) (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1996); Peter R. D’Agostino, “The Scalabrini Fathers, the Italian Emigrant Church, and Ethnic Nationalism in America,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 7, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 121–159. The Scalabrinians operate migrant shelters in Tijuana, Nuevo Laredo, Tapachula, Tecún Umán, and Guatemala City. The number of countries where the Scalabrinians operate is listed in Annuario Scalabriniani 2014 (Rome: Casa Generalizia, 2014), 7. Víctor M. Espinosa, “El ‘Día del emigrante’ y el retorno del purgatorio: Iglesia, migración a Estados Unidos y cambio sociocultural en un pueblo de Los Altos de Jalisco,” Estudios Sociológicos 17, no. 50 (1999): 375–418. The shelter was built with the support from the German Catholic charity Misereor and a ten-thousand-dollar donation from a Scalabrinian parish in California. Following the success of this facility, the Scalabrinians opened a second shelter in Ciudad Juárez in 1989 and a third one in Nuevo Laredo in 2006. Flor María Rigoni, El Norte se vuelve sur: 30 años de presencia scalabriniana en México (Tijuana: Congregación de los Misioneros de San Carlos; A.M.A.C. Impresos, 2010), 41–45. Ernesto Rodríguez Chávez, Salvador Berumen Sandoval, and Luis Felipe Ramos Martínez, “Migración centroamericana de tránsito irregular por México: Estimaciones y características generales,” Apuntes sobre Migración no. 1 (July 2011): 4. Fabiola Martínez and Gustavo Castillo, “Fracasan 75% de intentos de migrantes de CA por llegar a EU,” La Jornada, April 19, 2013, 46. For more information on the network of shelters in Mexico see Guillermo Candiz and Danièle Bélanger, “Del tránsito a la espera: el rol de las casas del migrante en México en las trayectorias de los migrantes centroamericanos,” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 43, no. 2 (2018): 277–297. Rodolfo Casillas, La trata de mujeres, adolescentes, niñas y niños en México: Un estudio exploratorio en Tapachula, Chiapas (Mexico: Comision ´ Interamericana de Mujeres; Organizacion ´ de Estados Americanos; Organizacion ´ Internacional para las Migraciones; Instituto Nacional de las Mujeres; Instituto Nacional de Migracion, ´ 2006), 181. Era como si tuvieran amortiguadores. Estaba en las nubes. “¿Los regalaste?” “Sí, se los regale a un migrante nicaragüense que tenía llagas en los pies.”

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38. Flor María Rigoni, “Informal Liturgy of the Migrant Journey: An Essay on the Expressions, Gestures, and Rituals of the Undocumented and Refugee Community from Central America to the North,” Migración y Desarrollo (First Semester 2008): 159–177; Flor María Rigoni, Reflexiones en el camino del migrante: Expresiones, gestos y rituales del pueblo indocumentado y refugiado de Centroamérica hacia El Norte (México: Porrúa, 2008); and El norte se vuelve sur: 30 años de presencia scalabriniana en México (Tijuana: Congregación de los Misioneros de San Carlos; A.M.A.C. Impresos, 2010). 39. One part of the Toy Story video game encourages children to imagine themselves as rescuers of orphans on a runaway train. With the help of the cowboy Woody, they can save the children from the clutches of the evil Dr. Pork Chop and help foil Pork Chop’s plan for world domination. 40. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination; Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology and Modernity, 1860–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 41. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 19. 42. Ibid., 20. 43. Ibid., 23–25. 44. Rigoni, “Informal Liturgy,” 159. 45. Patrick Anderson, “I Feel for You,” in Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Mutations, eds. Lara Nielson and Patricia Ybarra (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 88–90. 46. Lauren Berlant, “Introduction: Compassion (and Withholding),” in Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, ed. Lauren Berlant (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1–14. 47. Mónica Hoth, Martina y los hombres pájaro (Mexico City: CONACULTA, 2003) and Miguel Ángel Gutiérrez, Emiliano y el tren al inframundo (unpublished manuscript, 2013) was staged in one of Guadalajara’s largest and most prestigious theaters, the Teatro Degollado; Ana Paula Uruñuela first choreographed a short (15-minute) dance piece, “La Bestia,” in 2012, then in 2014 expanded it to an hour and restaged it with co-sponsorship from Amnesty International and the Mexican government. First staged in Guadalajara, “La Bestia” then toured Mexico City, Puebla, and the western migrant route cities of Tepic, Mazatlán, and Culiacan. See reviews by Ana Elena Puga, “Emiliano and the Train to the Underworld [Emiliano y el tren al inframundo] dir. by Miguel Ángel Gutiérrez, and: The Beast: Stories that Migrate, Stories with Faces [La Bestia: Historias que migran,

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49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

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historias con caras] by Ana Paula Uruñuela.” Theatre Journal 67, no. 3 (2015): 523–527. Don Bartletti, “2003 Pulitzer Winner—Feature Photography,” Los Angeles Times, September 19, 2014, https://www.latimes.com/visuals/ photography/la-ph-pulitzer-enrique-html-htmlstory.html. In 1905, the Mexican railroad system connected Tapachula to the rest of Mexico. In 1998, the system was privatized and divided into four main systems operated by four companies: Kansas City Southern de México, Ferromex, Ferrosur, and Terminal del Valle de México, or Ferrovalle. In the restructuring that followed the privatization, the passenger rail service was abolished. In November 2005, just after the system that connected to Tapachula, Ferrosur, was severely damaged by Hurricane Stan, the company was sold by its owners, Grupo Carso and Grupo Financiero Inbursa, both companies controlled by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú. The companies were sold to Ferromex, which is owned by Grupo México. As of this writing, repairs on the line connecting Tapachula to Arriaga, the northernmost town in the state of Chiapas, are still ongoing. Rigoni, El Norte, 70. Flor María Rigoni, “Actualidad Migratoria,” Migrantes (April–June 2013): 16. “Hemos hecho del tren carguero con sus racimos de gente colgándose por todo[s] lado[s] una imagen de folclor que hemos exportado en todo mundo.” Rigoni, “Un amigo moreno,” Migrantes (April–June 2013), 26, lines 13– 15. Translations of Rigoni’s poems are ours. Rigoni, “Informal Liturgy,” 160. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 174. Ibid., 174, note 37. Ibid., 174. Ibid., 174, footnote 34. Rigoni, Reflections, 52. Juan Bustillo Oro, Tres Dramas Mexicanos: Los que vuelven, Masas, Justicia S.A. (Madrid: Editorial Cenit, 1933), 73. “Hoy aquí estoy para decirle que aun sin piernas puedo besar a mi esposa, acariciar a mis niños, anunciar la Palabra…” Rigoni, Reflections, 52. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Petra Kuppers, “The Wheelchair’s Rhetoric: The Performance of Disability,” TDR 51, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 80–88; and Moeschen, “Suffering Silences.” Rigoni, “Nuestra Shoah Olvidada,” El norte, 101, lines 19–22. Rigoni, “Nuestra Shoah Olvidada,” El norte, 101, lines 35–38. “Pupusas, Tacos, y Tortillas/Arepas y Tequila/son símbolos de dolor y de nostalgia/y también de fiesta.”

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65. Rigoni, “Nuestra Shoah Olvidada,” El norte, 102, lines 43–46. 66. Flor María Rigoni, “Externalizing Problems with Regards to Migration in the Case of Mexico,” in Safe International Migration: Proceedings of the Second and Third International Forums on Migration and Peace (New York: Scalabrini International Migration Network, 2013), 173. 67. Rigoni, “Externalizing Problems,” 172. 68. E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

CHAPTER 3

Rescuers as Saints and Martyrs in Contemporary Migrant Melodrama

Sometimes in order to do good you have to make people feel pity… But it does bother me because it’s like I told you, “the photo of pain.” Olga Sánchez Martínez, founder and director, Shelter of Jesus the Good Shepherd for the Poor and the Migrant. Migration is a human fact. Migration is a movement as natural as breathing. As pure and natural as breathing. And we should see in our migrant brothers the person of Jesus. In reality we are all migrants. Father Alejandro Solalinde Guerra, founder and director, Brothers on the Road Shelter.

On the other side of the same Guatemalan borderland city of Tapachula that houses Rigoni’s Bethlehem Shelter, a second migrant shelter founded and directed by a very different sort of charismatic figure—a layperson and a woman—has become a significant node in the Mexican network of such facilities. While images of Bishop Scalabrini greet visitors to Bethlehem Shelter, visitors to Sánchez’s shelter, Jesus the Good Shepherd for the Poor and the Migrant [Jesús El Buen Pastor del Pobre y el Migrante] must first pass under a portrait of Saint Teresa of Ávila hung over the doorway in the front office before entering a compound that includes several dormitories, a classroom, a chapel, a kitchen, and a simple bakery. Also known as Teresa of Jesus, the sixteenth-century nun was the first woman honored (belatedly in 1970) with the title of “doctor of the church.” An extended illness led Saint Teresa to embrace a mystical life of prayer while still managing to reform the Carmelite order and found © The Author(s) 2020 A. E. Puga and V. M. Espinosa, Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37409-9_3

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seventeen convents around Spain. Sánchez’s own history of serious illness and mystical recovery through prayer fueled her admiration for the saint (Fig. 3.1). A photo display covering an entire wall in the Good Shepherd shelter’s administrative office documents Sánchez’s efforts as a healer of disabled migrants, including several photos of migrants showing off their new prosthetic legs, as if the surrogate limb had miraculously made them whole again. Doña Olga (b. 1959), as most people refer to her, has none of Father Rigoni’s cultural or material capital. She is not supported by the Church structure, has just a few years of formal education, and has not published any books or articles on migration. Yet she has risen to prominence on the strength of her highly publicized efforts on behalf of sick and disabled migrants, efforts propelled by a strong religious faith, a warm personality, and a sense of devotion to the sick. Though she is a Catholic layperson, not a nun, Sánchez’s manner of dress—a white blouse with a long white skirt and white sandals, with white rosary beads strung around her neck, hair pulled back in a bun—costumes her as an agent of medical care and as spiritually self-identified with purity and goodness. As related numerous times, on the shelter’s website authored by her daughter and in the accounts of print journalists and documentary filmmakers, her life story reinforces an image of Sánchez as a guardian angel to the poor and “afflicted,” to use the nineteenth-century term that best seems to capture the depiction of migrants in such narratives. Sánchez’s persona as a saintly figure is further reinforced by the focus of her shelter on helping the migrants most severely injured by accidents during their journey north to the United States, particularly migrants who suffer amputations of limbs after they fall from, or are pushed off, freight trains. Because of her reputation, even after the freight train stopped running out of Tapachula in 2005, hospitals and other shelters from areas of the country further north on the migrant route have continued to send injured migrants back to the Good Shepherd shelter for care during their recovery. Sánchez won Mexico’s highest human rights honor, the National Human Rights Award [Premio Nacional de Derechos Humanos], in 2004, two years before Rigoni. In 2009 she traveled to San Francisco to receive the Dalai Lama award for “Unsung Heroes of Compassion.” Admiring profiles of her have been broadcast on CNN and have been published in the popular Mexican news magazine Proceso, among other places. She was featured prominently in Sonia Nazario’s journalistic narrative Enrique’s Journey and in both Pedro Ultreras’s documentary film, La

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Fig. 3.1 Olga Sánchez Martínez, founder and director of shelter Jesús el Buen Pastor, with photo of Saint Teresa de Ávila, Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico (Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa, August 8, 2009)

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bestia [The Beast], and in the accompanying Ultreras book with the same title. In a description typical of the journalistic coverage of Sánchez, Ultreras describes her as a model of “selfless humanitarian labor.”1 His summation of her relationship to the migrants she cares for is typical of much media coverage of migrant shelters in its recycling of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century views that construct the undocumented, particularly the disabled undocumented, as completely helpless while endowing the rescuer with almost all the power in the relationship: “Doña Olga is like a mother for these people, and in many cases, their only hope.”2 By casting Sánchez as a mother figure to her charges, Ultreras implicitly puts the migrants in the position of children, though in fact most of them are adults with children of their own. To describe Sánchez as “their only hope,” moreover, implies that they are completely dependent on her and have no other resources, such as family, friends, their own efforts, or access to other charitable organizations. Ultreras’s depiction of an all-versus-nothing power relationship between rescuer and rescued in migrant shelters is not unusual. The title of CNN correspondent Karl Penhaul’s report, for instance, explicitly elevates Sánchez and denigrates the migrants: “Olga Sanchez [sic], a guardian angel to dirt poor, mutilated migrants.”3 We study Sánchez’s performance of self, and her casting and staging of migrants, through the accounts of others as well as through our own interviews with her and through our participant observation during two months of volunteering in her shelter, in January of 2013 and again in January of 2014. First, we look closely at the account of Sánchez’s life story written by her daughter Aracy Matus Sánchez (as told to her by her mother) and posted on the shelter’s website.4 Next, we use our own participant-observation research to scrutinize Sánchez’s efforts to help fund her shelter by claiming the space outside of several local Catholic churches to sell baked goods, sometimes accompanied by disabled migrants or by her disabled adoptive son.5 And finally, we analyze the efforts of one of the disabled migrants in her shelter to avoid the role of the “afflicted” as he sells donuts to raise funds for the shelter and for himself. In the first part of the chapter, we analyze Sánchez’s self-casting as what we call an “angel in the streets”: a woman who ventures out into the public sphere in order to provide charity. As an angel in the streets, Sánchez attempts to pull both herself and her shelter up by its bootstraps yet, paradoxically, also trades in what she calls “the photo of pain,” her shorthand term for spectacles of suffering. In the second part of the

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chapter, we contrast Rigoni’s and Sánchez’s performances of rescue with those of Father Alejandro Solalinde, who empathizes with migrants neither as a barefoot buddy in the style of Rigoni, nor as a saintly survivor of illness-turned-healer in the style of Sánchez, but as a martyr of violence, or more precisely a potential martyr who mirrors the violence that the undocumented face with a willingness to risk falling prey to violence himself. Martyrdom, we argue, is the biggest trade of all in the political economy of suffering: an exchange of heroic suffering to the point of death in hopes of posthumously alleviating the suffering of others. We show that like Rigoni, Sánchez grapples with the contradiction between the supposed technological progress of modernity and the persistence of injustice and inequality in Mexico today. Yet if Rigoni bridges the gap between himself and the migrants he serves through empathic identification, imagining himself a migrant or a migrant fellow-traveler in his poetry, Sánchez instead closes the distance between herself and migrants by casting herself as capable of a saintly kind of empathy that arises from a fusion between her own past experiences of physical suffering and those of the migrants she serves. As with Rigoni, displays of empathy help establish Sánchez as an authority on migrant suffering. Rigoni, a foreign-born priest with a master’s degree in philosophy and theology from The Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome who hobnobs with politicians and intellectuals, performs his empathy through poetry, ritual, and costume; Sánchez, a Mexican woman from rural Chiapas with a third-grade education, also adopts a manner of dress that signals empathy, but primarily makes her empathy tangible by relating her own experiences of embodied suffering. On the shelter website’s biography, Sánchez’s accidental amputation of part of a finger, her repeated episodes of serious illness, and her extreme poverty are all recounted to let the reader know that Sánchez does not need to imagine or study migrants’ pain: she has lived through and physically felt the very same pain. Her pain precedes theirs; they in a sense experience what she already experienced. The question of whether any two experiences of pain lived by separate individuals can ever actually be identical is not addressed by the narrative. On the contrary, readers are led to imagine that Sánchez can somehow mysteriously, like Christ or like a saint, heal by the virtue of her own perfect empathy, intimate in its embodiment, requiring no mediating rituals. By analyzing these four

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migrant advocates as rescuer characters who shaped (Scalabrini) and continue to shape (Rigoni, Sánchez, and Solalinde) how many people understand and relate to migrants and migrant rights, we illuminate some of the drawbacks of migrant melodrama as well as its progressive potential.

Sánchez’s Life Story: Melodrama Meets Hagiography At least three narrative patterns are interwoven in Sánchez’s life story, as related by her daughter Aracy Matus Sánchez on the shelter’s website and by Sánchez herself in numerous interviews: the story of the young girl who defies the odds by migrating from the countryside to the city to work as a maid and rises to prominence; the hagiography of the pious, mystical woman, like Saint Teresa of Ávila, whose own illness imbues her with the power to heal others, even in defiance of male Church authorities; and the tale of the compassionate rescuer of an abandoned disabled orphan, which fuses Sánchez’s public persona as founder and director of the shelter with her private persona as a wife and adoptive mother. The supporting characters in Sánchez’s biography are migrants, reduced to portraits of the physically mutilated and psychologically shattered, the migrants she takes into her shelter and attempts to heal, migrants whose missing or mangled limbs make them deserving objects of charity, and by extension make her shelter deserving of charitable contributions. While our fieldwork confirmed for us that Good Shepherd provides valuable services, it also revealed how some of the shelter’s practices cannot help but reduce the disabled body to a spectacle of suffering, a spectacle that Sánchez sometimes avoids and sometimes accepts as a necessary evil. As anthropologist Ruth Behar notes in her groundbreaking 1990 analysis of the life story of a female Mexican street vendor, a life narrative reveals more than an individual’s experience: it reveals a culture and a social system.6 Building on Behar in an internet age, we argue that Sánchez’s life story—a narrative displayed on a website with more than 25,000 “hits,” a narrative often repeated in bits and pieces by Sánchez in published interviews with local, national, and international press—does even more than reveal a culture or a social system: it builds a transnational affective community that can mobilize international charity. We borrow the idea of a transnational affective community from film scholar Laura Podalsky, who uses it to explain the mechanism by which certain Latin American films make emotional appeals to First World audiences, enabling

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a kind of melodrama-fueled empathy that allows audiences to feel through rather than for others.7 In our analysis, we interpret the website life story as both a text and a performative appeal to empathy, focusing on how it is crafted so as to produce affective identification and response both from distant readers in other parts of the world and from readers who may also encounter the flesh-and-blood Doña Olga on the streets of their city. Both sets of readers are urged by the website text to show solidarity by depositing electronic contributions in the shelter’s bank account. Just as significant as Sánchez’s conception of herself, then, is her transnational audiences’ (local, national, and global) affective response to her construction as a character and to the character types, plots, and displays of suffering created for the migrants she assists. The more readers make contributions, the more the displays of suffering of Sánchez and of the migrants she assists rise in value on an online global marketplace. Matus’s account of her mother’s life scrolls down the screen in a string of fifty-two short paragraphs that repeatedly sound the themes of poverty, hard work, and illness in what she describes as the “surprisingly incredible” experiences of “a great woman and a model human being.”8 The narrative arc moves from rags to relative riches, the attainment of a measure of financial security and the establishment of a privately owned shelter for migrants. Born in 1959, Sánchez survives early poverty and deprivation, vividly conveyed by details such as an account of a meal composed of “one hard-boiled egg and three re-heated tortillas.” As a child she is sent to work as a maid for an uncaring family in Tapachula, but at the age of eleven runs away to Mexico City, where she eventually finds work for herself with a kind family that treats her more like an adoptive daughter than a maid: They sent her to the city of Tapachula to work, as a maid in a house where she slept on the floor, after a few months of working in that house, she decided to run away and head out for Mexico City with another minor. For a time, she went from job to job, because her bosses were bad and didn’t pay her. For several years, she was able to work in a home where they loved her and took good care of her, this allowed her to send money to her mother to support all her brothers and sisters and so avoid that they send the other younger siblings to work.9

The picaresque adventures of the poor girl who makes good, sometimes through marriage, sometimes through hard work and migration from the

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countryside to the big city, is the familiar plot of many Mexican popular films and telenovelas .10 Another significant theme in Matus’s account with roots in Mexican melodrama is female sacrifice for one’s family. For instance, in Emilio Fernández’s ever-popular 1949 film classic, Salón México, Mercedes selflessly dances with men for money in order to finance the private-school education of her younger sister Beatriz. The young Sánchez endures abuse from “bad” employers who make her sleep on the floor and fail to pay her but is eventually rewarded by finding a good family that treats her well and pays her enough to save her younger siblings from a similar fate. We point out the echoes with Manichean fiction not to question the truth of the facts of Matus’s account, but to point out how she arranges those facts in a plot that reinforces a Christian notion that has been taken up by popular melodrama and endlessly recycled in stagings of undocumented migrants and their advocates: sacrifice and suffering are redemptive. Intertwined with the story of her struggle for financial survival is the story of Sánchez’s battle with breakdowns in her health. She suffers three major episodes of illness: as a young child just seven years old, as an adolescent of eighteen, and as a woman of thirty pregnant with her third son. We extract the paragraphs that describe her illness from the rest of the narrative: At seven years of age she had an intestinal infection, due to lack of medications, and because of lack of money, this illness was complicated to the point of taking her to the brink of death. This provoked many health problems throughout her infancy and adolescence.11

*** When she turned eighteen years of age she suffered temporarily from blindness and dumbness, she lost a lot of her hair, and she came to weigh about thirty-five kilograms and she was in a coma for eight days. After she overcame this difficult test of health she confronted a very difficult decision. In the home where she had been working for years the bosses wanted to adopt her as their daughter and take her out of the country, something impossible to accept, since she could not imagine not being able to see her brothers and sisters and her mother. This made it necessary for her to return to the city of Tapachula.12

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*** Having relapses due to her health, she didn’t give up, even though on occasions she had to be hospitalized in the public hospital for several weeks. This motivated her to go to church (Catholic) and for a while she was a catechist. In 1990 a doctor diagnosed her with cancer and she found out that she was pregnant with her third son. The doctor told her that she would not be able to see her son grow up. For various days she kept the secret in her tormented heart and one day, depleted of strength, she went to church. When she arrived there, she knelt and began to pray, with all the anguish and fear she felt that she would not be able to see her three children grow. In her prayer she said the following: “They say God exists. Then why don’t you cure me? So that I can take care of my children.” And it was at that moment in her prayer that she also said: “I’ll make a pact with you God: Cure me and I will serve you.”13

The illnesses are recounted in a chronological progression from serious to almost deadly to a death sentence, a progression that builds suspense, as each obstacle appears more insurmountable than the last. The climax of the progression comes when Sánchez strikes her bargain with God, a moment that signals an abrupt transition from her old life as a wife and mother pushed by financial necessity to work as a small-scale vendor to a new life devoted to healing the sick. Such changes in life course as a result of direct communication with God are frequent in accounts of the lives of saints. One scholar of the autobiography and hagiography of St. Teresa of Ávila, for instance, divides Ávila’s autobiographical narrative into three parts: “old life” “mystical experience” and “new life.”14 Moreover, as in Ávila’s autobiography, Sánchez’s conversion experience follows an illness so intense that she falls into a coma. As in the hagiographies of many female saints, not just Ávila, but also early Christian martyr-saints such as St. Catherine, St. Agatha, and St. Lucy, to list just a few examples, Sánchez suffers terrible physical tortures—she goes blind and dumb, loses her hair, and becomes emaciated. Yet following the pattern of hagiography, her spectacular suffering only serves to bring her closer to God and make her an ideal witness to the suffering of others. Sophie Oliver writes of the lives of the early modern saints: “Abject embodiment is precisely what guarantees the martyr’s role as sacred witness.”15 Oliver argues that contemporary spectators would

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do well to adopt such an attitude toward contemporary victims of atrocity—rather than viewing them as dehumanized objects of pity. As Oliver and other scholars have noted, the spectacular suffering of the female body in pain requires an audience to appreciate how the martyred body proclaims God’s word, to admire the faith and stoicism with which the saint endures suffering, and to learn from her example to endure our own trials with greater fortitude. Matus’s version of her mother’s life reaches out to a contemporary audience presumed capable of appreciating suffering as a sign of a divinely inspired humanity. In her account, Sánchez’s suffering makes her a model witness to the suffering of migrants. And we in turn, as readers and spectators, become witnesses to her witnessing. One significant difference between Sánchez and the saints mentioned above, however, is that Sánchez is not a young virgin, but a mature married woman with four children. As her life story progresses, her health improves, and she goes on to dedicate her life to healing migrants, her status as wife and mother becomes part of the recurring theme of family sacrifice. Melodrama meets hagiography most vividly in the account of how Sánchez must spend time away from her husband and children in order to minister to sick migrants and build her shelter from the ground up—with help from the migrants themselves, who did much of the actual construction work. Sánchez overcomes the hardship of her early years, not to rise to fame and fortune, as in rags-to-riches melodramas, but to take on further self-abnegation and saintliness. Though she and her husband, a bookkeeper and owner of several small kiosks, later earned the means to live in comfort in a modest house financed by a government loan, they instead opened their home to the overflow from a local hospital that had no long-term care facility for victims of the train. Not long after her diagnosis of terminal cancer was proved false, or she was cured through divine intervention (depending on whether you take a religious or secular view of the fact that she did not die of cancer), Sánchez told us, she had a vision: “I saw myself as a little Olga dressed all in white.”16 From that moment on, she has worn only white clothing. Though she has no formal medical training, she provides first-aid to the injured and follow-up care to the patients in her shelter. In the years when the freight train still ran north from Tapachula, she would help pick up injured migrants from the side of the tracks and take them to the hospital, sometimes gathering severed limbs in hopes that doctors would be able to reattach them.

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An Angel in the Streets Improvising on the conventions of maternal melodrama, Matus details her mother’s work in the public sphere as an example of a kind of reverse maternal sacrifice, as if the time she spent outside of the domestic sphere were further evidence of her selflessness, not a selflessness for the sake of her family as in the usual domestic maternal melodrama plot, but a sacrifice of her family life for the sake of a public life. The underlying assumption is that in fact Sánchez would rather have been at home with her husband and children. Without speculating on Sánchez’s desires, it is worth noting that she fits neither of two longstanding Mexican female archetypes, neither the self-abnegating “angel of the home” nor the sexualized woman of the streets.17 By venturing out of the domestic sphere in an asexualized costume that announces a spiritual-medical mission, Sánchez instead embodies a third archetype that has been less explored in Mexican cultural studies, a path we might call “the angel in the streets,” the woman who exercises a capacity for charity and civic work in the public sphere, transferring the nurturing qualities that supposedly make her a good homemaker to the task of tending to others in a broader realm. Sánchez’s working-class background, status as a layperson, and lack of professional training, however, differentiates her from the nurses, teachers, nuns, and volunteers from an upper-class elite background who traditionally assumed the role of angels in the streets. Silvia Marina Arrom, in The Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857, details some of the earliest examples of such women, the members of religious orders such as The Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul and the Company of Mary, who staffed hospitals and established schools. As a literary example of this type Arrom refers to a character constructed by nineteenth-century Mexican novelist Manuel Payno: “The angelic Celeste in Payno’s El fistol del diablo is an unforgettable image of saintliness, floating through the city in drab garb to console dying soldiers during the U.S. invasion of Mexico City.”18 In Payno’s blend of realism and romantic fiction, Celeste is ultimately punished with a humiliating arrest, imprisonment under false charges, and the death of her parents.19 In twentieth-century melodrama, angels in the streets do not necessarily fare much better than Celeste. For instance, Rosaura (María Félix) in the 1947 film classic Río Escondido (dir. Emilio Fernández) fulfills her patriotic duty to accept a teaching assignment in a remote town, where she joins forces with the priest and the doctor to help the local villagers accept smallpox vaccinations, only to suffer a heroic

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death at an early age. Celeste and Rosaura are just two prominent examples from Mexican melodrama of women characters that devote themselves to the care of others in a public rather than a purely private sphere. While not as common as the heroine who tends to sick children or elderly relatives at home, the image of the angel in the streets is familiar enough from Mexican narrative, stage, and screen to be reactivated by Sánchezas-spectacle. Clad from head-to-toe in white with her rosary beads around her neck, Sánchez summons that image every time she publicly performs activities that claim a space for her in the streets of Tapachula.

Ángel Moisés: The Disabled Body as Proof of Authenticity The story of Sánchez’s adoption of a fourth son, whom she named Ángel Moisés, has its own section on the shelter’s webpage, a distinction that none of Sánchez’s other three children nor her husband has been accorded. While the link, titled “Fighting to Live,” is billed as the story of Ángel Moisés, born in 2007, it is in fact just as much a continuation of Sánchez’s story, presented as further evidence of her compassion as a mother combined with her heroic willingness to take on tasks that others might avoid. The link to Ángel features four photos: two as an adorable infant, one cradled in Doña Olga’s arms, and a more recent image as a toddler drinking from a sippy cup. The narrative informs us that he cannot see, nor hear, nor speak “very well” but offers humanizing details: he has a mischievous tendency to bite at times; he can throw his cup to the floor, like any infant. Ángel Moisés’s saga is related by Matus to the more general narrative of Sánchez’s migrant rescues: he is the biological son of an undocumented migrant who was beaten by her husband during her pregnancy. As a result of the beatings, doctors surmise, the child suffered brain injuries. After his mother left him in the hospital, no other institution or individual was willing to care for him, yet Doña Olga accepted him joyfully as “a gift that God sent to her home.” We are thus invited to admire Sánchez as a model of Christian charity, both as a healer of migrants and as an adoptive mother. By placing stories and photos about both the adoptive child and the migrant patients on the same website, the narrative implicitly associates the innocence and vulnerability commonly attributed to children, particularly disabled children, with the shelter’s patients. While this association may inspire compassion and move some potential contributors to donate to the shelter, it may strike

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others as manipulative and infantilizing of the adult patients. Moreover, it circumscribes both the migrants and the child as pitiful victims who embody virtue and deserve charity because of how much they suffer. In the 1990s, Sánchez begged in the streets for money to fill prescriptions for her patients. Sometimes she took the patients in wheelchairs with her to beg outside of churches. Then she got the idea of baking muffins, cookies, donuts, and breads to vend on their behalf and began to sell baked goods, sometimes in the middle of the street, hawking her wares to motorists as they paused at street lights. When accompanied by migrants in wheelchairs, she readily acknowledges, she gathered more contributions from passersby than when she would beg or sell on her own: “Sometimes in order to do good you have to make people feel pity… But it does bother me because it’s like I told you, ‘the photo of pain.’” The phrase “the photo of pain,” Sánchez explained, is a shorthand term that she first coined to describe the photos politicians like to take with her and her shelter’s patients. Those photos, she said, are nothing more than a tool that politicians use to demonstrate their compassion and further their election campaigns. She soon began to use the term more loosely to refer to any effort to benefit from any displays of migrant pain, including her own. While aware of the disadvantages of posing for photos of pain—what we call creating spectacles of suffering to embed in migrant melodramas and participate in the political economy of suffering—Sánchez described such transactions as a necessary cost of “doing good.”20 As disability scholars and melodrama scholars alike have noted, coding of the impaired body as nothing more than the epitome of pain, to create “affliction melodramas,” to use Sheila Moeschen’s term, can be effective in motivating generosity because it allows the able-bodied to display charitable empathy as a socially accepted response to pitiful spectacle. As Karen Wells notes, the onlooker who displays the socially correct response is then rewarded with occupying the position of a heroic rescuer rather than of an indifferent, cruel villain.21 In an internet age, he or she joins the transnational affective community created by all of those who click on the same link in order to donate funds to a cause that has moved them. Sánchez is aware that some see her positioning of herself next to the disabled as self-serving. Malicious gossip among Tapachula residents has it that she takes all the migrants’ earnings away from them to buy luxuries for herself and her family. In this revisionist version of her life story, the roles are switched, and the would-be saint becomes an evil ringleader of a gang of men with disabilities put out to beg or sell baked goods for

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the sole benefit of Doña Olga, her husband, and her children. We analyze the struggle over control of melodramatic performances, which we call “casting competition,” in detail in Chapter Four. For the moment it is worth keeping in mind that Sánchez’s life story, because it is also a public performance, is always subject to critical scrutiny and to some spectators’ attempts to flip an assigned role from hero to villain, from rescuer to exploiter. We turn now to two different examples of performances in daily life that demonstrate how difficult it is to refuse the “photo of pain”: at church one Sunday, when Doña Olga sold pastries accompanied by her disabled son; and on the streets with a disabled migrant from Honduras, Celso, who regularly ventured out from the shelter in a wheelchair to sell donuts. Both situations reveal how melodrama is sometimes constructed by others who encounter migrants and their advocates, regardless of whether or not the central “actors” seek or welcome it. When bodies are perceived as “afflicted,” when their disability is visible, others tend to view them as objects of pity and to weave a melodramatic narrative around them, limiting their agency to an expression of need.

Help Her! The sale of baked goods outside of churches on Sundays is one of Sánchez’s primary encounters with her local community (Fig. 3.2). Sometimes she attends a circuit of three or four masses at different small community chapels in a single day in order to return home with an empty “basket,” which in actuality is often a large plastic box, since old-fashioned baskets hand-woven out of natural fiber have become more expensive than plastic boxes. When Sánchez sells baked goods, she adheres to the same rules as her migrant sales staff: she sells each plastic bag containing five items—either muffins, assorted sweet rolls, or the big crunchy cookies called polvorones —for twenty pesos (about one dollar). She stations the plastic box filled with the bags of baked goods on a little metal stand just outside of the chapel door and sits inside during the mass, in the back row, where she can keep an eye on her merchandise. She participates in the mass, prays, takes communion, then after the service is over, she stands outside the door and offers her wares, assisted by either a migrant from the shelter or a volunteer worker. Often, during the announcements at the end of mass, the priest will ask worshippers to support her by purchasing baked goods.

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Fig. 3.2 Olga Sánchez Martínez, selling pan dulce outside of a chapel in Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico (Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa, January 19, 2014)

Over the years, church authorities have proved a source of both frustration and support of the effort to maintain the shelter. It was a supportive priest who first helped Sánchez find her calling by taking her with him to the local hospital to visit patients and by training her to teach catechism. She attends mass every day and says she prays as if in a close friendship with God. Yet within the Catholic Church structure, there is little room for women like Sánchez, women who feel a calling to serve yet are not willing or able to live in celibate seclusion. Moreover, since women are barred from serving as priests, even the most devoted nuns will inevitably hit the Church’s iron ceiling. As Sánchez tells it, one priest was so angered by her insistence on seeking alms for migrants in a conspicuous and symbolically charged location—outside of the historic San Agustín church, beside Tapachula’s central square—that he declared her ex-communicated and told her that he never wanted to see her in church again. Later, other priests and even the regional bishop proved more tolerant and supportive. Today several Tapachula priests can be counted on to promote the baked goods during their announcements, referring to it as “pan,” or

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“bread,” a word that has a biblical aura and functions as shorthand for the generic Spanish term for certain kinds of baked goods, “pan dulce.”22 One priest, Father Cándido Pérez, went so far as to suddenly end his sermon on how God has given us all the strength to do good in the world with an impromptu meditation on Doña Olga, her work with migrants, and her disabled son. It was Sunday afternoon, January 12, 2014, at the Capilla de San José de las Palmeras, an extremely modest chapel in a working-class neighborhood. The chapel consists of little more than a tin roof held up by cinder-block walls with rectangular spaces left unbricked for ventilation, a concrete floor, and two rows of benches cobbled together from rough wooden planks. Sánchez sat in her usual spot near the open back door, on the last wooden bench, with Ángel by her side in his stroller. A couple of electric fans kept the sweltering heat to a tolerable level. It was her fourth mass of the day, yet she had only sold half of the fifty bags of baked goods she had left with in the morning. As usual, Pérez, who most locals call Father Cándido, came down from behind the altar table at the front of the room to preach in the aisle between the benches filled with more than a hundred congregants, a decent crowd considering that the Christmas season had come to an end. God is with us from the moment of our baptism. We have that God-given strength. We have that spiritual grace, that spiritual grace, that grace of God to pass like Jesus through the world doing good. [Pause.] There is Olga.23

Pérez stretched out his arm out toward Sánchez and held the gesture. In the stroller next to her, Ángel sat with his head dropping loosely to one side, his eyes rolled back in his head. Though he was six years old, his frail limbs and undersized head made him look much younger, like a child of three or four. Some parishioners kept facing forward; others turned around in their seats to look at Sánchez and the child. Suddenly, to everyone’s surprise, Pérez broke the fourth wall to address Sánchez directly. PÉREZ. How many years have you been working with the immigrants? SÁNCHEZ. Twenty-four. PÉREZ. Twenty-four years.24

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Father Cándido shifted his focus back to the worshippers: We met her twenty years ago… She has to work a lot. She is with us selling us bread because through that bag of bread she is supporting the migrants. We think the government supplies the money, but no, to work. No, to work. For the love of our fellow man. [Long pause, extends his arm toward Ángel and holds it there.] Look, there is the boy. Look at how he is! That boy that they left at her house. There are parents who don’t want their children… [because] they have to take them to treatment. This is our mission as children of God, to pass through the world doing good. [Pause.] Help her! Buy that little bag of sweet bread. Some people don’t like bread. But you can buy it and give it away. You can give. Don’t be hard, don’t be cheap. You can share!25

Following the priest’s rousing endorsement, after the service, members of the congregation flocked to Sánchez and the volunteer who accompanied her just outside the back door of the church, quickly buying up the twenty-five bags of baked goods that she had left to sell. As they made their purchases, many of the parishioners stopped to chat and inquire about Ángel’s health. Up until that day, Pérez had usually restricted his remarks to a cursory announcement at the end of mass asking people to please note that Doña Olga and the shelter migrants, or the shelter volunteers, were selling baked goods and to please support their efforts on behalf of migrants, the poor, and the elderly. But that day, since his car had not been working, he had asked her for a ride from the third chapel to the fourth and had ridden in the front seat of the shelter’s van with Ángel’s loose limbs half-draped across his body. He asked Sánchez how the sale of cookies was going; she told him that there was still a lot of merchandise left to sell. In his effort to boost Sánchez’s sales, for what he saw as a good cause, Pérez created both an affliction melodrama and a migrant melodrama, one layered over the other. He provided what Moeschen describes as “a unique affective experience where spectators could ‘safely’ engage with physical difference while simultaneously visually and emotionally reaffirm their own sense of self.”26 As a kind of playwright, director, and actor, he cast Ángel as an impaired innocent in need of rescue by a Christian community, giving his spectators the opportunity to prove themselves part of the rescue effort, to be on the side of goodness in a Manichean world. And like the shelter’s website narrative, he implicitly fused the suffering

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of Ángel, a child with the perfect name to connote innocence and piety, with the suffering of Sánchez’s other charges, the adult migrants who some might otherwise suspect of begging for undeserved handouts or of stealing to pay their way—common accusations against Central American migrants traveling through Mexico. Pérez assured his audience that Sánchez and her migrants have suffered enough to deserve support. As is typical of migrant melodrama, the scene he crafted did not raise the more radical question of whether all migrants deserve food, shelter, and medical care; instead, it reassured potential supporters that these particular migrants, the ones like Ángel, under Sánchez’s wing, deserve support. Finally, he reinscribed the power imbalance between the dispensers of charity and the object of charity, the power imbalance between the offstage performers (the migrants) and the audience (the members of the congregation). The following day, Pérez mentioned to us that some people might suspect Sánchez of using her son as a hook to beg. But he didn’t see it that way, he said, offering a description of the body of the disabled boy as if it constituted proof of sincere intentions: “the way his arms and legs are all watery… I don’t think so.” In this logic, the authenticity of a body in distress vouches for the virtue of those who care for it and of those who display it. Because suffering is intangible, because it can only be appreciated through its outward manifestations, it might be difficult to conceive of it as a commodity. We contend, however, that suffering is often reified through melodrama, made concrete enough to exchange for positive affect, for money, or for acknowledgment of one’s humanity or of one’s human rights. In the performance directed by Pérez on Sánchez’s behalf, the spectacle of suffering Ángel was exchanged for material support for the shelter without the boy’s knowledge or consent. In the performances of disabled migrants who take to the streets of Tapachula to sell donuts and other pastries on their own, the exchange of suffering for affect and money sometimes takes place with their knowledge yet over their objections.

Celso: A Reluctant Victim Celso says he does not want to be an object of pity.27 When we met him, the Afro-Honduran undocumented migrant was a 31-year-old cook from San Pedro Sula who had worked a mean grill in a small restaurant. But like many heads of family who leave Honduras, he found that his

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salary didn’t cover his most basic expenses for his wife and three young children. He tells us that he doesn’t like to talk about the train-related accident in Veracruz that took the lower part of his right leg, below the knee, so we don’t probe for details. Selling donuts on behalf of the Good Shepherd shelter seemed to him like a good way to make a little cash and keep himself busy in between weekly sessions of physical therapy and the wait for a prosthetic leg to be provided by the International Red Cross (Fig. 3.3). He knew something about selling: When he was a boy, his older sister used to bake coconut bread and send him out into the streets to hawk it. His friendly manner and abundant physical energy had always made him an excellent vendor. Aside from his impressive capacity for work, however, he had few skills and only a primary school education. Celso told us that he doesn’t like for anyone to push his wheelchair, preferring to roll himself along “for exercise.” Since Tapachula sidewalks, with their missing manhole covers, cracked sidewalks, and high curbs, are impossible to navigate in wheelchairs, he rolls down a traffic lane in the street, amid the cars, cart peddlers, bicyclists, and dogs, balancing a large

Fig. 3.3 Celso, migrant from Honduras, selling donuts in Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico (Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa, January 7, 2014)

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plastic box that holds up to fifty jelly-filled donuts on his lap, left hand on the edge of the box, right hand on the wheel of the chair. People stop to stare at him, momentarily hypnotized by the riskiness of the balancing act. As we accompanied Celso on his daily rounds in January 2014, we witnessed his body navigating public space as both what Hughes would call a body-as-spectacle and a body-in-spectacle. In a city with few people of African origin, a black man is a rare sight. A black man in a wheelchair with a truncated limb wrapped in a standard-issue pink bandage meant to match lighter skin is a spectacular sight that arouses curiosity. Where is he from? What happened to him? (And when we accompanied him: Who are the two people by his side?) Celso was also in the spectacle of busy streets that defy easy passage for people with disabilities. The vulnerability of his body to further mishap, or even serious accident, as he balances the box and glides down the street at a steady clip, holds the kind of fascination that Hughes describes as the part of the attraction of actors and dancers in the spectacles of nineteenth-century stages plagued by unsafe conditions.28 Celso tried to sell most of his donuts while safely stationed outside the offices of the National Migration Institute (INM). What he didn’t sell there, he would sell on a two-mile-long route that included an outdoor marketplace and involved a number of repeat customers—the auto mechanics at the body shop, the fruit stand vendor, the half-dozen women who sell recently slaughtered chickens laid out on folding tables, the two women who sell the fruit juice mixed with water called agua fresca, and a host of others. Most customers remark that the donuts are tasty. And at five pesos per donut, even children can afford them. Celso also deploys some effective sales techniques. For instance, he always asks customers, “just one?” He points out that there are a variety of flavors available: pineapple, strawberry, and caramel. Some people then decide to buy two or three donuts. Sometimes he identifies the boss of a construction work crew and urges him to buy donuts for all of his workers. Sometimes the boss obliges. One technique that Celso never uses, however, is to try to win sympathy from others: He never refers to his injured leg or, in fact, to any personal problem. Most days, he sells all of the donuts. “I’m not embarrassed to sell, and I like to do it alone,” he tells us pointedly. He lets us tag along though, as long as we agree not to push his wheelchair or provide any assistance unless requested. Despite his best efforts, however, Celso cannot entirely control the staging of his performance. As he passes, one man comments: “They really

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are making you sell a lot of donuts today. That’s too much for you.” The fruit stand vendor, Don Pedro, tells us that he regularly buys from Celso because he feels sorry for him, though, he concedes, the donuts are tasty. Like others we spoke to along the route, he assumes that Celso’s capacity to earn a living has been irrevocably damaged, that his body is incomplete, that he is vulnerable to abuse. One woman in a small neighborhood store not only refuses to buy a donut, she belligerently condemns the shelter and Doña Olga, whom she accuses of forcing Celso out into the streets to sell donuts. She doesn’t believe us when we try to reassure her that the shelter never obliges anyone to sell, that the activity is purely voluntary. Doña Olga probably buys fancy cars with the profits from the migrant sales force, the woman surmises aloud. At times like this Celso quickly withdraws from the scene of conflict rather than engage any further and moves on to the next potential customer. What we gathered from this encounter, and others like it that we witnessed, is that when faced with a person with a visible disability, even today, some observers tend to confine the object of their gaze to the character type of melodrama victim-hero in need of rescue, helpless in the hands of exploitative villains. This kind of assignment of roles cannot always be resisted by the object of the pitying gaze, a gaze that lumps disabled children together with disabled adult men. In Chapter Five, we will analyze in more detail a group of men with disabilities who, like Celso, attempted to cast themselves in ways that corrected the castings of others.

Alejandro Solalinde Guerra It can take migrants several days to travel the 255 miles north from Tapachula to Ciudad Ixtepec: most combine walking around immigration checkpoints with riding the small buses known as combis to Arriaga, the town where the freight train starts. Then from Arriaga, it’s a twelve-hour ride atop a freight train that slowly worms its way to Ixtepec. Though it officially calls itself a city, “Ciudad” Ixtepec is actually a dusty town of 25,000 residents located on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the narrowest land route from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico and a center of east–west as well as north–south trade routes. Its strategic location brought nineteenth-century immigrant settlers from the United States, England, France, Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, and Japan, among other nationalities.29 In its heyday the town boasted eight hotels. But after passenger trains stopped running there in the 1970s, the local economy declined to

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the point where it is now primarily founded on services for a local military base and a university campus. Just one major hotel remains, along with a handful of smaller hostels and restaurants, one major grocery store, too many little bars to count, and no bookstores or movie theaters. Ixtepec’s more colorful neighbor to the south, Juchitán de Zaragoza, attracts many tourists to its marketplace. Romanticized in popular imagination by Graciela Iturbide’s famous photo of a woman carrying several iguanas on her head, Juchitán’s marketplace offers turtle eggs and iguana tamales sold by local women who sometimes still wear hand-embroidered huipil tops with floor-length skirts trimmed with lace. By contrast, tourists rarely visit Ixtepec, where less exotic Western dress and food prevails. With a burst of magenta bougainvillea here or a terracotta tile roof there to break up the monotony, most of the local architecture consists of plain concrete one- or two-story structures with paint fading and cracking under the strength of the brutal sun. In the absence of public trash cans, the streets are littered with plastic bottles and other refuse. Surrounded by a yard of untended almond trees, the little nineteenthcentury Catholic church on the town square is crumbling in disrepair. The square has been partially commandeered by skateboarding youth; other young men congregate on street corners to drink liters of Corona beer straight from the bottle. Some locals call their town “Tristepec,” a play on “triste,” the Spanish word for “sad.” In recent years, however, Ixtepec has garnered national and international attention because of Father José Alejandro Solalinde Guerra (b. 1945), usually known as simply Father Alejandro or Father Solalinde. After years of running a home for children in the region, Solalinde, who has a Master’s Degree in Family Therapy, was contemplating retirement at the age of 60 in 2005, when the vulnerability of the undocumented Central American migrants passing through town on freight trains first captured his attention. He began to go to the railroad tracks to meet the trains. At first, he simply offered the migrants food, but soon realized the need to protect them from assailants and kidnappers. Almost from the start, Solalinde did not limit himself to providing humanitarian assistance such as food and water. Unlike many other shelter directors around Mexico, he does not subscribe to the model of international aid first propounded by the Red Cross, which holds that humanitarian work must be politically neutral, above politics, or apolitical, a model with which some newer nongovernmental organizations such as Doctors of the World have broken. On the contrary, along with a small minority of shelter directors, such as Fray Tomás González Castillo in Tenosique,

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Tabasco and Father Pedro Pantoja in Saltillo, Coahuila, Solalinde has been at the center of a high-profile effort to promote respect for migrant human rights. Even before he formally founded and began to operate the Brothers on the Road [Hermanos en el Camino] shelter in 2007, he confronted local, state, and national authorities as he denounced mass kidnappings, rapes, and other violence against migrants. His effort was propelled by international human rights organizations, especially Amnesty International, as well as by local, national, and international news media. From both his home base in the Ixtepec shelter and during his wellpublicized travels abroad, Solalinde has construed migration and migrant advocacy as part of a larger transnational social movement that exposes the commodification of migrants as part of a relationship between organized crime, state corruption and violence, and globalized neoliberalism. He insists that migrants represent a force of resistance against the inequalities of access to transnational mobility and accumulation of wealth.30 We studied Rigoni’s performative strategies primarily through his writing and Sánchez’s primarily through her life narrative as written by her daughter, as well as her public performances of self in daily life. In Solalinde’s case, since he has published an autobiography Revelaciones de un misionero: Mi vida itinerante (2018) and a book of theological reflections El reino de Dios : Replanteamiento radical de la vida (2016) yet has also given many media interviews and been extremely active in other social performances—such as protests—on behalf of migrants, we analyze three elements of his activism: how sympathetic media and human rights advocates cast and “stage” him, how he has performed himself, and how he has cast and staged migrants. Not all of Solalinde’s activism relies on a melodramatic imagination—for instance, when he gathers migrants in the shelter and encourages them to share their migration experiences, or when he opens the shelter space to meetings with visiting migrantrights organizations. And he deployed a variety of different tactics to lobby Mexican members of congress for the 2011 reform that helped decriminalize humanitarian assistance to migrants.31 As with Rigoni and Sánchez, we find that while melodramatic imagination by no means infuses all of his performances, it does significantly inform his worldview and structure his appeals to spectators, in his case appeals not so much for charity but for activist solidarity. Potential martyrs of violence like Solalinde channel empathy and empathic suffering differently from how either Rigoni or Sánchez construct melodramatic performances. Yet like the egalitarian barefoot cuate performed by Rigoni or the saintly martyr-to-illness-turned-healer performed by Sánchez, the martyr of

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violence also participates in spectacles of suffering, structures migrant melodramas, and may function as an actor within them. Here we focus on how Solalinde embodies potential martyrdom in public performances, scrutinize how martyrdom intersects with melodrama, and explore how the martyr-archetype contributes to the transnational migrant-rights movement in which he participates. We intend our analysis to help denaturalize and evaluate the efficacy of this performative approach, which like Rigoni’s and Sánchez’s performances, does not necessarily result from a conscious strategy. Though Solalinde is not a scholar, some of his ideas about migration coincide with those of scholars who view migration as an autonomous process that cannot be controlled by nation-state policies. Theorists of the “autonomy of migration” argue that the very fact that migrants decide to escape intolerable political and/or economic conditions in their home communities constitutes evidence of their production of subjectivity and resistance to the inequalities and injustices of global neoliberalism. Rather than claim citizenship rights, the argument goes, migrants instead exercise them as if they already were citizens, thus demonstrating the limits of nation-state control over migrant bodies, their mobility, and their labor.32 They demonstrate the creativity, communication, self-organization, and cooperation heralded by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri as the hallmarks of a force capable of producing new subjectivities and transforming the world from an abyss of hierarchies and inequalities into something closer to a radical democracy.33 Solalinde infuses the “autonomy of migration” line of thought with Christian discourse and takes it even further, arguing that through the simple act of crossing national borders (without authorization) migrants represent a revolutionary potency. In interviews and public lectures Solalinde often describes migrants as a divinely inspired force for moral transformation, whether or not they view themselves as such: I am convinced that they are changing the world with their presence. From the viewpoint of God, they bring a mission. Maybe they are conscious of this. In their path, while they pass, they touch the politics, the economy and the consciousness of society. With their very presence, they are shaking indirectly and unintentionally, the structures of the institutions, such as the Church.34

Solalinde’s sense of migrants’ revolutionary potential extends to almost every element of cultural and social structures. The very act of migration

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itself, he contends, constitutes a protest against economic, political, social, and religious injustice: Their presence has a profound meaning here. In a peaceful, non-violent, silent manner, we reject the injustice of the economy, politics, society and religion. They do not critique this injustice directly, but indirectly their actions show that we are not OK, because there are no opportunities for a life of dignity. We who perceive this injustice are denouncing it, and we are bringing into the light these aggressions and violations of the rights of migrants. These legal complaints have awoken in the entire world the rejection of these violations and solidarity with the migrants. In this sense, and without intending to, they, the migrants, have begun a revolution and subversion of these things. Thus, the space where they are generating the transformations that are going to bring us into a more just and unified world is a social consciousness. Of whatever culture, politics, religion, gender, they are constructing a common denominator of humanity. It is they, the migrant people, who are the most vulnerable, without defense against the official power of governments that abuse them. In this manner, they, the migrants, trigger two forces. One is those who cause the suffering of the migrants: they hit, torture, abuse, exploit, extort, kidnap, and kill to make a profit. Meanwhile, the other force that arises is solidarity, the globalization of love.35

In Solalinde’s scheme, the Manichean division is clear: those who demonstrate solidarity with migrants participate on the side of goodness, “the globalization of love;” those who mistreat migrants are instruments of evil. Solalinde draws from Christian patterns of thought when he arrays global forces into dichotomies of goodness and evil, love and hate. In his elaboration of specific performances, as we shall demonstrate, those forces of good and evil are channeled into character types, plot lines, images, spectacles, and appeals for compassion that fuse Christian and melodramatic imagination.

An International Audience When Solalinde highlights migrant suffering, he has an international audience to whom to appeal for compassion. International anti-neoliberal globalization movements have welcomed him as a speaker at their demonstrations. During his travels to the United States and Europe, in addition to addressing Occupy Movement demonstrators in New York City and Boston, he has testified at the Inter-American Commission on Human

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Rights, met with members of Congress in Washington, DC and members of the European Parliament in Brussels. Latinx community leaders in Los Angeles and Chicago confer with him regularly. Central American activists know of him because together with Mexican activists who also participate in the U.S. migrant-rights movement, he has participated in at least four separate protest caravans that publicized the plight of Central American migrants and offered his shelter as a supportive space for several other caravans, particularly those led by Central American mothers seeking to publicize the disappearances and hoping to learn the fates of their missing sons and daughters. The caravans were one of the first stages upon which he began to perform himself for national and international audiences. Solalinde’s first caravan, in January 2011, involved only about 150 people, most of them migrants, along with a few protesters. In a performance of empathy, Solalinde tried to board a freight train together with the migrants and other protestors in order to highlight violence against migrants who ride the rails. Prevented by authorities from boarding the train, however, he and his fellow protesters, including activist leaders Elvira Arellano and Rubén Figueroa, walked and rode buses for twenty-four miles along the side of the railroad tracks from Arriaga, Chiapas to Chahuites, Oaxaca. In the second caravan, in July and August of that same year, Solalinde and the same activists joined forces with Fray Tomás González, director of a shelter in Tenosique, Tabasco named “La 72,” after the mass murder of seventy-two migrants in San Fernando, Tamaulipas in 2010. The caravan began in two parts: one part, led by González and Figueroa, left from Tenosique; the second part started in Guatemala and passed through Ixtepec, where Solalinde joined the group. The two parts of the caravan united in Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, passed through the city of Puebla, and ended their sojourn in Mexico City. Some five hundred people reportedly participated in the caravan, including Central American migrants, relatives of disappeared migrants, human rights activists, and members of nongovernmental organizations such as the Mesoamerican Migrant Movement, which is led by Figueroa, Arellano, Marta Sánchez Soler, and her husband José Jácques y Medina, a former member of the Mexican congress. In September of 2011, Solalinde also joined the Caravan Towards the South that was part of a Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity organized by Javier Sicilia, a poet who became a peace activist in the wake of the murder of his own son. A fourth caravan, “Opening the Doors to Hope,” organized by Solalinde together

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with Irineo Mújica Arzate and Estela Jiménez of the Coalición Humanitaria Internacional Pro-migrante, traveled from Los Angeles across the United States to Washington, DC in April–May of 2013. The caravan’s ostensible purpose was to promote immigration reform efforts that would decriminalize migrants, a goal that remains unfulfilled as of this writing. In general, however, all the caravans in which Solalinde participated functioned less as vehicles for attaining specific policy outcomes and more as mechanisms for generating publicity and for promoting a sense of shared purpose among activists in disparate geographical locations involved in discrete local organizations. Solalinde’s activism has been covered by many national and international news organizations, including CNN Mexico and Mexican CNN’s star interviewer Carmen Aristegui; major Mexican news agencies such as Notimex; newspapers including Reforma, Excélsior, and La Jornada, and major magazines such as Proceso, Gatopardo, and even Mexican Playboy. Outside of Mexico, Solalinde has received coverage from The New York Times, Le Monde, and Al Jazeera among others.36 Both documentary and fictional filmmakers have given him a platform. He appears on screen with the glamorous Mexican film star Gael García Bernal in Amnesty International’s series of four short documentary films, The Invisibles ; he appears in Pedro Ultrera’s The Beast, as do Rigoni and Sánchez. Yet he is the only one of the three shelter directors who has an entire documentary film devoted to him, The Shelter [El albergue] (2012), directed by Alejandra Islas. Moreover, he is the only shelter director to have acted, in a cameo appearance as himself, in a fictional film, La jaula de oro [The Golden Dream] (2013), directed by Diego Quemada-Diez. Some scholars, including us, have also been captivated by Solalinde. Anthropologists and specialists in International Studies have interviewed him for academic publications.37 Others have invited him to give talks, including South Texas College, The University of Texas at Brownsville, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Puget Sound, Northeastern Illinois and DePaul Universities in Chicago, Lehman College, Ithaca College, and Cornell University. In 2012, Solalinde was promoted as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize by the Mexican nongovernmental organization, Without Borders [Sin Fronteras], though as of this writing he has not won the prize.38 The aura of human rights celebrity that Solalinde has acquired, we would argue, is due not only to his relentless activism and articulate denunciations, but also to the personal risks he has undertaken on behalf

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of migrants and just as importantly, to his ability to dramatize and publicize those risks. “‘I can’t open a newspaper without reading about you. Your life is a telenovela!’” he says one of his superiors in the Catholic Church scolded him in an unsuccessful bid to get him to tone down his public profile, adding that he refused because he believes that public denunciation is the best way to fight for migrant rights and to defend himself against potential attacks.39 A series of violent events in Solalinde’s life story have fascinated national and international audiences: his forceful arrest and detention in January 2007, death threats in early 2008, an aborted attempt to burn down his fledgling shelter in June that same year, and more death threats in April–May of 2012, followed by temporary self-exile in Europe and the United States until July 2012. Solalinde’s success as an activist relies on making the personal dangers he has suffered, and continues to suffer, legible to an international audience while also effectively associating his suffering with the suffering of undocumented migrants. This strategy embeds him in the genealogy of a well-known Latin American archetypical character: the martyr of violence.40

“The Mexican Romero” The word “martyr” comes from the Greek root “martus,” meaning to witness. While the earliest Christian martyrs were witnesses to the life of Christ who sacrificed themselves for the sake of their religious beliefs, in its broadest sense the term has come to refer to any extreme suffering for the sake of a cause, whether religious, political, or both. The act of bearing witness, particularly bearing witness to social injustice, remains central to modern martyrdom in Latin America, where some of the most prominent martyrs have born witness to the experiences of the poor. The Christ-like figure whose witnessing comes at the cost of his or her life has been particularly powerful in Central America, where religious figures such as Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar A. Romero, the four churchwomen assassinated in El Salvador in 1980, the six Jesuit priests assassinated along with their housekeeper and her daughter in San Salvador in 1989, and the Guatemalan Bishop Juan Gerardi, who was assassinated in 1998, are considered martyrs by the Catholic Church and in the collective imagination. Romero was formally canonized by Pope Francis in 2018. Solalinde has been dubbed “the Mexican Romero” by some journalists and scholars, including some who claim that Central Americans have taken to calling him that. While we were not able to substantiate that Central American

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migrants refer to Solalinde as such, an internet search of “Solalinde” and “Romero mexicano” turned up eleven different journalistic articles and activist blogs in Mexico and the United States that repeat the sobriquet. In Solalinde’s biography, his coauthor Karla María Gutiérrez, strengthens the connection to Romero by repeating the opinion of Salvadoran documentary filmmaker Marcela Zamora that Solalinde is “a Romero of the migrants” and a statement by the influential Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martínez that his courage and faith reminded him of Óscar Arnulfo Romero.41 Moreover, an internet video of Solalinde speaking on a U.S. college campus shows that at least one scholar refers to him as “the Mexican Romero” as he introduces the priest to the audience.42 In the most widely circulated of the journalistic accounts, Emiliano Ruiz Parra’s article from the cultural magazine Gatopardo, an article that was later reprinted as a chapter in Ruiz’s book on contemporary rebels in the Mexican Catholic Church, the idea of martyrdom is related to witnessing: Risking his life, he [Solalinde] has shed light on the holocaust suffered by undocumented Central Americans in Mexico, who don’t matter. In Central America he became a legend, to the point of being referred to as “the Mexican Romero,” alluding to Óscar Arnulfo Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, El Salvador who was murdered by the dictatorship.43

Our aim is not to judge whether or not the title of “Mexican Romero” is an apt description of Solalinde but to explore what it means for him to be publicly identified with the Central American archbishop and his martyrdom. The Latin American theologian who has written most extensively on the phenomenon of martyrdom is Father Jon Sobrino, who was also a close friend of Romero’s and of the massacred Jesuits. In Witnesses to the Kingdom, Sobrino lists many ways in which martyrs strengthen Christianity: martyrs resemble Jesus; they embody and epitomize the martyrdom of entire peoples; they expose the deadliness of concentrated military, economic, and political power; through their love of the poor, they win their trust and love in return; and they express the redemptive spirit of resurrection in which a crucified God accepts his death in order to give life to others.44 From the perspective of a sociologist who is also a Christian activist, Sharon Erickson Nepstad coincides with much of Sobrino’s explication of martyrdom, yet also combines social movement theory with analysis of melodramatic narrative in her exploration of how Archbishop

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Romero’s life story, including his death by assassination in 1980, served to build transnational solidarity among activists in the United States and Central America throughout the 1980s. Defining melodrama broadly as “a narrative that depicts a situation in morally clear terms and evokes heightened emotions because of the degree of victimization,” Nepstad identifies several qualities in Romero and in his life story as a martyr that she argues were crucial to fostering transnational collective identity. First, Romero’s charismatic personality made him a good “human face” to epitomize the plight of the Salvadoran poor. Second, the facts of how he was shot through the heart by an assassin while celebrating mass fit melodrama’s Manichean plot structure, in which starkly dichotomized moral forces square off against each other. Third, Romero’s life story highlighted a conversion experience, from unconcern or unawareness of many human rights abuses to an abrupt awakening upon the murder of his friend, Father Rutilio Grande. According to Nepstad, many U.S. activists could identify with such a shift from lack of knowledge or concern to a sudden realization of the brutality of the military government’s repression. Borrowing from James Jasper, Nepstad refers to this as a “moral shock” that captivated the attention of progressive faith communities and motivated them to fight the “villains.”45 And finally, following David Snow and Robert Benford, Nepstad argues that Romero’s emphasis on essential values and beliefs shared by many Christians created “ontological resonance” that allowed him to unify disparate peoples under the banner of a common Christianity.46 Solalinde fits all of the above criteria for martyrdom except one—he has not been assassinated. Nevertheless, the highly publicized attacks on his person render him a potential martyr, a state of being that comes with advantages and disadvantages. Like the martyrs analyzed by Sobrino and Nepstad, potential martyrs may also strengthen both Christianity and the social movements for which they advocate. We take issue with Sobrino, Nepstad, and others who stress the nobility of martyrdom, however, because martyrs and potential martyrs alike personify a contradiction: in order to combat suffering of others, they embody, naturalize, and even trade in it. Martyrdom is the biggest trade of all in the political economy of suffering: an exchange of heroic suffering to the point of death in hopes of alleviating the suffering of others. Besides structuring an exchange, the martyr’s suffering constitutes a gamble, a wager that his or her suffering now will pay off in reduced suffering for others in a future that the martyr may never see but can only imagine or believe in through faith and the

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example of Christ’s sacrifice. A potential martyr may enjoy the advantage, before his or her death if he or she is in fact martyred, of being able to see how the physical risks he or she is willing to run can, at least temporarily, bring people together. This unity may fuel the notion that a trade in suffering, to the point of death, for the sake of others is possible or desirable or worthy of celebration. A strain of Christian logic underlies an assumption of many faith-based and non-faith-based movements alike: because Christ died in sacrifice for humanity, it is admirable for humans to die in attempted sacrifice for each other. Nevertheless, do the advantages of martyrdom and its attendant performances outweigh the disadvantages, not only of the risk of death but of contributing to an ongoing trade in human suffering? The battle between Solalinde as a good person and potential martyr battling evil in the form of organized criminals and corrupt police was first publicly staged and disseminated through video and photos of his arrest by municipal police on January 10, 2007. A freelance journalist in Ixtepec, Martha Izquierdo, took photos of the priest as five police officers surrounded him, picked him up and threw him in the back of pickup truck, then hauled him off to jail. Izquierdo’s photos and accompanying article were first circulated around the world by wire services and by an Amnesty International report, then won Mexico’s prestigious national award for journalism, giving Solalinde even more publicity. According to Izquierdo’s account, Solalinde was imprisoned because he attempted to serve as a witness to a kidnapping. That morning he had accompanied a group of migrants trying to find their family members, who had been forcibly taken off a train in Ixtepec and hustled off to a local house by men in police uniforms. When municipal police officers arrived at the house, instead of pursuing the kidnappers or trying to rescue the kidnapping victims, they arrested Solalinde and the eighteen migrants who had gone looking for their kidnapped relatives. According to the Amnesty International report, they “brutally beat” at least nine of the migrants arrested. The text of the report does not follow up on or speculate about the fate of the kidnapped; instead it focuses on Solalinde’s heroism: “These incidents are exceptional only in that human rights defenders or members of the local community took action to protect migrants in the face of apparent complicity between local officials and criminal gangs.”47 Izquierdo’s photos remain accessible online through Amnesty International’s website, which boasts that almost 17,000 people were moved by their campaign to petition the Mexican government to “provide Father

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Alejandro Solalinde Guerra and his team with effective protection, in accordance with their wishes, to enable them to carry out their human rights work without fear of reprisal.”48 In the photo of Solalinde in jail, he grips the iron bars of his cell gently but firmly, as if to confirm a willingness to remain where he is (Fig. 3.4). He is surrounded by three grim-faced Central American migrants, who remain shrouded in shadows. Along with Solalinde’s calm demeanor, his position at the frontand-center of the frame epitomizes his function as a willing companion on their journey, to use a religious metaphor for empathy, the shepherd who puts himself on the line for his flock. His empathic identification, however, also obscures his flock: all of the light in the photo falls on the fair-skinned priest wearing white clothing; the darker-skinned men behind him remain barely visible in the darkness of the cell. Because the photo is taken from below, Solalinde looks down at the viewer from a great height, like a saint on display for veneration, the small coconut-shell cross that hangs from his neck contrasting with his white clerical-collared shirt.

Fig. 3.4 Father Alejandro Solalinde, founder and director of Hermanos en el Camino shelter, detained in prison in Ixtepec, Oaxaca, Mexico (Photo by Martha Izquierdo, February 2, 2006)

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Yet the exaltedness of his position is complicated by the notebook and visor cap he grips in his left hand, which connects him to the everyday material world. The notebook underscores the priest’s role as a witness, which in turn evokes the root meaning of martyr. The extremes of light and dark, often associated with good and evil, visually link Solalinde with lightness and goodness. Both the prison and the migrants, however unintentionally, are shrouded in darkness and possibly associated with evil, or at least with the mysterious unknown. Solalinde was released after just four hours; the eighteen migrants arrested together with him were released but subsequently deported. Just as important as the arrest itself to the creation of Solalinde’s international reputation was the manner in which Izquierdo, Amnesty International, and Solalinde himself cooperated in the depiction of the arrest as an example of persecution by evil villains of a good, pious man willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of those he seeks to defend from those same villains. The second, even more dramatic, example of the use of Solalinde’s suffering body as a figure of potential martyrdom comes in the form of an often-repeated anecdote about how he was confronted by a mob and almost set on fire. As Solalinde has recounted the incident to human rights organizations, to journalists, to academics, including us, and later in his autobiography, on June 24, 2008, he came close to losing his life.49 That morning municipal authorities in Ixtepec, including the mayor and fourteen municipal police officers, acted on a rumor (that they themselves may have fueled) that a Central American migrant had raped a sixyear-old local girl. They rounded up a group of about fifty townspeople and headed for the isolated plot of land where Solalinde was building a migrant shelter on the outskirts of town near the railroad tracks. Cans of gasoline and rags in hand, they easily entered the unfenced premises and surrounded the balding, bespectacled priest, dressed in vestments since he was on his way to visit a Church superior, his usual coconut-shell cross hanging from his neck. When the crowd realized that there was little in the way of furniture to burn and that the walls and floors were made of concrete, they demanded that he turn over to them all the migrants on the premises. Nine migrants had sought refuge inside one of the shelter’s few completed structures. When Solalinde refused to hand them over, insisting that they were not guilty of anything, it only made the mob angrier. One woman cried out that they should burn Solalinde himself. He then stepped forward, head bowed, arms outstretched with palms up,

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in imitation of Christ on the cross and said: “Alright then, if you are going to burn me, go ahead.” “But not like that: lower your arms!” the woman replied. He held the position a moment longer, until the crowd fell silent and backed off, then turned and walked into his office, at that time one of the only buildings on the premises with a door.50 When he reflects upon the incident, Solalinde credits divine intervention with inspiring him to instinctively adopt a physical position that he believes made the crowd back off. From our secular perspective we instead see the cultural power of the archetypal figures of the martyr and of the potential martyr at work in that moment. Besides the fear of transgression against a Christ-like figure, the realization that they might create a martyr, we suspect, might be enough to make some enraged citizens think twice before setting fire to a priest. Solalinde’s demonstration of a willingness to die, a performance of potential martyrdom, may not only have succeeded in saving his life, it has become part of a narrative about him, repeated by himself and others, that enhances his status and legitimates his authority as a defender of migrants and of migrant rights. Sobrino, Nepstad, Michaela DeSoucey and others, have stressed that the martyr’s body can serve as a powerful symbol of the suffering faced by those whose pain it epitomizes.51 But what does it mean to be “the Mexican Romero” while one is still alive? Most scholars of social movements have tended to stress the advantages of such a status. Noelle Kateri Brigden, for instance, a scholar of government who conducted dissertation research at Solalinde’s shelter, recounts the narrative about his near-burning in a blog post for the Social Science Research Council’s webpage, and follows it with an admiring analysis: He publicly denounces the corruption and complicity of Mexican officials in migrant kidnappings and he calls on politicians by name in the national Mexican media to protect the oasis of safety for migrants that he has constructed. The padre’s selfless work at the shelter lends him the moral authority to make such statements, and the international human rights organizations that he cooperates with, such as Amnesty International, have a notoriety that will assure his martyrdom in the event of a counterattack.52

Brigden in a sense imagines Solalinde as already dead, a heroic martyr whose ultimate sacrifice only enhances his cause. As she describes it, martyrdom seems like the ultimate post-death trump card, as if what Solalinde

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might not have been able to accomplish in life might be accomplished through his death. But we would argue that the history of martyrdom in Latin America provides ample evidence that it is difficult, and often impossible, for one individual to trade one’s suffering for another’s. The fact that more than two decades after the end of their nation’s civil war, thousands of Salvadorans are emigrating every year because of violence and poverty speaks to the limits of the utility of the martyrdom of the many priests and nuns who were sacrificed during that conflict. Fetishizing the martyr’s body-at-risk, or the body-as-sacrifice, and embedding it in a melodramatic narrative about a melodramatic performance may in some ways empower the potential martyr but it can also make his or her death seem like an inevitable, foregone conclusion. Solalinde himself has said that he feels at times as if he dwells in a kind of “pre-death.”53 Besides the arrest and the threat of assault, numerous death threats against him have contributed to that sense of foreboding. In response to early death threats in 2010, the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights called for “precautionary measures” to protect the priest; the government of the state of Oaxaca appointed bodyguards to shadow him and guard the shelter’s entrance. With Vatican funds, walls were built around the perimeter of the shelter and topped with barbed wire, and security cameras were installed. Yet the threats resumed in the spring of 2012. After receiving warnings from local residents that hitmen had already been paid to kill him, on May 16, 2012, Solalinde left Oaxaca for two months. In many media accounts, the death threats served to elevate Solalinde’s reputation to the status of hero, a self-sacrificing hero who courageously risks death to save others. To have received death threats is a perverse status symbol that can confer an aura of dramatic tension, mystery, and anticipation upon the target’s persona, including the anticipation of seeing whether the prospective martyr-hero will in fact be sacrificed. Journalists who interviewed Solalinde in late 2012 rarely failed to ask him whether he was afraid for his life, thus giving him the opportunity to present himself as extraordinary in his valor when he inevitably replied in the negative. On the occasion of his return to Ciudad Ixtepec, New York Times reporter Elisabeth Malkin, for instance, noted that Solalinde “seemed unperturbed about going home.” She cites the priest: “I discovered that when you are not afraid, they respect you more. Bit by bit, I got stronger, I learned and lost the fear.”54 Whether Solalinde actually overcame his fear or not is beside the larger point that not demonstrating

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fear allies his comportment with that of a long historical lineage of martyrs. For instance, in describing accounts of seventeenth-century Jesuit martyrdom in colonial Mexico, Maureen Ahern writes: “The Jesuit martyrs demonstrate clairvoyance, purity, solidarity, unwavering courage and inspiring eloquence at the moment of an always joyous death.”55 Several hundred years later, the discourse and performance of martyrdom remain remarkably similar. Before his assassination, as a potential martyr, Archbishop Romero became renowned in part for the statements in which he calmly accepted the possibility of his murder as payment for a better future for his country: “As a pastor I am obliged to give my life for those I love, who are all Salvadorans, even those who are going to murder me. If they fulfill their threats, as of now I offer God my blood for the redemption and resurrection of El Salvador.”56 Yet the persistence of poverty, inequality, violence, and injustice—not only in El Salvador, but also in Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua—today continues to provide the unfortunate opportunity for others to step into the role of martyr for the cause of Central Americans.

The Casting and Staging of a Migrant Holy Family Potential martyrs for the sake of migrant rights, such as Solalinde, have the status necessary to bestow an aura of holiness upon certain migrants deemed vulnerable, virtuous, and in need of protection, or at least of respect. Solalinde, for instance, often refers to migrant women as “heroes,” in an attempt to reverse the stigma of being labeled unfit mothers who “abandon” their children in their home countries, or worse, bring them with them on the dangerous journey. We briefly analyze here a Christmas Eve mass celebrated by Solalinde on December 24, 2012, in which he in a sense works as a theatrical director to stage the suffering of an undocumented Guatemalan couple whose journey to the United States was interrupted by an assault and a pregnancy. While this is by no means a complete ethnographic account, our analysis, from the perspective of participant observers in the celebration, contributes several insights into how the mass served not only as a religious ritual, but also as a social performance that helped forge a transnational activist community. First, Solalinde’s improvisations in the official structure and rules of the Catholic liturgy made it an unusually inclusive experience of mass. Second, as a director/narrator Solalinde found a dramatic way to effectively and affectively communicate the precarious circumstances in which migrant bodies circulate, to make his audience feel an urgency, for some,

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even a divine imperative to help protect those bodies. Yet third, like the migrants brought to life in Rigoni’s poetry and like the migrants who sell baked goods for Sánchez’s shelter, the migrants participating in the mass gave up a measure of control of their performances to their charismatic director-priest. In particular, the couple that played the leading roles in a dramatic tableau that combined elements of the performative genres of posada and pastorela was simultaneously exalted and circumscribed by Solalinde’s staging. The mise-en-scène for the mass was the Brothers on the Road shelter’s spartan chapel, an open-air space consisting of a single concrete wall painted adobe-pink that rises to meet a tin roof. The concrete floors are painted green. The crowd sat in rows of white plastic chairs, with the overflow settled in makeshift seating along a low concrete wall that surrounds the rectangular structure. The only permanent adornment in the chapel is a life-size plaster Christ on the cross (Fig. 3.5). For the Christmas celebration, two more simple wooden crosses were balanced in each corner of the front altar-table area. A humble flower arrangement created a minimalist altar for a small portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Fig. 3.5 Migrants resting in the chapel of the shelter Hermanos en el Camino, Ixtepec, Oaxaca, Mexico (Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa, August 12, 2009)

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The altar table was created by laying a white tablecloth decorated with hand-embroidered flowers over a folding table. In front of the table, on the floor, three candles and two poinsettias flanked a larger arrangement of chrysanthemums. Directed by the visiting nuns, volunteers had strung garland and little Christmas lights under the tin roof. Just outside of the altar area, they had also strung a line across two nearby structures from which to dangle a piñata for the children to break at the conclusion of the service. The decorations created an atmosphere of festivity with a minimum of ostentation. Solalinde’s Christmas Eve mass has become an annual social occasion that brings together visitors from around the world interested in the issue of migrant rights. In 2012, the “audience” of about one hundred participants was diverse, including a half-a-dozen or so volunteers from Mexico City; several Spanish nuns; a priest from New Orleans; a handful of university exchange students from Germany; another handful of migrant-rights activists visiting from other parts of Mexico; a consul from El Salvador and his wife; an anthropologist from Washington, DC; a photographer from Spain; a young couple from Veracruz who said they just wanted to meet Solalinde to see if he was all the press made him out to be; about thirty members of the local community, including a few children; and another thirty or so undocumented Central American migrants using the shelter’s services on their way north. Some of the migrants self-identified as Catholics, others were Protestants who nevertheless participated in the celebration. A sense of community was created by the nuns, who led the celebrants in popular Christmas carols such as “The Little Drummer Boy” and “Silent Night,” and passed out sheets of paper with the lyrics printed on them to encourage everyone to sing along. We each also received a thin white candle to be lit at the conclusion of the service. Solalinde cultivated a sense of solidarity by asking every individual there to introduce him or herself and say where he or she was from. One of the first volunteers to introduce herself added the request that each person say something about his or her reason for being there. As reasons began to emerge from volunteers, researchers, tourists, and migrants, they highlighted the discrepancy in privilege between the undocumented migrants who had arrived from the south by freight train in need of the shelter’s services and the privileged outsiders from the global north who could more easily jet around the world in comfort. Yet at the same time, a sense of horizontality also emerged from the very repetition of short declarative statements: “I am here to serve.” “I had heard about Father Solalinde and the

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shelter and I wanted to see it for myself.” “I am from El Salvador and I am following my American dream.” One nun who was visiting from Guadalajara, Jalisco informed the migrants about the FM4 Paso Libre facility there, explaining that it offered a dining hall with showers and donated clothing. In Guadalajara, should they choose that increasingly popular western-Pacific route to the north, she said, she would welcome them. (The western route is longer but considered safer than routes to the east.) The sister’s invitation, among other statements, helped create awareness of a web of interconnections between the people present and the place from which they had come and toward which they were going. At the same time, Solalinde remarked on the uniqueness of the moment, on the fact that never again would these same individuals occupy the same space together again. Seated just to the left of Solalinde at the front of the chapel were Irene Bor Galvez and Marcos Díaz Boch, both 27-year-old migrants from Guatemala, together with their newborn baby girl swaddled in a white blanket.57 In what he referred to jokingly as a nativity scene without a need for clay figures, Solalinde declared the couple María [Mary] and José [Joseph] for the day. Two nuns used white cloth and headbands to create matching faux-Middle Eastern headdresses for them, and sat them in a position of honor, facing the audience together with Solalinde (Fig. 3.6). Bor and Díaz’s story was in some ways even more difficult than the biblical sojourn of Mary and Joseph. The couple had arrived in the shelter nine months earlier, after having been robbed while walking through an isolated area to avoid a migration checkpoint. Irene was sexually assaulted yet, in an example of how migrants can resourcefully deploy performative strategies, she narrowly managed to escape being raped by telling her attacker to be careful because she was going to the United States to seek medical treatment for her cancer. The man believed her implication, that cancer is contagious, and also took pity on her: he backed off, even returning twenty pesos of the money he had stolen from her.58 When Bor and Díaz arrived at the shelter, Solalinde encouraged them to report the attack, which under Mexico’s immigration law, would allow them to obtain a humanitarian visa to remain in the country during the investigation. Shortly after arriving at the shelter, the couple discovered that Bor was pregnant with their first child. When she went into labor, two different local hospitals turned her away, forcing her to travel to the larger nearby city of Salina Cruz to give birth to her daughter. Following

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Fig. 3.6 Irene and Marcos cast as the Holy Family during Christmas Eve mass at the Shelter Hermanos en el Camino, Ixtepec, Oaxaca, Mexico (Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa, December 24, 2012)

Solalinde’s practice of using the media to denounce injustices, the shelter publicized the discrimination in local media and in international press releases. For the Christmas Eve service, the couple sat directly in front of one of the wooden crosses, a potent symbol of their suffering; Bor’s proximity to the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe heightened her aura of holiness. During his sermon, Solalinde told a brief, expurgated version of the couple’s trials, focusing on how their baby girl had just recently been born in an area hospital, but only after the mother was turned away from two local hospitals. He strongly implied that this was because of discrimination against undocumented migrants. Hailing the couple and their child as “an authentic migrant family,” he declared the baby girl “a little girl Jesus” [una Jesusita]. Reading the New Testament passage from Luke 2:1–14 recounting Christ’s birth in a manger after Mary and Joseph were turned away from the inn, he drew a parallel between the Holy Family and Irene and Marcos:

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This night they are reminding us that migration is pure. Migration is a human fact. Migration is a movement as natural as breathing. As pure and natural as breathing. And we should see in our migrant brothers the person of Jesus. In reality we are all migrants. And the story that Lucas tells us today refers precisely to that.59

Solalinde’s sermon further paralleled the suffering of Mary and Joseph as recounted in Luke with the suffering of today’s migrants: Allow me to apply these words to the moment that Mexico is living, after having lived in years of tension, of struggle against other brothers, of violence under the pretext of [fighting] drug trafficking. Many people died. We know of 70,000, maybe there are more. Of our migrant brothers, that they have disappeared them, that they have kidnapped them. If they haven’t paid, they have murdered them. There is an entire forensic route, it is sad to say it, but there is a forensic route that still has not been investigated. It remains hidden.60

For those among us in the audience who knew that Irene and Marcos had been assaulted and could easily have been killed by their assailants, their bodies took on an additional charge as potential victims, the unintentional martyrs that Sobrino calls “passive martyrs.”

Irene and Marcos as Tableau Vivant While Solalinde spoke about them and for them, the couple sat silently, the baby girl nestled in Irene’s arms, and maintained almost perfect stillness. Superficially, the scene could be read as utterly “normal,” exhibiting none of the bodies in extremity that performance scholar Hughes argues are required to constitute a sensation scene. One might be tempted to view the couple as performers in a happy pastorela, the Mexican Christmas plays in which goodness and good humor triumphs over Satan’s temptations. After all, the tableau represented the birth rather than the death of Christ, and the baby in her mother’s arms embodied new life. Before the mass began, as Irene breastfed the baby, the photographers present crowded around to take photos that would underscore her role as virtuous, nurturing mother of an innocent child. Solalinde encouraged them, remarking on what a beautiful image Irene and the baby made. Marcos and Irene, as Solalinde referred to them by first name (just as Mary and Joseph are commonly referred to by their first names), were reenacting

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images of the Holy Family, and of Mary breastfeeding Christ, that have been rendered and re-rendered in Western culture as icons of divinity. Yet the family also functioned as a kind of theatrical tableau vivant , in which silent actors frozen in space and time communicate an emotional truth. As in the tableaux from nineteenth-century melodramas analyzed by Brooks in The Melodramatic Imagination, the couple’s muteness seemed to testify to their innocence and vulnerability.61 In today’s context, as “actors,” they embodied the precarious situation of all undocumented Central American migrants in Mexico. Their silence, moreover, underscored the mystery surrounding the fates of many anonymous migrants who have met with violent deaths along the journey but whose bodies have never been found and whose stories have never been told. The somber expressions on Bor and Díaz’s handsome faces wordlessly testified to hidden anguish, both the suffering of all migrants on the “forensic route” described by Solalinde and their own potential for future suffering, since they were still determined to continue their journey to the United States. Their costumes as Mary and Joseph, the carols sung by the congregants, the glimmer of the evening light in the dusk, the twinkle from the candles we lit at the end of the mass as we sang “Silent Night” in Spanish, in short, all of the elements of a Christmas Eve mass as outdoor theater culminating in the ritual of communion, served to transform and elevate the tableau into a stylized representation of passive martyrdom—not the martyrdom of an activist like Solalinde who knowingly risks death but the martyrdom of the innocent who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. While there was no explicit physical risk, at that moment, to those particular bodies playing Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus, Solalinde’s vivid description of their travails, coupled with his narrative detailing how many migrants are kidnapped, disappeared, and murdered, functioned like melodrama’s crashing chords. We knew that many of the migrants present in that space at that moment had suffered or would suffer physical and psychological violence and pain on or near the train. By contrast to Hughes, we would argue that one doesn’t need to see a body explicitly at risk or in pain in order to experience a sensation scene.62 While we couldn’t see the bodies tied to the railroad tracks as in the old melodramas, we could hear the whistle of the actual freight train that passes behind the shelter. It is enough to receive affective cues that allow one to imagine that the risk exists. Moreover, while these cues may be visual, they may also appeal to one or more of the other four senses. While Bor

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and Díaz performed an aestheticized and sanctified version of suffering, with help from Solalinde-as-director they nevertheless created a disturbing sensation scene. (The large crucifix and the crosses behind them served as reminders that birth ends in death, and for believers, implies rebirth.) From our wide variety of subject positions as spectators, whether we identified with the migrants, with their rescuer, with both or with neither, it would have been difficult to miss the affective charge in the air, a blend of sadness and wonder at humanity’s ability to persevere in the midst of undeserved suffering. The emotional tension erupted toward the end of the mass, after communion, when Solalinde asked if anyone wanted to share their thoughts. A young migrant woman from Guatemala dressed for travel by freight train in gym shoes, blue jeans, and a t-shirt, her hair pulled back into a ponytail, stood up to address the crowd and burst into tears. She said how grateful she was that “nothing bad” had happened to her yet, that somehow, she had so far been spared. Pain during the migrant journey had come to seem as natural and inevitable as Solalinde had declared migration itself. The young woman seemed to be experiencing a simultaneous blend of relief about the past and anxieties about an uncertain future that could easily include unwilling martyrdom.

Progressive Melodrama On the one hand, one might argue that Solalinde staged what Sánchez calls a photo of pain at his Christmas Eve mass, when he posed a migrant family in a tableau that highlighted their suffering and by extension implied that they deserved redemption. Photos of pain, or what we call spectacles of suffering, often form part of migrant melodramas that suggest that because migrants and their rescuers have suffered, they deserve redemption, for instance, in the form of a new life for Central American migrants in Mexico, or for both Central Americans and Mexicans in the United States. With its insistent focus on individual suffering, the photo of pain can distract from the social inequalities that often caused, or exacerbated, the supposed misfortune to begin with. Sánchez, in her own way, makes this point. She notes that beyond wanting to have their photos taken with disabled individuals in order to demonstrate their capacity for compassion, politicians rarely seem to offer any long-term solutions for poverty, corruption, violent crime, and impunity. While the international regime of assistance focused on the deserving individual that Fassin calls

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“humanitarian government” (in the broad sense of the term “government” as regulation, control, and distribution of aid, including decisions about who is entitled to it under what circumstances) may have evolved at the end of the twentieth century under regimes of neoliberal capitalism, the melodramatic imagination underlying humanitarian government has far older roots in a Christian worldview that posits Jesus Christ as the ultimate heroic victim. The dominant assumption that suffering should be redemptive, leads some migrant-rights advocates to accept the demands of humanitarian government for “the photo of pain,” in order to win short-term benefits for themselves and for migrants, even though they may suspect that in the long run such displays only reinforce the pernicious idea that undocumented migrants are necessarily always victims. This attempted exchange of suffering-for-redemption is borrowed by migrant melodrama from Christianity and is sometimes recycled in religious performances that in turn create new melodramas. As Christian rescuers imbue the people they try to protect with an air of divinity, they often position themselves as equally virtuous—ideal friends, saintly mothers, or martyrs to the migrant cause. Journalists, artists, activists, and academics all participate in such melodramas, at the very least by becoming part of their audience, at most by perpetuating their logic of exchange in our own work. As a potential active martyr, who willingly places himself in harm’s way, Solalinde, like Rigoni and Sánchez, establishes his authority through displays of empathy, in his case, empathy with passive martyrs (to use Sobrino’s terms) who have no choice but to risk violent assaults. Yet on the other hand, at least some of Solalinde’s migrant melodramas open up the possibility for a broader variety of more horizontal exchanges of affect. Everyone at the Christmas Eve mass, regardless of religious affiliation, was invited to take communion and everyone at the mass was invited to speak. At every one of the dozen masses that we saw Solalinde officiate over a period of two years (2013–2014), the end of the mass always became an opportunity for an open assembly in which all were encouraged to speak. Unlike Rigoni, moreover, Solalinde does not hold separate masses that segregate levels of social class into migrants and middle-class potential dispensers of charity to migrants. The consul from El Salvador, the volunteers from Germany, and migrants from various Central American countries all listened to each other in a space that did not deny yet temporarily bracketed their obviously unequal levels of privilege. Though Solalinde “directed” the performance, he created the conditions for a

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communal experience and a multi-directional exchange that exceeded privileged enjoyment of the spectacle of suffering Others. He did not publicly refer to the physical assault that Bor had suffered; nor did he ask for contributions to his shelter or for the couple because of that suffering. Instead of creating an exchange that focused on generating pity for the suffering of migrants, his performance sought to elicit admiration for how they overcome suffering. While still working within the conventions of migrant melodrama, he took the genre in a more efficacious direction, opening a space for migrants to express not only their pain but also other dimensions of their affective subjectivities: relief, courage, pride, joy, and family love, among others. While doing good work, charismatic figures such as Rigoni, Sánchez, and Solalinde cannot help but be sucked into the vortex of awards ceremonies, print interviews, television appearances, film cameos, and, yes, recognition by scholarly writers, a vortex that inevitably spins their performances as well as those of the migrants they seek to assist. Heroic rescue can have many different modes of operation, or styles, within migrant melodrama. We have described just three: empathic (Rigoni), saintly (Sánchez), and potential martyr (Solalinde). No single shelter director exhibits only empathy, saintliness, or a tendency toward martyrdom. At different times, or under different circumstances, each of these advocates may exhibit all or none of these characteristics. Yet their public performances of self are consistent enough to be able to differentiate and describe what we contend are distinct approaches to rescue in migrant melodrama. We have argued that the empathic and saintly rescuer styles encourage a symbiotic relationship between supposedly powerful rescuers and supposedly powerless rescued that fuels one of the key cycles of exchange in the political economy of suffering: displays of suffering in return for charity. The potential martyr, as embodied by Solalinde, attempts to trade the rescuer’s suffering for alleviation of the suffering of the rescued, a trade that we argue may not be possible or desirable. In different ways, all three styles of migrant advocacy enhanced the reputation and helped establish the authenticity, and consequently the authority, of Rigoni, Sánchez, and Solalinde. For migrants, the profit to be gained by displays of their suffering might consist of nothing more than real-world respect for human rights that in theory they already possess. In Part II we will further explore how migrants cast as suffering mothers and fathers in some cases embraced their assigned roles and in other cases slipped out of and corrected the castings suggested by would-be rescuers.

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Notes 1. Pedro Ultreras, La bestia, 145. 2. Ibid., 143. 3. See CNN News Correspondent for the program Connect the World, Karl Penhaul, “Olga Sanchez, a guardian angel to dirt poor, mutilated migrants.” Aired June 25, 2010, accessed at http://transcripts.cnn.com/ TRANSCRIPTS/1006/25/ctw.01.html. 4. See albeguebuenpastor.org.mx, accessed December 1, 2013. Many elements of the website have been subsequently edited or deleted. 5. Sánchez also funds the shelter through sales in several small convenience stores that she operates around Tapachula, including one next to the shelter and another inside the facilities of the National Institute for Migration (INM). 6. Ruth Behar, “Rage and Redemption: Reading the Life Story of a Mexican Marketing Woman,” Feminist Studies 16, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 223– 258. 7. Laura Podalsky, The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 125–160. 8. “Es una gran mujer, un ejemplo de ser humano y es sorprendentemente increible escuchar todas sus vivencias.” In citing from the Good Shepherd’s website, we have chosen neither to correct the lack of diacritical marks, nonstandard punctuation, grammar, and spelling nor to highlight it with the term “sic.” All translations into English are ours. 9. La mandaron a trabajar a la ciudad de Tapachula, de criada en una casa en donde dormia en el suelo, a los meses de trabajar en esa casa, decidio escaparce y aventurarse a la ciudad de México con otra menor de edad. Por un tiempo anduvo de trabajo en trabajo, debido que sus patrones eran malos y no le pagaban. Durante varios años, logro trabajar en una casa en donde la querian mucho y cuidaron, esto le permitio mandarle dinero a su madre para mantener a todos sus hermanos y asi evitar que mandaran a sus demas hermanos menores que ella a trabajar. 10. Séverine Durin and Natalia Vázquez, “Análisis de las representaciones de trabajadoras domésticas en telenovelas mexicanas,” Trayectorias 15, no. 36 (January–June 2013): 20–44; Adriana Estill, “The Mexican Telenovela and Its Foundational Fictions,” in Latin American Literature and Mass Media, eds. Edmundo Paz-Soldán and Debra A. Castillo (New York: Garland, 2001), 169–192. 11. A los 7 años de edad tuvo infeccion intestinal, por falta de medicamentos, por no tener dinero, esta enfermedad se complicó al punto de llevarla al borde de la muerte. Esto provoco que a lo largo de su niñez y adolescencia tuviera muchos problemas de salud. 12. Cuando cumplio 18 años de edad sufrio temporalmente de seguera y mudes, perdio mucho de su cabello, llego a pesar aproximadamente 35

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kilogramos y estuvo 8 dias en coma. Despues de superar esta dura prueba de salud afronto una decision muy dificil. En la casa en donde tenia años trabajando, los patrones, la queria adoptar como su hija y llevarsela del pais, algo imposible de aceptar, debido a que no podia consevir la idea de no volver a ver a sus hermanos y madre. Esto la obligo a regresar a la ciudad de Tapachula. Teniendo recaidas por su salud, no se dio porvencias, pese que en ocasiones la tenian que internar en el Seguro Social (hospital) por varias semanas. Esto la motivo a ir a la iglesia (catolica) y por un tiempo fue catequista. En 1990 un doctor le diagnostico cancer y se entero que estaba embarazada de su tercer hijo. El doctor le comento que no iba a poder ver crecer a su hijo. Por varios dias, guardo el secreto en su corazon atormentado y un dia, sin más fuerzas fue a iglesia. Al llegar a ese lugar se arrodillo y comenzo a rezar, con todo esa angustia y miedo de no poder estar para ver crecer a sus 3 hijos. En la oracion que ella hizo, dijo lo siguiente: “Dicen que Dios existe. ¿Entonces porque no me curas? para poder cuidar a mis hijos.” Y fue en ese momento que tambien en su oracion dijo: “Haré un pacto contigo Dios: Curame y yo te servire.” Carole Slade, St. Teresa of Avila: Author of a Heroic Life (Berkley: University of California Press, 1995). Sophie Oliver, “Sacred and (Sub)Human Pain: The Body as Witness in Early Modern Hagiography and Contemporary Literature of Atrocity,” http://www.academia.edu/171380/Sacred_and_Subhuman_Pain_The_ Body_as_Witness_in_Early-Modern_Hagiography_and_Contemporary_ Literature_of_Atrocity, 5. Olga Sánchez Martínez, interview by the authors, Tapachula, Chiapas, January 13, 2014. Debra A. Castillo, Easy Women: Sex and Gender in Modern Mexican Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Silvia Marina Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 49. Elias Palti argues that the character of Celeste is based on the reformed prostitute protagonist of Fleur-de-Marie in Eugène Sue’s French romantic novel Les Mystèries de Paris. This lineage is significant because it demonstrates the enduring connection between the woman in the street and the prostitute. One of the functions of Sánchez’ all-white garb, rosary, and pulled-back hair, is to make it impossible, despite her frequent presence in the streets of Tapachula, to confuse her with a sex worker. Elias Palti, “Narrar lo inenarrable. Literatura, nación y muerte en ‘El fistol del diablo’ de Manuel Payno,” Iberoamericana 5, no. 19 (September 2005): 7–26. Martínez, interview by the authors, Tapachula, Chiapas, January 13, 2014.

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21. Karen Wells, “The Melodrama of Being a Child: NGO Representations of Poverty,” Visual Communication 12, no. 3 (August 2013): 277–293. 22. The term “pan dulce” does not perfectly correspond to either sweet bread or sweet roll. The baked goods known as pan dulce are not actually bread, nor are they as moist and sweet as U.S. sweet rolls. They are closer to in texture and taste to dry cookies yet are roughly the size and shape of U.S. sweet rolls. 23. Dios está con nosotros desde este momento de nuestro bautismo. Tenemos esa fuerza de Dios. Tenemos esa gracia espiritual, esa gracia espiritual, esa gracia de Dios para pasar como Jesús por este mundo haciendo el bien… Allí esta Olga. 24. PÉREZ. ¿Cuántos años tienes trabajando con los inmigrantes? SÁNCHEZ. Veinticuatro. PÉREZ. Veinticuatro años. 25. Hace veinte años nos encontramos con ella… Tiene que trabajar mucho. Está con nosotros vendiéndonos el pan porque a través de esa bolsa de pan está apoyando a los migrantes. Nosotros pensamos que el dinero lo ponen los gobiernos, pero no, a trabajar. No, a trabajar. Por amor al prójimo… Miren, allí está el niño. Miren como está. Ese niño que dejaron allí en su casa. Hay padres que no quieren a sus hijos… [porque] tienen que llevarlos a tratamiento. Esta es nuestra misión como hijos de Dios, pasar por el mundo haciendo el bien… ¡Ayúdenle! Cómprenle esa bolsita de pan. Hay algunos que no les gusta el pan. Pero pueden comprar y regalarlo. Puede uno dar. No hay que ser duros, no hay que ser tacaños. ¡Pueden repartir! 26. Sheila C. Moeschen, “Suffering Silences, Woeful Afflictions: Physical Disability, Melodrama, and the American Charity Movement,” in “Popular Entertainment and American Theater Prior to 1900,” ed. Eve Salisbury, special issue, Comparative Drama 40, no. 4 (Winter 2006–2007): 437. 27. Celso asked that we identify him only by his first name. 28. Hughes, Spectacles of Reform, 13–32. 29. Gaspar Gómez Roussell, Inmigrantes en la Villa de San Jerónimo Ixtepec, Oaxaca (Oaxaca, Mexico: Parajes, 2012). 30. And yet, like Rigoni and Sánchez, Solalinde does not entirely reject government overtures. When President Enrique Peña Nieto came into office in December 2012, one of his first official acts was to award Solalinde the same National Award for Human Rights that Sánchez and Rigoni had been awarded by his predecessor. Solalinde accepted the prize. 31. Alejandro Solalinde, interview by authors, Ixtepec, Oaxaca, December 27, 2012. 32. Sandro Mezzadra, “The Gaze of Autonomy: Capitalism, Migration, and Social Struggles,” in The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity, ed. Vicki Squire (New York: Routledge, 2011), 121–143.

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33. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 83. 34. Alejandro Solalinde, “The Meaning of Migration: Migroma” (unpublished manuscript, lecture, University of Texas, Austin, December 23, 2013), 1. 35. Ibid., 1. 36. The televised interviews with Aristegui were broadcast on June 29, 2011, April 19, 2012, and July 11, 2012. The Mexican news agency and newspaper articles are too numerous to list here. For key coverage, see Pedro Matías, “Solalinde: No merecemos más el México podrido que tenemos,” Proceso, July 12, 2012, https://www.proceso.com.mx/ 313961; José Gil Olmos, “El incómodo Solalinde,” Proceso, August 8, 2012, http://www.proceso.com.mx/?p=316511; Isaín Mandujano, “Alerta Solalinde por reactivación de crímenes contra migrantes,” Proceso, April 16, 2014, http://www.proceso.com.mx/?p=369889; Emiliano Ruiz Parra, “Solalinde,” Gatopardo, September 9, 2011, https://gatopardo. com/reportajes/solalinde/; Arturo J. Flores, “Padre Alejandro Solalinde: Dios puede hacer santo hasta a un Zeta,” Playboy México, December 2012, 40–44. “Des immigrants victimes d’un trafic d’organes au Mexique,” Le Monde, July 11, 2013, http://www.lemonde.fr/ameriques/ article/2013/11/07/des-immigrants-victimes-d-un-trafic-d-organes-aumexique_3509983_3222.html; Chris Arsenault, “Surviving Mexico’s Migrant Trail,” Aljazeera, January 12, 2011, http://www.aljazeera.com/ indepth/features/2011/01/201111212651634326.html; and Elisabeth Malkin, “A Priest Stands Up for the Migrants Who Run Mexico’s Gantlet,” The New York Times, July 14, 2012, A5. 37. Vogt, “Crossing Mexico.” Noelle Kateri Brigden, The Migrant Passage: Clandestine Journeys from Central America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018). 38. David Carrizales, “Proponen a Solalinde para el Nobel de la Paz,” La Jornada, August 29, 2012, 22. 39. Solalinde, interview by authors, Ixtepec, Oaxaca, December 27, 2012. 40. For details on the threats that Solalinde has experienced, which are too numerous to detail here, see his autobiography, coauthored with Karla María Guttiérrez, Revelaciones de un misionero: Mi vida itinerante (Mexico City: HarperCollins México, 2018), 218–258. 41. Ibid., 182 and 203. 42. Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, during his introduction of Solalinde at the 2012 Lozano Long Conference, “Central Americans and the Latina/o Landscape: New Configurations of Latina/o America.” The conference took place at The University of Texas at Austin, February 22–25, 2012.

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43.

44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

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Solalinde delivered the lecture titled “El migroma humano: El significado de la migración” (which he translated into English as “The Meaning of Migration: Migroma”) on February 23, 2012, http://vimeo.com/ 39728085. Emiliano Ruiz Parra, “Alejandro Solalinde: Priest in Devil’s Territory,” The Borderland Chronicles (blog), April 5, 2013, http://theborderland.org/? s=solalinde. Also see Emiliano Ruiz Parra, “Alejandro Solalinde: Un hogar para los migrantes,” in Ovejas negras: Rebeldes de la Iglesia mexicana del siglo XXI (Mexico City: Océano, 2012), 89–137; Parra, “Solalinde.” Jon Sobrino, “Theological Reflection,” in Witnesses to the Kingdom: The Martyrs of El Salvador and the Crucified Peoples (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2003), 101–118. Sharon Erickson Nepstad, “Creating Transnational Solidarity: The Use of Narrative in the U.S.-Central America Peace Movement,” Mobilization: An International Journal 6, no. 1 (2001): 30. Ibid., 32. Amnesty International, Invisible Victims: Migrants on the Move in Mexico (London: Amnesty International Publications, 2011), 14. See “México: la vida del padre Alejandro Solalinde corre peligro,” Amnistía Internacional, accessed November 27, 2018, https://www.es. amnesty.org/actua/acciones/mexico-padre-solalinde-peligro/. The Amnesty International report does not mention the threat to burn Solalinde, only the threat to burn down the shelter. See “Fear for Safety,” Amnesty International alert, July 2, 2008, http://www.amnesty.org/ fr/library/asset/AMR41/029/2008/fr/05822cb1-48f4-11dd-94d48d51f8ac221b/amr410292008eng.pdf. The anecdote is also repeated in Ruiz Parra, Ovejas Negras, 115–177, and on the SSRC webpage of government scholar Noelle Kateri Brigden, “Brothers in the Road: Migration and the Globalization of Love,” Social Science Research Council, accessed November 27, 2018, http://www.ssrc.org/pages/Brothers-in-the-RoadMigration-and-the-Globalization-of-Love. Alejandro Solalinde, interview by authors, Ixtepec, Oaxaca, August 12, 2009. In his autobiography, Solalinde recounts the episode slightly differently but substantively the same. See Revelaciones de un misionero, 233– 239. Sobrino, “Theological Reflection;” Nepstad, “Creating Transnational Solidarity;” Michaela DeSoucey, Jo-Ellen Pozner, Corey Fields, Kerry Dobransky, and Gary Alan Fine, “Memory and Sacrifice: An Embodied Theory of Martyrdom,” Cultural Sociology 2, no. 1 (March 2008): 99– 121. Brigden, “Brothers in the Road.” Alejandro Solalinde, interview by authors, Chicago, May 27, 2010. Malkin, “A Priest.”

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55. Maureen Ahern, “Visual and Verbal Sites: The Construction of Jesuit Martyrdom in Northwest New Spain in Andrés Pérez de Ribas’ Historia de los Triunfos de Nuestra Santa Fe (1645),” Colonial Latin American Review 8, no. 1 (1999): 7–33. 56. “Como pastor estoy obligado por mandato divino a dar la vida por quienes amo, que son todos los salvadoreños, aun por aquellos que vayan a asesinarme. Si llegaran a cumplirse las amenazas, desde ya ofrezco mi sangre por la redención y resurrección de El Salvador. El martirio es una gracia que no creo merecer. Pero si Dios acepta el sacrificio de mi vida, que mi sangre sea semilla de libertad y la señal de que la esperanza será pronto una realidad.” From the published text of a telephone interview with José Calderón Salazar, the Guatemala correspondent for the Mexican newspaper Excélsior. The interview took place on March 12, 1980 and was published in the archdiocese’s newspaper Orientación on April 13, 1980. Reprinted in Óscar A. Romero, La voz de los sin voz (San Salvador, El Salvador: UCA Editores, 1987), 461. 57. Bor and Díaz asked that we include their full names. 58. Irene Bor Galvez and Marcos Díaz Boch, interview by the authors, Ixtepec, Oaxaca, December 30, 2012. 59. Esta noche ellos nos están recordando que la migración es pura. La migración es un hecho humano. La migración es un movimiento tan natural como respirar. Tan puro y natural como respirar. Y nosotros debemos ver en nuestros hermanos migrantes a la persona de Jesús. En realidad todos somos migrantes. Y el relato que nos cuenta hoy Lucas se refiere precisamente a eso. 60. Permítanme aplicar estas palabras al momento que vive México, después de haber vivido años de tensión, de lucha contra otros hermanos, de violencia con el pretexto del narcotráfico. Muchas personas murieron. Se sabe de 70,000, tal vez hay más. De nuestros hermanos migrantes, que los han desaparecido, que los han secuestrado, por no pagar los han asesinado. Hay toda una ruta forense, da pena decirlo, pero hay una ruta forense que todavía no se ha investigado. Permanece oculta. 61. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 60. 62. Hughes, Spectacles of Reform, 32.

PART II

Mothers and Fathers

CHAPTER 4

Madre Dolorosa: Casting Competitions in Mother-Activism

As they say in the streets, Arellano is pimping the system. She is using Rosa Parks’ name to buy herself more time, and that disgusts me. Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell, describing activist Elvira Arellano, August 22, 2006 She is a role model, like the saints, following in the footsteps of Christ. And she is an icon of what is happening to countless women here in the United States. Javier Chavira, visual artist, describing activist Elvira Arellano, November 23, 2009

The contrast between these two emotional reactions—disgust and admiration—to a migrant mother activist who fought her deportation from the United States to Mexico demonstrates the porousness and instability of melodramatic roles in social performance: the line between victim-hero and criminal-villain is extremely thin. And the line between the emotions conjured and circulated by melodramatic character archetypes is equally thin. In Part II and III of this book, we turn from representations of rescuers to focus on the rescued, beginning with the figure of the undocumented mother. In this chapter we continue to investigate the use of the archetypal figures of martyrs and saints in social activism rooted in moral protest. In particular, we analyze the performance of protest of a Mexican mother who not only made it to the United States but who also became a migrant-rights activist. As a 31-year-old single mother in 2006, © The Author(s) 2020 A. E. Puga and V. M. Espinosa, Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37409-9_4

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Elvira Arellano fought her deportation order on the grounds that her seven-year-old U.S.-born son Saul needed medical treatment available in the United States. Intense media scrutiny focused on Arellano beginning in August 2006, when she sought sanctuary in a Chicago church for a year rather than accept a deportation order. Almost exactly a year later, soon after Arellano left the church and traveled to Los Angeles to participate in a protest, she was arrested by immigration agents and deported to Mexico. Saul remained behind with his activist guardians to undertake a national speaking tour on her behalf, later joining his mother in her native country. Some hailed Arellano as the heroic Rosa Parks of a Latinx migrant-rights movement; others vilified her as a cheater, a criminal, or a child abuser. What interests us is not to establish the truth, or even a truth, about the content of Arellano’s moral character but rather to illuminate the unstable dynamics of mother-activist performances that draw on the recycled melodramatic tropes of hero, martyr, and saint. For some, Arellano came to embody a centuries-old archetype that has been recycled countless times in countless ways by both Mexican and U.S. societies: the self-abnegating mother rooted in the Christian mater dolorosa. We delineate how that archetype was first deployed on Arellano’s behalf and embedded in melodramatic narratives and performances, how it was subsequently flipped by her opponents, then redeployed once more by her advocates in what we describe as a cycle of competitive castings. The dynamics of casting competitions in social life, we argue, demonstrate that the tactics of the migrant-rights movement and those of its opponents alike are still shaped by melodramatic expectations of motherhood with roots in Christian teachings refined by the Romantics and subsequently popularized in melodramatic narrative fiction, theater, film, and television. Arellano’s experiences as a migrant-rights activist underscore the extent to which melodramatic imagination and competitive casting circumscribes gendered activism. How do women who participate in migrant-rights movements negotiate gendered expectations, or demands, for moral clarity and spectacles of suffering as the price of inclusion in, or even just respectful treatment from, host communities? To what extent does the suffering of mothers function as a symbolic currency that can be traded for better treatment or for acknowledgment of various kinds of rights? And if mother-suffering does have currency, then does it make sense for women activists who are mothers to strategically participate in that political economy of suffering, despite its drawbacks?

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Casting and Social Movements Social movement theorists have long recognized the affinities between theater and social protest and have occasionally used the term “casting” to describe the construction of identification and roles for a “cast of characters” who form part of “movement dramas.” Using a metaphor that locates agency in an imaginary text, Robert D. Benford and Scott A. Hunt argue that it is a script that casts roles, composes dialogue, and directs action.1 A sociologist analyzing the New Sanctuary Movement, Grace Yukich, recently took up the term casting to describe how movement leaders select certain “particular concrete, embodied individuals for a specific set of roles in a movement or movement organization.”2 Yet casting is not the equivalent of what sociologists call “framing” translated to the language of theater/performance studies. Both terms, framing and casting, seek to explain how social movements create meaning and how those meanings shift. Yet the concept of casting, as we use it, accounts more for individual agency in the construction of the role, affective responses to the casting, and the history that provokes such affective responses. As a metaphor, the image of a frame tends to render the framed as the static subject of an outside gaze, a subject constructed by the thoughts, opinions, and worldviews of others. It is difficult to conceive of the framed as an active constructor of his or her own frame: as a metaphor, the image of a frame encourages a passive construction of the framed, thus limiting possibilities for understanding the self-construction of subjectivity. The term casting, by contrast, highlights the potential for (social) actors to wrench control of the role from those who have cast them. To extend the metaphor, just as theatrical actors collaborate in the elaboration of their roles to varying degrees, social actors also exercise varying degrees of agency in the creation of their roles. To the extent that frame analyses consider emotions, they tend to describe them as the consequence of cognition. In keeping with our emphasis on the spectacle as visceral rather than simply visual, however, we focus on how casting an individual in a particular role can instantly trigger powerful affective responses, in the individual cast, in those who helped cast her, and in the spectators, who embrace, question, or reject the assigned roles. For us, casting and recasting is linked to the types of affective states that promote inclusion or exclusion—for example, embracing the foreigner as a potential good citizen or rejecting her as a dangerous outsider. Social movement theorists have increasingly focused on the

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importance of mobilizing affects and naming them as emotions, such as anger, in order to channel movement energies against a grievance, or a set of grievances, sometimes by suppressing other less useful emotions, such as sadness.3 Castings can contribute significantly to the channeling of movement energies, as those cast as heroes, martyrs or saints inspire emotions that in turn lead to organization and mobilization. On the other hand, during what we call casting competitions, movement energies may be diverted or stymied as movement opponents claim that the essence of an individual has been incorrectly identified. While similar to what sociologists have called “counterframing,” or attempts to “rebut, undermine, or neutralize a person’s or group’s myths, versions of reality, or interpretive framework,” casting competitions go further than counterframing in that they seek to expose and activate shaming of the heroes, martyrs or saints of others.4 Counter-casting functions similarly to the climactic moment in melodrama in which the villain who has all the other characters fooled into thinking that he is a good person is suddenly unmasked as a scheming demon. Like casting, counter-casting is more than a process of cognitive repositioning; effective counter-casting can provoke a shift in affective response from acceptance to rejection, from love to hate, or vice versa. A “criminal” might become a “good mother”; or a “good mother” might become someone who is “pimping the system.” Finally, we argue that castings have the power to rile emotions so immediately and shift perceptions so quickly because they are anchored in a rich history that can be instantly summoned, whether consciously or unconsciously. While social movement theorists invoke terms such as “morality drama” or “hero” or “victim” and “villain,” they rarely if ever go into any historical depth on which particular genres of drama or what specific types of heroes and villains are being invoked by the frame. As we analyze Arellano’s casting, by contrast, we connect it to specific tropes and character archetypes that we argue are invoked by the media coverage and cultural production surrounding her particular style of activism. This kind of detailed historical and cross-cultural analysis can help us better understand the production and circulation of affective response in social movements. Moreover, historical and cultural analysis can help us understand why certain movement strategies are efficacious and why others are only partially effective or backfire altogether. The nineteenth-century anti-slavery movement in the United States used affective response to its advantage, perhaps most famously in Harriet

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Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its sentimental anti-slavery stage adaptations.5 The touchstone scene for saintly mothers protesting legal injustice is Eliza and the sensation scene in which she rejects the family separation imposed by slavery, and takes the risk of leaping from ice block to ice block on the partially frozen Ohio River, her baby in her arms, to reach freedom on its northern shore. A century later, the U.S. civil rights movement was furthered by the emotions raised by images of grieving mothers and martyred children: the murder of Emmett Till, the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing, and the many AfricanAmerican children and youth attacked as they attempted to integrate allwhite schools.6 More recent social movements in both the United States and Latin America offer many instances of mother activists emphasizing the grief and rage experienced when their children are taken from them, whether killed at war in foreign countries or at home by drunk drivers, “disappeared” for political reasons, victimized by traffickers in drugs and human bodies, or subjected to the state violence of deportation, either when parents are deported and their children left behind, or vice versa, when children are deported and their parents are left behind. Figures as disparate as the mothers (now grandmothers) of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, mother activists of victims of femicide in Ciudad Juárez, the anti-Iraq war activist Cindy Sheehan, and Elvira Arellano all share a similar grievance: the threat, and the reality, of violent family separations.7 Women who make performances of traditional motherhood central to their activism occupy a paradoxical position: they attempt to transcend the realm of politics in order to organize politically. And yet even in the best-intentioned cultural production, not to mention in aggressively antiimmigrant activism, mothers are also sometimes blamed for the plight of their children, thus shifting the responsibility for suffering from sociopolitical structures to individual family units. Mother-based activism, we show through the example of Arellano, risks reducing systemic violence to a family tragedy, a melodramatic tragedy in which good mothers “naturally” sacrifice and suffer. Within melodrama’s Manichean schema, which divides mothers into the good ones who suffer as opposed to the evil ones who indulge their own selfish desires, activist mothers feel pressure to claim virtue by stressing their traditional roles as self-sacrificing guardians of the domestic sphere. The danger of this move, however, is that it can lead to what Wendy Brown theorized as a “wounded attachment” in which one’s identity is predicated on an injury that never heals.8

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Such identities are ideally structured for a political economy in which displays of suffering are exchanged for empathy, sympathy, or concessions from those in positions of authority, which as we have noted, sometimes leads to further expectations, even demands, for ever-more intense displays of suffering.

The Cult of Domesticity: From Europe to the United States and Mexico Contemporary mother-activism, we contend, continues to be influenced by what Barbara Welter dubbed the “cult of true womanhood,” which in the nineteenth century celebrated piety, virtue, submissiveness, and domesticity.9 To better understand mother-activism, on both sides of the border, it is important to briefly delineate its shared origins in nineteenthcentury teachings about motherhood yet also signal a few of the key ways in which the U.S. and Mexican cults of motherhood diverged as they developed, in narrative, theater, film, and television. Elements of both traditions can be seen in the activism of Arellano and of the other mother activists with whom she has allied herself. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his eighteenth-century writings on childhood were very influential in the advice bestowed upon both Mexican and United States upper-middle-class nineteenth-century women, advice that glorified the supposed centrality of the child to the life of the mother.10 Both Mexican and United States societies celebrated, and in certain circles still celebrate, the pious mother who suffers so that her family can survive and thrive with its unity intact. In both societies the ideal mother was religiously devout, slavishly devoted to her children, and willing to sacrifice everything for their sake. The U.S. and Mexican versions of the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity, however, differed in some significant ways: in the United States the traditional mother was Protestant; in Mexico, she was Catholic. In Mexico, moreover, the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe exacerbated a virgin–whore dichotomy in representations of women reproduced in countless works of popular culture. As a result, the virtue of modesty among Mexican women may have been even more exaggerated than it was in the United States.11 Yet the vast regional and urban–rural differences within the two nation-states meant that even within each nation’s borders, there was no one uniform, national feminine ideal. Finally, even within a single nation-state, differences in social class and levels of education meant that middle-class ideals of femininity might

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be disseminated to popular classes through elementary school instruction in some communities, but not necessarily be disseminated at all in other communities in which access to education was extremely limited. In the United States, the melodrama mother in nineteenth-century novels and plays was often a middle-class woman circumscribed by what Martha Vicinus describes as the expectation that she would be the “angel in the house,” “expected to sacrifice all for the emotional, moral, and physical well-being of her husband and children.”12 Vicinus argues that domestic melodrama between 1820 and 1870 responded to the growing dichotomy under capitalism between the pressures of production and an idealized private sphere that could serve as a refuge from the competition and exploitation of the public realm. Mothers in these works often combined self-sacrifice with rebellion, a rebellion that was usually paid for with punishment and additional sacrifice. The prime example of such a dramatic structure was the enormously popular East Lynne, the novel by Mrs. Henry Wood that was first adapted for the U.S. stage by Clifton W. Tayleure and ran fairly continuously from 1865 to 1940, according to E. Ann Kaplan.13 East Lynne’s heroine temporarily abandons her family yet soon regrets her decision and spends most of the rest of the drama making up for her moral lapse by working, in disguise, as a governess for her own children. Even as such models of abnegation were supplanted by the New Women of the twentieth century, activist reformers tended to continue to invoke domestic metaphors such as “sweep Uncle Sam’s kitchen clean” and “tidy up our country’s house.”14 Judith L. Stephens shows that Progressive Era plays of the 1890–1920 period, which attempted to show mothers as capable of independence from their families, nevertheless continued to construe them as the moral center of the household.15 The tradition of mothers nobly absenting themselves so that their children might thrive was recycled in twentieth-century films that featured white mothers, such as (once again) East Lynne (dir. Frank Lloyd, 1931), Stella Dallas (dir. Henry King, 1925; dir. King Vidor, 1937) and films featuring African-American mothers such as Imitation of Life (dir. John Stahl, 1934; dir. Douglas Sirk, 1959). Today, the narratives of transnational migrant mothers who leave their children behind in order to seek work and send back remittances in an attempt to improve the dire conditions of their children’s lives—conditions exacerbated by neoliberal globalization—provide fodder for screenwriters once again inspired by the figure of the absent mother, now embodied by self-sacrificing Latinas.

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The very small percentage of the Mexican population that was literate in the nineteenth century read French and Spanish-language translations of French masters of melodrama such as Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Eugène Sue, and Alexander Dumas (both father and son). Influenced by the ideas of Rousseau and his contemporaries, Mexican authors such as José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi provided instruction on how to raise morally upright young women. In the popular serial novel La Quijotita y su prima (1818–1819), Lizardi’s narrator relates the cautionary tale of two girl cousins: the pompous Pomposa and the epitome of modesty, Pudenciana. Deformed in moral character by a lack of her mother’s breast milk, an excess of reading, and various other flaws in her upbringing, Pomposa descends into a life of sin and ends her days in a brothel. Pudenciana, by contrast, has the good fortune to be raised by a wise mother who breastfeeds her own daughter rather than outsource the task to a wet-nurse, and who limits her daughter’s access to books and other corrupting influences. In her analysis of La Quijotita, Jean Franco insightfully stresses that Pomposa’s fate follows from her illegitimate incursions into male realms of knowledge and power.16 Perhaps because it is so obvious, Franco does not dwell on the novel’s Manichean division of the world, and of its female protagonists, into extremes of good and evil, a hallmark of melodrama. But it is worth highlighting this example of early Manichaeism since it is this very kind of division of the female character into extreme good or extreme evil that almost two hundred years later still dominated the melodramatic imaginations of those who engaged in casting competitions over the figure of Elvira Arellano. Later nineteenth and early twentieth-century Mexican women, under the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911), were encouraged to embrace modernity in ways that were believed to promote nationbuilding, such as working outside of the home. Working-class or lower middle-class women were particularly encouraged to take on the gendered jobs at which women supposedly excelled, such as sewing, rolling cigars, and low-level office help. Yet as Carmen Escandón’s study of “Señoritas porfirianas” demonstrates, whether or not women worked outside of the home, they were still expected to demonstrate devotion to their children and obedience to their men.17 In The Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857 Silvia Marina Arrom explains how motherhood became a part of nationbuilding and education became a means to the dissemination of effective motherhood. Education, however, was tailored to social class, so that

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while elite schools for the upper classes provided thorough academic educations along with classes in embroidery, sewing, and music, schools for the lower classes imparted only basic literacy skills in order to focus more on developing domestic labor skills such as washing and ironing. “These differences in curricula show that female education was not intended to promote social mobility; on the contrary, it was meant to enforce the existing social system while serving national goals,” Arrom explains.18 On early twentieth-century stages, plays such as Concepción Sada’s El tercer personaje (1936) and the popular hit Maternidad (1937), by Catalina D’Erzell (1897–1950), highlighted the importance of women’s labor to the task of building the modern nation and openly debated whether the sacrifices of motherhood were worthwhile. Reproductive and capitalist labor comes together in the figure of D’Erzell’s protagonist in Maternidad, the idealized widowed mother Rosario who sews endlessly in order to raise money to support her three children. Rosario’s frivolous chica moderna of a sister Aurelia disdains motherhood in her youth only to regret her decision later in life. In the end, Aurelia is punished by loneliness and humiliation, as her husband abandons her for a more fertile woman; by contrast, the saintly, now elderly Rosario is rewarded by love and companionship. She adopts and raises yet a fourth child as her own in order to spare the reputation of the unwed mother (who happens to be Rosario’s granddaughter); one of her sons becomes successful enough to help her out financially and she finally gets her man. The suitor she had long ago rejected in favor of single-minded mothering returns to woo her once again in her old age. Maternidad comes down on the side of laser-like devotion to mothering as woman’s highest calling. D’Erzell’s play was still being staged in 1950, the year of her death. Her adaptation of the play for film, Como todas las madres (1944), was directed by the legendary Fernando Soler and featured the extremely popular comic actor Joaquín Pardavé. While later playwrights, most prominently Luisa Josefina Hernández in Los frutos caídos (1955) and later Rosario Castellanos in El eterno femenino (1976), questioned the ideology of motherhood as woman’s highest calling, the belief remains prevalent in many sectors of Mexican society even today. Carlos Monsiváis argued that twentieth-century melodrama, popularized in film and on television, taught Mexicans how to be citizens, and more importantly, how to accept the limitations of their roles as assigned by gender, skin color, or social class. All Mexicans, no matter how unequal in terms of economic wealth, could be united by the common human

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experiences of intense emotion, of joy, suffering, pain, and catharsis.19 All women could presumably be united by the stereotype of the “selfsacrificing mother, the saintly mother” [madrecita abnegada, la madrecita santa], as portrayed by Sara García in so many films between 1935 and 1971.20 Jorge Ayala Blanco notes the madrecita’s “glorious masochism” and suggests that suffering, along with a somewhat paradoxical combination of passivity and resourcefulness in the service of her family is key to the composition of the character type.21 Today, the melodrama mother lives on, not just in the old Sara García movies but in many television shows, especially the television dramas known as telenovelas , in commercial and documentary films, and in nonfiction media narratives. In the immensely popular 1969–1971 telenovela Simplemente María, for instance, the protagonist is a rural-urban migrant seamstress and another single mother who marries late in life, only after she has selflessly dedicated herself to raising her son. In recent years, the increase in numbers of transnational women migrants who leave their children behind in order to provide financial support from abroad has provided a true-life melodramatic hook, family separation, for screenwriters and filmmakers crafting protagonists in the contemporary madrecita mode. Referring to the actual lives of women as a “melodramatic hook” might seem flippant or trivializing of actual suffering. Yet by using this phrase we seek to convey how actual suffering is absorbed and recirculated by mainstream popular culture focused on creating sensation and suspense: Will mother and child be reunited? Will good mother migrants suffer enough to win citizenship? Will bad mothers be deported?22 In addition to the saintly migrant worker-mom aspiring to deserve citizenship in Under the Same Moon, which we will discuss in Chapter 6, two additional recent examples of suffering migrant mothers in otherwise very different films distributed on both sides of the border bear mention. First, in comic mode, the Mexican maid in Spanglish (dir. James L. Brooks, 2004), played by the Spanish actress Paz Vega, in yet another Hollywood elision of all Hispanics, serves as the angelic savior of her Anglo employers while trying to protect her teenage daughter from their corrupting influences. Second, in tragic mode, the Mexican nanny in Babel (dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006), played by Adriana Barraza, is torn between her responsibilities to her two young Anglo charges and her desire to attend her own son’s wedding. Arellano’s performance was consumed by global audiences that have been primed to expect migrant mothers to suffer. In discussing one recent Mexican telenovela that depicts

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a family separated from the mother at the border crossing, The Wounded Soul [El alma herida, 2003], Alicia Schmidt Camacho suggests, as part of her argument that migrants suffer from something she calls “migrant melancholia,” that melodrama affirms and enlarges migrant suffering “so that it cannot be sublimated and normalized.”23 We argue the contrary. The more migrant suffering is affirmed, enlarged, and circulated through migrant melodrama, the more it becomes a common currency that may teach us how to feel with Others across national borders in transnational affective alliances, yet may also teach us what to expect for those Others: additional pain.

Mother-Activism in the Americas Scholars from many different fields—including sociology, anthropology, geography, Latin American studies, Latinx studies, American studies, gender studies, and performance studies—have studied resistant performances and social movements led by women activists in a wide range of countries spanning the Americas, including Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Mexico, the United States, and Canada, without coming to a consensus on the limits of the radical potential of the mother activist, the woman activist who strategically foregrounds her status as mother. More celebratory analyses, such as that of feminist Chicana scholar Cynthia L. Bejarano, stress that mother activists expand the notion of citizenship to include “maternal citizenship.” In her study of mother activists in Argentina, El Salvador, and northern Mexico, Bejarano writes: Traditionally “good” mothers were protectors of their children, but only so far as the parameters of the playground and the streets of their neighborhoods – never against the ubiquitous state and its assassins. As activist mothers, however, they acted and engaged their maternal citizenship in the public sphere.24

Along the same lines, Amalia Pallares maintains that the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and Arellano alike relied on conventional discourses to “engage in very novel and unconventional actions.”25 The actions that Pallares defines as “very novel at the time for any undocumented person,” however, include seeking sanctuary in a church and daring state authorities to deport her from the church grounds. Seeking sanctuary from the state on church grounds is far from novel: it is an ancient practice that

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dates back to the ancient cities of refuge described in the Old Testament and practices which were codified in medieval English common law.26 Salvadoran undocumented migrants fleeing the civil war fueled by U.S. support for the military, moreover, had used the same strategy more than two decades before Arellano, in the first Sanctuary Movement.27 While we agree with Pallares that resisting deportation does constitute an attempt to exercise agency, we would also stress how the attempt to justify that exercise of agency to a potentially hostile public drew upon specific character types embedded in particular histories of cultural production, histories that inevitably entail limitations to agency, whether or not the subject desires such limitations. In order to better understand mother-activism, besides contrasting the activists’ discourse with their actions, it is important to analyze how the discourses and actions, despite their apparent discrepancies, work together to generate social performances in daily life. The type of performance that we call migrant melodrama gathers appreciative audiences of religious communities and leaders, who in turn spawn further melodramas, precisely because many archetypal religious tropes— martyrs, saints, virgins, and angels—were already incorporated into melodrama from religious performance since at least the nineteenth century. Some alliances between migrant activists and religious leaders today may seem like a natural fit not only because both parties share a concern for the fate of the family, as Pallares suggests, but also because they draw from the same store of performative archives and repertoires when they conceptualize and restage Western, Christian, heteronormative families.28 Without wishing to detract from the courage of mother activists, our view aligns more with that of scholars who see mother activists as hamstrung by their reliance on the tropes of domesticity. In her analysis of the activism of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina during the country’s most recent dictatorship (1973–1984), performance studies scholar Diana Taylor credits the women with drawing attention to the political disappearance of thousands of young Argentines; yet she also argues that the white-kerchiefed women were trapped in the “bad scripts” of traditional motherhood.29 Geographer Melissa Wright’s more recent study of mother-activism from 1995–2005 in northern Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez, where women organized to protest the continuous stream of sexual assaults, torture, and killings of their daughters, is even more pessimistic about the potential for mother-activists to permanently expand women’s range of agency in the public sphere. Wright persuasively argues that the politics of mother-activism couches radical demands

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within the conservative demeanor of women who have been obliged by government inaction to forsake their domestic roles and claim space in the public sphere: Their politics rests on a plea for the government to create the conditions by which they can return home. Thus it is their presence on the street that exposes the social perversion, not because the mothers are socially perverse but because the situation has forced them, against the natural order of things, to leave their homes. In this way, the mothers articulate that their politics is a reaction to a state that neither protects nor holds sacred the patriarchal family but instead creates conditions that force women to leave their homes and look for their children.30

Such activism, Wright argues, implicitly concedes that once the correct order of things has been restored, women will be able to retreat to their proper place in the home, out of the public sphere. Less well-studied than the above examples but just as relevant as precursors to Arellano’s activism is twentieth-century mother-activism in Mexico during the demonstrations leading up to the massacre at Tlatelolco’s Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City on October 2, 1968. On September 30 of that year, hundreds of women clad in black to denote mourning marched from the Monument to the Mother in Mexico City to the headquarters of the Chamber of Deputies to protest the state violence that had been unleashed against demonstrating youth that summer. The mother of a high school student who had been killed by the military was given a place of honor in the demonstration and called for an end to military incursions into high schools and universities. In addition, the mothers demanded the release of political prisoners such as railroad labor leader Demetrio Vallejo and called for changes to the laws that had been used as a pretext to ban the formation of a non-governmentsponsored union.31 In the short run, attempts to organize around motherhood were squelched by the violent repression at Tlatelolco and again in the second wave of repression of the early 1970s. Yet by 1978 the Comité Pro-Defensa de Presos, Perseguidos, Desaparecidos y Exiliados Politicos was founded by Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, whose son had been arrested and “disappeared” by government security agents in 1975. On the thirty-fifth anniversary of her son’s disappearance, in 2010, the 83-year-old Ibarra, by then a multi-term member of the Mexican senate, led a small protest outside the National Cathedral in Mexico City to

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commemorate her son and continue to highlight the many still unsolved political disappearances: “Many mothers were not fortunate enough to be able to hug our children, but we were able to see others hug theirs with their eyes full of tears. That would make anyone feel good.”32 Ibarra’s remark allegorizes and genders embodied affective response: the hugs she describes sum up all mothers’ love for their children in a physical gesture; the mothers’ collective tears underscore both the suffering occasioned by the loss of a child and the joy of reuniting with a child. Moreover, Ibarra exemplifies the social circulation of what sociologist Deborah B. Gould has called “political feelings,” which encompass both prelinguistic physiological experience and the language necessary to express that experience as an emotion. Movement leaders like Ibarra and Arellano in a sense translate affective states for their publics. As Gould puts it, in reference to social movements in general, they “‘make sense’ of affective states and authorize selected feelings and actions while downplaying and even invalidating others.”33 Ibarra, for instance, encourages collective solidarity by legitimizing feeling good about other women’s good fortune, as opposed to, say, feeling envy or anger in response to their reunions with their children. As in much mother-activism, fathers are missing from the picture, not just as activists but also as partners in parenting.34 Arellano emerged from a Latin American tradition of mother-activism and drew from a performative repertoire very familiar to Latin Americans in general and to Mexicans in particular—marches, hunger strikes, displays of self-sacrificial mothering, and identification of the good mother with the Virgin of Guadalupe. Yet because she came into her own as an activist in the United States, with the help of U.S. activists, Arellano’s activism also fits within the performative repertoire of U.S. mothers, from the depression-era protesters who blocked roads to claim a right to feed their hungry children to Latina mothers organizing in urban areas such as East Los Angeles and Chicago to Sheehan and her “peace mom” refusal to celebrate the ultimate maternal sacrifice.35 Though we will not review the history of such U.S. mother-activism in any detail, it is important to keep in mind that Arellano also belongs to the history of U.S. mother activists, non-Latinas and Latinas alike. The activists who helped her found the organization Familia Latina Unida, moreover, were drawing on both their experience in the U.S. civil rights movement and on the first Sanctuary movement, which provided safe haven to hundreds of Central American refugees from U.S.-funded wars in the 1980s. (In 2018, the New Sanctuary movement was still small, but growing, with about

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forty people sheltered in churches around the United States.)36 The Rev. Walter “Slim” Coleman, who offered Arellano sanctuary in the Adalberto United Methodist Church, was a veteran of the African-American civil rights movement who was well-known in Chicago for having led a voter registration drive to help elect Chicago’s first black mayor in 1983. Thus both Latin American and U.S. traditions of social activism that emphasize the redemptive quality of suffering came together in the figure of Arellano. In the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr. succinctly articulated a Christian worldview about the value of unjust suffering that is also central to melodramatic narrative and describes the mindset of many migrant-rights activists today: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

Plot, Setting, and Casting Dynamic The facts of Elvira Arellano’s biography offer a combination of the commonplace and extraordinary that can easily be shaped into the equation of suffering-as-virtue and the blend of political-as-personal that melodrama demands. Like hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants every year, Arellano was rounded up by immigration authorities and ordered to present herself for deportation. And like many of those deported, Arellano was a single mother with a U.S.-born child who would either have to leave with his mother or remain in the United States apart from her. As journalists have noted, the extraordinary element of the narrative is that rather than accept deportation or risk time in prison by attempting to remain in the country as a “fugitive,” Arellano openly defied what she and many others consider unjust immigration laws.37 After her first deportation, in 1997, Arellano walked back over the border again. In 2002, when she was arrested in an Immigration Control and Enforcement crackdown on O’Hare airport, she did not agree to the “expedited removal” offered by immigration authorities but instead appealed to Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez, who introduced a private relief bill in the House that won her a stay of deportation based on her son’s need for medical treatment. She became a public figure in June of 2004, when she confronted then Mexican President Vicente Fox during a town-hall meeting with the Chicago-area Mexican community and urged him to reject George W. Bush’s guest-worker plan. By the time she sought sanctuary in the Adalberto Methodist Church on August 15, 2006, she had already been a public figure for more than two

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years. During the following year, as the first person granted sanctuary in what became the New Sanctuary Movement until her deportation, on August 20, 2007, she was the object of hundreds of news stories, television broadcasts, and internet discussions throughout the United States, Latin America, and Europe. After her deportation, media attention remained focused on her son Saul, as he embarked on a speaking tour of the United States accompanied by his guardians, New Sanctuary Movement activists Emma Lozano and the Rev. Walter Coleman.38 In September, Saul rejoined his mother in Mexico. Unlike many migrant mothers, Arellano avoided the pattern of transnational motherhood that trades family separation for economic advancement, instead seeking both improved economic circumstances and family unity. So, one might ask, where is the melodrama? It can be found in her attempt to base her claim to a right to remain in the United States in part on the figure of the suffering mother, the potential suffering that would result from the disruption of mother–child unity if she were deported while her son exercised his right as a citizen to remain in the United States, the suffering of a lower standard of living in Mexico, the suffering of spending all of one’s time inside a church building. Beyond the lawsuit filed in federal court arguing that Saul Arellano’s constitutional rights as a U.S. citizen were being infringed, a lawsuit that was quickly dismissed, Arellano also staked a moral claim to residency rights, performing herself as a good mother, a desexualized, pious, Christian mother who cared deeply about her innocent, also suffering, child, a child who suffered at the hands of an unjust immigration regime.39 The domestic setting for the Arellano migrant melodrama was the apartment above the church where she lived with her son. Yet it also unfolded on a world stage and became an allegory about transnational migration, the stuff of action-and-adventure, or contemporary sensation melodrama. The setting was both domestic and public, occupying both secular and sacred spaces. It took place not only in the apartment, but also in the church where she worshipped, and organized the congregation, on the streets where her supporters and detractors alike demonstrated, and on the Mexico–U.S. border, where her entrances and exits were recorded. Within this setting, the plot, as in sensation melodrama, was full of suspense and intense emotion—in this case, created by the constant threat of deportation. And as in race melodrama, the protagonist’s suffering was connected to her racialization, in this case her racialization as a brown-skinned working-class woman with limited education.

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The sentimental tropes of race melodrama, particularly the emphasis on the potential threat of family separation, were activated in attempts to win public sympathy that were not always successful. Time Magazine, for instance, opined: “Her case and her cause have also at times been handled inartfully – the aggressive use of her young son as a mascot for the movement at times bordered on being exploitative.”40 As a dynamic, the Arellano melodrama evolved in at least three escalating, competing rounds of casting: (1) Arellano’s performance of self as a virtuous, suffering mother and the casting of her son Saul as an innocent child-victim of unjust laws; (2) the response of Arellano’s opponents: a competing assignment of roles that cast Arellano as a cruel, criminal mother who herself victimized her son; (3) the response of supporters to the attacks on Arellano: a post-deportation canonization of Arellano as a madre dolorosa, or sorrowing Virgin Mary figure, in other words, a martyr and a saint. In order to analyze the first two rounds, we reconstruct the first two competing melodramas primarily from news accounts and media photos. In considering round three, post-deportation representations, we look primarily at a contemporary painting by Javier Chavira. Whether in the media or in visual culture, we argue, the struggle around Arellano essentially centers on a metaphoric casting competition: We, the court of public opinion, are asked to determine which (social) actor deserves which role.

First Casting: Arellano as Suffering Mother, Saul as Innocent Child, ICE as Villain and Church as Rescuer Arellano, her lawyers, her advocates in the New Sanctuary Movement, and sympathetic news reporters and photographers collaborated in casting her as a suffering mother. It is impossible to determine exactly to what extent, if at all, this casting was conscious and to what extent Arellano exercised agency in her embodiment of the role. To some extent, her role was created for her, or at times even demanded of her, by her advocates, by the media, by legislators who accepted her petitions, and by the nation-state that had the power to deny her appeals and deport her. Arellano operated under severe historical, material, and ideological constraints; yet it would be condescending to assume that she had no conscious understanding of the power dynamics of her situation or of the importance of presenting

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herself in particular ways in public. Whether or to what extent she was conscious of her performance is less important than the fact that an interpretation of the performance can be constructed from the evidence of her public appearances. In all the photos we’ve found through internet searches, including some on Arellano’s Facebook page and others published by mainstream newspapers such as USA Today, The New York Times, and the wire service the Associated Press, Arellano dresses modestly, often in pants and high-necked blouses, her long hair often pulled back into a low ponytail. (She never publicly mentioned current or former sexual partners and never identified Saul’s father, referring to him only in the vaguest of terms and only when directly asked.) In photographs, while she sometimes looks directly at the camera, she also at times clutches Saul to her and keeps her head tilted and her eyes downcast in a typical Madonna gesture, thus positioning herself as a virginal mother and positioning her son as a potential innocent victim41 (Fig. 4.1). Since many of these images were accessed online through Google-image searches, and many of them were posted anonymously, it has not always been possible to ascertain their origin or to discern to what extent the photographers posed Arellano and her son. In one oft-posted photo that has no credit, Arellano appears seated next to a statuette of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a microphone in one hand and her other hand wrapped around Saul as he sits in her lap, dressed in a gray suit and a shiny red tie. Behind Arellano stands a life-sized placard with a dash-line outline of her body similar to those used in South America in the 1970s and 80s to protest political disappearances. Above the outline, black letters read: “Don’t let the migra take my mommy away.” In the background, to the side of the placard, sits an unidentified man clothed in clerical garb. While the photo appears on at least one proArellano blog,42 it has also been posted on the website of an individual who posted the cutline under it: “Elvira Arellano & Anchor Baby Son Saul.”43 Thus an image that was most likely created in hopes of associating Arellano with the piety and goodness of the Virgin was flipped to assist in her demonization. In an anti-migrant context, the use of the word “mommy,” the language of a child, perhaps intended to evoke empathy or sympathy, instead taps into stereotypes of Latinas as hyper-fertile threats to the nation. The day before she sought sanctuary in the Adalberto United Methodist Church, Arellano told Chicago Sun-Times reporter Esther J. Cepeda: “I can’t go back, I have no job there, I have no savings, and what will I be able to take in one suitcase? What about my son? He is ready to

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Fig. 4.1 Elvira Arellano and her son, Saul Arellano, in the Adalberto United Methodist Church, Chicago (Photo by M. Spencer Green, September 30, 2006. Courtesy of Associated Press Images)

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go to second grade, and in Mexico I won’t even be able to feed him.” Arellano’s question, “what about my son?” foregrounds the potential suffering of an innocent child, not yet old enough to deserve punishment, and evokes the pitiful image of a boy, just out of first grade, starving to death in Mexico.44 Arellano herself, in this configuration, matters only in terms of her ability to provide for her son. And the boy matters both because of his status as an innocent child and because he is a U.S. citizen. Early news accounts in the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune, just after Arellano sought shelter, tended to accept her selfpresentation. Sara E. McElmurry’s thorough study of the Chicago newspaper coverage surrounding the Arellano case demonstrates that the Spanish-language press, far more than the English-language press, depicted Arellano as a “good mother.”45 Typical of the coverage is this quote from the Spanish-language newspaper Hoy: Upon returning home, his mother awaited him with just-prepared food in the second-story apartment right above the church, which is now his new home. “I will be with him always, to help him with his homework and to make sure that he graduates and realizes his dream of becoming a fireman,” said the Mexican mother. 46

Emphasizing the “Mexican mother” designator, McElmurry credits Hoy with the construction of the good-mother identity. But actually Arellano and the Hoy journalist worked together to construct her identity. Arellano herself, if she is quoted correctly, vows to remain with Saul “forever” to help him realize his dreams, a vow that foregrounds her loyalty to his ambitions and makes no mention of any desires or dreams of her own apart from his. Arellano herself serves the meal in front of the journalist, performing motherhood through traditionally gendered domestic tasks. During her stay in sanctuary, because of her inability to leave the church property, Arellano was able to temporarily perform a culturally constructed ideal of intense middle-class mothering that as a single working-class Mexican woman who had been employed in the low-status gendered and racialized job of cleaner, she perhaps perceived as a luxury. Saul, or “Saulito” as he was sometimes called in the diminutive to extra sentimental effect, was often cast by the adults surrounding him as the melodrama child, the wise and innocent victim-as-savior who bravely faced the tragic threat of separation from his mother. For example, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, Sue Ontiveros highlighted Saul

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Arellano’s small physical size and his U.S. citizenship when she projected him as an emblem for the three million U.S.-born children whose parents are undocumented. “Just as those children suffer, so does little Citizen Saul,” she wrote on August 26, 2006. A week later, in response to emails she received from readers who rejected Saul’s right to citizenship, she opened her column with a somewhat condescending bid to make Arellano herself seem childlike and vulnerable, while indirectly calling attention to some of her readers’ racism, “My, my, one little brown woman sure has a lot of people very angry.”47 Saul’s casting, like his mother’s, was always unstable and created expectations, if not demands, for extraordinarily charismatic performances that he was not always able to deliver. Some journalists seemed disturbed by how Saul did not exude the air of wisdom and unusual compassion expected of melodrama child-heroes imbued with the power to redeem their parents or other wayward adults, an archetype that we analyze in more depth in Chapter 6. Some journalists noted with implied disapproval that Saul seemed shy, awkward, and at times downright resentful of his mother’s activism.48 At a rally in Tijuana shortly after her deportation, Arellano insisted that whatever distress the boy had experienced was the fault of the state. According to the Associated Press, Arellano narrated their saga in the third person as she told a small crowd of supporters: “He’s a boy who has been suffering, because the U.S. government told his mother she couldn’t stay in their country anymore because she was undocumented.”49 In this round of casting, the melodrama villain, the personification of evil, is the arm of the state charged with deportations, Immigration Control and Enforcement, or “la migra” in colloquial Spanish. In the poster heading described above—“Don’t let the migra take my mommy away”— that was recirculated in photos and on the internet, “la migra” is vilified through its personification as a mother snatcher.50 The supposed voice of the child, (in fact, most likely created by adults) speaks as if to say, “Save me from the villain!” Some journalists even went so far as to indulge in the melodramatic tradition of depicting the villain as physically deficient and so unattractive. For example, Daniel Hernandez of LA Weekly described the ICE agent who spoke at the press conference after Arellano’s deportation as “bald, stocky and arrogant.” Arellano, by contrast, was described by Hernandez as “small-framed and soft-spoken.”51 We agree with those who rightly point out that Immigration Control and Enforcement, taking its cue from the federal government, appears indifferent to the plight of

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mixed-status families and constructs working-class Latina migrants as “illegal,” thus providing a stream of cheap, disposable labor. Yet to portray ICE agents as ugly thugs intent on separating children from their mothers personalizes the systemic violence of the nation-state to such an extent that it appears as if the “prison warden with a well-worn truncheon,” to use Patrick Anderson’s words, is to blame for the operations of the prison.52 The rescuers in this first casting are the Rev. Coleman and his wife Lozano, who housed Arellano in the apartment above their storefront church and used her embodied threat of mother–child separation to claim the moral high ground for the New Sanctuary Movement. To New Sanctuary Movement churches around the country that provide shelter to undocumented migrants, the defiance of nation-state laws constitutes civil disobedience of immoral human law for the sake of adherence to higher law. As Coleman put it, “I care more about God’s law than I do about Homeland Security.”53 It is difficult to ascertain whether, or to what extent, as part of their rescue mission, Coleman and Lozano may have helped stage Arellano in ways that unintentionally backfired, turning public opinion against her.

Recasting by Arellano’s Opponents Saul was the pivot that opponents of undocumented migrants used to try to turn the melodrama around and re-cast the roles. Opponents kept the melodramatic structure intact but implied that the character types had been incorrectly identified. Saulito, they claimed, was in fact suffering, but not because an evil nation-state was persecuting his good mother. He was suffering because his mother was actually a cruel woman who was simply posing as a victim. And they undertook to expose her. The group Mothers Against Illegal Aliens staged several protests outside of the church to accuse Arellano of child abuse. They called Saul an “anchor baby” and said he had repeatedly been kept out of school to make public appearances. Moreover, they said, he was deprived of a normal social life with other children. Somewhat paradoxically, the proposed solution of the Mothers Against Illegal Aliens to the alleged child abuse was to pressure Immigration Control and Enforcement to do its job and deport Arellano, together with her son. They started an internet campaign to get people to telephone the agency to request that its agents arrest and deport her. Sociologist Mary Romero has followed the activities of Mothers Against Illegal Aliens very closely and analyzed in detail how they constructed

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themselves as devotees of the cult of true, white middle-class motherhood and adopted a Madonna figure as their logo, though they were not a Catholic organization. Romero also shows how Mothers Against Illegal Aliens associated Arellano and other migrant women with images of animals who breed excessively while also accusing them of immoral and deceitful strategizing in order to remain in the United States.54 After the protests by Mothers Against Illegal Aliens, the press coverage became more hostile. On the one-year anniversary of Arellano’s entry into sanctuary, August 15, 2007, the Sun-Times ran an editorial headlined: “It’s time to get out – Elvira Arellano has flouted the law long enough. She should leave the church and go back to Mexico.” The editorial accused Arellano of exploiting her son for her gain: “It’s time Arellano stop using Saul as bait – like the shrewd panhandlers on the ‘L’ parading their young for change.” This image of the evil mother using the innocent child as a tool for panhandling comes straight out of nineteenth-century melodrama. Martha Vicinus, for example, describes a scene from the 1847 novel by G.W.M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London, in which a mother suggests blinding her own children because once blinded they will be less likely to escape her evil clutches: No one who has read G.W.M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London (1847) will forget the mother who proposes blinding her children by placing a large insect between their lids and eyes; as blind children they will be more effective beggars and more dependent on her. Her motives are purely economic, but what we remember is the travesty of motherly feelings.55

The Sun-Times editorial appeals to readers’ sense of outrage in its construction of Arellano as capable of such a travesty of the motherly love she had proclaimed and performed. Thus a derogatory trope—the unscrupulous beggar—dating back at least as far as Victorian London is redeployed against a Mexican woman, perhaps bringing to mind for some readers stereotypical racialized and gendered images of hyper-fertile Mexican beggars whose poverty is their own fault, or whose poverty is merely an act devised to dupe the unsuspecting passerby into a foolish gesture of generosity.56 In the context of the debate about which migrants, if any, merit inclusion in the U.S. nation-state, the migrant-as-beggar is a melodramatic trope that can trigger emotions, such as disgust or anger, likely to justify migrant exclusion.

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Sun-Times reporter Esther Cepeda made a complete about-face in her coverage of Arellano. Toward the beginning of Arellano’s sanctuary, Cepeda wrote fairly sympathetic articles and even called Saul a “little freedom fighter.”57 After Arellano’s deportation, however, Cepeda wrote an opinion column condemning her for allegedly forcing her son to stand in the “hot sun” and hand out fliers about migrant rights. Arellano’s supposed offenses also included not allowing Saul to watch fireworks with his friends on the Fourth of July, an accusation that hinted at the antiAmerican sentiment. Cepeda and other journalists thus transformed Saul from potential melodrama rescuer, endowed with the redemptive power to save his mother, into the melodrama victim of an evil mother who was not worthy of rescue. In this casting, Coleman and Lozano were accomplices to the villain rather than rescuers; the real rescuer became ICE, for saving the new victim, the United States, from Arellano. Editorials in favor of Arellano’s deportation often construed her removal as just retribution, or in other words, melodrama punishment, for her alleged misdeeds in defying immigration laws. Exultation over Arellano’s deportation in several journalistic accounts took on a nasty celebratory tone. Cepeda, for example, wrote: “Adios and good riddance.”58 Melodrama simplifies complicated, potentially confusing situations, so that like audiences who applaud the hero and hiss at the villain, we know whom to love and whom to hate, whom to support and whom to oppose, whom to include and whom to exclude. Mary Mitchell’s scathing column in the Chicago Tribune, besides accusing Arellano of “pimping the system” argues that she was “no Rosa Parks” because she was charged with a felony for reentering the United States after her first deportation and using false documents to obtain employment. Mitchell emphasizes that Parks did not break the law when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man back in 1955, because she was already sitting in the section of the bus legally designated for blacks.59 As Suzanne Oboler notes, while Mitchell is technically correct, she misses the larger point that the civil rights movement, like the abolitionist movement before it, both relied heavily on the violation of unjust laws as a strategy for political action.60 Jane Juffer notes that Mitchell pushed Arellano into the category of “unworthy victim.”61 McElmurry says that the columnist created an “‘Us’ versus ‘Them’” dichotomy.62 We agree with both these analysts yet would add that Mitchell also joins the preexisting efforts of others to cast Arellano as a villain.

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Arellano as Virgin and Saint After Arellano’s deportation, advocates of immigration reform tried to re-cast the melodrama yet again, as they began to depict both Arellano and Saul as martyrs, marking another significant shift in the melodrama dynamic. In the wake of Arellano’s physical absence from the United States, references and images began to appear to fill in the gap. Large color photographs of Arellano’s face graced the walls of the Adalberto Methodist Church, flanking the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe (Fig. 4.2). On October 25, 2009, a group of about a dozen church members gathered in the sanctuary to watch a preview of a new documentary film, Immigrant Nation: The Battle for the Dream, by independent Chicago filmmaker Esaú Meléndez. It was as if the act of watching the film constituted a ritual of worship. In respectful detail, the documentary recounts Arellano’s decision to seek sanctuary, her struggles as a political activist in

Fig. 4.2 Photo of Elvira Arellano on the wall of Adalberto United Methodist Church, Chicago. Church members watch a documentary film about Arellano (Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa, October 25, 2009)

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Chicago, and her eventual return to her hometown in Michoacán, Mexico. The same year, a Mexican documentary filmmaker who had studied at Chicago’s Columbia College, Javier Solórzano Casarin, premiered the documentary Elvira, another tribute that highlights both her feistiness and her piety. More recently, in 2015–2016, a young Latina actor and playwright, Jessica Carmona, premiered first a one-woman show, then a full-length play based on the life of Arellano: Elvira: The Immigration Play. In a YouTube video to promote the solo performance, Carmona says, “Many people refer to Elvira Arellano as the Latina Rosa Parks. And the reason is because Elvira disobeyed, or she broke an unjust law, or a law that she felt was unfair, which is that a mother should be separated from her son because of who has citizenship and who doesn’t, who is documented and who isn’t.” Elvira was staged at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2015 and restaged in 2016 in a college production by Long Island University, Brooklyn campus. The hand program to the latter production tells spectators that the play is “based on the real-life story of Elvira Arellano. Known by many as the ‘Latina Rosa Parks,’ she entered the United States illegally in 1997 and was deported in 2007.” Carmona’s work demonstrates that in certain sectors of the popular imagination, Arellano has already been canonized as the Latina Rosa Parks. While we will not analyze this first work of a young writer in any detail, we touch on it briefly here to note how its Christian humanistic optimism, like much melodramatic cultural production about migrants and migration, reframes the political as the individual. While Elvira includes scenes from Arellano’s early life in Mexico— acted on a colorful sarape lain across the stage floor in a minimalistic and stereotypical scenic design (Keegan Wilson)—and from her days as an immigrant worker who cleaned homes and airport bathrooms, the through-line consists of a series of scenes depicting a fictional interrogation of Arellano by a U.S. border patrol agent, Officer John Williams. The interrogation is set in a sterile U.S. government office, furnished only with a metal desk and two hard-backed chairs; a map of the United States and Mexico provides the only wall decoration. During the course of the interrogation, Arellano’s deep religious faith contrasts starkly with the agent’s loss of faith in the wake of the murder of his son by Mexican drug traffickers. When Arellano asks if he reads the Bible, he replies: “I don’t read fiction.” By the end of the play, however, his experience with the deeply religious Arellano transforms him so radically that he also loses his faith in the Department of Homeland Security and decides to

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quit his job. Williams’ resignation letter sounds like it could have been written by a liberal immigration-rights activist: “I love this country so much, but I think we need to stop living in fear.” As played by Greta Quispe in the Long Island University (Brooklyn campus) production directed by Misti B. Wills, Arellano mostly seems the perfect model of piety, devoted motherhood, and passionate activism.63 “This land belongs to everybody. This land belongs to God, not to you,” she preaches to Williams, played by Aiden Wallace. Yet in a moment of heated argument with the Homeland Security official, she suddenly lashes out: “You are a cruel, evil man. You are a heartless devil. Maybe your son deserved to die.” He had a son; she has a son. Both of them have failed to see the other as fully human and to appreciate the other parent’s love for his or her child. The playwright’s attempt to add complexity to her otherwise unblemished hero and to humanize the obvious candidate for the villain of the drama makes the protagonist and antagonist into mirror images of each other, implying that they are actually very much alike but just can’t perceive the similarities. Williams’ letter of resignation offers facile hope to pro-immigration rights spectators, as if all it would take to unfetter human mobility would be a mutual recognition of humanity. At the same time, the plot creates a false equivalency of power, as if undocumented migrants and agents of the nation-state enjoy the same degree of authority to make and unmake each other’s worlds. By contrast to such fantasies of migrant agency, what might be called the “sí se puede” plot that follows from a Latina Rosa Parks casting layered onto the saintly mother archetype, the work of other artists and scholars that open up a space to think in ways that diverge from melodrama remind us that no matter how good a migrant might be as an individual, the state holds the final card: deportability. As Nicholas De Genova suggests, it is not a lack of recognition of their humanity that has made migrants deportable by the state, but instead the ability of the state to determine when and how to create their humanity as subjects who either enjoy or do not enjoy political rights. Drawing on philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life,” De Genova argues that Arellano’s confinement in the church, and the temporary respite from deportation that she was granted while in sanctuary, exemplified the state’s exercise of sovereignty and its control of the circumstances of her deportation. Whether or not to deport Arellano from the United States remained the prerogative of the state: “If the law regarding Arellano’s actionable deportation was at least temporarily set aside, therefore, the norm of her deportability remained rigorously enforced.”64

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Madre Dolorosa Perhaps the most powerful contribution to the move to canonize Arellano came from the Mexican-American visual artist Javier Chavira. His 2008 painting, Elvira Arellano combines the European iconography of the “Mater Dolorosa,” or “Sorrowing Mother,” rooted in the fifteenth-century Netherlands with contemporary Mexican iconography to depict Arellano as a Virginal figure defined by her strength, yet also by her suffering, her pain, and her resignation. Commissioned to create a piece for the National Museum of Mexican Art’s 2008 “A Declaration of Immigration” exhibit, Chavira worked from an image of Arellano’s mug shot that he found online to transform the criminal into the sacred (Fig. 4.3). Against a deep blue background evocative of both sky and the Virgin of Guadalupe’s cape, Arellano’s mug-shot stare is now recreated in a 24by-24-inch tempera painting finished with oil in a technique mixte used to render every shadow and line of her face in realistic detail. Her face and shoulder-length hair are framed by a halo fashioned from actual barbed wire, thorns, and rhinestones that stick out from the canvas to give the painting a sculptural dimension (Fig. 4.4). The barbed wire recalls the fences intended to keep migrants out; the thorns recall Christ’s crown of thorns; and the rhinestones, Chavira told us, symbolize the riches that migrants dream of accumulating in the United States. Monarch butterflies and white moths painted on the canvas appear to perch on the barbed-wire halo, making the process of human migration seem as natural and inevitable as that of the butterflies.65 Arellano’s shoulders and upper chest are draped in a simple yellow mantle with a high square collar that serves as background for a nopal-heart carved out of wood, painted green, and spiked with the same thorns that grace her halo. In minimalist evocation of the seven spears, or “swords of compassion,” that pierce the heart of the traditional Mater Dolorosa image and symbolize her empathy with Christ’s suffering, a little jeweled dagger stabs the nopal-heart.66 The many actual thorns protruding from the heart, however, magnify the sensation and the threat of pain, both to Arellano and us, were we to touch the heart. Unlike many traditional images that portray the sorrowing Madonna weeping, Arellano’s eyes shed no tears and look directly out at the viewer; the mug-shot convention dictating that she keep her gaze forward and her head straight, a posture that hints at defiance rather than submission or humility. Her mouth is set in a close-lipped, slightly

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Fig. 4.3 Elvira Arellano by Javier Chavira. Acrylic and oil on a panel, 24 inch by 24 inch (Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa)

downturned angle that suggests resignation and endurance. While nothing about her expression is melodramatic—if anything it is restrained—we would argue that the painting simultaneously gives Arellano an eloquent voice of protest and yet also limits that protest to an expression of pain. Historian Joyce E. Salisbury reminds us that the early Christian women who were literally martyrs in fact surrendered their children in order to devote themselves to religious life and give themselves up to the Romans for execution. In “How Martyrs Became Mothers and Mothers Became Martyrs,” Salisbury explains that actual martyrdom was incompatible with motherhood. Early Christian writers used motherhood merely as a

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Fig. 4.4 Elvira Arellano by Javier Chavira. Acrylic and oil on a panel, 24 inch by 24 inch (detail) (Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa)

metaphor to describe the martyr’s self-abnegation. Later writers flipped the metaphor: in the fifth century, Augustine described his mother, Monica, as martyr-like in her faith and spirituality, weeping for him as she prayed for his salvation. “Monica may be seen as the prototype for the Christian mothers who watched out for spiritual health by exhortations, prayers, and the shedding of many tears. All these actions were characteristic of the confessors preparing themselves for martyrdom,” writes Salisbury.67 Chavira’s painting reworks the metaphor yet again, turning Arellano from an individual mother into a symbol for all mothers threatened by castings such as “illegal” or “criminal” that lead to detention, deportation, and sometimes separation from children and partners. At the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, Elvira Arellano debuted in a 2008 “Declaration of Immigration” exhibit, along with about one hundred other works. The exhibit was framed by an “official statement” that appropriated and revised the language of the Declaration of Independence to challenge equations of undocumented

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migrants with criminality. When commissioned to produce the work, Chavira said he immediately thought of the Arellano case, with which he was familiar only from news accounts. As he began to read about Arellano on the internet, he said: “I found a lot of horrible racist websites out there about her. But I think she was very courageous and she is a role model, like the saints, following in the footsteps of Christ. And she is an icon of what’s happening to countless women here in the United States.”68 Despite the challenge to contemporary immigration policy posed by the exhibit concept, and despite the beauty and defiance of the Arellano portrait, the painting still unmistakably celebrates, within its lament, the suffering of mothers, specifically, in its allusion to the Virgin Mary, a mother who witnesses the death of her only child. But Saul Arellano is not dead. In fact, though he lived in Mexico for seven years between 2007 and 2014, he did not starve to death. Is the painting suggesting that living in Mexico is tantamount to crucifixion? And by positioning Arellano as Virgin and a martyr does the work make her vulnerable, upon the discovery of any human flaw, to the charge that she is an imposter, the bad witch posing as good witch, the whore posing as virgin? In the context of immigration debate, the painting continues a cycle of melodrama surrounding Arellano, pushing her image up to the next level of virtue— a response to those who criminalized her and celebrated her deportation that continues to depend on melodrama’s Manichean worldview as well as on the “glorious masochism” of its mothers.

Post-deportation Mother-Activism After her return to Mexico, Arellano struggled to find an activist community. She served as an icon for a new shelter for women deportees in Tijuana, Mexico named Casa Elvira and ran unsuccessfully for the Mexican Congress. Then she expanded the transnational reach of her mother-activism by allying herself with a new group of Latin American mother activists, Central American women searching for adolescent and adult children who disappeared as they tried to make their way north to the United States. Since 2004, an annual caravan of Central American mothers has made an annual pilgrimage through Mexico to publicize the disappearances of their children, both men and women, who vanished during their attempts to reach the United States. Organized in recent years by the Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano (MMM), a

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nongovernmental organization based in Mexico City and led by Marta Sánchez Soler, the caravans have been small, usually fewer than fifty mothers crammed into a single bus accompanied by various other vehicles for organizers, supporters, and press. Many family members of the disappeared are too poor to undertake a journey to look for their children, publicize their disappearance, and press authorities to investigate. Yet the numbers of Central American migrants estimated to have disappeared in Mexico is large—ranging from conservative estimates of 5000 to the huge figure of 70,000. The few mothers who do manage to travel north to Mexico accept the support offered by MMM and other nongovernmental organizations, including shelters for migrants that offer them lodging, as they traverse cities and small towns on the migrant routes around country. At each stopping point, the mothers stage a performative event, often in a historic town square: a march, a demonstration, and/or a quickly assembled exhibit of photographs of their children spread out on folding tables or even on blankets laid out on the ground.69 The women take turns speaking into a microphone or a bullhorn. They tell the story of when they last heard from their son or daughter (or in some cases, a spouse or a sibling), conveying details that make the young people vivid and their plight tangible—what their personalities were like, why they wanted to travel to the United States, what they said during their last telephone call home, what the kidnappers said when they demanded ransoms, where their sons and daughters (who may have been sexually trafficked) were last seen. The disappearances are publicized, and sometimes people are found, not only through the in-person contact during demonstrations but also through the national and international media. Arellano participated in several marches along with the Central American mothers, often leading chants with a bullhorn in hand. In 2011, Arellano and Father Solalinde both joined the annual caravan, lending the group of women a symbolic mother and father. That year the national press reported that Arellano briefly attracted the attention of Mexican immigration authorities, who apparently mistook her for an undocumented Central American and threatened to round her up for deportation.70 But as a citizen in her own country, in this situation she was better able to control her own self-casting: the authorities quickly accepted her explanation of her status as a Mexican supporter of immigrants from Central America and moved on. In a few minutes, with the lightening speed of certain casting shifts, an activist became a “criminal” and then an activist once more.

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Arellano’s status as a Mexican activist mother vulnerable to deportation became international news once again in 2014 when she returned to the United States as part of a protest, together with 150 deported families that included Dream Act youth activists and LGBT Dreamers. Once again, Mexican motherhood played a role in her self-casting, as she crossed the border with her Mexican-born second infant son, Emiliano, strapped to her chest in a shawl.71 She sought asylum on the grounds that her activism on behalf of Central American migrants in Mexico had led to threats against her. Both she and eventually her partner, Emiliano’s father, were granted temporary work permits while their applications for humanitarian visas were processed. As of this writing, in 2016, Arellano is back in Chicago, awaiting the outcome of her latest bid for residency.72 Her reunited family exemplifies the complicated transnational dynamics of what has come to be known as “mixed-status” households: her oldest son Saul, now a teenager, is a U.S. citizen; she and her youngest son Emiliano are Mexican citizens; and her partner Ismael Armando Mejía Valle is Honduran, an activist whom she met at Father Solalinde’s shelter in Ixtepec, Oaxaca. Arellano’s saga, and the growing body of cultural production inspired by it that circulates in the political economy of suffering, underscores how such transnational households must often claim their human rights by trading in suffering, equating suffering with virtue, and equating virtue with the unity of a heterosexual family. In the next chapter, we analyze the struggles of Honduran men whose ability to lead such traditional families has been compromised by injury and permanent disability. Perhaps because men have not needed to justify their presence in the public realm, fatherhood has not had the same high symbolic value in activism in the American hemisphere as motherhood has. Yet as we detail, some contemporary performances, in both cultural production and social protest, that foreground fatherhood and masculinity are just as significant as those of mothers in the claiming of migrant rights.

Notes 1. Robert D. Benford and Scott A. Hunt, “Dramaturgy and Social Movements: The Social Construction and Communication of Power,” Sociological Inquiry 62, no. 1 (1992): 39. 2. Grace Yukich, “Constructing the Model Immigrant: Movement Strategy and Immigrant Deservingness in the New Sanctuary Movement,” Social

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

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Problems 60, no. 3 (2013): 305. Yukich equates casting with the sociological term “framing,” defined by Yukich as “how different groups construct different discourses describing the same person or group.” In her discussion, Yukich cites Ana Elena Puga, “Migrant Melodrama and Elvira Arellano,” Latino Studies 10, no. 3 (2012): 355–384. Deborah Gould, “Life During Wartime: Emotions and the Development of ACT UP,” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 7, no. 2 (2002): 177–200. Robert D. Benford and David A. Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment,” Annual Review of Sociology (2000): 611–639. See also Erving Goffman seminal work, Frame Analysis (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1974). Of the many scholarly analyses of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and of sentimentality in the abolitionist movement, the following studies, listed in chronological order, have been most influential to our thinking on how the spectacle of suffering migrants today, like the spectacle of suffering slaves in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s era, can be simultaneously condemned and enjoyed: Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Heather S. Nathans, Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787 –1861: Lifting the Veil of Black (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence (New York: New York University Press, 2011); and Amy E. Hughes, Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2012). Also see the classic proabolition stage adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, George Aiken and Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852), reprinted in Gerould (1983). Rene C. Romano, “Narratives of Redemption: The Birmingham Church Bombing Trials and the Construction of Civil Rights Memory,” in The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, eds. Rene C. Romano and Leigh Raiford (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 96–133. Between 2003 and 2013, the U.S. government deported 3.7 million migrants to their home countries. An estimated 20–30 percent of this total is composed of parents of U.S.-born children. Fathers, however, are far more likely to be deported than mothers: 91 percent of deportees in recent years have been men. Marc R. Rosenblum and Doris Meissner, The Deportation Dilemma: Reconciling Tough and Humane Enforcement (Washington, DC: MPI, 2014). Wendy Brown, “Wounded Attachments,” Political Theory 21, no. 3 (1993): 390–410.

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9. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2, Part 1 (1966): 151–174. 10. E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (New York: Routledge, 1992), 20. 11. As in the United States, however, there was often a contrast between public ideals and private realities, such as sex work. For more on nineteenthcentury standards of morality and modesty in Mexico see Julia Tuñón Pablos, Women in Mexico: A Past Unveiled, trans. Alan Hynds (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987, 1999), 45–72. 12. Martha Vicinus, “‘Helpless and Unfriended’: Nineteenth-Century Domestic Melodrama,” New Literary History 13, no. 1 (1981): 127–143. 13. Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation, 76–106. 14. Welter, “True Womanhood,” 174, note 116. 15. Judith L. Stephens, “Gender Ideology and Dramatic Conventions in Progressive Era Plays, 1890–1920,” Theatre Journal 41, no. 1 (1989): 45–55. 16. Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 89. 17. Carmen Ramos Escandón, “Señoritas porfirianas: Mujer e ideología en el México progresista, 1880–1910,” in Presencia y transparencia: La mujer en la historia de México, ed. Carmen Ramos Escandón (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1987), 154. 18. Silvia Marina Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 17. 19. Carlos Monsiváis, “Se sufre, pero se aprende (El melodrama y las reglas de la falta de límites),” Archivos de la Filmoteca no. 16 (1994): 7–19. 20. One prominent exception to the purely saintly mother was the white mother in Angelitos Negros (dir. Joselito Rodríguez, 1948), who more in the tradition of the mothers in East Lynne and Imitation of Life, from which it was loosely adapted, at first cruelly rejects both her black mother and her black baby daughter, but then overcomes her racism to reconcile with her daughter. For an incisive discussion of the Latin American racial dynamics in Angelitos Negros, see Theresa Delgadillo, “Singing ‘Angelitos Negros’: African Diaspora Meets Mestizaje in the Americas,” American Quarterly 58, no. 2 (2006): 407–430. 21. Jorge Ayala Blanco, La aventura del cine mexicano (Mexico, DF: Grijalbo, 1993): 42–53. 22. Relevant scholarship on the very real challenges faced by Latina migrant mothers today includes Denise A. Segura, “Working at Motherhood: Chicana and Mexican Immigrant Mothers and Employment,” in Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, eds. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey (New York: Routledge, 1994), 211– 233; Pierette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine Avila, “‘I’m Here but

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25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

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I’m There’: The Meanings of Latina Transnational Motherhood,” Gender & Society 11, no. 5 (1997): 548–571; Mary Romero, “Go after the Women: Mothers against Illegal Aliens’ Campaign against Mexican Immigrant Women and Their Children,” Indiana Law Journal 83, no. 4 (2008): 1355–1389; and Jørgen Carling, Cecilia Menjívar, and Leah Schmalzbauer, “Central Themes in the Study of Transnational Parenthood,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 38, no. 2 (2012): 191– 217. Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 307. Cynthia L. Bejarano, “Las Super Madres de Latino America: Transforming Motherhood by Challenging Violence in Mexico, Argentina, and El Salvador,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 23, no. 1 (2002): 131. Amalia Pallares, Family Activism: Immigrant Struggles and the Politics of Noncitizenship (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 10. For details on the biblical history of sanctuary, see Jennifer Ridgley, “The City as a Sanctuary in the United States,” in Sanctuary Practices in International Perspectives: Migration, Citizenship, and Social Movements, eds. Randy K. Lippert and Sean Rehaag, 219–231. For the history of sanctuary in medieval English law, see Karl Shoemaker, “Sanctuary for Crime in the Early Common Law,” in Lippert and Rehaag, 15–27. The civil war in El Salvador lasted from 1980 to 1992, during which time more than 75,000 civilians were killed. The United States contributed hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the government and trained many of the soldiers who later formed part of death squads at the School of the Americas, including nineteen of the soldiers involved in the 1990 assassination of six Jesuit priests. New York Times editorial, “School of the Dictators,” September 28, 1996. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Diana Taylor, “Trapped in Bad Scripts,” in Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s Dirty War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 183–222. Melissa W. Wright, “Urban Geography Plenary Lecture—Femicide, Mother-Activism, and the Geography of Protest in Northern Mexico,” Urban Geography 28, no. 5 (2007): 401–425. Daniel Cazés, Crónica 1968 (Mexico, DF: Plaza y Valdés Editores, 1993), 206–208; Raúl Jardón, 1968: El fuego de la esperanza (Mexico, DF: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1998) 90–91. “Muchas madres no tuvimos la dicha de volver a abrazar a nuestros hijos, pero sí la de ver a otras abrazar a los suyos con los ojos llenos de lágrimas. Eso satisface a cualquiera.” Cited in Víctor Ballinas, “Se cumplen 35 años

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36. 37.

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de la desaparición de Jesús Piedra Ibarra,” La Jornada, April 19, 2010, 20. Deborah Gould, “On Affect and Protest,” in Political Emotions: New Agendas in Communication, eds. Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich, and Ann Reynolds (New York: Routledge, 2010), 33. One significant recent exception to this tendency to focus on mothers when thinking of parents as activists is the movement founded by poet Javier Sicilia after the 2011 abduction and murder of his son by drug thugs: Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad [Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity]. In 2011, Sicilia mobilized thousands of demonstrators in marches around Mexico protesting the violence unleashed by the Calderón government’s war on drugs. See Julián Miglierini, “Mexico Poet Javier Sicilia Leads Anger at Drug Violence,” BBC News, April 23, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latinamerica-13141263. On the sentimentalizing strategies of depression-era protesters, see Ann Folino White, “Starving Where People Can See: The 1939 Bootheel Sharecroppers’ Demonstration,” TDR 55, no. 4 (2011): 14–32; on Sheehan, see Donald E. Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 192–204. Aline Barros, “More Undocumented People Find Sanctuary in U.S. Churches,” VOA, April 19, 2018, www.VOAnews.com. Gretchen Ruethling, “Chicago Woman’s Stand Stirs Immigration Debate,” The New York Times, August 19, 2006, 10; Amanda Paulson, “For Mother and Son, an Immigration Predicament,” The Christian Science Monitor 98, no. 191 (August 28, 2006): 1. Rev. Walter Coleman, interview by the authors, October 25, 2009, Chicago. The language of the decision implies that Saul needed to make a stronger case for his potential future suffering: it finds that family separation would not inflict hardship sufficient enough to constitute his de facto deportation, in violation of his constitutional rights: “This is not to say that Saul will not suffer a hardship; undoubtedly he will. But the question before the Court is whether that hardship is of constitutional magnitude – under any construction of the alleged facts, it is not.” See A.J. St. Eve and Walter L. Coleman, “as next friend of the minor child, Saul Arellano v. The United States,” 454 F. Supp. 2nd 757, 2006. Along the same line of logic—the more you suffer the more you are entitled to exercise your rights—Saul Arellano, although a U.S. citizen, was required to produce evidence of his suffering in the form of the medical condition Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, in order to win special permission from Congress for his mother to temporarily accompany him in his native country. For a persuasive argument that courts have relied on outmoded and

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discriminatory assumptions in refusing to recognize children’s rights to family unity in their country of citizenship, see Jacqueline Bhabha, “The ‘Mere Fortuity of Birth’? Children, Mothers, Borders, and the Meaning of Citizenship,” in Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender, eds. Seyla Benhabib and Judith Resnik (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 187–227. Nathan Thornburgh, “The Fallout from a Deportation,” Time, August 21, 2007. The previous year the magazine had sung a very different tune, including Arellano on its list of “people who mattered,” in the company of George W. Bush and Pope Benedict XVI. Wendy Cole, “Elvira Arellano: An Immigrant Who Found Sanctuary,” Time, December 25, 2006. See for instance the photo posted on the “Elvira Arellano Friends” Facebook page, www.facebook.com, accessed January 30, 2010. http://peruanista.worldpress.com, accessed October 1, 2011. Debbie Schlussel, “Prediction: Immigration Won’t Touch Illegal Alien Criminal Elvira Arellano,” August 16, 2007, http://www.debbieschlussel. com/353/prediction-immigration-wont-touch-illegal-alien-criminalelvira-arellano/. Esther J. Cepeda, “Vigil Set to Halt Migrant’s Deportation,” Chicago Sun-Times, August 14, 2006, 14. Sara E. McElmurry, “Mother, Immigrant, Criminal: Newspaper Coverage and the Construction of Identity in the Elvira Arellano Controversy,” unpublished paper delivered at the Centro de Idiomas, Universidad Tecnológica de la Mixteca, February 19, 2009, 1–22. Al regresar a casa, su madre lo esperaba con comida recién preparada en el apartamento del segundo piso, justo arriba de la iglesia, donde ahora es su nuevo hogar. “Estaré con él siempre, para ayudarle con sus tareas y procurando que se gradué y logre su sueño de ser bombero,” comentó la madre mexicana, cited in Mc Elmurry, “Mother,” 11. Sue Ontiveros, “Vote if You Support Elvira Arellano: Voting is the Only Way to Make Those in Power Sit Up and Pay Attention,” Chicago SunTimes, August 26, 2006, 12; Sue Ontiveros, “Prejudices Cloud Vision on Immigration,” Chicago Sun-Times, September 2, 2016. Stefano Esposito, “Supporters Cheer Return of ‘Saulito’: Boy, 7, Back from Tour for Immigrant Mom,” Chicago Sun-Times, November 19, 2006, A9; Robert Mitchum, “Arellano’s Son Back in City—Saul, 9, Returns to U.S. for Immigration Events,” Chicago Tribune, April 28, 2008, 3; Maureen O’Donnell, “‘Saulito’ Delivers Message for Elvira— Boy at Church Where He, Mom Spent Year,” Chicago Sun-Times, April 8, 2008, 15. The Associated Press, “Deported Immigration Activist Says Son to Move to Mexico,” September 13, 2005.

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50. The role of the villain in melodrama has a history far too extensive and varied to detail here. But for a few succinct descriptions of the character type, see David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture 1800–1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 177– 180; Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 17; and Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, 256–257. 51. Daniel Hernandez, “Broken Sanctuary,” LA Weekly, August 21, 2007, http://www.laweekly.com/news/broken-sanctuary-2150144. 52. Patrick Anderson, “To Lie Down to Death for Days: The Turkish Hunger Strike, 2000–2003,” Cultural Studies 18, no. 6 (2004): 819. 53. Coleman, interview by the authors, October 25, 2009, Chicago. For more on the New Sanctuary Movement see Gregory Freeland, “Negotiating Place, Space, and Borders: The New Sanctuary Movement,” Latino Studies 8, no. 4 (2010): 485–508; Marta Caminero-Santangelo, “The Voice of the Voiceless: Religious Rhetoric, Undocumented Immigrants, and the New Sanctuary Movement in the United States,” in Lippert and Rehaag, Sancutary Practices, 92–105; Grace Yukich, “I Didn’t Know If This Was Sanctuary: Strategic Adaptation in the New U.S. New Sanctuary Movement,” in Lippert and Rehaag, Sancutary Practices, 106–118. In a fascinating, from the perspective of theater/performance studies, journalistic account of the New Sanctuary Movement, The Nation’s Sasha Abramsky complains about “handlers” who stage a “scene” with a migrant sheltered in the Los Angeles area in a manner that does not seem sufficiently authentic to her. See Sasha Abramsky, “Gimme Shelter: What the New Sanctuary Movement Offers, Beyond a Safe Space, for the Undocumented,” The Nation 286, no. 7, February 7, 2008, 24–28. 54. Romero, “Go after the Women,” 1375–1376. 55. Martha Vicinus, “Helpless and Unfriended,” 129. 56. On Latinas as hyper-fertile threats to the nation, see Chavez, The Latino Threat, 46 and 87. 57. Esther J. Cepeda, “Mexico Embraces Boy Pleading Mom’s Case,” The Chicago Sun-Times, November 16, 2006, 17. 58. Esther J. Cepeda, “Adios and Good Riddance, Elvira Arellano—Felon with Huge Sense of Entitlement Mocked Law, Gave Immigrants Stigma,” The Chicago Sun-Times, August 14, 2007, 21. 59. Mary Mitchell, “Blacks Know Rosa Parks and You, Arellano, Are No Rosa Parks,” Chicago Sun-Times, August 22, 2006, final ed., editorial, 14. 60. Suzanne Oboler, “Editorial: It’s Time to Brush Up and to Make History: A Response to Mary Mitchell,” Latino Studies 4, no. 4 (2006): 353–355. 61. Jane Juffer, “Mothers Against Mothering: Mothers Against Illegal Amnesty Movement and the Politics of Vulnerability,” Journal of the Motherhood Initiative 2, no. 2 (2011): 79–94.

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62. Sara E. McElmurry, “Elvira Arellano: No Rosa Parks, Creation of ‘Us’ Versus ‘Them’ in an Opinion Column,” Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 31, no. 2 (2009): 182–203. 63. We saw the production on March 26, 2016. 64. Nicholas De Genova, “The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement,” in The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement, eds. Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 36. 65. The butterflies evoke Arellano’s roots in Michoacán, where a sanctuary in the central highlands of Mexico serves as a breeding ground for millions of migrating butterflies every year. In Chicago, the butterfly has traditionally been used by immigrant organizations to represent the transnational movement of people between Chicago and Michoacán. See Víctor M. Espinosa, “René Arceo: Artisan and Artist,” in René Arceo: Between the Instinctive and the Rational, ed. Francisco Piña (Chicago: Casa Michoacán en el Medio Oeste, 2010), 18. More mystically, butterflies are also associated with the souls of the dead: “The monarch with its migration has reached an iconic status, becoming a symbol of… safe migrations across national borders… and, finally, the souls returning to Michoacán on the Day of the Dead.” Karin M. Gustafsson, Anurag A. Agrawal, Bruce V. Lewenstein, and Steven A. Wolf, “The Monarch Butterfly through Time and Space: The Social Construction of an Icon,” BioScience 65, no. 6 (2015): 619. 66. The seven swords have been linked to seven sorrowful events in Christ’s life. Carol M. Schuler traces the image of the sword in the cult of the sorrowing Madonna back to the 1490s in the Netherlands: “This motif was interpreted by medieval commentators variously as a symbol of Mary’s pain at the Passion, as the counterpart of the lance used to pierce Christ’s side, and as the embodiment of Christ’s pain shared by his mother. All views have in common the understanding of the sword as an expression of compassion, conveying the belief that Mary suffered her son’s tortures with him.” Carol M. Schuler, “The Sorrows of the Virgin: Popular Culture and Celtic Imagery in Pre-reformation Europe,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 21, no. 1/2 (1992): 6. 67. Joyce E. Salisbury, The Blood of Martyrs: Unintended Consequences of Ancient Violence (New York: Routledge, 2004), 128. 68. Elvira Arellano was subsequently exhibited at the South Shore Arts Salon Show (September 13–November 1, 2009), where it won a $250 merit award, and the Tall Grass Arts Association Gallery in Park Forest (December 4, 2009–January 31, 2010). It sells for $6000. 69. We participated in the ninth annual caravan in December 2013. 70. Fernando Camacho Servín, “El INM intentó detener a Elvira Arellano,” La Jornada, January 5, 2011, 12.

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71. Blanche Petrich, “Activista e indocumentada, Elvira Arellano fue detenida de nuevo en Estados Unidos,” La Jornada, March 25, 2014, 32. 72. Jaime Reyes, “Se reunifica la familia de Elvira Arellano, ‘la lucha por los inmigrantes sigue,’” Vívelo Hoy, April 27, 2016, http://www. vivelohoy.com/noticias/8608362/con-estabilidad-familiar-la-lucha-porlos-inmigrantes-sigue.

CHAPTER 5

Wounded Warriors: Corrective Castings in Male Activism

You still have what every woman wants, that wasn’t cut off. [Ustedes todavía tienen lo que toda mujer quiere tener, eso no se los cortaron.] Grass-roots activist leader Rosa Nelly Santos, joking with male migrants who have returned to Honduras as amputees.

Rosa Nelly Santos’ joke—delivered while pointing down toward her genital area with a knowing look—usually elicits smiles and laughs, not necessarily because the attempt at humor is all that funny but because of the incongruous sight of a grandmotherly woman dressed in a long skirt, her gray hair pulled back in a bun, making bawdy gestures and clearly alluding to sex. Besides trying to provoke a laugh, the grassroots activist leader from the northern Honduran city of El Progreso says she offers these words of consolation when speaking both privately to individuals and publicly before groups, for several reasons: to try to boost the disabled men’s self-esteem, to emphasize that their sex lives are not necessarily over, and to help them feel entitled to organize and protest. Still, the humor is also undergirded by an implicit assumption intended to reassure the men, an assumption that we will interrogate here, that although their bodies have been altered, their male privilege remains intact. While masculine privilege is far more complicated than ownership of an intact penis, or enjoyment of a heterosexual relationship, we recount Santos’ comic routine for how it highlights the vulnerability of disabled men to being cast as less than fully male. Santos’s impulse to shore up the men’s sense of © The Author(s) 2020 A. E. Puga and V. M. Espinosa, Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37409-9_5

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masculinity by suggesting that every woman wants a penis confirms what theorists of disability Bethany M. Coston and Michael Kimmel argue: men with disabilities are often viewed as emasculated. “Disabled men do not meet the unquestioned and idealized standards of appearance, behavior, and emotion for men. The values of capitalist societies based on male dominance are dedicated to warrior values, and a frantic able-bodiedness represented through aggressive sports and risk-taking activities, which do not make room for those with disabilities,” they write.1 Though Coston and Kimmel describe such values in the United States, “warrior values” also exist among Mexican and Central American working-class migrant men. Honduran hegemonic masculinity is additionally marked by the colonial imposition of Catholic religious culture combined with many years of military rule.2 As sociologist Rocío Tábora outlines in her study of masculinity in the Honduran political class from 1883 to 1949, the model male leader projected strength, courage, virility, and loyalty.3 Workingclass Honduran men undertaking migration today sometimes use the journey as a test of those same values to help construct their masculine identity. Qualities such as physical strength and risk-taking are required both for surviving the migrant journey intact and for the physical work that migrants often undertake in destination countries in order to accumulate capital and try to fulfill the role of provider to their families. In the context of Honduran social performance, we define hegemonic masculinity among migrants as the ability to cast themselves as “homeland heroes,” a term coined by Noelle Kateri Brigden and Wendy A. Vogt to describe the aspiration to remain in the United States long enough to accumulate capital and send home remittances that can be used to fund food, clothing, cars, homes, and better educational prospects for migrants’ children.4 The image of a homeland hero grows out of melodrama’s Manichean division of the world into heroes and villains, yet takes a neoliberal turn in that the traditional moral virtues displayed by melodrama heroes are reduced to economic triumphs. As Brigden and Vogt argue, the nation-state celebration of Central American migrants as homeland heroes institutionalizes neoliberal values that put the responsibility for economic survival on the shoulders of individual citizens unsupported by adequate social safety nets. Many people we spoke to in Honduras’s marginalized neighborhoods said they admire those migrants who are able to “salir adelante” [get ahead] and expressed pity or even contempt for those who return empty-handed.

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Brigden and Vogt focus their study on Salvadoran undocumented migrants, who have a longer history of emigrating than Hondurans, since civil conflicts fueled by the United States first erupted in El Salvador in the late 1970s, about twenty years before Honduran migration began in earnest. After Hurricane Mitch devasted much of Honduras in October of 1998, in subsequent years tens of thousands of Hondurans left for the United States. By the year 2000, the number of Hondurans estimated to be living in the United States was 283,000, more than double the number from 1990.5 By 2013, the figure had almost doubled again to 498,000, of which more than 60 percent were undocumented.6 Meanwhile, the population of Honduras has increased from six million in 1998 to more than nine million in 2018. The Honduran state has yet to officially recognize successful Honduran migrants as heroes with a monument such as that built to the “hermano lejano” [distant brother] on the highway from the airport leading to San Salvador (later renamed “Hermano Bienvenido a Casa” [Welcome Home Brother]). Yet even without official recognition from the nation-state, the neoliberal premium on individual economic triumph has filtered through to the poorest sectors of society and created winners and losers, heroes and victims, among migrants who have come home, whether of their own volition or because they were deported. Thus to return to Honduras as an impoverished amputee is to occupy one of the bottom rungs of the social ladder, disqualified from casting in the role of homeland hero. In this chapter, we deepen our exploration of casting in the political economy of suffering by delineating how a group of male activists who were disabled during the journey and returned to Honduras exemplify a type of self-casting maneuver that we call “corrective casting.” First, we draw on six weeks of fieldwork in Honduras in June–July 2016 to detail how a protest-caravan of the Association of Returned Migrants with Disabilities (AMIREDIS) traveled back to Mexico and the United States. We show how the AMIREDIS protest-caravan emerged from frustration over how returned migrants were cast as “micro-entrepreneurs” by the Catholic Church working together with the federal government, without sufficient funding or training for them to actually assume that role. Second, we analyze how some of the men in the caravan were then cast as tragically emasculated by a 2015 four-part televised Univision news series about the caravan broadcast throughout the United States and Latin America: Los mutilados: la travesía de un grupo de indocumentados hacia Estados Unidos (The Mutilated: Journey of a Group of Undocumented

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toward the United States). Produced, cowritten, and narrated by Pedro Ultreras, the series had more than 1.6 million viewers in 2015.7 Finally, we draw on our fieldwork in Honduras, as well as on three weeks of participant observation with the AMIREDIS protesters in Chicago, in order to compare how the men were cast as embodiments of tragically feminized masculinity in the Los mutilados with how they correctively cast themselves as wounded warriors in media interviews and in performanceprotests before both Protestant and Catholic Church audiences in the United States. The corrective casting dynamic is not part of a cycle of competitive casting and counter-casting that confronts and rejects previous assignment of roles, as in the performances surrounding Arellano that we delineated in the previous chapter. Corrective casting is a more subtle maneuver in which the individuals cast create alternative roles without openly attempting to refute the previous roles, similar to how Celso, who we discussed in Chapter 3, avoided conflict with those who pitied him yet also attempted to show through his income-earning activities that such pity was unecessary. Like people who preface their remarks with, “Well, actually…” rather than with “No, you’re wrong!” the AMIREDIS performance amends rather than directly contradicts previous castings. Unlike Celso, however, who operated within a shelter-established system that attempted to reward individual efforts unrelated to political protest, the AMIREDIS activists we focus on in this chapter took collective action to protest the nation-state policies, practices, and laws of three countries: Honduras, Mexico, and the United States. They contend that because these countries created the conditions that led to their forced migration and eventual disability, they are owed benefits, or even reparations. To continue the casting metaphor, instead of envisioning themselves as solo performers, they forged an ensemble that called attention to a multinational injustice. In her study of casting, Amy Cook draws on the work of bioethicist Rosamond Rhodes to consider how we might conceive of human beings as coexistent rather than independent, and of casting as “a creative and performative act that compresses and makes sense of the moving, living conspecifics we share the world with.”8 Corrective casting, we argue, is a performative strategy that takes back a measure of control of that sense-making, shifting the power to compress and define identities from rescuers, advocates, and allies back to the subjects themselves. The seventeen men who undertook the AMIREDIS protest are a small subset of a small organization. Yet their protest is significant both for what it reveals about casting and because it took the form of a caravan, a style of

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migrant travel that by 2018 grew to involve up to seven thousand Central Americans who traveled north together through Mexico to seek asylum in the United States.9 While much media coverage of the 2018 caravan stressed the poverty and violence the refugees were fleeing, we believe that the act of collectively crossing, or attempting to cross, borders without authorization also involved an element of defiance of unjust nationstate laws, policies, and practices. For some, the term “caravan” might conjure images of long lines of camels, yet it is often used in Mexico and Central America to denote a collective protest-in-motion, in which people travel together from place to place to draw attention to their cause. The AMIREDIS caravan, we argue, was an early manifestation both of the instinct to seek safety in numbers and of the challenge posed to nationstates by migrants who find conditions at home so intolerable that they refuse to heed political leaders who demand that they remain in, or return to, their home countries and stay there, with the implicit demand that they resign themselves to lives of poverty and submission to violent crime and corruption. It is not coincidental that the first large caravan of Central American migrants in 2018 left from the same bus station in San Pedro Sula from which the AMIREDIS caravan left three years earlier in 2015. San Pedro Sula’s murder rate from 2010 to 2014 led the international media to dub it “the most dangerous city in the world.” Young men who live in the satellite neighborhoods of San Pedro Sula and the nearby smaller cities of El Progreso, La Lima, Potrerillos, as well as in the capital city of Tegucigalpa, are among the most vulnerable to gang recruitment and violence. Young men and even entire families fleeing gang violence, including extortion, now make up a significant portion of Central Americans who take to the migrant road, not only to reach the United States but also to seek asylum in neighboring Latin American countries.10 As the secondlargest city in the country, an industrial hub with a population of more than 700,000, San Pedro Sula also attracts many rural-to-urban migrant women who come for the opportunity to work in the maquiladora industry. The development of the maquiladora industry, beginning in the 1970s and continuing today, encourages rural–urban migration of families, yet provides more low-skilled jobs for women than for men. Men who find themselves unemployed in urban areas can feel pushed to migrate internationally in search of work. From one perspective, this may be viewed as empowering for the women who are earning wages. Yet since those wages are not high enough to support a family, however,

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from another perspective rural–urban migration debilitates the family unit and displaces the male from his traditional position as a provider without offering him many alternatives within his home country, other than illegal activities in the underground economy, such as extortion and drug trafficking. Anthropologist Adrienne Pine explains the impact of this dynamic on men’s sense of masculinity: In an agrarian economy – and even for wage laborers on banana plantations whose working conditions improved after the 1954 strikes – the gendered structure of labor allowed for a man to be the primary wage earner of his family. This permitted him to adhere to a particular definition of masculinity, one in which his control of the family was justified and earned economically…the economic base of the patriarchy in Honduras has been radically transformed.11

A 2005 study by the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin America found that 62 percent of the 1200 Honduran men they surveyed believed that the primary role of a father was to provide economically for his family.12 Men who find themselves unable to provide for their families within the country may therefore be tempted to migrate in order to fulfill the expectations of that social role. More than the actual limitations of physical impairment, employment discrimination triggered by the perception of disability makes it difficult for returned disabled migrants with low educational levels to earn a living in their home countries. Disabled men often say they feel that instead of helping their families, they have only become a burden to them, especially since families may have loaned them money to make the journey, debts that become difficult, if not impossible, to repay. Some disabled migrants have been told by their families that their accidents were their own fault and that they are now “inútiles,” useless people, an extremely strong insult. Some marriages do not survive; some migrants themselves do not survive. Several men acknowledged that they had attempted suicide or thought seriously about taking their own lives; others mentioned to us that in recent years at least two disabled migrant men deported back to Honduras have committed suicide by taking poison. Because the Honduran government only began to keep track of the statistics very recently, no one knows exactly how many returned migrants with disabilities there are in the country: estimates vary widely, from 450 to 700. The International Committee of the Red Cross treated 41 amputations in 2012, 31

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in 2013 and 31 in 2014, including assistance given to Salvadorans and Guatemalans as well as Hondurans, who each year made up the majority of those injured. Adding those figures to those provided by the Mexican National Institute of Migration, which has been keeping statistics since 2002, a team of journalists from El Salvador and Mexico came up with a total of 476 for all three countries.13 Yet the Catholic Church estimates that, just within Honduras, there are more than 600 cases of migrants who suffered amputations during migration.14 Analysis of the details of how AMIREDIS male members are cast and re-cast themselves in performances that highlight masculinity, or a lack of it, provides additional insight into migrant melodrama and the operations of the political economy of suffering. If madres dolorosas attempt to exchange suffering for recognition of the human right to family unity, in what sorts of exchanges do disabled activist men participate? We show how these migrant activists display the impairment of their bodies to elict concessions, small and large, from a variety of authority figures, yet, more efficaciously in the long run, to also challenge nation-state control of borders and expose how multinational policies actually fuel forced migration. AMIREDIS members’ performances further illuminate how melodramatic spectacles of suffering are exchanged in some cases for respect for human rights, and in others, for lesser “exceptions” to a norm of indifference or rejection, exceptions that read as expressions of tolerance or charity. Building on the work of performance scholars such as Sheila C. Moeschen, Carrie Sandahl, and Philip Auslander, who have focused on performances of disability in the U.S. context, we take the dialogue between performance and disability studies to a Latin American transnational arena, demonstrating how under certain circumstances the doing of disabled masculinity can facilitate migration and structure social activism intended to impact migration policy in several countries at once.15 As disabled migrant bodies cross national borders without legal documents they are both cast by others and struggle to shape their own subjectivities through self-castings. The casting shifts that we explore here involve neither passive victims who are buffeted by global neoliberal economic forces beyond their control nor heroic individual agents who strategically deploy, or reject, melodrama for noble ends. To argue one position or the other would be to engage in migrant melodrama ourselves. Instead, we delineate the history of certain AMIREDIS performances of disabled masculinity, highlighting their contradictions, in order to demonstrate how disability operates as a powerful, constantly

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shifting symbol in masculine performances related to twenty-first-century migration. Sometimes performative aims and tactics clash, revealing internal conflicts within the grassroots organization. At different times and places some men are more willing than others to resort to melodrama. While pathos-laden displays of impaired bodies may sometimes seem like an undignified way to move, survive, and protest, in a world that trades reified suffering for rights and privileges, there are also disadvantages to refusals of melodrama.

First Casting: Micro-entrepeneurs AMIREDIS does not have roots in a tradition of father activism that one might expect would correspond to the tradition of mother activism out of which Elvira Arellano emerged. For three reasons, we hypothesize, no such tradition of activism based on one’s status as a father exists in the United States or Latin America (that we know of). First, because the public realm has always been open to men, they have no need to justify their incursions into public space with a role that originates in the home. Second, because men were traditionally expected to provide economically for their families, the many types of activism focused on improving one’s economic status, such as labor organizing, organizing of agricultural workers, or organizing within the electoral system, all implicitly draw from the male role as father-provider. The expectation that men provide economically is so pervasive that it might be considered the normative assumption underlying almost all activism rather than the basis of an exceptional strain of gender-marked activism. Finally, because child care is still often considered the domain of women, the father-child bond is seldom highlighted in activism. (As mentioned in the previous chapter, Mexican activist Javier Sicilia’s “Caravan for Peace” in the wake of the murder of his son is a notable exception to this rule.) The social role most associated with migrant success is related to fatherhood only insofar as fathers who can provide economic sustenance to their families might be considered to fulfill a “good father” role, defined by contrast to the stereotypical “good mother” identity that we explored in Chapter 4, the sweet, passive domestic angel and self-sacrificing mother. AMIREDIS was formed in 2008 by disabled returned migrants in and around El Progreso, a northern Honduran city with a population of 300,000 located less than twenty miles from San Pedro Sula. While the city center of El Progreso bustles with many tiny businesses, the outskirts

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host United States and other foreign-owned assembly plants hidden behind high walls, and the surrounding area is dominated by agroindustrial plantations of banana and palm oil. The disabled migrants were originally assisted by Santos, a leader with the Committee of Family Members of Disappeared Migrants from El Progreso (COFAMIPRO), a more established grassroots organization founded by mothers devoted to documenting and pressuring for the investigation of cases of migrant disappearance in Mexico. On May 24, 2008 about thirty men and a handful of women rounded up by Santos and other members of the organization for families of disappeared migrants in Mexico held their first meeting.16 In a sense, therefore, AMIREDIS has roots in mother-based activism. With Santos’s help, fifty-three migrants, thirty-eight of whom are men, in and around El Progreso began to meet and call themselves the Association of Returned Migrants with Disabilities [Asociación de Migrantes Retornados con Discapacidad, or AMIREDIS]. The association’s members acquired their disabilities at different times in the late 1990s and the 2000s, after suffering accidents or assaults as they rode freight trains north through Mexico to try to reach the United States. As the train passed over their bodies, it amputated an arm or a leg, or sometimes more than one limb. The men returned to Honduras as “failures” in the eyes of many of their fellow citizens: they had not lived up to the ideal of the homeland hero. While AMIREDIS remained local, the following year a group of Scalabrinian nuns in Honduras, with support from the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Care of Human Mobility, began to organize disabled returned migrants on a national scale. The national organization called itself The National Commission for the Support of Returned Migrants with Disabilities [La Comisión Nacional de Apoyo a Migrantes Retornados con Discapacidad] and used the acronym CONAMIREDIS, which translates as “with AMIREDIS.” Before long, CONAMIREDIS had dwarfed AMIREDIS, with more than 200 members in five chapters organized by geographical regions that cover the entire country. A thinly stretched army of volunteers reports to a single paid coordinator who works with the Scalabrinian sisters to make home visits, offer extremely limited financial assistance, and coordinate volunteer professionals who donate basic psychological and medical care.17 The Scalabrinian sisters also work with the national government, most recently with President Juan Orlando Hernández (2014–), to provide some basic care for deportees. Rather than confront the government over issues such as its minimal support for returned migrants, the sisters instead

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continue the collaborative style that the Scalabrinian order has long maintained, and that we reviewed in detail in Chapter 2.18 After years of quiet pressure from the Church and other non-governmental organizations, in 2015 the Honduran congress established a fund of about five million U.S. dollars, some of which goes to fund a welcome center on the periphery of the San Pedro Sula airport that was opened the following year for all returned migrants, with or without disabilities. Another portion of the fund went to establish an extremely modest program of micro-loans for returned migrants who want to start small businesses. The government has also obtained some scholarships from universities for migrants who might qualify for university positions (a very small minority, since most migrants come from rural areas in which a primary school education is the norm). And the Scalabrinians offer limited psychological services, both individual counseling and weekend group retreats that bring together dozens of returned migrants from all over the country. The assistance of the Scalabrinians helps some migrants come to terms with life with a disability and earn a subsistence-level, or less than subsistencelevel, income in tiny businesses in the informal economy with activities such as setting up candy stands, making and selling tortillas, hawking cell phone accessories, styling hair, and selling used clothing.19 While grateful for the assistance, all ten of the migrants we interviewed said that what they earned from the small businesses was not even enough to support themselves, much less their families. Some members of AMIREDIS, for instance, were provided with equipment to press juice. Yet without adequate facilities or training in sanitation, they said, they were unable to get the proposed venture off the ground. The equipment ended up stored in one individual’s home, unused. The role of micro-entrepreneur, while preferable to the stigma of a role such as “useless,” is difficult, if not impossible, for many returned migrants to inhabit. At a CONAMIREDIS retreat in the colonial city Comayagua that we attended on the weekend of July 1–3, 2016, fifty-nine returned migrants with disabilities from around the country gathered to rehearse roles as micro-entrepreneurs. In a Catholic seminary that provided dormitories, meeting rooms, and a dining hall, the migrants, all but a handful of them men, participated in a number of small-group activities that prodded them to marshall inner resources and reflect on sources of social support that they may have otherwise overlooked. In one activity, for instance, they worked together in small groups with scissors and pieces of colored construction paper to create trees that represent their lives. On the “roots”

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they listed in writing all the sources that could nurture their efforts in life and maintain the “trunk” strong. “Family” and “church” were by far the most common words written on the trunk, not government, perhaps indicating that they expect little support from the state. On pieces of red paper cut into the shape of apples they wrote what benefits they would like to harvest from their efforts. The three words written most often indicated the basic necessities they lack and seek: “education,” “dignified housing,” and “a micro-business.” “Micro-business” may have come up frequently because the migrants know that the church can help them qualify for such assistance. By stating that they desire to inhabit a pre-existing social role constructed for them by others, they begin to collaborate in a casting, in this case a casting as micro-entrepreneurs, rehearsing the possibility of inhabiting that social role, even if only on an imaginary level. Other activities encouraged the participants to build trust and work together while having fun and developing marketing skills. For instance, they worked together in small groups supplied with plastic and cardboard to devise an imaginary product that would protect an egg from being crushed. Each group gave a short speech to “sell” its product. The rest of the groups then voted to judge one group’s egg protector as the best, on the basis of which they would be most likely to purchase. The winning group was celebrated with cheers and applause, providing positive reinforcement for those who best played the role of successful micro-entrepreneur. What was missing in two days full of similar moraleboosting business-oriented self-help exercises and rousing pep talks was any discussion of the social discrimination, deep-rooted poverty, or threats of violence faced by many returned migrants with disabilities. It was as if the organizers and participants had a tacit agreement not to acknowledge any constraints on individual agency, for fear that such an acknowledgment might serve as an excuse for despair and inaction. The Scalabrinians’ pastoral care in Honduras encourages the returned migrants they cast as micro-entrepreneurs to avoid confrontations with authorities and to control any impulse they may have to migrate again. During a 2016 celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Scalabrinian sisters’ presence in Honduras, three rows of disabled returned migrants sat quietly, uniformed in identical white t-shirts provided by CONAMIREDIS, listening politely but never publicly speaking for themselves. The migrants sat among an audience of several hundred people gathered in a meeting room in the Catholic University’s library, an austere handsome red brick structure with enormous windows and

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a grand view of the hills of Tegucigalpa. Though many migrants are evangelical Christians and others do not identify with any religion, they were shipped in from around the country to sit through a Catholic mass, watch a video about themselves, and partake in a reception buffet, before being bussed back to their homes. In essence, they served as props in an event firmly controlled by male Catholic Church authorities. During the mass celebrated by Archbishop Óscar Andrés Rodríguez, a stage set up at the front of the room behind an improvised altar table was filled with priests and higher-ranking male church dignitaries, while the Scalabrinian nuns ostensibly being celebrated sat up front in the audience. The twelve-minute documentary video on the work of the Scalabrinian sisters included interviews with family members of the forty-nine migrants who were killed during a 2012 massacre in Cadereyta, Nuevo León, Mexico, followed by a narrator’s stern description of the horrors of “La Bestia” and interviews with migrants who had suffered amputations during the train journey, complete with close-ups of their artificial limbs. The cooperation between the Scalabrinian sisters, who are originally from Brazil and other South American countries, and their host government was palpable, for instance, in the presence of two representatives from a division of the Foreign Ministry established in 2015 to assist returned migrants with post-deportation re-integration into Honduran society. Judging only from this event, one might assume that the Catholic Church and the Honduran state have come together to organize and support, yet also control, returned migrants to dissuade them from migrating again. In fact, however, governmental support for returned migrants is extremely limited. Working under the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Care for Human Mobility, the Scalabrinians essentially operate as a nongovernmental organization that uses volunteer labor to fill in a sliver of the huge gap in social services that the government cannot, or will not, provide. The assistance program for potential micro-entrepreneurs dovetails with the neoliberal ethos of Honduras’s governing National Party, which returned to power after a 2009 military coup ousted the democratically elected government of Manuel Zelaya.20 With as little assistance as possible from the state, individuals are left to mostly fend for themselves. The global constraints that Daniel R. Reichman analyzes with respect to non-governmental organizations in rural Honduras, including evangelical religions, also applies to the work of the Scalabrinians with disabled returned migrants: While regulating institutions, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) facilitated the free movement of capital around the globe, there was no political counterweight to institutionalize social or environmental

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protections at the global level. In this context, the social welfare function of government was left to transnational NGOs – both religious and secular – that promoted human rights, environmental justice, and fair labor standards through “soft power.”21

In the absence of the social safety net that the nation-state might provide, coupled with a brand of capitalism that glorifies individual success, it is not surprising that migrants with disabilities feel compelled to try once again to make the journey north. For many people, male or female, disabled or not, who cannot earn even subsistence-level wages in Honduras, migrating to the United States seems like the only way they might be able to cast themselves in the role of “homeland hero.” The contradiction undermining church-state calls to Honduran citizens to avoid danger and seek entrepreneurial opportunities at home is that remittances from migrants in the United States now provide the only safety net that keeps some of the most vulnerable households from falling into abject poverty. A 2014 survey by the National Institute of Statistics found that almost one out of every six Hondurans receives financial support from abroad. The majority of those who benefitted from the remittances were women, 69 percent; 83 percent of the recipients came from households that were defined as either poor or at risk of falling into poverty. For those households, the average of $166 U.S. dollars per month that they received constituted 38 percent of their household income.22 Neither nationalistic rhetoric about getting ahead as micro-entrepreneurs without leaving the country nor warnings about the dangers of the journey are likely to dissuade potential migrants who know that for their families remittances can make the difference between adequate food and shelter and doing without the basic necessities of life.

AMIREDIS’s Early Performative Protests Frustrated by the limits of CONAMIREDIS-structured social events and entrepreneurial self-help activities that to them seemed of limited use toward meaningful social change or individual economic advancement, a small group of disabled returned migrant men within the original El Progreso-based nucleus of the group began to stage confrontational protests. Norman Varela, former the vice president of AMIREDIS, recalls that as he began to reflect upon his country’s social structures that he thought: “we need something like a Che Guevara.” This is not to say

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that he literally wanted a Marxist revolution, but rather that he realized that the self-help activities, motivational talks, and charity provided by CONAMIREDIS were not enough to foment the kind of change that would enable people with limited education in Honduras to hold down jobs that would pay the rent and feed their families.23 Influenced in part by their participation in workshops run by Jesuit priests in El Progreso, Varela, AMIREDIS President José Luis Hernández, and some other AMIREDIS members had come to view undocumented Honduran migration as a forced expulsion of people for whom the Honduran nationstate cannot or will not create opportunities.24 In the face of state neglect, AMIREDIS members requested a meeting with former President Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo Sosa (2010–2014). At first, the president ignored them. In response, the activists developed a performative strategy to make their suffering legible to others and attract the attention of the press: They protested in front of the Honduran presidential residence, removed their prosthetic legs, and placed them on the sidewalk next to them. This motivated some passersby to offer them money to buy food and also attracted the attention of the media, who covered their protests in the press and on television. On October 31, 2012, after several days of protests during which AMIREDIS members kept vigil day and night in front of the presidential residence in Tegucigalpa, sleeping outside on the sidewalk and giving numerous news media interviews, Lobo finally agreed to meet with the group of about thirty protesters. During the meeting, in keeping with Honduras’ history of clientelist politics, almost as if it were a personal gift, Lobo promised plots of land for thirty returned disabled migrants and pledged to have houses built for another five who already had plots of land but no houses. Lobo also gave each of the men who attended the meeting 5000 lempiras (about $200 dollars at today’s exchange rate). His wife, First Lady Rosa Elena de Lobo, distributed a few wheelchairs and pairs of crutches.25 During 2013, the men traveled to Tegucigalpa five more times to remind Sosa of his promise, to no avail.26 Each time, they said, they repeated the performative strategy that had proved so effective the first time, of removing their prosthetic limbs to panhandle for spare change in order to buy food and soft drinks for the group, as well as to pose for media photographers and video cameras. While most of the AMIREDIS members were comfortable with this strategy, one former member who usually prefers to wear long pants over his prosthetic leg said he felt ashamed by the tactic. “I was so ashamed that I felt like my face was falling off,” recalled

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William Guzmán Ávila, who participated in one of the protests. One protest, he said, ended abruptly when the military sent a group of soldiers in the middle of the night—at time when spectators were less likely to be around—to round up the protesters by force and load them onto a military bus back to El Progreso, where it dumped them by the side of the road at dawn with no transportation back to their homes.27 Lobo left office in January 2014 without having delivered the land and housing; his successor, President Juan Orlando Hernández, finally followed through on the commitment by the end of the following year. For about a month in March–April 2014, a group of fifteen AMIREDIS members traveled from Honduras to Mexico in an attempt to meet with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. They demanded reparations because of Mexican responsibility for their accidents and pressured the government to establish a transit visa that would guarantee legal passage of Central Americans through Mexico. If migration checkpoints and detentions on bus routes were eliminated, they reasoned, many more migrants would marshal the resources to take the bus rather than risk more dangerous travel by freight train. The fifteen AMIREDIS members were granted humanitarian visas under existing legislation, yet no new legislation guaranteeing visas to migrants who had suffered disabling accidents in Mexico has been approved so far. Peña Nieto refused to meet with them, yet they won extensive news media coverage. And with help from Father Solalinde, the men were also given the opportunity to speak at a forum on migration attended by some members of the Mexican Senate, the president of the National Commission for Human Rights, Raúl Plascencia, and the U.S. ambassador Anthony Wayne. Since the president of Mexico refused to meet with them, the men decided to seek a meeting with President Barack Obama and began to plan a protest-journey to the United States. Though still undocumented and economically marginalized, in 2015, almost half of the male members of AMIREDIS, seventeen out of thirty-eight men, decided to migrate again in a protest-caravan to publicize their plight and demand additional assistance from the presidents of Honduras, Mexico, and the United States. They left San Pedro Sula again, crossed Mexico, reached the U.S. border, crossed into the United States, and after a period of detention, protested outside of the White House as well as in various cities around the country. In the following section, we will analyze how a major television network covered the protest and cast the protesters.

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Second Casting: Emasculated Victims In January of 2015, AMIREDIS President José Luis Hernández and Vice president Norman Saúl Varela first began to plan the protest journey to the United States and tried to marshal enthusiasm for the trip among the organization’s members. Many potential participants were hesitant: How would they finance the travel? What would happen when they got to the U.S. border? How would they cross without documents? Then they heard that Pedro Ultreras, a well-known Mexican news journalist with the giant television network Univision, was interested in accompanying the protest. Ultreras had spent years interviewing migrants for his documentary films and television news coverage for Univision. For his documentary film and book, both titled The Beast [La bestia, film 2010; book 2012], Ultreras had even ridden the freight trains himself. Ultreras promised to bring a camera crew and travel along with the AMIREDIS members, trying to remain a proverbial fly on the wall, a witness who would not intervene in the process but would simply document it. Yet the promise of television coverage influenced how the organization’s members made decisions. If Ultreras was going to travel with the group and Univision would broadcast their story, AMIREDIS member Benito Murillo said he thought, it would be all right: even if the trip somehow failed, if the worst happened and the group was violently attacked, at least the world know and maybe care about what had happened to them.28 After all, he figured, everyone watches Univision news. In fact, Univision has the largest audience of any Hispanic television news network in the United States and also has a large following in Latin America. The membership’s excitement about Ultreras and the Univision coverage was so great that Hernández and Varela thought that all fifty-three members of the group might join the protest. But on February 19, 2015, the day they had set to leave from the San Pedro Sula bus station, only seventeen members, all men, turned up. Nevertheless, Ultreras followed through on his promise to accompany the men on what turned out to be a four-month long journey from San Pedro Sula to Washington, DC. He filed more than a dozen short news reports for Noticiero Univision, which aired from February 26 to September 12 of 2015, then compressed the reports into a four-part series for the news show Aquí y Ahora that he produced, cowrote, and narrated: Los mutilados: la travesía de un grupo de indocumentados hacia Estados Unidos (The Mutilated: Journey of a Group of Undocumented toward the United States). All four parts aired for U.S. audiences on prime time,

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a Sunday evening, November 8, 2015; for people who missed the broadcast Ultreras later uploaded the videos to YouTube and provided links to them on his Facebook page. For contemporary audiences who watch digital television that they can pause or replay, the television camera and the medium of the television broadcast provide the perfect voyeuristic tools for observing the disabled. When the camera closes in and lingers, the spectator can stare, for instance, at a truncated limb to his or her heart’s content, without fear of being considered rude. Technology that allows spectators to watch television shows online, moreover, makes it possible to replay selected scenes and pause on an image without offending the object of the spectator’s stare and without incurring the judgment of other spectators. The individual, potentially private nature of online television viewing allows contemporary audiences to privately indulge in a kind of spectatorship that has fallen into public disrepute. Whether viewed with empathy, pity, or horror, televised victim-heroes can be gazed upon with the kind of fascination that Garland-Thomson describes so eloquently in her study of staring: When we do see the usually concealed sight of disability writ boldly on others, we stare in fascinated disbelief and uneasy identification. Why, we ask with our eyes, does that person with dwarfism, that ampuetee, that drooler, look so much like and yet so different from me? Such confusing sights both affirm our shared humanity and challenge our complacent understandings.29

As it presents the disabled protesters of AMIREDIS as extraordinary and excites the viewers of Aquí y Ahora, the series Los mutilados, like much of the cultural production we have analyzed thus far, also marshals the familiar conventions of melodrama, this time in the service of constructing damaged masculinities. In Los mutilados, one can discern a jumble of distant echoes from various kinds of nineteenth-century melodrama: rent-day melodramas, following the model set by Douglas Jerrold’s The Rent Day (1832); “dramas of affliction” featuring blind, deaf and/or dumb protagonists; dramas of moral reform, like Augustin Daly’s Under the Gaslight (1867), famous for a disabled male character, a one-armed Civil War veteran who is tied to the railroad tracks by the villain in what became an archetypal plot after the feminized victim-hero later morphed into a female character; and

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finally, the popular freak shows that displayed the bodies of the disabled as horrific wonders.30 Though we doubt that any of the above were conscious, direct influences on Ultreras and his co-author Beatriz Guerra as they wrote the script, or on the camera operators (Andrés Juárez, Martín Guzmán, and Gerardo Pinzón), or on the editor of the video footage (Guillermo Flórez), we call attention to these echoes in order to denaturalize the casting of the migrants as victim-heroes and the construction of their masculinity as feminized by circumstances that are made to seem as inescapable as the ending of a tragic plot. For example, teaser openings at the start of each episode are delivered by the host, María E. Salinas. She sits in an Univision television studio clad in a skirt and high heels, signaling supposed first-world sophistication and raising suspense by posing questions to be answered by news reports that take the viewer to a third-world field explored by a reporter, Ultreras, clad in blue jeans and sneakers that signal his readiness for adventure. Parts One and Two of the series both include very similar scenes at the center of the episodes: Ultreras and the camera take the television viewer into the home of an AMIREDIS member. Part One conveys the circumstances of Benito Murillo’s accident with cuts back and forth from Murillo as talking-head narrator and stock footage of freight trains in motion underscored by ominous sound effects. In 2005, Murillo (b. 1974) only made it as far as Mexico’s southernmost state of Chiapas before he got mud on his shoes and slid off the train in a remote area between towns. After the wheels of the train ran over his body, severing his right arm and leg, it was seven hours before he was sighted and taken to a hospital. Murillo eventually returned to his wife and four children in El Progreso and, with a micro-grant from the government facilitated by CONAMIREDIS, he set up a small stand on a street corner where he sells candy, soft drinks, and cold drinking water in plastic bags with a straw. His four children, ranging in age from twelve to nineteen, sometimes help out at the stand.31 By minute 3.14 of the 7.57-minute episode, viewers follow Ultreras, on camera with Murillo, into the interior of a home roughly crafted from cinder-block and slats of wood. As they enter, Ultreras, on voice-over, informs us that Murillo’s wife left him for another man. He does not mention that Murillo did not return home to Honduras from Mexico immediately after his accident but instead slowly recovered in Doña Olga’s shelter in Tapachula, where he lived for eleven months, making and selling baked goods, like the disabled migrants we discuss in

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Chapter 3. Discussion of what role this separation might have had in the breakdown of the relationship would complicate the simple narrative of a pitiful male victim abandoned by an unfaithful wife. In fact, after his wife’s departure, Murillo had little difficulty in finding a new girlfriend, who often joins him in running the stand, making sales and ensuring that no one steals the products. At the time of Ultreras’s filming, however, either the new girlfriend was not yet on the scene or did not make it on camera. Once inside Murillo’s house, from a low angle, a hand-held camera rises from a concrete floor covered with a haphazard patchwork of small, worn rugs to a twin matress and a queen-sized mattress covered with dinghy sheets and scattered clothing. MURILLO. My whole family sleeps here. I was given this bed a little while ago. ULTRERAS. [in an incredulous tone] You and four children? MURILLO. Yes. This is where we sleep.32 The camera takes us to the kitchen: only a small rickety wooden table and an electric two-burner hotplate balanced atop a four-burner gas stove are visible. While no explanation is offered for the odd arrangement, viewers may surmise that there is no money for gas to fuel the larger stove. Ultreras solemly intones on voice-over: “This is his home. The kitchen is practically empty.”33 In the next scene, Murillo sits by his sidewalk stand and relates how he sometimes only earns enough for two meals per day. Within seconds his image is replaced by that of his 13-year-old daughter in a spaghettistrap blouse and headband, sitting at the stand with a young man at her side. She playfully grabs at the cell phone he holds in his hand. Meanwhile, Ultreras on voice-over informs us that the daughter got pregnant and that now Murillo must also support his granddaughter. The playful struggle over the cell phone suddenly acquires a sexual overtone. Cut to Murillo sitting in the middle of an unpaved road, holding his baby granddaughter by his side. On voice-over, Ultreras asks: “Have they ever asked you for food and you don’t have any?” The sequence ends back in Murillo’s home, with a close-up of his troubled face as he replies: “Yes, many times. And the only thing you can do is cry because… [he chokes up] right?”4:05.34 In less than a minute, Murillo has been summed up as a

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man who cannot provide for his family, including a hungry baby, who cannot control either his partner’s or his daughter’s sexual behavior, who has failed as a husband and a father, and whose response to poverty is to weep. This portrait of failed masculinity takes a pseudo-ethnographic tone that legitimates voyeuristic exploration of the most intimate spaces and details of Murillo’s life. At the same time, the episode encourages empathic identification with his sense of hopelessness and impotence. What can the spectator do but weep with him? As in much melodrama, the spectator’s empathy may produce a sense of enjoyment of the unfortunate Other’s spectacular suffering.35 The second episode, “Their Tragedy Deepened their Poverty,” follows the men on their journey from Honduras to Guatemala, constructing almost exactly the same type of tragically feminized masculinity with and for Norman Saúl Varela (b. 1971). In a long-shot we see Varela asleep on the bus that will take the AMIREDIS members to the Guatemalan border. On voice-over, Ultreras as omniscient narrator tells us that the bus ride gives Varela too much time to contemplate his “desperate” circumstances. The next shot flashes back to interviews that were apparently conducted earlier. Varela holds his face in his hands, as if crying, though when he turns his head to reveal his ruddy visage, there are no tears. Off-camera, we hear Ultreras ask a question that implicitly assumes that Varela should support his family: (min. 1:12): “How do you live Norman? How do you support your family?” Varela replies: “I beg. I do odd jobs, tough ones, for whatever they want to give me.”36 His mouth twists into a bitter little smile. Now we are inside Varela’s home, which has higher quality furniture than Murillo’s in the dining area, well-maintained appliances, and a large table with a clean tablecloth. Rather than explore the bedroom, as in the Murillo sequence described above, in Varela’s apparently more prosperous home, the camera seeks out hardship in the yard: while Ultreras sits outdoors with his protagonist, in the background Varela’s wife can be glimpsed washing clothes by hand in a concrete sink. “Twice I’ve wanted to take my own life in order to not be like this,” Varela says.37 As in Murillo’s case, the story of Varela’s accident is told through a combination of voice-over, grainy footage of trains, and Varela’s own on-camera testimony relating that he was shoved by a Mexican immigration officer into the path of a train that amputated his right leg below the knee. “His tragedy deepened the poverty in which the family lived, snatching away his dream of having a house,” Ultreras intones on voice-over, summing up the consequences of the accident over a soft, melancholy piano soundtrack that lays on the pathos.38

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The camera work takes every possibility to highlight Varela’s prosthetic lower leg. It lingers on it in extreme close-up from the front when he sits with Ultreras and in extreme close-up from behind when he walks away, reducing his essence to a mechanical body part. In a short scene shot at an AMIREDIS meeting, after the camera examines other members’ metaland-plastic limbs in lingering detail, Varela’s face and body is centered in a frame-within-a-frame, with the right-angle of an artificial bent knee providing the upper-right corner of the inner frame. The entirety of Varela’s identity is literally, as well as figuratively, contained within a disability frame. In another scene, shot long from the front, Varela walks outdoors along the side of his rented house, his wife by his side and Ultreras trailing behind. Varela limps heavily and uses a cane. His arm is wrapped around his wife’s shoulder: he literally leans on her for support (min. 2:20). About thirty seconds later, we learn that his wife also supports the family financially by sewing and taking in laundry. In a quick pair of closeups, first we see her feet in motion as she works an old sewing machine with a foot pedal, then her arms and hands in action scrubbing clothes by hand. Her activity contrasts with his supposed fragility. Her limbs shot in close-up, separated from the rest of her body, underscore the absence of Varela’s limb and the supposed difference that a complete male body would make to their lives. When he is seen working, it is not at the heavy jobs to which he referred earlier but rather in a feminized role as her assistant, seated by her side at the sewing machine, pushing through the cloth as she moves the pedal with her feet. His labor seems superfluous. At the end of her sequence, she stands behind the concrete sink, on the verge of tears, her voice breaking. A super-title identifies her in terms of her husband as “Regina Martínez, wife of Norman.” “When our children ask us for something we can’t give it to them, because of the situation,” she says.39 In contradiction to Varela’s statement that he performs heavy labor, the Univision report suggests that he is incapable of labor, unable to provide basic necessities for his family, and thus a worthy victim. The emphasis is kept firmly on the personal pathos, with no interrogation, for instance, of structural violence or the causes of the economic inequalities that led the men to want to migrate.40 Part Three of “Los Mutilados,” “Crossing this Border Reminds Them of Their Own Hell,”41 begins with Varela gazing at the Suchiate River marking the boundary between Guatemala and Mexico as he wistfully remarks: “There were so many things that I wanted to do as a man that now I can’t do.”42 As Univision depicts it, among the most important of

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those manly things is owning a house, which it portrays as a crucial element of masculine identity. In the previous episode, Varela tells Ultreras that he is seven months behind on the rent and that the landlord has asked them to look for somewhere else to live. The scene recalls the many more modern and contemporary versions of nineteenth-century rent dramas, in which the male farmer from the original has morphed into a female protagonist who cries: “I can’t pay the rent!” Yet unlike in many of those recyclings, in Univision’s version no hero steps into fend off the villainous landlord and pay the rent. Instead, the news report creates a potential hero by contrasting two very different houses. Varela voices a desire in a tone of lament: “What I want is a house, to live with dignity, because I think I have that right as a human being.” Ultreras on voice-over informs us that the statement constitutes a message that Varela would like to convey to U.S. President Obama in person. From shots of Varela in front of his rental home, then seated inside helping his wife sew, framed by a doorway that reveals concrete under peeling paint, the report cuts to a panoramic shot of the U.S. White House. The White House looks enormous by contrast to the seemingly tiny people gathered on the sidewalk in front of it. In the foreground are two antique cannons. While the camera zooms in on the White House, with its giant fountain in front, four magnificent pillars, and a U.S. flag flying above it, one cannon’s barrel always remains in view in the lower right corner of the frame, a phallic reminder of U.S. military and economic power. The report cuts back to Norman, who has a message for Obama, now positioned as his potential savior, his “hero:” “I know that the Mr. President of the United States of North America will listen to us. Because he won a Noble [sic] Peace Prize. And I feel like if he won it, it was for a reason.”43 The discrepancy in power between the United States and Honduras looms in the contrast between the images of the two houses; and the discrepancy in masculine power between the two men is also crudely underscored: one man sits sewing with his wife, on the verge of eviction from his crumbling concrete block of a house; the other dwells in magnificent white splendor, surrounded by phallic symbols. By neither editing out nor giving Varela the chance to correct his malapropism, “Premio Noble” instead of “Premio Nobel,” the report simultaneously underscores his admiration for the U.S. president and his relatively low educational level. By minute 3:34 spectators are back on the bus with the men, the foreshadowing having established that only Obama, only U.S. power, can save them from their miserable lives and restore their masculinity.

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We met Varela in person for the first time on July 25, 2016, when we accompanied him and four other AMIREDIS members to breakfast at a Mexican diner in Chicago. He walked down the street at our side at a brisk pace with no limp. He did not use a cane, and at one point he demonstrated for us how his prosthetic leg works so well that he can jump and kick without difficulty. His mobility seemed to have improved significantly since the Univision news special was shot the previous year. Like Arellano performing motherly chores and describing her role as a supporter of her son’s aspirations before a journalist who would describe the scene and convey her words (Chapter 4), in the Univision special Ultreras and Varela work together to complete his casting as an impotent, feminized male. We would argue, however, that performing one’s vulnerability in an exaggerated manner is not deception; it is a survival strategy. The rules of the political economy of suffering demand that performances of suffering be extreme in order that the reward for the suffering seem that much more deserved. If Varela had used an angry tone or even a neutral tone rather than a sad, quiet tone when he told Ultreras—“What I want is a house, to live with dignity, because I think I have that right as a human being.”—his claim to a universal human right might have been interpreted by spectators as a demand born out of a sense of entitlement.44 Such an attitude would run the risk of moving Varela out of the category of the pitiful victim, the deserving disabled migrant, and into the category of angry “illegal” person asking for an undeserved hand out. Varela did not have to be familiar with scholarly terms like “melodrama” and “political economy of suffering” to know how to play by the unwritten rules of the trade in spectacles of suffering and craft a performance that would satisfy viewers accustomed to the blurry line between news report and telenovela. Parts Three and Four of the Univision Series follow the men as they reach the United States, are imprisoned in a Texas detention center for six weeks, released with the help of pro-bono lawyers, then go on to reach the White House. Discouraged by their detention and pressured by the Honduran consul as well as by ICE officials, several of the men accepted “voluntary” deportation to Honduras. Varela left the group for a time to stay with family members in Dallas. Obama never agreed to meet with AMIREDIS. Yet Ultreras pronounces on voice-over, “What seemed like

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an unattainable dream became reality,” which is also the sub-title of the final episode, “Trial by Fire.”45 After detailing their struggles, a forced happy ending depicts the remaining protesters—eight out of the seventeen who first undertook the journey—posing in front of iconic U.S. landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty. Were it not for their uniform of shorts and white t-shirts with AMIREDIS emblazoned on them, they might be mistaken for tourists. In front of the Statue of Liberty, one migrant declares, in the tradition of melodrama’s religiously devout heroes: “I take it as a miracle.”46 The background piano now plays a happy tune. The final “happy ending” scene takes place on the sidewalk in front of the White House on a spring day in May 2015. The trade in sufferingfor-reward is explicitly articulated by Ultreras on voice-over: “After four months of suffering, there they were, in front of the White House.”47 Murillo cries on camera and praises the Lord. He says his tears stem from “gratitude to God [sniffs] and the strength He has given us to get here.”48 The exclusive focus on temporary permission to remain in the United States, while asylum claims are adjudicated, as an achievement in-and-of-itself leaves out a lot. No mention is made of the fact they were never granted an audience with the president. The three AMIREDIS members who were pressured by an Honduran consul in Texas into agreeing to their own deportations were not depicted again—they simply disappear. No questions are asked about how the remaining protesters survive in the United States without any visible means of support. The series ends not with one of the men whose masculinity was previously feminized, but with Hernández, in a shot from the neck up that does not show his disabled body, accentuating the positive: “We’ve already accomplished a lot just by the fact that we were able to get here. And here we are in front of the White House.”49 The series never re-genders the feminized masculinities of Murillo and Varela as masculine; instead, it changes the subject, shifting in focus from the long-term “tragedy” of the men’s lives to their short-term triumph in winning visas that allow them to remain in the United States until their asylum hearings. After ten days of fasting in front of the White House to no avail, Benito Murillo and Geremías Gámez went home to their families in Honduras. Yet before long, Murillo once again felt the pressure to migrate north. When we spoke to him in El Progreso in July of 2016, he told us he was thinking of heading for the United States yet again, this time with his two oldest boys, leaving the two youngest at home in Honduras with their mother. His plan was to use the humanitarian visa

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the Mexican government gave the AMIREDIS protesters to cross Mexico by bus, then turn himself into U.S. authorities at the border and request political asylum for himself and his teenage boys, aged nineteen and sixteen, an age at which forced recruitment into a gang was a concern. Yet he was hesitating in part because the journey did not go smoothly for a second group of AMIREDIS members who tried to follow in the footsteps of the first group, which succeeded in claiming political asylum and securing relatively speedy release from detention. The second AMIREDIS group, composed of five men and a woman with a year-old baby and a three-year-old toddler, crossed into the United States in June of 2016 near Tijuana and was quickly imprisoned in the Otay Mesa Detention Center. The woman and the two children were released in a week and joined the AMIREDIS group in Maryland. Yet three men were released only after paying $5000 dollars in bail; another was deported to Honduras and one man remained imprisoned in the detention center for many months. These early attempts at small-group collective migration from San Pedro Sula served as a kind of rehearsal for the caravans of 2018 that were formed by thousands of Central Americans. Based on the preceding analysis, we can draw some conclusions about performances in which undocumented migrant men with disabilities are cast as tragically emasculated and feminized: (1) they depict their protagonists as powerless, precarious, and visibly vulnerable—in short, doubly feminized by injury and lack of resources; (2) they assume that the rightful position of the male should be hegemonic, in control of his family’s finances and of the sexuality of his wife and children. There is no celebration of a feminized masculinity, for instance, as an alternative identity that might lead to the embrace of new gender norms; (3) they display the suffering of the feminized male for the entertainment of spectators who are assumed to be better off in terms of gender privilege, social class status, physical ability, and access to global mobility; and (4) they suggest that the suffering deserves to be somehow rewarded. In the political economy of suffering, the value of performances of disability as masculinity-gone-wrong, a “tragedy” is explicitly recognized by Ultreras as narrator, by Salinas as the studio host, and by the migrants themselves. The series reinstantiates the social construction of men with disabilities as the “oxymoron” described by Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander: “Since masculinity is defined as able-bodied and active, the disabled man is an oxymoron. Becoming disabled for a man means to ‘cross the fence’ and take on the stigmatizing constructs of the masculine body made feminine and soft.”50

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As feminized men, the migrants’ primary resource becomes the evidence of their injuries. Ultreras, Salinas, and the migrants themselves claim that their prostheses will be their “visa” or their “weapon.” This metaphor reveals an exchange: an individual who wears, or carries, a prosthetic limb has tangible proof of physical and psychological injury, proof that can be traded for a benefit, in this case, the ability to cross national borders. The image of a the prosthetic-as-visa suggests an officially approved exchange; the image of the prosthetic-as-weapon suggests an extraofficial, perhaps even forced, exchange. The prosthetic-as-weapon, moreover, hints at an attempt to recuperate a more normative masculine identity, which we argue in the following section that the AMIREDIS men achieved later through their own in-person performances. When the U.S. border patrol stops the group at the U.S.–Mexico border, Hernández tells Ultreras in frustration: “We sometimes believe that our weapon is our disability but that doesn’t work with these people”51 Hernández’s observation signals a moment of potential breakdown in the logic of the political economy of suffering: the border agents appear unmoved by the migrants’ suffering. The suffering might be worthless to these authorities, in this situation. Under a different system, of course, the men might be free to cross the border simply because they want to, regardless of their level of suffering or disability. The Univision news series both documents trades in suffering and facilitates future trades, as it creates cultural production that takes displays of suffering in daily life, embeds them in melodramatic narratives, and circulates them through mass media. The tragic emasculation and feminization that it portrays as the seemingly inevitable result of disability then acquires an exchange value on an international market that both feeds and fuels an appetite for future spectacles of suffering.

Third Casting: “Soldados Caídos” Varela eventually rejoined the four remaining protesters—Hernández, José Alfredo Correa, José Nain Gutiérrez, Fredy Omar Vega—and they settled in the Baltimore area, yet continued to tour the United States throughout 2016, displaying their bodies in dozens of self-styled performative protests before church groups, community organizations, university audiences, and local political leaders. Besides Baltimore-area protests, their protest-tour included stops in Houston, Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, Birmingham, Atlanta, Miami, New York City, and Washington, DC. Almost everywhere they went, radio, television, print, and internet

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journalists sought to interview them, university professors invited them to speak before groups of students, and politicians received them. By the time we caught up with the men in summer of 2016, Varela said, “I’m tired of being on television. Television just uses us to put the words that they want and not the words that we want them to put. They won’t put our phone number.”52 The phone number was a crucial fundraising tool to recruit potential donors. According to Varela, churches provided a better audience for spreading their word and raising funds: many church members gave immediate cash donations, providing money for the men to support themselves and even to sometimes be able to send remittances to their family members in Honduras. Since they were prohibited from working while their asylum cases were being processed, performative protest was an important source of economic support. Correa was hopeful that they could eventually move beyond self-subsistence and establish a fund for the remainder of the AMIREDIS members in the El Progreso area, perhaps with a focus on the education of their children.53 In what follows we analyze the performances of the five AMIREDIS members we observed and interviewed during July and August of 2016, focusing on how they staged their masculinity as wounded warriors [soldados caídos] during public performances before church audiences, providing an adjustment or corrective to earlier castings as micro-entrepreneurs and tragically emasculated victims. While Murillo and Varela were the protagonists of the Univision series, José Luis Hernández (b. 1989) was the star of the social-life performance that the men shaped for themselves. Hernández is younger than the other two men and in some ways might have made a more pitiful victim for the series, since he is more severely disabled. Not only was his right arm and leg severed by a freight train, he also lost three of the fingers of his left hand. Yet Hernández is better off financially than the others, in part because he has no children or other family members to support, and in part because following his failed attempt to migrate, his father decided to complete the journey that his son had started. Hernández Sr. worked for five years in New York State and Louisiana, earning enough as a builder to be able to save a substantial amount. Hernández’s parents’ home in El Progreso is among the most solid in its working-poor neighborhood, and boasts a few touches of luxury, such as a façade distinguished by twist-fluted plaster columns painted bright green-and-gold and a late-model Toyota pickup truck parked out front. When we visited his family, his father and brother were still working on completing the upper level, which will include a room for the

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younger Hernández, if and when he goes home. José Luis stressed to us that he also contributed to the household economy: part of the funds for the purchase of the truck came from the sales of a CD of religious hymns that he recorded after his accident. More than his relative financial stability, his degree of physical impairment, or his talent as a singer, however, it is his charisma as a speaker and flair for improvised dramatic gestures that have made Hernández an attractive leader for the group. His face is telegenic, with large eyes and sensual lips, he sports a fashionable mop of a haircut, and conveys the earnestness of the devout combined at times with the sulky diffidence of a rock star. Even before we met him, other disabled migrants had described the power of Hernández’s motivational speeches to us. In Honduras, one impressed returned migrant with a disability recounted how, for instance, at one point in a talk before a group of disabled migrants Hernández fell to the floor, apparently by accident. When one of the organizers of the event rushed to help him up, the migrant recalled, Hernández rejected his help and said something along the lines of: “Just like you offer me your hand, I want you to offer a hand to everyone here. And just like I can get up by myself, I want everyone here to get back up.” Hernández usually speaks from four to thirty minutes, depending on his audience and the length of time he is allowed by the hosting organization. Before evangelical Protestant groups, he is sometimes allowed to go on for quite a while. Before Catholic Church groups, the parish priest will usually give him just a few minutes at the end of the service. Press interviews and meetings with politicians have taught him to be succinct and speak quickly when necessary. Over the decade since his accident turned him into something of a celebrity in the northern Mexican city of Delicias, Chihuhua, where he fell from the train, he has given hundreds of media interviews and delivered dozens of talks before high school and college audiences. During three weeks of intense AMIREDIS activism in Chicago, Hernández spoke before an audience of students at the University of Illinois at Chicago, addressed a dozen or so church groups, met with Democratic Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez, and gave several television interviews, tailoring the same basic speech every time to fit the situation and the audience. Though in media interviews, Hernández did not repeat the metaphor of the “fallen soldier” that he has used many times since the group’s earliest trips to Mexico, that metaphor was implicit in the men’s collective attitude and performances of self. The Univision Aquí y Ahora series, in Part

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One, briefly flashes on Hernández telling a group of his fellow AMIREDIS members: “This is like a war and we are fallen soldiers.”54 The use of the word “caído,” like the English “fallen” is more commonly used to indicate that a soldier has died. Yet AMIREDIS activists use it to refer to migrant injuries that were often sustained, literally, by falling from a train. While in Mexico in 2014 to demand an audience with President Enrique Peña Nieto, Hernández was interviewed by a correspondent from La Prensa, one of Honduras’s major newspapers: I think that not even the United States’s wars have left so many mutilated as in Honduras. I call them fallen soldiers. And our war was the lack of opportunities and the unemployment in our countries. That was what forced us to emigrate. But we are not here because we are lazy, we are here because we liked to work and help our families get ahead. We were only looking for an opportunity and we destroyed our lives.55

The analogy between the violence endured by U.S. war veterans and Honduran disabled migrants is a bid for respect, social status, and social entitlements. In so doing, it also draws on traditional Honduran tropes that associate masculinity with militarism. Finally, by making the analogy, Hernández draws attention to another parallel between Central American migrants and U.S. veterans, many of whom are working-class AfricanAmericans and Latinx hoping to “earn” the full rights of U.S. citizens: Both migrants and veterans are construed by the nation-state as patriotic subjects, which as Brigden and Vogt note, can help preserve an illusion of national cohesion in times of growing inequality. When he speaks before church groups, as opposed to media interviewers, Hernández avoids military metaphors and softens his message, for example, omitting a description of a rape he witnessed along the migrant route that he often mentions in media interviews. In churches, he always ends his remarks with a song, sometimes a religious hymn or sometimes a popular song about the suffering of migrants. The talks that we observed before four separate church gatherings in three different churches always succeeded in motivating members of the congregation to contribute, sometimes without an explicit request from Hernández or from the religious authority figure hosting the AMIREDIS presentation. For instance, one elderly woman at the Salem Evangelical Free Church, where Hernández spoke before about fifty congregants on the morning of Sunday, July 31, 2016, shuffled up the aisle with a $20 bill clutched in her hand and

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loudly declared as she proffered the cash, “No one told me anything, but here, take this.”56 The minister quickly intervened to say that donations would be collected later and turned over to AMIREDIS after the service. At other services, the priests encouraged their congregants to donate to the group after mass. When Hernández speaks at an elevated podium, the other four members of the group stand off to the side, facing the audience in positions of relaxed alertness, like a silent chorus. When he speaks without a podium, the five men form a line and face forward, with AMIREDIS members flanking him as he balances a mike in the crook of the armpit of his armless right shoulder and props it up with his permanently injured left hand, which is always wrapped in a bandage. Though the men who accompany Hernández do not speak, they too are performers, a chorus that consciously dresses in costume and displays the metal-and-plastic legs that protrude from the shorts they have all agreed to wear as a uniform for their activist work. On the Sunday we attended services with them, three of the five wore shorts with a camouflage fatigue pattern, giving them a faintly military look that underscored their claim to be symbolic soldiers (Fig. 5.1). The sense of a military contingent was also created by

Fig. 5.1 José Luis Hernández and members of AMIREDIS in Holy Cross Church, Chicago (Photo by Víctor M. Espinosa, July 31, 2016)

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the rest of the costume/uniform: white short-sleeved t-shirts, some with an AMIREDIS logo, white socks, and black rubber-soled shoes. In the AMIREDIS logo, a large stick figure seated in a circle of a wheelchair, in the style of the Americans with Disabilities Act logo, hovers above a train trestle that leads the eye into a map of Central America, Mexico, and the southern United States. Black dots trace a route north. While facing the congregation, none of the men smiled; they wore somber expressions, stood up straight and clasped a hand over a wrist in front of their bodies, a bearing that recalled soldiers at ease. Varela and Correa sometimes looked down, their heads inclined slightly forward, as if listening very intently or praying. The position of the men’s bodies and neutral facial expressions, neither making eye contact nor looking away from the audience, gave spectators permission to look at them, to stare in a situation in which staring is not considered rude. By contrast, for example, to the priest who invited congregants to gaze upon Doña Olga’s disabled son (discussed in Chapter 3), these performers invite and control the gazes of their audience; rather than offer themselves up as passive objects of pity, they imbue their self-display with dignified agency. It would be too simplistic, however, to conclude that what GarlandThomson wrote of disability rights activist Harriet McBryde Johnson also applies to the AMIREDIS activists: “By staging strategic staring encounters that teach her audience a new way to look at her, she enables them to recognize her full humanity, to stare without stigmatizing.”57 It is more accurate to say that the men re-appropriate stigma and even magnify it, as their tableaux of suffering resonates with the Greek and Latin meaning of stigmata: marks, such as those made upon a body. On the life-size crucifixes hovering behind them in the altar areas of Catholic Church venues, the stigmata of Christ are a crucial part of the scenic design, associating the visible evidence of their wounds with the wounds of Christ. As if to underscore the evidence of pain, statues of suffering saints often surround them and their audience. The function of encouraging stares in this miseen-scène might be closer to what Catherine Cole described in her artist’s statement for her dance-theater piece Five Foot Feat , which she begins by removing her prosthetic leg: “I felt that by giving people permission to look, and to look on my terms, we could move beyond awkwardness to something more interesting.”58 We focus our analysis here on the talk that Hernández gave on July 31, 2016 at the St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church on Chicago’s south side at the end of the 5:30 p.m. mass conducted by Father Hugo Leon

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Londoño, before about one hundred congregants gathered in a nave that could easily accommodate ten times that many people. Over the years since the massive red brick church in the Polish Cathedral style was built in 1914 for the Polish working-class community in the Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood, the stock yards have long since closed, and the Catholic population has shrunk, becoming primarily Latinx. While the parish still offers two masses per week in Polish and six in English, four masses per week are conducted in Spanish. Outside of this church, as well as in front of the Holy Cross Church a few blocks to the north, where AMIREDIS performed twice that same day, after every mass street vendors pushing carts with Mexican paletas and fritangas would roll along the sidewalks outside the churches to sell their treats. At St. Joseph, Hernández approached Father Londoño, a native of Colombia clad in Birkenstock sandals and jeans under his cassock, as he opened the doors to the church for the evening mass. In Spanish, Hernández requested permission to speak briefly to the congregation in order to ask for alms [limosna], deploying the language of traditional church charity rather than the language of contemporary political demands. The priest quickly granted permission and the five men entered the church, moving to a pew in the front, where they were highly visible and could quickly make their way to the altar area at the end of the mass. In the four minutes it takes him to deliver it, Hernández’s talk interweaves language and imagery drawn from an eclectic mix of genres: biblical allusions, melodrama, testimonio, political protest, and popular song. We cite it here in its entirety, as an example of the talk he has delivered dozens of times with minor variations: If the land that we come from does not produce good fruits, we all have a right to emigrate to a land that does produce good fruits. For hundreds of emigrants, the promised land that we dream of in our country, a land that produces fewer fruits, we find it, or we seek it, in the United States. But the consequences for hundreds of immigrants are lamentable. And this is the case of all of those you see here, all of us victims of a dream converted into a nightmare. In my case, after twenty days of coming along this path enduring hunger, thirst, and exhaustion, sometimes walking for weeks, going around migration checkpoints, because of persecution on the part of Mexican migration, because of this, as I was getting to a city called Delicias, Chihuahua in Mexico, I fainted on the train. I fell from the train, [and it] mutilated my leg, my arm, and part of my other hand. With a little bit of

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luck I fell near a city called Delicias, because there are hundreds who fall in the desert and they don’t get [medical] attention in time and they lose blood and die, forming part of the long list of the disappeared, especially Central Americans, that exists in consequence of the search for better life opportunities in this country. Sadly, just in Honduras there are more than seven hundred people like us that are mutilated because they sought better opportunities in this country. In the last six years they have repatriated 362 bodies, only of Hondurans, who have died in their attempt to reach this country. There are more than 3,500 disappeared people in Honduras who came to the United States and whose families never heard from them again. So, what we are doing is that you experience the sad face of migration, and the same time speaking for the thousands who have died, for the hundreds of thousands who want to leave, so that they don’t do it. What we want is that this promised land that we find in this country be our own country. We believe that some things are impossible, like that my leg or my arm grow back, or that my comrades, their mutilated legs. That is impossible. But there are things that are possible, if our governments concerned themselves with this reality. And that is to prevent more mutilated, prevent more deaths, prevent more disappeared, prevent more rapes of women, among other things that immigrants face today… What is it that we are looking for? Prevent so much pain. We think that it can happen, if and when, I repeat, our governmental leaders don’t promise things and see the consequences of these remittances, if they concern themselves with generating favorable conditions of life in our countries, to avoid that more migrants end up mutilated like us. Just [among] Hondurans, there are about 74,000 people who migrate, who day after day confront mutilations, deaths, disappearances, so many things. So, that is what we seek here; we are lifting our voices, with the objective of meeting with President Obama, so that he, because we believe that he can do a lot, telling our leaders to concern themselves with their countrymen [connacionales] and do something about this reality. And I don’t want to abuse the time, but thank you for your attention, we will be outside handing out flyers, any help is important to us and we appreciate it very much. Thank you to the Father. And I leave you with this song that says: If the soft moon slips… Why must the wetback Prove with visas That he is not from Neptune.

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If the universal visa is extended On the day on which we are born And expires with death, Why do they pursue you wetback, If the consul of the skies already gave you permission?59

Hernández’s opening biblical references to bearing “good fruit” and searching for a “promised land” parallel migrants with both the biblical followers of Moses and Joshua in the Old Testament and with the flight of Joseph and Mary to Egypt with the infant Jesus depicted in the New Testament. These parallels have been made by many religious leaders who advocate for migrant rights, seek to depict migration as an inevitable consequence of oppression, and maintain that divine injunctions mandating hospitality to strangers supersede the laws of national sovereignty. (See our discussion of Father Solalinde in Chapter 3 and of Rev. Coleman in Chapter 4.) From the allegorical references to migration, the talk moves into the more explicit imagery of melodrama, invoking the familiar phrases used to describe migrants who appear defeated by adversity: “victims of a dream converted into a nightmare” and “the sad face of migration.” The dream/nightmare binary has been deployed repeatedly to describe the dashed hopes of migrants who for whatever reason do not realize their aspirations. Yet in the presence of actual somber-faced men who display their bodies to underscore the evidence of physical pain and permanent loss, the cliché gains a new intensity. Indeed, there is something dreamlike in the embodied contradictions of the men’s integration of themselves into a religious service: They come like messengers from a violent world that contrasts with the quiet contemplation of a peaceful space yet also mirror the images of suffering at the core of Catholicism. To the familiar generalities about dreams becoming nightmares, Hernández adds the specifics of his personal testimonial narrative. As he relates the details of his journey and accident, he keeps the emphasis on bodily suffering typical of both melodrama and Christian iconography that could also be used to describe a soldier on a military campaign: “enduring hunger, thrist, and exhaustion, sometimes walking for weeks….” This section of the story ends with his collapse, followed by a miraculous rescue and survival, almost like a resurrection. He has come to preach, like Christ, to offer news. As in much testimonial expression, individual experience provides the starting point for a collective social

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protest. The statistics that Hernández offers on the numbers of Honduran migrants (74,000 per year), deaths on route (362 migrant bodies repatriated to Honduras during the last six years), disappearances (3500), and “mutilated” in Honduras (more than 700) can be instantly correlated by spectators with the materiality of the bodies standing before them. The physical presence of the bodies with disabilities offers a kind of proof that the numbers relate to actual human beings. The evidence of disability on stark display testifies to the account of the war-like conditions and encourages spectators to trust the speaker. Hernández builds toward a politically radical climax, a call for peace: he demands that the violence against migrants traveling through Mexico be curbed and that “this promised land that we seek in this country be our own country,” in other words that the opportunities that force Hondurans to leave their country be available within Honduras, obviating the need to migrate. For these demands to be met, the policies and practices of three nation-states would have to change: The United States would have to stop pressuring Mexico to deport Central Americans; Mexico would have to find a way to control its corrupt officials and protect migrants from violent gangs; and Honduras would have to resist rather than embrace the neoliberal economics that have turned it into a haven for transnational investors looking to exploit cheap labor on both rural plantations and in urban assembly plants. Rather than enter into details of how those policies could or should change, however, Hernández leaves it to President Obama to solve the specifics of the problem: “We believe that he can do a lot.” In his musical conclusion, Hernández once again quickly shifts register, ending with two verses from the song Mojado, by the Guatemalan folkpop star Ricardo Arjona.60 The song closes the circle with a reiteration of the message that God’s law knows no mortal nation-state boundaries. Sung a cappella in a clear, slow, strong tenor, Hernández’s cover elicited an enthusiastic round of applause from the congregation. In the context of the entire performance, from the moment Hernández approached Father Londoño until the moment he left the church, the singing of “Mojado” straddled a thin line between singing for one’s supper, singing on buses or subway platforms or on the street for spare change tossed in a hat and singing at a protest rally, singing to inspire people to effect change. By contrast to how Hernández presented his body and that of his coperformers as impaired, calling attention to their difference as the “tragic face of migration,” his voice was strikingly unimpaired: it imparted a sense

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of hope and possibility. Though we do not mean to stage Hernández as a “super-cripple” whose ability compensates for his disability, when he sings the spectator’s attention is called to one of the elements of his embodied presence that remains as it was before his accident, his vocal ability. After mass, while his four-man chorus collected contributions and sold t-shirts emblazoned with the AMIREDIS logo on the sidewalk outside of the church, Hernández asked us for a ride back to Holy Cross, located a few blocks away in the same neighborhood, so that while the others collected donations he could set up the fourth and last appearance of the day. After the last performance at Holy Cross, as the men handed out flyers and sold t-shirts emblazoned with the AMIREDIS logo out of the trunk of their old sedan, their disabilities seemed normalized as they blended in with the men selling frozen fruit bars and fritangas. They used the familiar fundraising strategies typical of many kinds of grassroots organizations as they interacted with parishioners who seemed to have had their fill of staring, if they needed to stare, inside the church. Now the parishioners made eye contact and small talk as they handed over donations or made purchases. The fragility of the normalcy of these exchanges was highlighted, however, when it was broken by a small boy. He was accompanied by his mother, who bought two t-shirts from the men and draped them over the handlebar of the stroller in which she rolled his baby sibling. Varela noticed that the boy, who looked to be about eight and was wearing shorts, used a prosthetic right leg. “Look, my leg is just like yours! We all have legs like yours,” he said, gesturing toward the other AMIREDIS members standing around. Instead of acknowledging Varela, the boy turned his head away and shut his eyes tightly, refusing to look at their prosthetic limbs, or even to look at the men at all. The mother explained apologetically that she had only recently been able to convince her son to wear shorts in the summer and that he didn’t like to talk about his leg. It is impossible to know for sure what was behind the boy’s attempt to shut out the focus on disability. Perhaps he was overwhelmed by the attention to his body, which like the grown men’s, might always be vulnerable to the scrutiny of others? Or, perhaps it was too difficult to project himself into the future as an adult male with a disability? Whatever the reason, he refused to be cast as part of the AMIREDIS ensemble. If the AMIREDIS protesters had been able to meet with Obama one imagines that the former president might have told them that the United States is already taking measures to create additional opportunities in Honduras. Under the “Northern Triangle’s Alliance for Prosperity

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Plan” approved by the U.S. Congress in December of 2015, the United States was to provide up to $750 million in aid to Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Much of the aid, however, was intended to promote more foreign investment and fuel the war against drug traffickers by further militarizing the region, with $222 million dedicated to the regional security strategy known as the Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI). Moreover, creating more subsistence-level jobs in assembly and garment industries, human rights advocates warned, primarily benefits United States and other foreign investors rather than Hondurans, and could create the unintended consequence of encouraging additional migration.61 With a clear echo of President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress in its name, the Alliance for Prosperity continues Washington’s long established practice of “what’s good for General Motors…,” linking $299 million in development assistance and $184 million in economic “prosperity programs” to opportunities for foreign investors to make handsome profits, a tradition of taking advantage of inexpensive Honduran labor that dates back to that country’s late nineteenth and early twentieth-century days as a “banana republic” and continues today in the palm oil and maquiladora industries. By late 2016, when Donald Trump was elected president, the numbers of apprehensions of Central Americans at the southern border of the United States were at almost record highs. Without directly defying the Scalabrinian sisters’ attempt to cast AMIREDIS members as micro-entrepreneurs or Univision’s casting of them as tragically emasculated, the performances that the men staged for themselves allowed them to reconstruct a masculine identity without focusing on their ability, or inability, to provide for their families. They instead activated longstanding associations of masculinity with violence and warfare in order to present themselves not as feminized victims but as wounded warriors who deserve compensation for their injuries. In keeping with their adoption of military personas, their self-stagings are quite hierarchical in how speaking roles are reserved for Hernández, and sometimes Varela, while Correa, Gutiérrez and Vega remain as a silent chorus or an honor guard. There is no innovation in how military masculinity is constructed and no blurring of gender roles; if anything their performance reinforces traditional gender roles. The performance does not entirely avoid recycling melodramatic tropes that construe them as victims, yet on the balance it suggests instead that they too deserve to be viewed as “homeland heroes.” While their costumes and their postures allude

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to the “fallen soldier” persona, they never publicly express the frustrated or destructive male anger that one might expect of a wounded warrior. Instead, they use their display of injuries to advocate for a shift in how we conceive of the undocumented who suffer accidents on the migrant journey, from blaming the individual victims for their supposed carelessness or weakness to holding nation-states responsible for their practices, policies, and laws. When Hernández alludes to the permanence of his losses, to the impossibility of playing on a soccer team or picking up a guitar again, or to the impossibility of his arm or leg growing back, it is always to balance the impossibility with what he insists is the possibility of political change. AMIREDIS’s corrective castings and self-stagings are not necessarily more politically efficacious than any other, especially since they involved small numbers of participants and spectators, and centered around a demand for a meeting with Obama that never happened and that became obsolete with the election of Trump. Neither did they entirely elude the political economy of suffering, since the core of their self-displays remained the expression of pain in exchange for a possible benefit. Because of their emotional earnestness, it would be inaccurate to characterize their performances as postmodern pastiche, assemblage, or parody. Yet their performances gently tweak melodrama, re-appropriate the stigma of the “mutilated,” and construct a collective male subjectivity that resists conformity with neoliberal ideals of individual striving in competitive isolation. Unable to see a way forward as individual strivers, they nevertheless refused to become disposable bodies. From a marginalized position, they participated in the political economy of suffering on their own terms.

Notes 1. Bethany M. Coston and Michael Kimmel, “Seeing Privilege Where It Isn’t: Marginalized Masculinities and the Intersectionality of Privilege,” Journal of Social Issues 68, no. 1 (2012): 97–111. 2. Óscar Martínez, “The Macho Cops of Honduras,” trans. Kristina Cordero, The New York Times, March 9, 2014, SR5. 3. Rocío Tábora, “Masculinidad en un frasco: Cultura y violencia en el discurso de la clase política hondureña (1883–1949),” in Entre silencios y voces: Género e historia en América Central (1750–1990), ed. Eugenia Rodríguez Saenz (San José: Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 2000 [1997]), 131–151.

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4. Noelle Katari Brigden and Wendy A. Vogt, “Homeland Heroes: Migrants and Soldiers in the Neoliberal Era,” Antipode 47, no. 2 (2014): 303–332. Also see Sarah J. Mahler’s study of competition in Peruvian and Salvadoran immigrant communities on Long Island, American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 5. Daniel Reichman, “Honduras: The Perils of Remittance Dependence and Clandestine Migration,” Migration Policy Institute, April 11, 2013, http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/honduras-perils-remittancedependence-and-clandestine-migration. 6. Gustavo López, “Hispanics of Honduran Origin in the United States, 2013,” Pew Research Center, September 15, 2015, http://www. pewhispanic.org/2015/09/15/hispanics-of-honduran-origin-in-theunited-states-2013/. 7. Elisa Shearer, “Hispanic News Media: Fact Sheet,” in State of the News Media 2016 (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2016), 73–79. 8. Amy Cook, Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 148. 9. “UNHCR Says Stabilizing ‘Caravan’ Situation Urgently Important,” UNHCR, The UN Refugee Agency, October 23, 2018, https://www. unhcr.org/news/briefing/2018/10/5bceda274/unhcr-says-stabilizingcaravan-situation-urgently-important.html. 10. “Five Facts about Migration from Central America’s Northern Triangle,” WOLA: Advocacy for Human Rights in the Americas, January 15, 2016, https://www.wola.org/analysis/five-facts-about-migration-from-centralamericas-northern-triangle/. 11. Adrienne Pine, Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 32–33. 12. Manuel Ortega Hegg, Marcelina Castillo Venerio, and Rebecca Centeno Orozco, Masculinidad y factores socioculturales asociados con la paternidad: Estudio en cuatro países de Centroamérica (Mexico: Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, 2005), 173. 13. Priscila Hernández and María Cidón, “La Vida Después de ‘La Bestia’: los migrantes mutilados por el tren y su otra batalla,” Sin Embargo, April 6, 2015, https://www.sinembargo.mx/06-04-2015/1302579. 14. “Conamiredis alerta de aumento de hondureños retornados con discapacidad y de reincidencia de los mismos,” Proceso Digital, September 4, 2016, http://www.proceso.hn/actualidad/item/130838-conamiredis-alerta-deaumento-de-hondurenos-retornados-con-discapacidad-y-de-reincidenciade-los-mismos.html. 15. Sheila C. Moeschen, Acts of Conspicuous Compassion: Performance Culture and American Charity Practices (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

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17. 18.

19. 20.

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Press, 2013); Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander, eds. Bodies in Commotion: Disability & Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). COFAMIPRO (Committee of Family Members of Disappeared Migrants from El Progreso) [Comité de Familiares de Migrantes Desaparecidos de El Progreso] was founded in 1999 by a group of women who wanted to obtain news of daughters and sons who had disappeared in Mexico. With first Emeteria Martínez, then Rosa Nelly Santos, at its helm, the organization broadcast a weekly radio show, “Without Borders,” later called “Opening Borders,” on Radio Progreso, a station operated by local Jesuit priests who are committed to human rights, to discuss migration issues and pressure the government to help locate the disappeared or determine their fate. Starting in 2004, COFAMIPRO organized an annual caravan to travel through Mexico to publicize the issue of the disappearances there of many Central Americans. The caravan eventually came to include mothers from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua and the work of organizing it shifted to Mexican Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano. While it was thanks to Santos that disabled men and women were first brought together and began to organize, by 2008, AMIREDIS members began to establish their own meeting times and places, and to set their own activities and goals, apart from those of COFAMIPRO. Rosa Nelly Santos, founding member and leader of Comité de Familiares de Migrantes Desaparecidos de El Progreso (COFAMIPRO), interview with the authors, El Progreso, Honduras, June 27, 2016. Karen Núñez, AMIREDIS coordinator, interview with the authors, San Pedro Sula, Honduras, July 1, 2016. Sister Lidia Mara Silva de Souza, National Coordinator of the Pastoral Care for Human Mobility, interview with the authors, Comayagua, Honduras, July 2, 2016. Ibid. After Zelaya was ushered out of the country by the military on June 28, 2009, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at first called for “the full restoration of democratic order.” Yet within months the Obama administration changed its position, arguing that the coup was in fact constitutional and that the results of November 30, 2009 elections that brought the National Party’s Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo Sosa to power should be respected. See Dana Frank, “In Honduras, a Mess Made in the U.S.,” The New York Times, January 26, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/ 27/opinion/in-honduras-a-mess-helped-by-the-us.html. Daniel R. Reichman, The Broken Village: Coffee, Migration, and Globalization in Honduras (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 96.

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22. Lukas Keller and Rebecca Rouse, Remittance Recipients in Honduras: A Socioeconomic Profile (Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank Group, September 2016). 23. Norman Varela, interview with the authors, Chicago, July 25, 2016. 24. AMIREDIS leaders said their political consciousness was awakened by workshops run by the Team for Reflection, Research, and Communication (Equipo de Reflexión, Investigación y Comunicación, ERIC) run by the Jesuit priests in El Progreso. Operating under the slogan, “La voz que está con vos” [The voice that is with you], besides discussing migration as noted above, Radio Progreso also provides a forum for discussion of other social issues such as violence, human rights, impunity, social justice, and economic inequality. After the 2009 coup, the military temporarily shut down the radio station. José Luis Hernández, interview with the authors, Chicago, July 25, 2016. 25. Norman Varela and José Luis Hernández interviews with the authors. Also see “Lobo construirá viviendas a migrantes retornados discapacitados,” Departamento 19, November 1, 2012, http://www.departamento19. hn/index.php/portada/69-actualidad/8219-lobo-construira-viviendas-amigrantes-retornados-discapacitados-.html; Revista Conexihon, “Gobierno construirá 30 viviendas a migrantes retornados discapacitados,” November 3, 2012, http://conexihon.hn/site/noticia/derechos-humanos/migraci% C3%B3n/gobierno-construir%C3%A1-30-viviendas-migrantes-retornados. 26. “Migrantes discapacitados le recuerdan al presidente Lobo que no les ha cumplido el plan de vivienda,” Proceso Digital, December 17, 2013, http://www.proceso.hn/index.php/component/k2/item/10332. 27. During the three-hour bus ride, Guzmán said, he was gripped by the fear that the soldiers might take the protesters to a deserted area and execute them. After that harrowing experience, he refused to participate in any more protests or AMIREDIS activities. Guzmán’s fears might seem exaggerated were it not for the fact that 123 activists have been killed in Honduras since the 2009 military coup, most prominently the environmental activist Berta Cáceres. See Global Witness, Honduras: The Deadliest Place to Defend the Planet (London: Global Witness, 2017). 28. Benito Murillo, interviews with the authors, El Progreso, Honduras, June 29, 2016 and July 8, 2016. 29. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 20. 30. On Jerrold’s The Rent Day, see Martha Vicinus, “‘Helpless and Unfriended’: Nineteenth-Century Domestic Melodrama,” New Literary History 13, no. 1 (1981): 131–132. On Under the Gaslight , see Amy E. Hughes, Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2012), 118–154.

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33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

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On melodramas of affliction, see Moeschen, Acts of Conspicuous Compassion, 27–40. On freak shows, see Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Murillo was also featured in a shorter report on the network’s main news show, Noticiero Univision, hosted by the most well-known celebrity Univision journalist, Jorge Ramos, on March 5, under the title The Town of the Mutilated [Pueblo de Mutilados]. MURILLO. Aquí duerme toda mi familia. Esta cama me la regalaron hace poquito. ULTRERAS. ¿Usted y cuatro hijos? MURILLO. Sí. Aquí dormimos. Esta es su casa. La cocina está prácticamente vacía. ULTRERAS. ¿Le han pedido de comer alguna vez y no tiene? Murillo: Sí, muchas veces, y lo único que uno hace es llorar, porque, ¿verdad? Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 22–23. ULTRERAS. ¿De qué viven Norman? ¿Cómo mantienes a tu familia? VARELA. De pedir. Yo hago trabajos, fuertes, por lo que me quieran dar. Dos veces he querido hasta quitarme la vida para no estar así. Su tragedia agudizó la pobreza en que vivía la familia. Arrebatándole el sueño de tener una casa. Cuando nuestros hijos nos piden algo, no se lo podemos dar, por la situación. In one scene in which Varela speaks at an AMIREDIS meeting he does mention that he has applied for jobs in maquiladoras and been turned down because of his disability. Yet that sole mention of apparent discrimination is left unexplored. Cruzar esta frontera les recuerda su propio infierno. Tantas cosas que quería hacer como hombre, que ahora no puedo. Yo sé que el Señor Presidente de los Estados Unidos de Norteamerica nos va a escuchar. Porque él se ganó un premio Noble [sic] de la paz. Y siento de que si se lo ganó, es por algo. Yo lo que quiero es una casa, vivir dignamente, porque creo que tengo derecho como humano. Lo que parecía un sueño inalcanzable se hizo realidad. Yo lo tomo como un milagro. Luego de cuatro meses de sufrimiento allí estaban, frente a la Casa Blanca. …agradecimiento a Dios y la fuerza que él nos a dado para llegar hasta aquí. Ya hemos logrado mucho solo con el hecho de poder llegar. Y aquí estamos frente a la Casa Blanca.

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50. Leonore Maderson and Susan Peake, “Men in Motion: Disability and the Performance of Masculinity,” in Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, eds. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 233. 51. Nosotros a veces creemos que nuestra arma es nuestra discapacidad, pero con esta gente no funciona eso. 52. Ya me cansé de salir en televisión. La televisión nomás nos utiliza para poner las palabras que ellos quieren y no las palabras que nosotros queremos que pongan. No ponen nuestro número de teléfono. 53. José Alfredo Correa, interview with the authors, Chicago, July 26, 2016. 54. Esto es como una guerra y nosotros somos soldados caídos. 55. Nosotros somos, les digo yo, soldados caídos. Y nuestra guerra fue, pues, la falta de oportunidades, el desempleo de nuestros países. Eso fue lo que nos obligó a emigrar. Pero no estamos aquí por haraganes, estamos aquí porque nos ha gustado trabajar y sacar adelante a nuestras familias, solo buscábamos una oportunidad y destruimos nuestras vidas. Xiaomara Orellana, “Los 15 héroes hondureños expondrán a Peña Nieto el martirio de los migrantes en México,” La Prensa, April 11, 2014, http://www. laprensa.hn/especiales/eleccionesgenerales/639515-255/los-15-h%C3% A9roes-hondure%C3%B1os-expondr%C3%A1n-a-pe%C3%B1a-nieto-elmartirio-de-los. 56. A mí nadie me dijo nada, pero aquí tenga. 57. Garland-Thomson, Staring, 192. 58. Cited in Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander, “Introduction: Disability Studies in Commotion with Performance Studies,” in Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 4. 59. Si la tierra de donde venimos no produce buenos frutos, todos tenemos derecho a emigrar a esta tierra que sí produce buenos frutos. Para cientos de emigrantes, la tierra prometida que soñamos en nuestro país, una tierra que produce menos frutos, la encontramos, o la buscamos, en Estados Unidos. Pero las consecuencias para cientos de inmigrantes son lamentables. Y ese es el caso de todos los que ustedes ven aquí, todos nosotros víctimas del sueño convertido en una pesadilla. En mi caso, después de 20 días de venir en este camino aguantando hambre, sed y cansancio, a veces caminando por semanas, rodeando garitas de migración, por persecuciones por parte de migración de México, a consecuencia de eso, ya para llegar a una ciudad que se llama Delicias, Chihuahua, en México, yo me desmayé en el tren. Me caí del tren, mutiló mi pierna, mi brazo y parte de mi otra mano. Con un poco de suerte me caí cerca de una ciudad que se llama Delicias, porque hay cientos que se caen en el desierto y no los atienden a tiempo, se desangran y mueren, vienen a formar parte de gran lista de desaparecidos, en especial centroamericanos,

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que existe a consecuencia de buscar mejores oportunidades de vida en este país. Tristemente, solo en Honduras somos más de setecientas personas como nosotros que están mutiladas por buscar mejores oportunidades en este país. En los últimos seis años han repatriado 362 cadáveres, de Hondureños nada más, que han muerto en su intento por llegar a este país. Hay más de 3,500 personas desaparecidas de Honduras que se vinieron a Estados Unidos y que sus familias nunca jamás volvieron a oír o saber de ellos. Entonces, lo que nosotros estamos haciendo es que ustedes conozcan la triste cara de la migración y a la vez hablando por los miles que han muerto, por los cientos de miles que quieren salir, para que no lo hagan. Lo que buscamos es que esa tierra prometida que buscamos en este país, sea nuestro propio país. Creemos que hay cosas imposibles, como que me crezca mi pierna o mi brazo, o a los compañeros sus piernas mutiladas. Eso es imposible. Pero hay cosas que sí son posibles, si nuestros gobiernos se preocuparan por esta realidad. Y es evitar más mutilados, evitar más muertes, evitar más desaparecidos, evitar más mujeres violadas, entre otras cosas que los inmigrantes enfrentan hoy en día… ¿Qué es lo que buscamos? Evitar tanto dolor. Creemos que sí puede ser, siempre y cuando, repito, nuestros gobernantes no prometan cosas y que vean las consecuencias de esas remesas, se preocupen por generar las condiciones de vida favorables en nuestros países para evitar que más migrantes queden mutilados como nosotros. Sólo hondureños, hay como 74,000 personas que migran, que día a día enfrentan mutilaciones, muertes, desaparecidos, tanta cosa. Entonces, es lo que buscamos aquí, andamos alzando la voz, con el objetivo de ver al Presidente Obama, para que él, porque creemos que él puede hacer mucho, diciéndole a nuestros gobernantes que se preocupen por sus connacionales y hagan algo por esta realidad. Y no quiero abusar del tiempo, pero gracias por su atención, vamos a estar afuera repartiendo volantes, cualquier ayuda es importante para nosotros y se lo agradecemos mucho. Gracias al padre. Y me despido con esta canción que dice: Si la luna suave se desliza Por cualquier cornisa Sin permiso alguno, ¿Por qué el mojado precisa Comprobar con visas Que no es de Neptuno? Si la visa universal se extiende El día en que nacemos Y caduca en la muerte,

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¿Por qué te persiguen mojado, Si el cónsul de los cielos ya te dio permiso? 60. “Mojado” is a less harsh version of the term “wetback.” 61. Mercedes Garcia, “Alliance for Prosperity Plan in the Northern Triangle Not a Likely Final Solution for the Central American Migration Crisis,” Council on Hemispheric Affairs, March 3, 2016, www.coha.org/alliancefor-prosperity-plan-in-the-northern-triangle-not-a-likely-final-solution-forthe-central-american-migration-crisis/#_ftnref26.

PART III

Children and Youth

CHAPTER 6

Unaccompanied Migrant Children: Orphan-Martyrs in Motion

To be an orphan is a metaphor for an existential void, a state in which one suffers the painful effects of the absence of an authority figure (be it familial, cultural, national, etc.). In this regard, orphanhood is functional: one parent, or even both of them, may be alive, but it is as if they did not exist for the child. Dan Russek, film scholar

An exhausted boy struggles to stay awake and keep his balance on top of a moving freight train, or finds himself in the clutches of a junkie, or wanders lost through a desert borderland at night together with his little brother. These scenes, each taken from one of the three contemporary migrant melodramas on which we focus this chapter, are all built around the rich literary and dramatic tradition of “functional orphans,” to deploy film scholar Dan Russek’s term for children whose parents may be alive but are absent from the child’s life. While Russek traces the figure of the orphan, or near-orphan, in Mexican cinema as far back as Luis Buñuel’s 1950 film Los olvidados , melodrama orphans go at least as far back as Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel Les Misérables . From the novel to the stage to film, melodramas featuring functional orphans who fiercely love their parents and long to reunite with them have been produced throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and now the twenty-first century. In this century, a new version of this archetypal character has claimed the imagination of artists working in both fiction and nonfiction: the undocumented child who struggles to attain family reunification across international borders. © The Author(s) 2020 A. E. Puga and V. M. Espinosa, Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37409-9_6

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Though family reunification is expressed in Article 10 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child as an international human right, in much cultural production it is treated less like a right and more like a prize that must be earned through redemptive suffering. Starting in 1994, when Operation Gatekeeper effectively sealed off the safer, more popular border-crossing areas, circular migration has become far more expensive and dangerous, leading to longer and more traumatic separations between children and their parents. Increased border security, punitive legislation, and draconian policies have made the classic melodramatic plot device of family separation and the quest for reunification all too verisimilar. According to one survey, the majority of unaccompanied minors under the age of twelve are seeking reunification with a parent.1 In 2014, the number of unaccompanied minors crossing into the United States from Mexico and Central America surged to almost 70,000 from a previous high of almost 40,000 in 2013. Such minors are depicted in both fiction and nonfiction as vulnerable, innocent child protagonists in motion, featured among casts of characters that typically include a variety of villains, including incompetent parents, exploitative coyotes, corrupt authorities, and brutal gang members. Sometimes children on the road are rescued by heroic figures, such as the priests and compassionate lay workers we discussed in Part One. More often, however, the melodramas take a tragic turn, with brutally sensational scenes of beatings, sexual assaults, torture, incarceration, and deportation. In such scenes, one can often discern tropes recycled from nineteenth- and twentieth-century stage and screen in both Mexico and the United States, such as the figure of the orphan and another perennially popular archetype, the childmartyr. When the figures of the orphan and the martyr come together in a transnational setting, they often reveal the destructive effects of multiple societies’ failures on their most vulnerable members. As in earlier melodramas created for a single national audience, they often highlight the errors of the adult characters’ ways and implicitly urge adult spectators to create a more just world for the sake of future generations. At the same time, however, as Wendy S. Hesford notes, spectacles featuring victimized children, even children who ostensibly represent themselves, can also be used “as a means of self-recognition for the powerful – a representational pattern that shows how children’s agency is caught up in the global politics of recognition and economic distribution.”2 In Parts I and II, we briefly touched on the figure of the suffering child as we explored how rescuers and parents imbue human suffering with value, display it, and trade it for material support as well as cultural

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capital. In this chapter, we turn to cultural production that purports to offer the perspective of children (though it is created by adults) who undertake migrant journeys that even adults find daunting. The questions we ask about child characters parallel some of the questions we asked earlier about rescuers and parents: For whom is children’s suffering-inmotion valuable, how much is it worth, and what can it be traded for in the political economy of suffering? To what extent are suffering and child martyrdom conceived of as currencies in a process of “earning” family reunification? How do performances of children suffering during the migrant journey circulate across borders, and what meanings do they accrue on all sides of the borders? The preceding questions lead us to further questions about spectators’ affective responses to displays of suffering young bodies. How do spectators’ responses to performances by and about children intersect with notions of ideal parenting and about which parents should be granted belonging in a destination state? In short, what do displays of child suffering imply for citizenship rights, or for human rights, both for children and their parents? We answer the above questions by combing through a large and growing body of cultural production featuring Latin American child orphanmartyr migrants to focus on three well-known and influential works that illustrate the wide range of media and genres spanned by migrant melodrama: the 2006 journalistic narrative Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother, by Sonia Nazario; the 2007 fictional film Under the Same Moon, directed by Patricia Riggen; and the 2005 play Our Dad Is in Atlantis [Papá está en la Atlántida], by Javier Malpica. Created by authors from both the United States and Mexican sides of the border, these works nevertheless share a construction of child migrant protagonists as innocents who are entitled to rights not by virtue of being human but by virtue of suffering and sacrifice, including sometimes the suffering of others on their behalf. These works differ, however, in how they craft the meaning of their protagonists’ suffering as an intervention in debates surrounding migration from Latin America to the United States today. Despite the concern it voices for migrants, Enrique’s Journey, we argue, is ultimately a conservative melodrama that packages migrant suffering for the enjoyment of middle-class readers while portraying migrant parents and children alike as misguided victims who should have stayed home no matter how dire their circumstances. By contrast, the film comedy Under the Same Moon, which has been dismissed by critics as feel-good fluff, we argue, displays a radical optimism about the

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ability of love and desire to erase the limitations posed by nation-state borders. Finally, the drama Our Dad Is in Atlantis highlights what Lauren Berlant has called “cruel optimism” about the ability to attain a secure and prosperous life under neoliberal capitalism. Its ending is ambiguous enough that directorial choices in the staging of its final scene can determine the nature of its political intervention. We contrast two different productions of the play, one in the United States and one in Mexico, to demonstrate how the same play, in the hands of different directors, can either challenge spectators to intervene to end child martyrdom or lead them in a resigned lament for the disintegration of the Mexican family.

A Genealogy of Orphans and Martyrs Before we embark on an analysis of the above works, we will first sketch out a transnational genealogy of the figure of the child orphan-martyr in melodrama. Though by no means exhaustive, this context should help situate both U.S. and Mexican cultural production in relationship to some of its shared nineteenth-century European roots. Les Misérables ’s functional orphans, for instance, were familiar to reading elites in both the United States and Latin America: the noble street child Gavroche does his best to care for his younger siblings; the pathetic waif Cosette falls into the clutches of abusive parent-substitutes who keep her in wretched conditions and force her to work long hours. Gavroche and Cosette’s stories have come down to millions of spectators through extremely long theatrical runs, as well as film and television adaptations. Almost simultaneous theatrical adaptations of Les Misérables began in London in 1985 and a little later in the United States, beginning in 1987 and continuing, with interruptions and revivals, until 2016 on Broadway and 2019 in the West End. In Mexico, one stage production of Les Misérables ran from 2002– 2004 and a second, started in 2018, was still running as of this writing. Meanwhile, film and television audiences can also meet Gavroche and Cosette through a myriad of adaptations, including on television in 1978 and 2000; and on film in 1935 (dir. Richard Boleslawski, starring Fredric March), 1998 (dir. Bille August, starring Liam Neeson), and 2012 (dir. Tom Hooper, starring Hugh Jackman). In Mexico, a 1943 adaptation was directed by Fernando A. Rivero and starred Domingo Soler. A few years after Hugo’s novel was published, Adolphe d’Ennery and Eugène Cormon’s novel, Les deux orphelines (The Two Orphans, 1875) was adapted for the stage. Parisian theater audiences were entertained by the saga of two adopted sisters, one of whom is blind, who struggle to

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survive after their arrival from the innocent countryside to the wicked capital city. In the late nineteenth century, the Broadway adaptation of Les deux orphelines by N. Hart Jackson, The Two Orphans, was hugely successful, with 180 performances in 1874–1875 at the Union Square Theatre. After a national tour, however, an 1876 revival at The Brooklyn Theatre ended abruptly with a fire that killed almost 300 people.3 Two early twentieth-century film adaptations: The Two Orphans (1915), directed by Herbert Brenon, and the more well-known Orphans of the Storm (1921), directed by D.W. Griffith, soon followed. In Mexico, a 1950 film directed by Roberto Rodríguez, Las dos huerfanitas [The Two Little Orphan Girls], created a second generation of adaptation, since it was based not on d’Ennery’s novel but on a 1942 French film version of the novel. Featuring Mexico’s answer to Shirley Temple, the child star Evita “Chachita” Muñoz as an attractive teenager and María Eugenia “La Tucita” Llamas as her adorable younger friend, Rodríguez’s film recycles the French country girls adrift on the streets of Paris as two close friends who run away together from a provincial orphanage only to end up fending for themselves on the streets of working-class Mexico City. As in most tales of orphan siblings, the older girl selflessly tries to protect the younger one from the dangers of the metropolis. A third nineteenth-century melodrama, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, had more influence in the United States than in Mexico yet is essential to mention because of how it created an archetypal childmartyr whose reincarnations can be found in cultural production on both sides of the border: the saintly young Evangelina “Little Eva” St. Clare. Little Eva’s death scene epitomizes the unfairness of the child’s suffering while nevertheless suggesting that the suffering has purchased the heroic victim a place in a Christian afterlife. Child martyrs, like Eva in her opposition to slavery, are witnesses to injustice: they selflessly seek to suffer themselves in exchange for justice and an end to the suffering of others. Just as Little Eva tries to barter her life for her slaves’ freedom, contemporary child-martyr protagonists often attempt trades in suffering-forrights. Yet the innocence and vulnerability with which we imbue children sometimes makes it difficult to see the exchange for what it is—a transaction with political implications. Children are effective political agents precisely because they are perceived to be above or beside the point of politics. Moreover, because their existence heralds the future, their individually suffering bodies can help create social bodies and social policy organized around hopes for a better future. The figure of the dying child

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activates pity as a community-building affect. In Mexico, adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were staged as early as 1868 and puppet versions of the work were popular in the early twentieth century.4 While we do not claim that the lines of influence from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Les deux orpheline, or Les Misérables to contemporary narrative, film, and theater are necessarily always direct, we do demonstrate that the child orphan-martyr archetype is still very present in the collective imagination of U.S. and Mexican journalists, artists, activists, and scholars, a resource that shapes how we perceive, make sense of, and represent the new phenomenon of unaccompanied child migration from Latin America to the United States. Because of its wide international distribution, the Hollywood film industry has shaped the imaginations not only of U.S. spectators but also those of many Latin Americans. The Hollywood orphan waif began tugging at heartstrings as early as 1921, when Charlie Chaplin’s silent film The Kid starred a lovably vulnerable Jackie Coogan abandoned as a baby by his mother with no one to protect him but the tramp-like Chaplin. Coogan was so successful as the orphan-child that the following year he was cast as Oliver in the first of many adaptations of Dickens’ Oliver Twist (dir. Frank Lloyd). The orphaned Oliver has been adapted by either Hollywood or the British film industry about once a decade, including in a musical version Oliver! (dir. Carol Reed, 1968) and even a Walt Disney animated version in which Oliver is a homeless kitten (Oliver & Company, dir. George Scribner, 1988). The Disney film was dubbed into Spanish and distributed throughout Latin America, thus introducing millions of Spanish-speaking children to the Dickens character in the form of a loveable animal. In the second half of the twentieth century, boy protagonists tended to be less innocent, growing into the older delinquents and rebels of post-World War II cinema, most famously epitomized by James Dean in Rebel without a Cause (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1955) and in musicals like West Side Story (dir. Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, 1961). Orphaned girls, meanwhile, were portrayed as gutsy and precocious survivors in dangerous adult worlds by Mary Pickford in the 1920s, Shirley Temple in the 1930s, and Margret O’Brien in the 1940s. These child characters inevitably won the hearts of initially curmudgeonly adult characters that learned valuable lessons from their plucky young companions. Shirley Temple, for instance, offered lessons in how to cope with the Great Depression. In Dimples (dir. William A. Seiter, 1936), a film set in the 1850s that functions as an allegory for the 1930s, she pulls herself up by her bootstraps, works hard, and miraculously earns enough to support

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her entire family. In a fascinating example of archetypal recycling, Dimples manages to go from rags to riches by starring as Little Eva in a theatrical production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Scholars have recently made the case that the supposed innocence of Temple and Pickford were in fact subject to a pedophilic gaze that construed them as eroticized bodies.5 Yet by contrast to contemporary migrant melodramas’ tragic children and youth, whose bodies are often violated, maimed, and destroyed in excruciatingly explicit detail, the bodies of these children usually remain physically intact. During the Golden Age of Mexican film (1930s–1950s), martyred children were used to enshrine the family unit. In Antonio Guzmán Aguilera’s screenplay for Águila o Sol (Heads or Tails, dir. Arcady Boytler, 1937), the three friends who run away together from an orphanage to scramble for survival in Mexico City’s tent theater scene might have come from the pages of a nineteenth-century novel, complete with a long-lost father who wins the lottery and resurfaces just in time to save the day for his son Polito, played by the star comedian Cantinflas (Mario Moreno). In Nosotros los pobres (We the Poor, dir. Ismael Rodríguez, 1948) Mexico’s answer to Shirley Temple, “Chachita” (three years before she went on to star in The Two Little Orphan Girls ) plays a girl who rebuffs the overtures of friendship from a former prostitute suffering from tuberculosis, “La Tísica” (Carmen Montejo), only to find out just before the woman dies that she is in fact the biological mother for whom Chachita had always longed. In the sequel to Nosotros los pobres , Ustedes los ricos (You the Rich, dir. Ismael Rodríguez, 1948) it is an infant martyr that illustrates the noble resilience of working-class families like that of Pepe el Toro (Pedro Infante). After the villains set fire to Pepe’s house, despite Pepe’s heroic efforts to rescue his infant son, the baby dies in the blaze. Much anguished grieving ensues, complete with melodrama’s intense expressions of emotion—shrieks, wails, weeping—on the part of Pepe and the child’s mother Celia (Blanca Estela Pavón). Yet in the end, the infant’s death serves only to further strengthen the family ties among Pepe, Celia, and their adopted daughter, played once again by Chachita. God rewards the family’s fortitude with twins, as the mother announces in the last scene, beaming with joy as she cradles an infant in each arm, the new births completely canceling out the earlier tragedy. The sacrifice of the infant martyr has magically restored all previous losses. In other films, infants are victims of heartless mothers, like the prostitute in Víctimas del pecado (dir. Emilio Fernández, 1950), who tosses her baby in the trash to please her pimp. Seconds before it would be carted away

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by a garbage truck, in one of the melodrama’s fortuitous coincidences, it is rescued in the nick of time by an adoptive mother who proves once again that motherly love need not be biological. That same year, in Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados , the lifeless body of effectively motherless Pedrito ends up discarded in a garbage dump, an ironic reversal of the elegant deathbed scene in which heaven awaits an angelic child. As recently as 2013, the martyred child made a reappearance as the beloved baby daughter of a reformed playboy (Eugenio Derbez) in the popular movie No se aceptan devoluciones [titled “Instructions not Included” in English, directed by Derbez, and co-written by Derbez along with Guillermo Ríos and Leticia López Margalli.] Little Maggie dies of a congenital heart defect, but not before teaching her father the true meaning of love, courage, and responsibility. In the contemporary equivalent of Little Eva’s ascension, the final scene shows a happy Maggie (Loreto Peralta) in heaven, playing with her grandfather. According to film scholars Julia Tuñón Pablos and Tzvi Tal, who survey a wide variety of films from Latin American countries including Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Peru, the heroic child as a sacrificial lamb who pays for the sins of flawed adults and exposes society’s failings can be found in many parts of the continent. They note that the sacrificed child is closely associated with Christ’s sacrifice for humanity and emphasizes that in Catholicism suffering is rewarded with ascension to heaven.6 Yet the recycling of figures such as the dying Little Eva, the abandoned baby, and the plucky orphan in both traditionally Protestant United States and traditionally Catholic Mexico shows that the redemptive value of suffering is a belief that culture industries use to commoditize suffering and circulate it internationally, irrespective of a country’s religious tradition. Twenty-first-century films about child and teen migrants on the road tend to combine the pathos of classic child melodrama with the excitement produced by violence, or the threat of violence, in sensation melodrama. In Sin Nombre (dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2009) the Honduran teen Sayra (Paulina Gaitán) rides the tops of freight trains through Mexico along with her father and her uncle, narrowly avoiding being raped by a gang member. She makes it to the United States, but only after the gang kills the young man with whom she is in love. In The Precocious and Brief Life of Sabina Rivas (dir. Luis Mandoki, 2012), Sabina (Greisy Mena) is an orphan whose brother killed their parents back in Honduras. She dreams of heading north and making it big as a singer, yet during

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the course of the film she never makes it past the Guatemala–Mexico border. Not only is she raped, but she is also viciously beaten and forced into prostitution. In The Golden Dream (dir. Diego Quemada-Diez, 2013) the Guatemalan girl protagonist Sara (Karen Martínez) tries to avoid the wellknown danger of being raped by binding her breasts, cutting her hair, and disguising herself as a boy. Yet the gang of drug traffickers who intercept her and her two boy traveling companions discover her disguise and drag her off screaming, never to be seen again. The character’s disappearance from the film leaves the spectator to imagine the worst. Of the three friends, Sara, Chauk (Rodolfo Domínguez), and Juan (Brandon López), only Juan makes it to the United States, where he finds work in a meatpacking plant. In final scenes that show Juan awash in the blood and guts of animal parts (evocative of how migrant bodies are used and then disposed of) the film suggests that the youth’s suffering and the martyrdom of his traveling companions was for naught, a Buñuel-like reversal of the more common redemptive trope. While young migrant melodrama protagonists today descend from the orphan melodramas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their fates are usually more grim and the adults within their worlds are less sensitive to the moral lessons that they have to impart. In this new strain of melodrama, epitomized by Enrique’s Journey and its documentary film counterpart Which Way Home (dir. Rebecca Cammisa, 2009), the characters of the parents tend to be misguided at best and villains at worst, making it easy for spectators to feel superior rather than identify with them. Under the logic of the political economy of suffering, in the face of deficient parents, spectators are encouraged to fantasize about helping children who deserve rescue, children who have earned rescue by undergoing physical and psychic pain. Too often, however, the children’s parents are excluded from the rescue—as if their suffering has less value when considered next to that of their children. It is the rare comic melodrama, such as Under the Same Moon, in which the functional orphan and the parent both suffer and are both redeemed, thus challenging spectators to include the parents in the realm of those who deserve rescue. Moreover, because gentle comedy in both Moon and Atlantis blends nonthreatening exposure of the absurdities of current injustices with a utopic vision of a better tomorrow, it can help spectators imagine the possibility of a world without violent nation-state borders.

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Enrique ’s Journey: Good Mothers Don’t Migrate A blend of realism, quest narrative, and coming-of-age story infused throughout with melodramatic imagination, Enrique’s Journey takes readers on the road with Enrique as he travels from Honduras to North Carolina to find his mother Lourdes. She migrated to the United States eleven years earlier in order to send money home to help support Enrique and his older sister Belky, both of whom she left in the care of relatives. The saga was first recounted in a Pulitzer-Prize-winning series of articles for the Los Angeles Times that Nazario later expanded and adapted into a best-selling book that has been translated into eight languages and is often taught in classes around the United States.7 Typical of reviewers, the novelist Luis Alberto Urrea praised Nazario’s work in The Washington Post as “a stirring and troubling book about a magnificent journey, undertaken by a lone boy in a terrible, terrible place.”8 What such reviewers miss, we argue, is that our fascination, entertainment, and excitement by the lone boy’s ordeal reinforces expectations of migrant suffering as a necessary precondition for belonging. Such expectations are teased by Nazario’s introduction, which builds suspense and structures a bargain, suffering in exchange for family reunification: “Children who set out on this journey usually don’t make it. They end up back in Central America, defeated. Enrique was determined to be with his mother again. Would he make it?”9 The child suffers; the mother suffers. Will they suffer enough to win redemption in the form of family reunification? They do, but not before Enrique endures eight separate attempts to cross Mexico, experiencing robberies, beatings, hunger, and excruciating thirst. Enrique’s body is small, only five feet tall, Nazario stresses. Though he is sixteen when he first leaves Honduras, she consistently refers to him as a child, using him as an allegorical figure for all unaccompanied minors from Central America. Nazario narrates in thirdperson omniscient, yet her tendency to use short, simple declarative sentences creates the illusion that we hear a child speaking, a child much younger than a sixteen- or seventeen-year old. Nazario spares us no detail of his physical torment, describing his beating from assailants with a staccato series of terse, mostly one-syllable verbs: “They slam him facedown. All six surround him. Take off everything, one says. Another swings a wooden club. It cracks into the back of Enrique’s head. Hurry, somebody demands. The club smacks his face.”10

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While purporting to expose the evils of a world in which women must choose between remaining with their children in crushing poverty and leaving the children behind in order to send them material assistance from another country, the voice of the vulnerable child accuses women who migrate of making the wrong decision, as if there were one choice that is clearly superior to the other. As she details the hazards of migration, and uses them to entertain the reader, Nazario never suggests systemic changes that might make the journey safer or make migration unnecessary. Though she briefly notes how difficult it is for women with limited skills and education to secure a living wage in Honduras, she nevertheless casts migrant mothers as pitiful victim-heroines who make a tragic mistake in placing economic opportunity over family unity. The child’s voice enunciates a false binary—family unity versus material security—and a false hierarchy—love trumps money—that recycles simplistic fantasies of poor-but-happy fictional families in a nonfictional narrative. Nazario seems to aim for traditional U.S. journalism’s elusive blend of supposedly apolitical fairness and objectivity, which as Susan D. Moeller notes, reframes intensely political debates about children as apolitical and “purely moral.”11 Nazario positions herself as both a director of Enrique’s performing body and a narrator of her own show of horrors. This doubling offers readers an alternative identification, not with Enrique’s mother but with a middle-class professional woman who chooses to suffer in imitation of her protagonist. To provide a “true” story, in 2000 Nazario spent six months retracing Enrique’s steps, from Honduras to the Mexican border with the United States, traveling as he did, on buses and on top of freight trains. She thus created for herself the sort of simulated, immersive, performative environment that Scott Magelssen calls “simming,” with all the opportunities that such projects offer for walking in the Other’s shoes, yet also potentially trivializing their suffering.12 In 2003, Nazario retraced Enrique’s steps yet again. She describes her discomfort in the emotionally fraught language of melodrama: “For months, as I traveled in Enrique’s footsteps, I lived with the near-constant danger of being beaten, robbed, or raped.”13 Nazario is always close to danger, threatened by disaster, but thanks to an impressive array of safeguards that include cell phones, motels, credit cards, a letter of safe-conduct from the Mexican president, and special protection from police armed with shotguns and AK-47s, she can experience, like her readers, a rush of adrenalin while shielded from the actual dangers Enrique faced. The moral she derives from

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the experience reaffirms American exceptionalism: “The migrants that I spent time with also gave me an invaluable gift. They reminded me of the value of what I have. They taught me that people are willing to die in their quest to obtain it.”14 Though she reveals that she got the idea for the articles from her house cleaner, a woman who hadn’t seen her four children in Guatemala for twelve years, she never goes into any depth on the relationship between the privilege of U.S. consumers and the suffering of Central Americans. Toward the end of the book, Nazario does briefly note the lack of jobs for women in Honduras that pay a living wage and mentions that “many immigration experts have concluded that the only effective strategy for change is to bolster the economies of immigrant-sending countries.”15 She writes that some Americans: …believe that the wave of immigrants from Latin America is blowback, of sorts, for U.S. policies. In recent decades, the United States has supported, and sometimes even helped install, repressive regimes in Latin America. These regimes, they note, propped up economic elites who resisted reforms and perpetuated unequal political and economic systems. This fueled poverty, civil wars, and the resulting economic crisis that is now pushing so many to migrate to the United States.16

Rather than state whether she agrees with those Americans, however, in even-handed reporter mode, Nazario goes on to detail all the usual arguments that denigrate the undocumented, including accusations that they use government services without paying taxes and depress wages for working-class U.S.-born workers. Nazario expresses her own point of view only when she describes the horrors of individual suffering and condemns the decision to migrate. By the time Enrique completes his journey, his suffering has acquired a redemptive function, as if because he has experienced extreme physical and psychological pain, he has earned the reunion with his mother. Nazario suggests as much when she begins the reunion scene in the same sentence as she summarizes his ordeal: “At 10 am, after more than 12,000 miles, 122 days, and seven futile attempts to get to his mother, Enrique, eleven years older than when she left him behind, bounds from the backseat of the car and up five faded redwood steps, and swings open the white door of the mobile home.”17 Yet the hug and kiss between mother and

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son do not foreshadow a redemptive happy ending. The narrative cannot end here because such a conclusion would undermine Nazario’s central argument: no matter how terrible economic conditions are for Central American mothers, they should stay in their home countries together with their children. The chapter instead concludes with an acknowledgment that Enrique’s mind and body are not at peace. He is angry with his mother for having left him: they often argue; he drinks too much and even begins using illegal drugs. To Nazario, this turn of events constitutes evidence that Enrique’s mother made the wrong decision in leaving him and his sister behind to provide for their material needs: His mother’s actions, though well-intentioned, block his redemption and potentially deny readers a melodramatic happy ending. The narrative nevertheless delivers that ending in the last third of the three-hundred page book, with a shift in focus to the next generation: Enrique’s sister and his girlfriend, who have given birth to a son and a daughter respectively. Whether to remain in Honduras with their children or repeat the cycle of separation is presented as individual decisions that the young women must make. Nazario lectures readers: Latina migrants ultimately pay a steep price for coming to the United States. They lose their children’s love. Reunited, they end up in conflicted homes. Too often, the boys seek out gangs to try to find the love they thought they would find with their mothers. Too often, the girls get pregnant and form their own families. In many ways, these separations are devastating Latino families. People are losing what they value most.18

A stream of sources, from school psychologists to migration officials, supports the contention that Latin American mothers should remain in their home countries, no matter how dire their economic circumstances. An official with the International Organization for Migration, Norberto Girón, is typical of those Nazario cites: “We are seeing a disintegration of the family. Keeping the family together – even if they are poor – is more important than leaving and improving their economic conditions.”19 The book’s ending confirms the Manichean dichotomy between the virtuous, who stay in their home countries, and the misguided, who migrate, lured down the path of evil to drugs and loveless families. Enrique’s girlfriend back in Honduras repeats the cycle of family separation by leaving their daughter Jasmín behind to join him in the United

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States; his sister, however, makes the decision that Nazario implicitly ratifies as correct, whereupon the book can conclude with a melodramatic happy ending. In the final scene, Enrique’s sister Belky appears as a guest on a popular Spanish-language television show taped in Miami and broadcast around the United States and Latin America, Don Francisco Presenta. In a segment apparently suggested by Nazario, Don Francisco sponsors a guest appearance from Belky, bringing her from Honduras to Miami for a surprise reunion that allows Enrique’s mother Lourdes to see her daughter in the flesh for the first time in seventeen years: “Lourdes’ face becomes a river of tears. Her eyes go vacant. She is in shock.”20 And she nearly faints. Belky herself testifies to ratify the opinion that has already been hammered home through the voices of the supposed experts. Though she lives in a house paid for by her mother’s remittances, Belky laments: “‘But it never fills the void I have felt for so long.’ Her hand taps her heart. ‘Not even now that I have my baby. The love of a mother is something you cannot replace with anything else.’”21 The many melodramatic elements in this scene constitute what Brooks calls the “aesthetics of astonishment:” surprise, coincidence, heightened emotion, family reunion, and recognition of virtue.22 The women’s stylized gestures of emotion—the hand to the heart, the swoon—come from the nineteenth-century stage. Belky is staged as the virtuous heroine for returning to her impoverished country; her mother is cast as misguided victim for having left to finance her daughter’s education and the construction of her home. The warmth of family love triumphs over the coldness of mere material benefits such as food and shelter. Moreover, the interplay of “too late” and “just-in-time” typical of melodrama also heightens the emotion, since it is “too late” for Enrique, Belky, and their mother, but “just-in-time” for Belky and her infant son. What this staging ignores is that her mother’s remittances make it possible for Belky to remain with her son in Honduras and at the same time enjoy nourishing food and adequate shelter. When Belky speaks, her individual voice functions like a ventriloquist’s dummy for the voice of the narrative, a voice that romanticizes the mother–child bond as pure affect that can somehow magically trump all material needs, a voice that reduces the political to the personal and does not so much blame the victim as create two victims—the supposedly abandoned child and his or her hapless parent.

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Enrique ’s Journey on Screen Enrique’s Journey has inspired adaptations to ballet, theater, and documentary film. The most successful and popular of these works is Which Way Home, a documentary film directed by Rebecca Cammisa and produced by HBO that loosely adapts the book, focusing not on Enrique but on two other boys who set off from Honduras to the United States.23 Nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary feature of 2009, the film won almost universally positive reviews. Which Way Home exemplifies how the logic of Enrique’s Journey can inspire a chain of thought in which the suffering of children counts for more than the suffering of their parents. Which Way Home is even tougher than Enrique’s Journey on the parents: if in the journalistic narrative Lourdes and other mothers seem tragically misguided while the fathers are mostly absent, in the documentary film both mothers and fathers of unaccompanied minors are ignorant at best and malicious at worst. An astute scholar of migration, Susan Bibler Coutin, nevertheless forgives the absence of historical and political context in the film: “perhaps that is as it should be. The film’s narrative is that of children, who may not fully know this context, even as they live it.”24 We interpret the voice of the child in the film, however, not as a transparent reality but as the construction of its adult filmmakers. The lack of context not only conceals the constructed quality of the child’s voice it also makes it too easy for U.S. spectators to divorce the phenomenon of migration from the long history of destructive U.S. political and economic intervention in the region. While many college students who see the film in our classes, whether in sociology or in theater, are moved by the scenes of suffering children, some also express self-righteous indignation: “What are those mothers thinking?” The film follows parts of the journeys of more than ten minors, focusing most intensely on the through-line adventures of charismatic, gap-toothed 14-year-old Kevin, who has convinced his 13-year-old buddy Fito to leave their Honduran village and embark on a road trip that they hope will somehow end in New York City. Viewers follow Kevin and his sidekick from a train yard near the border with Guatemala, along their ride atop the trains, to a detention center in Houston, and back to Honduras after his deportation, where after a short stay, he and Fito set off for the United States yet again. The spectator learns from Kevin that his stepfather does not want him around, a fact that the stepfather himself later corroborates on camera; Fito confesses that his mother left him with

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his grandmother when he was three. In short, both boys’ parents are depicted as neglectful and abusive, or absent, falling on the most negative end of the range of parents in the film. Other parents are more repentant: they weep, pray, lament that they would never have let their children go if they knew they would end up injured or dead. Even when the children leave without the parents’ knowledge or consent, the parent is implicated for having put the idea of migration in the child’s head in the first place. A steady stream of intertitles informs us of “adult” facts and figures that neither the parents nor the children know. In combination with the melancholy soundtrack, the intertitles consistently undermine the reliability of the young narrators, underscoring their ignorance. What the children can most reliably address, the film suggests, is their subjective and emotional experience: their poverty; their suffering; their unfulfilled longing for loving, competent parents; their pain from the beatings they endure from assailants. Set firmly in melodrama’s tradition of equating suffering with virtue, the film invites the spectator to assign moral responsibility. Who is to blame for this situation? Who robbed these children of their right to a decent childhood, with material security, emotional warmth, and a good education? Melodramatic suspense comes both from the obvious question: Will they make it to the United States? And also from the less obvious question: Who is the villain? The interviews, intertitles, and voice-overs convey the same implicit message from many different angles: Good mothers keep their children home! The voice of authority, the only English speaker in the entire film, is a uniformed male border patrol officer, Andrew Adasme, who details the horrors that befall children who are abandoned or assaulted by their guides as a sequence of horrific still images of children and adults, presumably corpses, though we don’t know for sure, flash by as if to underscore the warning: Here is a six-year-old kid, doesn’t know anything about life. His parents make that decision to bring him to the United States, place him in the hands of some person they don’t even know, some person that will get drunk, use drugs, smuggles dope, and that’s the person that they give their kid to. They shouldn’t be surprised if their kid never makes it.

In one of its final moments, the film takes us to meet individual parents such as those Adasme scolds. After his deportation from Houston, Kevin returns to his impoverished village of Dulce Nombre in Honduras. His

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mother takes the trouble to meet his bus at a larger town and accompany him home. Yet after she and Kevin are back in the house, the camera reveals that as he tries to show her the homework he did at the shelter, her attention turns to kitchen chores and she ignores him. Meanwhile, his stepfather openly declares: “I thanked God when he went to the United States.” While it seems obvious that Kevin’s stepfather is a less-than-ideal parent, and that his mother is caring but distracted by other obligations, what does putting U.S. spectators in the position to judge their parenting skills accomplish? Kevin’s parents, like the other parents the film scrutinizes, are made to seem individually responsible for their own poverty and for the migration trends that result from it. Following Enrique’s Journey, the documentary suggests that ideal family love and unity can somehow surmount global economic inequalities; the parents fail to offer such ideal love. Both the narrative and the film train an imperial gaze on poorer Others to the south and finds them lacking in the wherewithal required to raise children properly; they fail the test of Western civilization that has been posed in a myriad of forms since Jean-Jacques Rousseau articulated it in Emile: Or, On Education, the test of proper child-rearing. Which Way Home also follows the unfortunate logic of Kindertransport in 1930s Europe and of Operation Peter Pan in 1960s Cuba: we must save the children, or some of the children, but their parents are dispensable. In the political economy of suffering, the suffering of a lucky few individual children can purchase their rescue; the suffering of their parents, however, sometimes has no currency. Kevin was granted political asylum in the United States and went into U.S. foster care at the age of 17.25 By encouraging us to pity the children and to compensate—in our fantasies or in real life—for supposedly absent, uncaring, or incompetent parents, the voice of the child in Which Way Home encourages adult spectators in the United States to embrace the children while continuing to exclude their parents from those who, to borrow Hannah Arendt’s phrase, enjoy “the right to have rights.”26 Moreover, while it attempts to foster the children’s agency, the film instead constrains it by encouraging individual rescue efforts, an inadequate solution to the inequalities exacerbated and perpetuated by neoliberal states invested in a global system of exploitation. At the same time, those with legal residency in the United States are allowed to feel smug. As Sara Bernstein, HBO’s vice president of documentary programming and supervising producer of Which Way Home told the Los Angeles Times: “What’s so powerful about the film is that it really reminds you of what a great country we

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live in and that people are desperate to come here.”27 That sentiment, which echoes Sonia Nazario’s pride in “the value of what I have,” seems symptomatic of a “circular look” in which another culture is used as a mirror, the better to admire oneself.28

Under the Same Moon [La misma luna]: We’re Here but We’re There By contrast to the rave reviews garnered by Enrique’s Journey and Which Way Home, Under the Same Moon’s cute little Carlitos (Adrián Alonso) and his long-suffering beautiful mother Rosario (Kate del Castillo) seemed to get on the nerves of many reviewers and scholars. Women’s Studies scholar Heather Hewitt, for example, writes: “The film silences the anxiety of truly unsettling scenes (such as Rosario’s border crossing) with easily identified and somewhat clichéd characters, light comedy, and a happy ending. The result, a one-dimensional presentation of Rosario, reinscribes gendered ideologies of the self-effacing and martyred mother. We are left with the near-perfect idealization of motherhood that young children seem to possess.” Hewitt concludes that “while the film achieves a great deal in telling the story of a transnational mother, it ultimately provides a feel good fairy-tale ending that shies away from more disturbing or complex realities.”29 Debra A. Castillo criticizes Moon as “imperialist nostalgia that encourages us to imagine the world in the form of a happy family waiting for a fictional Carlitos” and praises Nazario’s book for “adding necessary nuance to this idealized melodramatic image.”30 On the contrary, Moon, which actually came out after Enrique’s Journey and before the documentary film inspired by the book, provides an admittedly fantastical and heteronormative, yet nevertheless valuable corrective to representations of Latin American mothers as misguided (Enrique’s Journey) or neglectful (Which Way Home). Admittedly, as critics have noted, Moon’s archetypal characters are undoubtedly classical melodramatic exaggerations of the preternaturally wise young boy, the saintly mother, and the tragi-comic figure who sacrifices himself at the last moment to win redemption for his sins (played brilliantly by comic actor Eugenio Derbez). Yet in the context of a long tradition of representations of Latin American migrants as tragic victims, a melodramatic comedy in which a plucky little Mexican boy and his endlessly self-sacrificing mother defy overwhelming odds to end up together in Los Angeles, a Los Angeles so Mexican that it seems to transcend the nation-state, is actually radical in

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its optimism.31 Suffering, as in the vast majority of cultural production about migrants, is still the currency that must be traded for belonging, but in this film it pays off for both the child and his parent.32 The film also paid off at the box office. Moon’s Guadalajara-born director Patricia Riggen began Moon as an independent project, producing it herself on a $1.7 million budget. Fox Searchlight later picked it up and gave it much broader distribution than it might have otherwise enjoyed. According to IMDb, total box office returns as of July 2008 totaled about $12.6 million. Rather than purport to put spectators in the skin of the vulnerable child, or of his adult imitators, Moon keeps the spectator mostly on the outside of the travails suffered by mother and child. The camera work and editing (cinematography by Checco Varese) takes us back and forth between Los Angeles and Mexico in ways that shrink the distance between the two locales and visually simulate the experience of transnationality. For instance, in the opening sequence, from a close-up of Rosario’s sleepy face responding to the beeping of a morning alarm clock with “Are you up yet?” the film cuts to Carlitos’s little hand silencing his alarm clock, which makes the very same beeping noise, over the same melancholy piano soundtrack. The spectator is thus at first led to assume that mother and son are sharing the same room. Only later does it become clear that Rosario speaks not to her son but to a roommate with whom she shares a Los Angeles garage; Carlitos actually wakes up in his bedroom in an unidentified small town in Mexico. Rosario looks at herself in a mirror; Carlitos glimpses his reflection in the outdoor tub of water from which he scoops water for a cold bath. Rosario’s hands put a pot of milk on the stove; the hands that drop the chocolate in what at first appears to be the same pot, in a lapse dissolve, morph into the little hands of Carlitos, making morning hot chocolate for his grandmother in a different pot back in Mexico. In a climactic sentimental moment far later in the film, one of the few in which spectators are encouraged to see the world as if we actually were Carlitos, the boy seems to share the same bed with his mother: their faces side-to-side in close-up silhouette, she reaches out to caress his face as he weeps. An abrupt cut reveals an empty bed where Rosario’s face had been; her presence was a figment of Carlitos’s (and our) imagination. In a heavy-handed fashion that invokes the tradition of Mexican melodrama mothers that peaked in the 1930s– 1950s, spectators are encouraged to admire rather than judge her. The depiction of the traditional idealized Mexican mother in transnational

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mode leads spectators to wonder at the emotional transcendence, as well as the material limits, of transnational mothering. Unlike the suffering of children in Enrique’s Journey and Which Way Home, which has value only as a passive marker of how much they deserve rescue, the suffering of Carlitos is always depicted as a valuable commodity that can be exchanged for agency. In Moon, the juxtapositions between Carlitos behaving like a child at certain moments while generally functioning on a surprisingly adult level are presented not as evidence of villainous parents forcing a cruel precociousness but as wondrous, awe-inspiring signs of the boy’s unusual maturity. At the age of nine, Carlitos works a part-time job, saves more than a thousand dollars, pays for his own coyotes, secures a job for himself and his adult road buddy Enrique, even grabs the check from his long-absent biological father and treats him to lunch, bringing tears to his father’s eyes. The weeping father (Ernesto D’Alessio) seems weak but not malicious. Even when Carlitos behaves more like a typical child, giving his adult sidekick Enrique (Derbez) his favorite toy to thank him for accompanying him to Los Angeles, the childlike generosity foreshadows the reciprocal but more adult sacrifice from Enrique that keeps Carlitos out of the clutches of the cops. Not only has Carlitos suffered enough, and inspired others to suffer, to merit admission into the United States, he exhibits all the personal character traits that would make him an ideal U.S. citizen: he is clean, hard-working, sensitive, devout, generous to his friend, devoted to his mother and grandmother, a model of family values and entrepreneurial spirit that makes his small body the perfect vehicle for model U.S. Latinx citizenship in a neoliberal economy. By contrast to the mothers who suffer yet nevertheless lose their children’s love in Enrique’s Journey, the suffering of Carlitos’ mother, Rosario, is ultimately redemptive. Its primary commodity value, to purchase Carlitos’ respect and admiration, becomes clear when Carlitos realizes that all her sacrifices have been for his well-being. Far from losing the love of her son, Rosario’s decision to migrate ultimately wins greater love from him. Her character, as scholars have noted, is firmly rooted in the Mexican cinematic tradition of melodrama mothers who are slavishly devoted to their children, a tradition that we explored in Chapter Four.33 Since it has been four years since he has seen Rosario, Carlitos begins to doubt his mother’s love, but by the end of the film, following melodrama’s pattern of revealing the innocence of the virtuous character to all, including the other characters and the spectators, there can be no doubt of her devotion to her son. In virginal mode, she has even renounced her

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handsome security-guard suitor, Paco, in order to focus wholeheartedly on her son. While she herself begins to doubt the wisdom of her decision to leave Mexico, as if to underscore that in fact she was correct in her decision to migrate, in the end mother and son are reunited, not in Mexico, but in Mexican Los Angeles, a city depicted as an extension of Mexico. Inverting the power dynamics of Which Way Home, in which the only voice of sanity is the fatherly U.S. border patrol officer, the rescuer-figures in Moon are all Mexicans: the kindly rooming house owner (in a cameo appearance by the renowned María Rojo), who literally wrenches Carlitos from the clutches of the evil Mexican, who has in turn bought him from an Anglo junkie in the throes of withdrawal; the adult male reluctant sidekick on the road (Derbez, as mentioned above), who ultimately lets himself be arrested to allow Carlitos to escape from the police; and the band Los Tigres del Norte, who in a delightfully surreal moment roll up in their van to offer Carlitos and Enrique a ride to Tucson. Even the hardened coyote businesswoman (played by another renowned actor, Carmen Salinas) uses dulcet tones when she speaks to Carlitos, refuses to expose him to the danger of the crossing, and telephones his mother to warn her of his disappearance from his home town. By contrast, the Anglo figures in Ligiah Villalobos’s screenplay, besides the junkie, are exploitative employers, violent immigration officials who beat migrant workers with nightsticks, and fear-inspiring cops in bit parts. Like Carlitos, the Mexican characters rather improbably all speak perfect English and would make model U.S. citizens (except for Carlitos’s deadbeat dad). As in all stage and screen melodrama, music plays an important part in triggering spectators’ affective response. Love is the big emotion in Moon, the love between mother and child, the love between the boy and his father-substitute, even the biological father’s imperfect love for his son. Love of family, the film contends, is the motivating and mitigating factor in undocumented migration. Belted out to the accompaniment of a bouncy guitar and accordion in two-step rhythm, the refrain of the song Los Tigres perform in the moving van and dedicate to Carlitos drives home that sentimental moral: For love my chest could take a bullet on the fly, For love I will risk the crossing on the sly…

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Los Tigres’ iconic status as a band that wholeheartedly laments yet also celebrates the trials and tribulations of the Mexican migrant experience lends a sense of universality to Carlitos’ heroism and helps connect the fictional character to actual migrant children.34 The last scenes of Moon demonstrate just how much some parts of Los Angeles function like extensions of Mexico, or like hybrid territories between Mexico and the United States, which may bring to mind for some spectators that a large portion of the United States was in fact once part of Mexico. As Enrique and Carlitos scour East Los Angeles for the shopping plaza with the pay phone from which Rosario makes her regular Sunday phone calls to her son, we see Mexican murals splashed on urban walls, a “Pizza Loca” pizzeria, and a man eating the fried wheat dough known as “fritangas.” When Carlitos finally arrives at the correct plaza, the camera pans from a laundromat with a sign in front advertising “lavandería” to a Domino’s pizza to Carlitos’s awestruck face and back to a Mexican-inspired mural on the wall of the party store where Rosario promised to buy Carlitos supplies for the many birthday “fiestas” she would throw for him in years to come. As if through Carlitos’s eyes, we then see the pay phone, and Rosario herself standing next to it, looking for her son. One final boundary remains between them: a busy road full of high-speed traffic. First from a distance, then in a series of increasingly close-range close-ups, we see her weeping face from his perspective; we see his weeping face from her perspective. The boundary between Mexico and the United States is thus symbolically reduced to a single street. Then the red “don’t walk” hand changes into the white “walk” figure. As if by magic, in the blink of a light, the divisions between the two countries are wiped away. Castillo surmises that the walk sign implies that Rosario and Carlitos will form a happy heteronormative family on the U.S. sign of the border together with Rosario’s would-be boyfriend, who is conveniently a U.S. citizen. In one early scene, Rosario carries a book that indicates that she is studying for a U.S. citizenship examination. While the film does celebrate heteronormativity and the attainment of U.S. citizenship, the walk sign also functions as a symbol of affective and moral permission to cross nation-state boundaries, as the return to the Los Tigres song during the roll of the credits underscores: “And for love I will cross the border without fear.” Scholars today disagree about whether compassion, as produced and fueled by melodrama, may serve politically progressive ends. On the one hand, theorists of affect such as Lauren Berlant and Marjorie Garber

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stress that compassion can generate condescension from those who do not suffer as they contemplate distant others who do.35 Other theorists, most prominently film scholar Podalsky, challenge that view of compassion and of melodrama’s social function. Building on anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s ideas of global cultural flows, Podalsky argues that film melodramas can depict migrant suffering so as to form “transnational affective communities” that encourage viewers to feel in new ways, and to feel for each other across national borders. Through her analysis of the fictional film Babel (dir. Alejandro González Iñárruti, 2006) and the documentary Señorita extraviada (dir. Lourdes Portillo, 2001), Podalsky demonstrates that the strategic deployment of Mexican melodramatic cultural forms such as the telenovela and the nota roja [sensationalist press] can indeed challenge inequalities created by globalization without necessarily reinforcing established power relationships.36 Moon similarly appeals to love and suffering as natural, universal experiences that should help dissolve national borders. The film’s title reminds us that we, as human beings on Earth, all live under the same moon. The loveconquers-all moral, with the reduction of the political to the personal, affective experience, in some ways parallels Nazario’s stance on love in Enrique’s Journey: The argument is simply reversed from “because love conquers all you should not migrate” to “because love conquers all you cannot refrain from migrating.” Yet Moon does not advocate for any one, single correct way to demonstrate motherly love, nor does it reinforce the conservative political argument that migrants should just stay home, and keep their children with them, regardless of structural economic or political circumstances that make that choice unlikely or impossible. The film’s very old-fashioned genre of maternal melodrama thus subversively turns the tables on those who would question the motives of migrant mothers who leave their children behind. The film’s political efficacy is still limited, however, by its depiction of suffering as a redemptive experience for the undocumented, as a necessary step for them in the progress toward inclusion and belonging in the United States. Their suffering, rather than their humanity alone, ultimately entitles them to belonging and respect. Thus, despite its ingenious use of comedy to create a transnational affective community, the film does not go so far as to question the logic of the political economy of suffering.

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Our Dad Is in Atlantis [Papá está en la Atlántida] Inspired by a newspaper article about a boy who died during an attempt to smuggle him across the Arizona desert, Javier Malpica’s 2005 play Our Dad Is in Atlantis [Papá está en la Atlántida] is nevertheless laced with humor. Malpica (b. 1965 in Mexico City) is well-known as a prolific writer of stories for children. Though Malpica’s protagonists, two brothers who set out to find their migrant father, come to a more ominous fate than the charming Carlitos, they are equally plucky and also seem drawn more from the sentimental tradition of Mexican popular film than from the more experimental lineage of Mexican theater. On Mexican stages, children have generally been represented less frequently and with more complexity than in film. Sometimes they are supernatural, like the boy who offers in vain to free an imprisoned man in Elena Garro’s El rey mago (1958) or the ethereal boy spirit who can be seen only by the female characters in Estela Leñero’s Las máquinas de coser (1989). These children are mysterious, and impart lessons, yet they operate in shadesof-gray universes that do not follow melodramatic conventions. Perhaps the most well-known child protagonists in modern Mexican theater are realistic characters embedded in a play that transcends realism: the poor school children playing hooky in Emilio Carballido’s Yo también hablo de la rosa (I Too Speak of the Rose, 1965). Twelve-year-old Toña and her 14-year-old pal, Polo, skip school one day and derail a freight train, just for the heck of it. They are not particularly good; they are not especially evil. They are just bored. The more various experts pontificate on the meaning of the children’s actions, the more hollow the explanations ring, the less the characters “mean” anything, and the more it becomes impossible to extract a tidy moral lesson from the play. As spectators, we are not encouraged to empathize or to feel outraged; at most, we might be prompted to acknowledge the inadequacy of all our ways of attempting to understand the world: sociological, psychological, mystical, and so forth, as represented by the various characters who comment on the central event. The children are in a sense orphan-martyrs: though no one is hurt in the derailment, they are harshly punished by institutionalization in reformatories where they are likely to remain incarcerated for a long time. Yet their universe is more absurd than sentimental. By contrast, the eight- and eleven-year-old boy protagonists in Atlántida, identified in the Spanish-language version only by the symbols , seem to stand for Everyboy, or every Mexican boy left by his migrant

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parents in the care of his grandparents. The parents are not depicted as villains: the mother has died of an unspecified illness; the father says he is leaving for just a month yet fails to return. The younger brother finds a letter from his father to his grandmother and misunderstands the postmark “Atlanta,” as in Georgia, as “Atlantis,” as in the lost city. Since the letter includes neither a return address nor any other contact information, the boy’s allusion to a lost city resonates with the loss of the father and the unresolved mystery of what might have happened to him in a foreign land as enigmatic to a child as Atlantis is to adults.37 As in Moon, the grandmother dies, leaving the boys in the clutches of an exploitative uncle, the offstage villain of the play: he takes the boys out of school to use them as unpaid workers in his store. This leads the boys to run away to try to find their father in the United States. In ten episodic scenes, each of which begins “Stuff about…” the plot firmly moves the brothers’ situation along from bad to worse, until the finale in “Stuff about the Desert.” Lost, alone at night without food or water in what seems to be the Arizona desert, the younger brother either falls asleep, loses consciousness, or dies; the older brother tries in vain to rouse him. Their destiny is left an unanswered question. While the dialogue implies a tragic conclusion, and the finale could easily be staged as the death of one or both brothers, since the text includes no stage directions, the ending could also be staged to indicate that one or both boys survive, or that their fate is an open question. The directors of the two productions analyzed here took divergent approaches: one left open the possibility that the boys live; the other clearly indicated that they die. Our analysis of the text and comparison of the two productions demonstrates how the suffering of child characters in a work of dramatic literature can accrue different meanings and values, not only depending on how the work is staged by individual directors but also depending on the national perspective from which it is staged. In the United States, the play was staged and perceived primarily as a critique of U.S. immigration laws: the representation of the child characters’ undeserved suffering underscored a need for greater tolerance of migrants and protested nation-state policies and laws that criminalize them. In Mexico, the production that enjoyed the longest run and won the greatest critical acclaim staged the work as a lament for the disintegration of the Mexican family. The depiction of suffering called for a greater appreciation for and protection of family unity, what historian Thomas W. Laqueur, in speaking of antislavery narrative calls “family as the locus of sentiment.”38 And yet, like abolitionist drama in the nineteenth century, Atlantis highlights the

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pain of one family’s separation in order to condemn a broader political injustice, in this case the exploitation of migrant labor—one of the closest conditions to slavery in our contemporary world. Atlantis attained a level of transnational success enjoyed by few contemporary works of Mexican theater. In 2005 it received Mexico’s national prize for playwrights. Between 2006 and 2013, it quickly developed a momentum that led to staged readings and full productions across the United States and Mexico. In 2006, the work was chosen for English translation (Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas) and a staged reading by New York City’s LARK Play Development Center. In the southwest, Tucson’s Borderlands Theater staged a reading during the 2007 Festival Sin Fronteras. In 2008, LARK and Working Theater co-sponsored a full production at Queens Theatre in the Park as part of its “Immigrant Voices” project, directed by Debbie Saivetz. In the United States, Atlantis was produced primarily by regional theaters in areas with large Mexican immigrant populations, including the Chicago area, various California communities, and Tucson, Arizona, where Borderlands Theater gave it a full production in 2009 under the direction of Eva Zorrilla Tessler. It was also produced at the Phoenix Theatre in Indianapolis, directed by Bryan Fonseca and opened on May 8, 2008. That same year, Cortiña’s translation of the script was published in American Theatre Magazine, giving it national exposure and leading to further productions.39 After a showcase staged reading directed by Ann Filmer at Chicago’s Latino Theater Festival in 2010, it was fully staged by the same director at The 16th Street Theater, located in the Chicago suburb of Berwyn, which has a majority Mexican and Mexican-American population (Fig. 6.1). Subsequently, the English-language version was reprinted in the anthology The Goodman Theatre’s Festival Latino: Six Plays.40 In Mexico, during 2011–2012, Atlantis received 150 performances with the company El Rinoceronte Enamorado, under the direction of Jesús Coronado, who toured it around the state of San Luis Potosí, a region with a long tradition of sending migrant labor north, and also presented it to great acclaim in theaters around the country: Mexico City; Xalapa, Veracruz; Culiacán, Sinaloa; Mérida, Yucatán; Querétaro, Querétaro; Oaxaca, Oaxaca; and León, Guanajuato. Three other productions of Atlantis, in each of Mexico’s three largest cities, Mexico City (directed by Sandra Félix, and cast with young women in the roles of the boys, in 2009), Monterrey (directed by Alberto Ontiveros in 2010), and Guadalajara (directed by Daniela Casillas in 2013), all used young actors and staged the work for younger audiences.

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Fig. 6.1 Our Dad Is in Atlantis [Papá está en la Atlántida] by Javier Malpica. Remy Ortiz as Little Brother and Todd Garcia as Big Brother. The 16th Street Theater production, translated by Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas and directed by Ann Filmer, Chicago 2011 (Photo by Anthony Aicardi. Courtesy of The 16th Street Theater)

What accounts for Atlantis’s extraordinary popularity? With just two characters, minimal scenic design requirements, and a run-time of about seventy minutes, it can be uncomplicated and inexpensive to stage. The themes of migration and family separation under neoliberalism, moreover, are relevant to the lives of many Mexicans and U.S. citizens alike. According to Coronado, after almost every show audience members would come up to the actors and him to share their own or family members’ experiences with migration to the United States. During almost every performance, some spectators wept.41 Just as important as the play’s timely themes, we argue, are charming, sentimentally appealing child characters that Malpica created almost entirely through dialogue drenched in humor. Most importantly, the optimism exhibited by the characters—the offstage father who migrates in an attempt to support the boys from afar, the older boy who believes they stand a chance of finding their father, and the youngest who fantasizes wildly about the joys

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of life in the United States—exemplify not only migrant dreams but also the fantasies of a good life that are increasingly difficult for both migrants and nonmigrants alike to attain. Lauren Berlant defines cruel optimism as a relation in which “something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” Cruel optimism fuels expectations of what Berlant calls “conventional good life fantasies,” including “upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively durable intimacy,” all of which she notes have actually become impossible for many to realize since the advent of neoliberalism.42 …optimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or people risks striving; and, doubly it is cruel insofar as the very pleasures of being inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation, such that a person or a world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming.43

While the characters display cruel optimism about the rewards they plan to reap through migration, the play itself is perhaps even more radical in its optimism than Moon because it suggests that suffering doesn’t pay, that it has no redemptive value, and that it is not inflicted by parents on their children. Instead, both parents and children are depicted as buffeted by economic and political forces over which they have little or no control, a feeling with which even spectators unfamiliar with migrants or migrant issues might identify.

Humor in a Child’s Perspective Part of Atlantis’s sentimental appeal comes from how we experience the world of its functional orphans from the perspective of the two boys who we hear speak only to each other, forming a Charlie Brown-like universe in which adults are always out-of-view, their muffled voices distorted, offstage, and understood only through the children’s recounting. As in all the works we discuss in this chapter, the adult author creates a voice of the child in order to obliquely critique an adult world. In Atlantis, by contrast to the other melodramas we have considered, however, the plight of the children who do not entirely understand how the world

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functions is depicted with far more humor than anger, either at Mexican parents or at United States policy makers. With deceptively simple, childlike musings, like many child melodrama heroes, they demonstrate wisdom beyond their years as their dialogue alone, devoid of stage directions, indirectly touches on the themes of family disintegration, forced migration, exploitation of migrant labor, and the violence of both contemporary Mexico and the United States.44 With humor that softens the political critique, transnational migration is depicted as not worth the indignity of whatever small material benefit one might gain. The apparently gentle comedy covers a skewering thrust that chastises the relentless capitalism of the father’s host country: LITTLE BROTHER. But he’s going to call right? He has to call someday, doesn’t he? BIG BROTHER. He must be busy. In the United States, you have to constantly be working or they kick you out. Stop banging the chair with your fat feet. LITTLE BROTHER. Dad’s a hard worker isn’t he? BIG BROTHER. Of course he’s a hard worker. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have lasted over there. And obviously, he’s been there a long time. If he wasn’t a hard worker, they would have sent him back. That’s why he hasn’t called. That’s the reason. You hear me? That’s why.45

Atlántida may seem to adopt a conservative position similar to the stance upheld by the Mexican Catholic church and the State for much of the twentieth century, that emigrants were traitors to their country, or the stance that Nazario takes in Enrique’s Journey, that would-be migrants would be better parents if they just stayed home. Yet the play does not condemn the father as a traitor to his country or as an inept parent: it keeps the motives and the fate of the missing character unclear. The child’s rationalization of the father’s failure to telephone implicitly suggests an alternative explanation to adult spectators, that he has likely met with some tragic mishap. Still, the reference to the punishing labor routines demanded in the United States contains a kernel of truth. And the boy’s comic misunderstanding, that one can be expelled from the United States simply for not working hard enough, reinforces the adult spectators’ pleasure at being privy to the complexity of a situation that the child characters only partially grasp. As adults, we can enjoy both the child’s surprising insight and his inability to perceive what we can

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perceive. In the staged reading directed by Filmer that we attended at the Goodman Theatre’s Latino Festival, the unusually ethnically mixed, for Chicago, adult audience laughed long and hard at the Kids-Say-theDarndest-Things style of humor repeated in all ten scenes before the reversal of the tragic conclusion. The younger boy’s insistence on always looking at the sunny side of every situation exaggerates the cruelty of his optimism to absurd levels, giving the humor a bite. Berlant’s description of how people cling to fantasies that do them harm describes both the adult and child characters in Atlantis: the father hopes to provide for his children; the children hope for reunification with their father. Both sets of frustrated expectations intertwine in the dialogue below from scene five, “Stuff about Mom” [Cosas de Mamá]: LITTLE BROTHER. What about you? What are you going to do when we get to Atlanta? BIG BROTHER. They say people in that country don’t like foreigners. LITTLE BROTHER. Of course they do. Their biggest baseball stars are all from other countries. BIG BROTHER. Maybe that’s the case in baseball, but the people in that country don’t want foreigners working at any other jobs. Why do you think all the foreigners over there end up cleaning bathrooms or picking fruit? LITTLE BROTHER. I don’t think Dad is going to end up cleaning bathrooms.46

The amusing rejoinder about baseball stars softens the generalization about xenophobia that precedes it: since it comes from the mouth of a child, it can be absorbed by U.S. audiences as yet another misunderstanding with a kernel of truth. Rather than openly challenging U.S. spectators, the scene invites us to feel both superior to and protective of the child-speakers. And yet at the same time, we know that Dad may very well be cleaning bathrooms, and that to stubbornly imagine otherwise is part of a cruel optimism, a self-undermining trust in a global system of labor exploitation that does not deserve trust. The child characters trust, because they are supposedly innocent. But the adult spectators who know better are invited to mutually acknowledge through their communal laughter that they long ago learned better than to trust.

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No Mom and no Rescue One heart-tugging trope from Les Misérables and The Two Orphans, the tragic death of a mother who deeply cares for the child she leaves behind, is recycled in the construction and deconstruction of the family unit in Atlantis. The death of the boys’ mother, of an unspecified illness, triggers the father’s decision to migrate, thus leading to the dissolution of the family. “If Mom were here, Dad would never have gone to another country to clean bathrooms,” bemoans the older brother, called “Big Brother” in the English translation. BIG BROTHER. Mom would never have allowed the family to separate. LITTLE BROTHER. When she died I cried for a week. BIG BROTHER. If Mom hadn’t died, Dad could have kept working as a teacher.47

The mother, following traditional gender roles, keeps the home fires burning. And yet it is implied that the father could not earn enough as a teacher to support his children on his salary alone. The mother character is not drawn fully enough to answer questions that come to mind: Perhaps the mother also worked outside the home? Or she provided free child care while the father worked? The facts the children reveal about her through their dialogue relates only a few telling details: in the boys view their parents were a great team; every year on her birthday the father would give her a stuffed animal; she read fairy tales to the boys; and she baked a good lime pie that the little brother says he misses. The offstage mother is thus sketched out as a caring, responsible parent, and traditional homemaker whose husband coddles her. We learn even less about the father, who is referred to only as “Dad” [Papá], other than that he was a teacher and that he migrated to the United States, making him even more of a cipher than the mother and reinforcing his function as an allegorical figure for all Mexican fathers who migrate. His letter to the grandmother says to tell the boys he loves them, again indicating that he is a loving parent. No explanation is offered for why he ceases to communicate. By contrast to these sympathetic parent-characters from the offstage past, the villains in an offstage present torment the children—first the scary-strict grandmother, then the downright abusive aunt and uncle. Malpica’s functional orphans, however, differ in one crucial respect from many nineteenth-century orphan tales: there is no eventual rescue

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for them within the world of the work itself. In d’Ennery’s play, as in many of Hugo’s and Dickens’s novels, orphans often end up in the hands of caring and wealthy long-lost relatives or other benefactors. Malpica’s orphans, by contrast, remain alone and unprotected at the conclusion of the work. Since, unlike the suffering of children in Enrique’s Journey and Under the Same Moon, the suffering of Atlantis’s child-victims fails to redeem them within the work itself, their suffering demands additional sympathy and outrage from spectators. The play implicitly encourages spectators to translate their affective energies into action of some sort, whether to simply reflect upon the injustice of the children’s fate or to actually move to change the circumstances that create real-life child orphan-martyrs. The undeserved violence suffered by both boys is part of what makes them not only functional orphans, but also contemporary child martyrs— children who risk death for their beliefs. Without explicitly articulating it, the characters’ actions indicate that they believe they have the right to cross a national border without authorization or documentation in hopes of reuniting with their missing father. Since they are aware, as the younger brother notes, that on the border some people shoot migrants as if they were animals, their willingness to risk death in pursuit of that goal creates their martyrdom. The text strongly suggests that if the younger boy does die, he is entitled to saintly redemption in the afterlife, if there is one. For unlike most nineteenth-century melodrama’s firmly Christian outlook, this twenty-first-century play raises the possibility that heaven does not exist. Big Brother tells Little Brother in the seventh scene, “Stuff about God and Heaven,” that “If Heaven existed, then mom would have tried to get in touch with us, you can be sure of that.”48 The younger brother insists, however, on his belief in a childlike version of a heaven in which there is a baseball stadium, they show movies all day, and the meals all consist of pastries and chocolate milkshakes. Though his faith flies in the face of obvious injustice in his world, the younger boy is yet another Little Eva, fervently devout and sure of justice in the next world. His faith never wavers, though he is bullied and beaten by other boys at his new school, while his grandmother regularly beats his older brother. After she dies and the boys go to live with their aunt and uncle, the older boy is beaten again by his cousin and the cousin’s friends. Though related with humor, the persistently increasing violence culminates in the final scene of martyrdom in the desert.

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Atlantis ’s final, tenth scene offers melodrama’s classic Manichean clash between innocence and injustice, powerlessness and predatory power, good and evil. In Malpica’s work as in Stowe’s before it, the figure of the dying child activates pity as a community-building affect.49 In Atlántida, however, that community is transnational and the (possible) death literally takes place on a border, the border between Mexico and the United States. The scene begins at night, in darkness both literal and metaphoric, as the explicit low-level violence that peppered the previous scenes has grown into life-threatening forces assaulting the brothers’ bodies: cold, exhaustion, hunger, and thirst. They have been walking a long time and have no idea where they are or how much further they have to go. The older brother mutters that he was stupid not to have brought a compass, a belated realization that highlights how unprepared the boys are to undertake a desert crossing. The younger brother wants to turn back. Suddenly he recalls that people who cross the desert may be mistaken for wolves or coyotes and shot. Typical of his character, the remark betrays innocent ignorance of the reality that some people know full well that they are shooting at other human beings, at undocumented migrants. The Atlantis brothers’ helplessness is tempered only by their demonstrations of love for each other and the love for their parent, which as in Under the Same Moon, motivates and justifies their sojourn. Big Brother shows kindness in trying to encourage Little Brother to talk about pleasant things in an imaginary future—the car he wants to design, his fantasies of Atlanta— and twice brings up his own fantasy of the expression of joy on his father’s face when they are all reunited. Much of the pathos in the scene comes from the fact that such a reunion seems impossible to the reader or spectator. Little Brother’s body gives out first and he apparently sinks into the sand. As the boys sit or lie on the ground, the younger brother brings up his vision of heaven again, fantasizing about the city of Atlanta with images—games in the park, pastries, and milkshakes—similar to those he used earlier, in the seventh scene, to describe heaven. The reprise of the younger boy’s earlier musings on the nature of heaven may suggest to some readers that the boy is dying, particularly since these are the last words he utters in the play. His older brother’s attempts to rouse him are met with silence, indicated in the text by ellipses. Like the graves of the early Christian martyrs, sites in which heaven and Earth were thought to join together, the desert may become a holy burial ground for the boys.50 Unlike the martyrs, however, if the boys die, their gravesites will

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most likely go unrecognized, adding to the melodramatic pathos: while we spectators may acknowledge their innocence and goodness, within the world of the play it remains unjustly unacknowledged by others. In this contemporary migrant melodrama, by contrast to many other melodramas, both classic and contemporary, it remains questionable whether the suffering of young bodies can in fact be traded for a better future, either on Earth or in heaven. There is a subtle satiric edge to this death scene then, an ironic wink from the playwright to the reader that mocks both the cruelty of the boys’ optimism and the cruelty of the border they traverse, a wink that theatrical directors staging the work can either choose to highlight or ignore.

The 16th Street Theater Production The year that Atlantis won Mexico’s highest playwriting honor, 2005, was also the year that the U.S. House of Representatives passed HR 4437, legislation sponsored by Republican Senator James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin that would have made undocumented presence in the United States a felony punishable by prison time. Moreover, persons who provide assistance to undocumented migrants would also have been subject to criminal penalties. In spring of 2006 hundreds of thousands of people in Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles, among other cities, turned out for marches protesting HR 4437, demanding positive immigration reform that would include amnesty for undocumented migrants. Meanwhile, in 2006, the Arizona state legislature passed the earliest versions of SB 1070, the “show me your papers law” that would eventually mandate that all non-U.S. citizens carry their “alien registration” documents with them at all times. Under the law, police are required to ask anyone suspected of undocumented status during a stop, arrest, or detention to produce proof of legal residency or face fines and other penalties. While the earliest versions of the legislation were vetoed by then Governor Janet Napolitano (who later became the head of Homeland Security), the legislation passed again and in 2010 was signed into law by Napolitano’s successor, Governor Jan Brewer. As Atlantis was staged around the United States and Mexico, proposals for immigration reform were endlessly debated in Congress without resolution, while SB 1070 was challenged by the federal government in federal courts all the way up to the Supreme Court, yet was for the most part upheld. Meanwhile, the number of unaccompanied minors traveling through Mexico to the United States continued to grow.

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When Ann Filmer directed Atlantis for The 16th Street Theater in 2011, she cast two adult Latinx actors in their twenties as the eleven- and eight-year-old boys. As often happens with cross-gender or cross-racial casting, bodies representing an Other can sometimes heighten certain elements of that Other’s construction. Todd Garcia and Remy Ortiz’s performances estranged the child characters, in the Brechtian sense of defamiliarizing them, allowing spectators to see and reflect upon the concepts of “child” and “childhood” as distinct from a child’s body. Coming from adult male bodies, the pre-adolescent sulking and eye-rolling of Big Brother (Garcia) and the thrashing of arms and legs of Little Brother in full tantrum (Ortiz) were de-naturalized and heightened for audiences to ponder. Another Brechtian touch heightened the distancing effect: at the beginning of almost every scene, the actors stood at the edge of a floating platform of a stage in the box theater and announced the scene title in unison before diving into the action. Production values that could easily have heightened the play’s melodramatic elements were instead subdued or twisted in unexpected directions. For instance, there was little melos , no sad strings in this sound design (Barry Bennett), only a sound effect that suggested the distorted wail of children cheering at a sports event, and, at the end, the harsh ticking of a metronome, as if to suggest that time was running out for the boys. The scenic design (Kurt Sharp) was extremely minimalistic and symbolic—a raked platform-stage in the shape of a cross, which imbued the boys’ world with a sense of isolated martyrdom, a couple of chairs, a little table to represent the counter in the uncle’s store—once again breaking with realism when the actors mimed certain actions rather than use props. The final scene, set in the desert, began in total darkness then brightened just to the point where the actors were visible and the stars shone on a dark backdrop of a night sky (lighting designer Mac Vaughy). The actors, though clearly embodying children in crisis, were not always entirely naturalistic in their gestures, movements, and facial expressions. At the end of the fifth scene, “Stuff about Mom,” Ortiz-as-younger brother put on a big fake grin verging on the grotesque as he popped up to play baseball in an attempt to dispel his sadness about his mother’s death. The grin functioned a bit like the famous silent scream in Mother Courage, distilling the essence of despair in a stylized expression. The final scene was staged ambiguously enough to maintain the possibility that one or both of the boys survived. When the dialogue turned to the topic of heaven, the actors adopted the same physical position in

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which they sat earlier in the play when discussing heaven: they sat backto-back on the ground, their knees up to their chests, arms around their knees, their feet flat on the floor. As Little Brother fell asleep, or died, his head dropped down onto his knees. The desperate tone in which Garcia asked “Did you fall asleep?” immediately before the blackout indicated that he was hoping against all hope that his brother was still alive. Though the actors’ still bodies positioned near the center of the cross-like shape of the stage evoked a crucifixion, their fate was not yet sealed when the lights went down. This staging withheld catharsis and opened a space for spectators to reflect on the sociopolitical changes that might be necessary to help real children avoid a fate similar to that of the boy protagonists. One reviewer of the 16th Street Theater’s production, Time Out’s John Beer, wrote: “The play’s as eloquent and brutal as Dickens or The Grapes of Wrath; it should be required viewing in Arizona schools.”51 Beer’s comment hits on the moral and emotional appeal of the work: It has lessons to impart, both for adults and for children. For some U.S. spectators, the lesson was related to the apparent triumph of sentiment over argument, of morality over politics, of sympathy for helpless children over laws that would further criminalize migrants. Within the U.S. migration debate, Atlantis’s two protagonists appeared as if from another realm, not the world of talking heads arguing the issues on television news-entertainment shows, but the world of fairytales and Victorian novels. Like Hansel and Gretel, the boys are alone and lost in a dangerous world. Reviewers often used phrases involving the word “heart” or “heartstrings” to describe their visceral affective response to productions of the work. “By the time we get to ‘Stuff about the gringos’ and ‘Stuff about the desert’ our hearts are in their hands” wrote Chuck Graham in a review for the Tucson Citizen of the Borderlands Theater production directed by Zorrilla Tessler.52 Because child characters can more easily than adults convey innocence and vulnerability, and because their perceived fragility provokes pity, they powerfully convey the moral lesson that migrants are not criminals and do not deserve to be treated as such. Though this lesson is in fact highly political, it was often depicted by reviewers as if it were an apolitical truism. Another reviewer of the Borderlands Theater production, for the Tucson Weekly, Dave Irwin, concluded: “In the end, the political and economic issues that have shaped the situation are forgotten, and the audience feels as helpless and desperate as these two boys are, lost in the uncaring desert.”53 Irwin’s mention of political and economic issues, however, undercuts his own claim that

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they were forgotten. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they were temporarily submerged in sentiment. As the work of Joseph Fichtelberg in Critical Fictions: Sentiment and the American Market 1780–1870 shows, sentimental imagery can be used both to make economic forces more manageable and to transform them from “vast impersonal economic events into intimate conspiracies – betrayals of moral trust.”54 The boys alone in the desert embody the consequences of global forces and political betrayals that result in unnecessary migrant deaths.

El Rinoceronte Enamorado: Boy Martyrs for Migration Filmer’s production tended to play against the pathos of Malpica’s text and allow for spectators to imagine themselves somehow intervening. By contrast, Jesús Coronado’s production for the The Rinoceronte Enamorado theater in San Luis Potosí wholeheartedly embraced the pathos and added substantial melos in the service of a production that left no doubt about the martyrdom of its young victim-heroes, firmly positioning the spectators as mourners. Coronado initially cast two mature actors as the brothers, Eduardo López (b. 1952) as the younger brother and the late Enrique Ballesté (1946–2015) as the older brother.55 Both shaved their heads for the roles, giving them the appearance of giant bald babies. Ballesté was later replaced with an even older actor, the late Ramón Barragán (1937–2014), whose white beard hinted at the fact that he was well into his 70s. The actors were well-known locally as musicians and composers of folk and protest music, as well as music for children, which added an element of ghosting to their performances.56 In fact, Coronado recalled that in rehearsals they toyed with the idea that the actors were literally ghosts who had aged after their deaths and returned to tell the story of their journey to find their father, though they made no attempt to explicitly convey such a directorial concept to their audiences. The production opened in fall 2009 and ran for about three years, through the 2011–2012 season, with a total of about 150 performances, not only in the city of San Luis Potosí and in Mexico City, but also in tours around rural areas of the state of San Luis Potosí, as well as tours to the capital cities of many other states, as detailed above.57 Under Coronado’s direction, the actors displayed the heightened emotions crucial to melodrama. As Big Brother, Barragán was not just angry, he was often enraged: he clenched his fists in frustration, stomped his feet and repeatedly threw a baseball at his younger brother, making him

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fall to the ground in pain. Barragán’s Big Brother was also a bit of a pompous curmudgeon, speaking in a hectoring, exaggeratedly didactic tone, and rolling his eyes in despair at his younger sibling’s ignorance. Yet after his outbursts he often seemed regretful. Caring gestures toward the younger brother were also incorporated into his performance, for instance when he put a jacket on his sibling as he slept during the bus ride to the U.S. border. As Little Brother, López careened between ecstatic happiness and overwhelming sadness, whirling around in a lively two-step dance of joy before he and his brother run away then bursting into tears in the desert in the next scene. On one level, such extremes of emotion could be read as realistic depictions of the psychological simplicity of children, yet even for children, they were close to what critics of melodrama have called “monopathic,” or representative of melodramatic characters’ narrow range of emotions and motives, as opposed to the more psychologically complex characters aimed at in realism. Such monopathic characters, Peter Brooks argued, building on Robert Bechtold Heilman, are often marshaled to support one side or another in conflicts between good and evil.58 In this production, however, both brothers seem duo-pathic: the older one struggles to control his rage, swinging between hate and love; the younger is happy in his fantasy world until his brother, or his circumstances, plunge him into misery. Because the evil characters remain offstage, on stage we see only two victims, one who struggles against his own capacity to victimize his younger brother and the other almost uniformly innocent, except for the rare moments in which he gleefully tries to gain the upper hand by teasing his brother or threatening to tell on him. The melos of Coronado’s staging was provided by a sound design (including music composed for the production by Armando Corado) that seemed intended to similarly swing spectators back and forth between emotional highs and lows. Music and song heightened sentiment, particularly the sensations of nostalgia and sadness. The play opened with a snippet of “El chorrito,” by Francisco Gabilondo Soler (1907–1990), the legendary Mexican composer of songs for children, known as Cri-cri, The Little Cricket Singer. “El chorrito” begins with the story of a drop of water that falls from a cloud as a gift to a flower at dawn, and then rises back to the cloud when the sun comes up. “The little drop rises and falls, falls and rises, to the beat of this song,” López sang a cappella as the younger brother. He sat next to his older brother (Barragán), on a “bus” formed by two wooden blocks. For adult listeners, the song evokes the cycle of life as it alludes to changes in moods and in temperatures.

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The part of the song that López did not sing, but that would be very familiar to many Mexicans, goes on to tell the tale of a stream of fountain water that rises and falls as it struggles to make itself comfortable in the heat.59 Big Brother embodied the distress of the stream of water, as he squirmed and fussed in his seat as if very uncomfortable in the heat. The two boys were on a bus that would take them from the cooler, higher altitude of Mexico City to the hotter climate of the rural area where their grandmother lived. The song underscored the discomfort of life changes brought about when cycles of domestic rural–urban–rural migration intersect with cycles of international migration. The father’s move to the United States triggers the boys’ journey back to the provincial town from which the father’s generation had moved to the capital city. During the journey, Lopéz’s rich, deep voice contrasted with the stylized childlike mannerisms that accompanied his singing—raising his arms to the sky to signal the raindrop rising to the heavens, resting his chin on his overlapping hands, elbows out, as if repeating movements he had been taught for a primary school performance. The alienation effect was almost holographic: one could see the child-in-the-man and the man-in-the-child almost simultaneously. Other music included a mournful accordion played by Lopéz during scene changes (Fig. 6.2); a defiant love ballad aimed at the absent parents, “Don’t you dare think that I miss you” [No vayas a pensar que quiero verte], composed by Ballesté; a lively Norteño two-step to which both brothers danced in celebration before their final bus trip to the U.S. border; and swelling strings mixed with church bells at the finale that left little doubt that the younger brother had died. The scenic design (Jesús Coronado)—a circle of large rocks spaced out along the edges of a sand-colored cloth covering the entire stage—enclosed the actors in a ring of doom from the start until the end. In a departure from the realism of much of the production, in the last scene, the boys ritualistically piled up the rocks in a form reminiscent of a grave marker. The piling up of the rocks constituted a ritual of self-mourning, the culmination of a staging as lament rather than protest, a staging likely to provoke sadness rather than outrage and resignation rather than intervention on behalf of boy martyrs of migration. The older brother sat upon the pile of stones; the younger brother sat on the floor with his head resting on his older brother’s knee. At the moment of his death, the younger brother clearly seemed to breathe his last breath, his hand dropping to the floor to signal

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Fig. 6.2 Our Dad Is in Atlantis [Papá está en la Atlántida] by Javier Malpica. El Rinoceronte Enamorado Theater production, directed by Jesús Coronado, San Luis Potosí, Mexico, 2011–2012 (Photo by Fernando López. Courtesy of El Rinoceronte Enamorado)

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the end of his life. The older brother wept silently, his mouth agape in utter helplessness.

Orphan-Martyr Suffering and Moral Outrage Works like Enrique’s Journey depict child suffering to warn Latin American parents to keep their children home. Yet the simplistic “just stay home” message has little persuasive power in the face of global economic and cultural forces that demand cheap labor and vulnerable bodies. Moreover, such works unintentionally contribute to the enjoyment of violence against undocumented migrants by entertaining audiences with the sensational details of suffering unaccompanied minors and their hapless parents. With its fantastical happy ending, Under the Same Moon absolves the parents and forms part of a move to form transnational affective communities in which we can all, north and south, supposedly understand the pull of love toward family reunification and ascribe a redemptive value to suffering. Yet it reinforces the idea that suffering must be part of the dues paid for reunification in a north that charges an admission price for inclusion. Our Dad Is in Atlantis includes all of the above—the dangers of the journey, the appeal to love and family unity, the depictions of undeserved suffering as part of a bid for inclusion—as well as an ironic sense of humor. Depending on the staging, the work can either simply mourn child orphan-martyrs or ask spectators to reflect on their social responsibility and question the ethics of child martyrdom itself. As migration of unaccompanied minors surged in 2014 a news media blitz of sensationalistic narratives and images appealed to both readers’ sympathy and their fears. While The New York Times accompanied a major article on the surge with a heart-wrenching photo of a bandaged toddler, a Newsweek magazine headline posed the anxiety-provoking question: “Why are children flooding the U.S. border?”60 At the same time, children’s fears of separation from their parents were increasingly used by migrant rights activists in attempts to fight U.S. deportation policies. For instance, the 2010 documentary film Immigrant Nation: The Battle for the Dream (dir. Esaú Meléndez) features close-ups of children weeping as they recount their fears of being taken away from undocumented parents threatened by deportation. National television news coverage of the 2013 immigration reform debate in Congress includes images of activist children in Washington DC waving little American flags and wearing T-shirts that read “don’t deport my dad.” Political scientist Amalia Pallares notes

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that involving children in Latinx migrant rights activism may win public sympathy and call attention to the disruption in children’s lives caused by family separation, yet it can also expose parents and adult activists to the charge of manipulation of minors.61 Moreover, the activation of compassion for heroic migrant children who are martyred in their struggle for family reunification does not always extend to their parents. On the contrary, the parents are sometimes portrayed as the cause of their children’s suffering, the villains of the melodrama; children then become the alleged victims at the mercy of inadequate parents. As we saw in Chapter Four, The New Sanctuary Movement unintentionally fell into that trap as it sought to make heroes of mothers like Arellano. In this fraught historical moment, activists and artists took a moral stance—undocumented child migrant lives are worthy of our concern. They sought to spark what sociologist James M. Jasper calls the “moral outrage” that motivates citizens to social action.62 Yet as Fassin notes in his analysis of the use of children in anti-AIDS activism in South Africa, the moralization of a cause “tends to give rise to moral discrimination between what can be more or less legitimately defended, and often to support moral judgments already at work in the social world.”63 In other words, when resources are allocated on the basis of victimhood, we tend to separate the victims into worthy and unworthy, deserving and undeserving. Eventually, the moral and the political intertwine: the fingerpointing begins; resources are allocated, or not; laws are changed, or not. Unintended consequences almost always follow: as Fassin notes, the role of victim is not stable—today’s victim may become tomorrow’s villain.64 While the works we analyzed above leave no doubt that the trade in the suffering of children has a valuable political function, sometimes promoting tolerance, respect, belonging, citizenship rights, or human rights, the trade-in suffering also has unintended consequences: the devaluing of some children’s suffering in relationship to that of Others (our children versus “those” children); the devaluing of parent suffering in relationship to that of their children; and the instantiation of demands for displays of suffering as part of a system of exchange. In the next chapter, we examine how some undocumented migrant youth have rejected the role of innocent functional orphan-martyrs and instead “queer” migrant melodrama, refusing to perform themselves as victims of their villainous parents, or even as victims at all.

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Notes 1. Gustavo López Castro, “Niños, socialización y migración a Estados Unidos,” in El país transnacional: Migración mexicana y cambio social a través de la frontera, eds. Marina Ariza and Alejandro Portes (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México/Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, 2007), 545–570. 2. Wendy S. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 155. 3. J.K. Curry, “Kate Claxton, Fire Jinx: The Aftermath of the Brooklyn Theatre Fire,” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 18, no. 1 (2013): 64–69. 4. William H. Beezley and Servando Ortoll, “Cómo fue que El Negrito salvó a México de los franceses: las fuentes populares de la identidad nacional,” Historia Mexicana 57, no. 2 (2007): 420. 5. See Ara Osterweil, “Reconstructing Shirley: Pedophilia and Interracial Romance in Hollywood’s Age of Innocence,” Camera Obscura 24, no. 3 (2009): 1–39; Gaylyn Studlar, Precocious Charms: Stars Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 6. Julia Tuñón Pablos and Tzvi Tal, “La infancia en las pantallas fílmicas latinoamericanas: entre la idealización y el desencanto,” in Historia de la infancia en América Latina, eds. Pablo Rodríguez Jiménez and María Emma Mannarelli (Bogota: Universidad Externado de Colombia, 2007), 649–667. 7. Enrique’s Journey has also spawned a theatrical production and a ballet, among other artistic works inspired by the book. The artistic director of the Denver theater company Su Teatro, Anthony J. Garcia, adapted the work for the stage in 2011 and re-staged it at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 2014. See Margaret Gray, Los Angeles Times, theater review, “Rich Material Isn’t Quite Realized in ‘Enrique’s Journey,’” October 23, 2014, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-theaterreview-enriques-journey-at-los-angeles-theatre-center-20141021-story. html; John Moore, “Su Teatro Does ‘Enrique’s Journey’ Justice,” Denver Post, October 21, 2011, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/ la-et-cm-theater-review-enriques-journey-at-los-angeles-theatre-center20141021-story.html. The Ballet de las Americas in Charlotte, North Carolina, staged a ballet adaptation of the work on June 9, 2006. 8. Luis Alberto Urrea, “The Lost Children,” The Washington Post, March 26, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/ 03/23/AR2006032301468.html.

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9. Sonia Nazario, Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother (New York: Random House, 2006), xxvi. 10. Ibid., 53. 11. Susan D. Moeller, “A Hierarchy of Innocence: The Media’s Use of Children in the Telling of International News,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 7, no. 1 (2002): 48. 12. Scott Magelssen, Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2014). 13. Nazario, Enrique’s Journey, xx. 14. Ibid., xxv. 15. Ibid., 260. 16. Ibid., 252. 17. Ibid., 190. 18. Ibid., xxv–xxvi. 19. Ibid., 250. 20. Ibid., 265. 21. Ibid., 266. 22. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 24–55. 23. Reed Johnson, “‘Which Way Home’ Tracks Migrants’ Dangerous Journeys,” Los Angeles Times, August 22, 2009, http://articles.latimes.com/ print/2009/aug/22/entertainment/et-way-home22. 24. Susan Bibler Coutin, “Riding la Bestia with Central American and Mexican Migrant Children,” Current Anthropology 53, no. 1 (2012): 146. 25. A field producer for Which Way Home, Stephany Slaughter, offered this information during a question-and-answer session after a screening at The Ohio State University on October 19, 2011. 26. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 296–297. 27. Reed Johnson, “‘Which Way Home’ Tracks Migrants’ Dangerous Journeys,” online. 28. Margarita de Orellana, “The Circular Look: The Incursion of North American Fictional Cinema 1911–1917 into the Mexican Revolution,” in Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas, eds. John King, Ana M. López, and Manuel Alvarado (London: BFI, 1993), 3–14. 29. Heather Hewett, “Mothering Across Borders: Narratives of Immigrant Mothers in the United States,” Women’s Studies Quarterl y 37, no. 3/4 (2009): 121–139. See also Caryn Connelly, “Tanto de aquí como de allá: New Representations of the Illegal Immigrant Experience in La misma luna (2007) and 7 soles (2009),” Cincinnati Romance Review 32 (2011): 13–30. 30. Debra A. Castillo, “The Smallest Catch: Children Between Two Nations,” Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 42, no. 1 (2009): 21–30.

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31. The NYC Movie Guru, “Interview with Patricia Riggen, Director/Cowriter of Under the Same Moon,” http://www.nycmovieguru.com/ patriciariggen.html. 32. Films featuring tragic Latin American migrants include: Espaldas mojadas (Wetbacks, dir. Alejandro Galindo, 1955), Alambrista! (dir. Robert M. Young, 1977), El Norte (dir. Gregory Nava, 1983), Babel (dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006), and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (dir. Tommy Lee Jones, 2005). Films that focus on tragic unaccompanied minors from Latin America include Voces inocentes (Innocent Voices, dir. Luis Mandoki, 2004), El camino (The Path, dir. Ishtar Yasin Gutiérrez, 2008), Sin Nombre (dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2009), The Precocious and Brief Life of Sabina Rivas (Luis Mandoki, 2012), and La jaula de oro (The Golden Dream, dir. Diego Quemada-Diez, 2013). One film with an uplifting ending that defies the trend toward tragedy is Maria Full of Grace (dir. Joshua Marston, 2004). 33. Connelly, “Tanto de aquí como de allá,” 21. For more on Mexican melodrama mothers, see López; Carlos Monsiváis, “La Santa Madrecita Abnegada: La que amó al cine mexicano antes de conocerlo,” Debate Feminista 30 (2004): 157–173; Jorge Ayala Blanco, La aventura del cine mexicano (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1993), 42–53. 34. On the significance of Los Tigres del Norte in U.S. culture, see José David Saldivar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1–8. 35. Marjorie Garber, “Compassion,” in Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, ed. Lauren Berlant (New York: Routledge, 2004), 15–27. 36. Podalsky, The Politics of Affect and Emotion, 125–160. See also Laura Podalsky, “Migrant Feelings: Melodrama, Babel and Affective Communities,” Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 7, no. 1 (2010): 47–58. 37. Laura Guerrero Guadarrama, “Papá está en la Atlántida, de Javier Malpica: un viaje peligroso hacia el imaginario,” in Inmigración/Emigración na LIX, eds. Blanca-Ana Roig Rechou, Isabel Soto López, and Marta Neira Rodríguez (Pontevedra, Spain: Xeria, 2014), 395–400. 38. Thomas W. Laqueur, “Mourning, Pity, and the Work of Narrative,” in Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy, eds. Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 37. 39. Javier Malpica, “Our Dad Is in Atlantis,” trans. Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, American Theatre 25, no. 6 (July–August 2008): 69–89. The script was accompanied by an interview with Malpica conducted by Caridad Svich, “Border Crossing: An Interview with the Playwright,” 70–71. 40. Javier Malpica, “Our Dad Is in Atlantis,” trans. Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, in The Goodman Theatre’s Festival Latino: Six Plays, eds. Henry D. Godinez

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41. 42. 43. 44.

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and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 344–393. Jesús Coronado, email to the authors, June 13, 2014. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Ibid., 2. Christof Decker, “‘Unusually Compassionate’: Melodrama, Film, and the Figure of the Child,” in Melodrama!: The Mode of Excess from Early America to Hollywood, eds. Frank Kelleter, Barbara Krah, and Ruth Mayer (Berlin: Universitaetsverlag, 2007), 305–328. Malpica, Atlantis (trans. Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas), 370. : Debe tener mucho trabajo. Allá en Estados Unidos tienes que trabajar mucho o te regresan para acá. Deja de estarle pegando a la silla con tus patotas. : Claro que es muy trabajador. Si no, no habría durado nada allá. Y ya lleva mucho tiempo. Si no fuera trabajador ya lo habrían regresado para acá. Por eso no ha hablado. Por eso. ¿Me oyes? Por eso. Javier Malpica, Papá está en la Atlántida (San Nicolás de los Garza, Nuevo León: Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, 2006), 29.

46. Malpica, Atlantis (trans. Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas), 366–367. : Dicen que a la gente de ese país no les gustan mucho los extranjeros. : Eso será en el béisbol, pero a la gente de ese país no le gusta que los extranjeros vayan a trabajar de otra cosa. ¿Por qué crees que todos los extranjeros acaban limpiando baños o recolectando fruta? : Mamá nunca hubiera permitido que la familia se separara. : Si Mamá no hubiera muerto, Papá hubiera seguido trabajando como maestro. Malpica, Atlántida, 26.

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48. Malpica, Atlantis (trans. Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas), 373. >: Si existiera el cielo ya nos habría buscado mi mamá desde allí, de eso estoy seguro. Malpica, Atlántida, 33. 49. The work of Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman reveals how, in ways that do not promote progressive social change, the figure of the child’s body often becomes emblematic of a communal future. The attempt to devise policy and laws for the good of imaginary children in an imagined future can become a kind of conservative social glue that shortchanges the adult in the here-and-now. In political conflicts that pit U.S. Latino or Latin American children against U.S. white children, to make matters worse, the terms of debate can easily become “those children” versus “our children.” Authors like Malpica struggle against that bifurcation to create, through works depicting suffering children as universal, a transnational affective community in which adults (of any nationality) identify “those children” as equally worthy as “our children.” See Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 83–144; Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 50. Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981). 51. John Beer, “Javier Malpica’s Stunning Parable Views Life on the Brink through Innocent Eyes,” Time Out Chicago, April 26, 2011, http://www.timeout.com/chicago/theater/our-dad-is-in-atlantisat-16th-street-theater-theater-review. 52. Chuck Graham, “Border Reality Emerges in ‘Atlantis,’” Tucson Citizen, March 12, 2009, http://tucsoncitizen.com/morgue/2009/03/12/ 111957-border-reality-emerges-in-atlantis. 53. Dave Irwin, “Humor and Sorrow,” Tucson Weekly, March 12, 2009, http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/humor-and-sorrow/Content? oid=1149301. 54. Joseph Fichtelberg, Critical Fictions: Sentiment and the American Market 1780–1870 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2003), 14–15. 55. Olga Harmony, “Papá está en la Atlántida,” La Jornada, January 27, 2011, http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2011/01/27/cultura/ a06a1cul; Timothy G. Compton, “Spring 2012 Theatre Season in Mexico City,” Latin American Theatre Review 46, no. 2 (November 2013): 147–157. 56. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 57. Coronado, email to the authors, June 13, 2014.

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58. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 36. See also Robert Bechtold Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama: Victims of Experience (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), 85–86. 59. “Estaba de mal humor, pobre chorrito tenía calor.” 60. The photo of the bandaged toddler accompanied an article by Haeyoun Park, “Children at the Border,” The New York Times, October 21, 2014. Karla Zabludovsky, “Why Are Children Flooding the U.S. Border”? Newsweek, June 10, 2014, http://www.newsweek.com/why-arechildren-flocking-us-mexico-254371. “Stemming the Migrant Tide,” The Economist, April 18–24, 2015, 31–32. 61. Amalia Pallares, “Representing ‘La Familia’: Family Separation and Immigrant Activism,” in ¡Marcha!: Latino Chicago and the Immigrant Rights Movement, eds. Amalia Pallares and Nilda Flores-González (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 215–236. 62. James M. Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 63. Fassin, Humanitarian Reason, 169. 64. Ibid., 177.

CHAPTER 7

DREAMer Youth Artist-Activists: Queering Migrant Melodrama

When I was sixteen it became my secret to keep. When I was sixteen, it became my code to speak. Julio Alvarez, protagonist of Nine Digits, one-act dance-theater piece devised by Albany Park Theater Project, 2007 It’s a game that people are playing with us. And so by us fighting back and saying “Yo, no, I’m gonna tell my own story.” It’s almost a defense mechanism against this crazy, big political machine that sometimes is more powerful than us. But they can’t take away our stories. They can’t take away what we really have to say. Julio Salgado, visual artist, interview with Michelle Chen, Huffington Post, January 4, 2012

While Julio Alvarez (a pseudonym) is straight and Julio Salgado is queer, both young men were closeted DREAMers, a term that has come to be used as shorthand for some 3.6 million people who entered the United States without official permission before their eighteenth birthday. For Alvarez, brought by his parents from Colombia to the United States at the age of six, the age of sixteen marked the moment he realized that he dwelled in a closet of undocumentedness and assumed the same burden of secrecy that his parents had shouldered for many years. After several years of maintaining that secret, he only “came out” through a performance in which someone else played him, a one-act piece of dance-theater devised collaboratively by Chicago’s Albany Park Theater Project, Nine Digits (2007) that continued to protect his anonymity even as it told the story © The Author(s) 2020 A. E. Puga and V. M. Espinosa, Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37409-9_7

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of how he gradually began to reveal his undocumented status to the people in his life. Salgado, brought by his parents from Mexico at the age of eleven, came out first as undocumented then as queer through his visual art: dozens of posters and YouTube videos, including the series on which we focus here, Undocumented and Awkward (2011–2013), as well as many blog posts, essays, and interviews that proclaim his self-identity as “undocuqueer.” In this chapter, we compare how the two DREAMers come out through their artistic work and argue that each queers migrant melodrama in his own way, tweaking, twisting, or dispensing with some of the strategies that we have analyzed in previous chapters. We use the concepts of “undocutime” and “undocuspace” as points of departure for analyzing the queering of migrant melodrama in DREAMer cultural production and beginning to delineate a spectrum for queer migrant melodrama, a range of deviance from the norms of melodrama. Alvarez and Salgado (b. 1983) have actually aged out of the narrow definition of DREAMers, which refers to a smaller group under the age of thirty-six. Only 1.8 million individuals would benefit from the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for youth between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five who meet certain requirements: they must have come to the United States before the age of sixteen, been in the United States for at least five years, graduated from high school or earned a GED, be enrolled in college, work, or enlist in the military. Finally, they must demonstrate “good moral character” through a lack of a criminal record.1 In a broader sense, though, the term DREAMers has come to refer to any undocumented young person in the United States, regardless of whether they work, attend school, or serve in the military, regardless of criminal record or moral standing, and regardless of whether they have aged out of eligibility. First proposed in 2001 and re-proposed again in various forms since then, the DREAM Act has not been able to pass Congress for more than seventeen years. Nevertheless, the stalled legislation helped forge a community, an identity, and a political youth movement, as well as a rich collection of narratives, performances, visual art, and other cultural production associated with that movement.2 We close this book with a chapter on DREAMer youth in cultural production because compared to the migrant character archetypes we have so far explored—the rescuers and the rescued, the madres dolorosas, the wounded heroes, and the unaccompanied migrant children—youth have exercised the most agency in their creation of performances about the

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migrant experience. The undocumented children and child characters we analyzed in the previous chapter were all, as is typical of children, very reliant on adults for casting them and staging their stories. And the men and women we discussed in Part II, who came to the United States later in life, tend to have less cultural capital, lower levels of education, fewer personal contacts, and less artistic training than DREAMer youth, making it more difficult for them to control their own castings and stagings. Part of DREAMer activism, moreover, includes a rebellion against the kind of rescuer-casting from above that we discussed in Part I. In the case of the DREAMers, major national immigrant rights organizations were the supposed rescuers from whom grassroots activists established independence. According to sociologist Walter J. Nicolls, the failure to pass the DREAM Act in December 2010 marked a turning point in activist structure: “The DREAMer infrastructure before 2010 was largely top-down in design and execution. By contrast, the new infrastructure is grounded in local DREAM organizations firmly rooted in their local environments, namely, college campuses, community organizations, networks, and so on.”3 Both Alvarez’s and Salgado’s performances exemplify such local roots. Alvarez’s and Salgado’s performances as DREAMers structure thinly fictionalized characters crafted on the basis of their actual experiences and thus shape their subjectivities as actual people, developing the radical, utopian potential within migrant melodrama that we identified in earlier chapters. As we showed with our analysis of radical optimism in Under the Same Moon in Chapter 6 and of the corrective castings created by the AMIREDIS activists in Chapter 5, melodrama need not be entirely abandoned in order to achieve a degree of political efficacy. Nine Digits and Undocumented and Awkward demonstrate how artist-activists can push the limits of melodrama, and even react against it, while nevertheless still working within some of its conventions. By contrast to many of the works discussed in previous chapters, these examples of cultural production exhibit facets that might seem to disqualify them from the category of melodrama, including humor, satire, defiance, and anger. Yet we argue that rather than reject melodrama entirely, these works take melodramatic imagination in nonnormative directions, what theorists have called queering.4 We argue, furthermore, that queering migrant melodrama, subverting some of its conventions in order to challenge normative ideals, loosens the strictures of melodramas that would confine undocumented migrants to the role of pitiful victims who deserve respect for their rights on the basis of how much they have suffered.

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Queer migrant melodrama changes the terms of engagement with the market in pain that we have called the political economy of suffering. A crucial part of melodrama’s queering takes place through evocation and implicit critique of undocutime and undocuspace, terms that we, and sometimes others, use to describe the limbo endured by undocumented youth who are blocked from advancing on predictable, linear paths to success. For instance, in his photograph titled “UndocuTime,” Chicago photographer Alejandro Monroy depicts a fist clenching both an identification card with his photo and a large watch, while two more large watches cover his wrist and the top of his forearm. Each of the three watches tells a different time, conveying a sense of conflict, disorientation, and confusion. In an accompanying short essay, Monroy writes: Time takes on a more complex meaning depending on one’s legal status. For undocumented immigrants, there are various clocks that may stop ticking, slow down or speed up – we are rarely fully in the present. While we are aging on a linear path, there are various layers of “growing up” that may be contingent on documentation. Driving, working, education, traveling, voting, and so on depend on documentation.5

In a scholarly approach to the same problem, sociologist Roberto G. Gonzales conducted 150 ethnographic interviews that detail the frustration that even young undocumented people with degrees from prestigious universities feel about their lack of career prospects.6 As Gonzales notes, former President Obama’s policy of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which went into effect in 2012, attempted to ameliorate the effects of undocutime and undocuspace by offering temporary legal permission to work and study. Yet DACA did not alter the lives of many people who could not afford to apply for it or who applied and found that having a temporary legal work permit did not necessarily lead to a better job.7 Despite the slight relief provided by DACA, many young people still found themselves stymied in their attempts to get ahead in life. To make matters worse, the subsequent administration of President Trump attempted to end DACA in 2018. Besieged by various court challenges from around the country, the administration was forced to partially retreat: it refused to accept new DACA applications yet permitted DACA renewals. Undocutime was thus reimposed on a new population that might have benefitted from DACA as well as on the continuously growing over-thirty-five undocumented population that has aged out of

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eligibility for the promise of citizenship that the DREAM Act had once held. The related idea of undocuspace, as we use it, grows out of Susan Bibler Coutin’s insight that Central American migrants are often imagined to dwell in metaphorical spaces construed as clandestine: outside, underground, in the shadows, separated, and excluded from mainstream society. Despite their physical presence, as well as economic, social, and cultural participation, the U.S. legal system forces migrants into a kind of nonexistence in which they are not recognized as fully present. Migrants can find themselves trapped in a paradox: on the one hand, forced into clandestine work and limited in their movements, from driving a car to leaving the country, yet on the other hand asked to produce evidence of their physical presence and work history in order to qualify for certain kinds of legal relief from persecution.8 As Karma Chávez has analyzed in brilliant detail, in undocumented youth activism the metaphor of the shadows as the dwelling place of the undocumented has blended with the metaphor of the closet borrowed from the gay rights movement, particularly since a number of DREAMer activist leaders also identify as queer.9 Thus the idea of coming out, whether from a dark shadowy place to a light-filled space, or from a confined closet-like hiding place to an open, exposed space, has taken on a sense of liberation for undocumented youth and become a position from which they reject undocuspace and press for legalization. The third element of undocuspace is the illusion that the migrant body has no desires or needs that require use of space, such as adequate housing, healthcare, education, and retirement security. This fantasy is cultivated by day laborer and guest-worker schemes that attempt to exploit migrant labor without taking any responsibility for migrant bodies beyond those necessary to complete the immediate work at hand. When migrants declare that they exist and claim space, their bodies in performative protests serve as a reminder that their physical and psychological needs extend beyond the bare minimums required to keep working. DREAMer activists staging public performances that reject undocuspace tend to adopt seemingly divergent approaches that sometimes nevertheless overlap: they stake an achievement-based claim to the right to inclusion in legally recognized spaces, often highlighting educational achievement in particular; and/or they reject the pressure to conform to an all-American ideal while nevertheless demanding recognition and

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respect as residents of the United States who happen to lack legal documents. Protesters who highlight achievement often adopt a striking costume—graduation caps and gowns—worn by youth as they occupied the offices of U.S. senators and representatives in 2010, as they publicized a border crossing from Mexico in 2013, and as they staged annual undocugraduations unaffiliated with any particular school, from 2015 to 2018, to cite just a few of many instances of dissent.10 The graduation garb signals an ambition to claim admission to spaces previously closed to the undocumented and also highlights that the youth have been in the country long enough to pass through an educational system, that in a sense they are already socialized and shaped as U.S. citizens. They are familiar with U.S. rituals and ready to embrace them as their own. DREAMer activists who adopt the more defiant stance that all undocumented youth, regardless of levels of academic or other achievement, should have their status legalized have often borrowed from the gay rights movement to stage “coming out” events, leaving their metaphorical shadows and closets to declare themselves “unapologetic and unafraid.” As we shall see in the works featuring Alvarez and Salgado, at times there is significant overlap between performances of achievement and defiance, fitting in and coming out. For instance, in a 2016 undocu-graduation witnessed by theater scholar Christopher Goodson the keynote speaker declared herself “undocumented, unafraid, and unapologetic!” Goodson notes that another speaker the following year went even further to “reinforce both the need for a self-created narrative as well as the spirit of independence” as the speaker warned the audience: “Don’t let other people tell your stories.”11 To Goodson’s analysis we would add that both speakers challenge the standard melodramatic plot and casting too often invoked by politicians who support the DREAM Act, the melodrama of innocent, victimized children who were brought to the United States through no fault of their own by implicitly evil, criminal parents. As Nicholls and other scholars have shown, DREAMers themselves have by-and-large rejected that characterization of their parents.12 DREAMer rebellion has been expressed not only at coming-out events and mock graduations, but also in sit-ins, “die-ins,” fasts, caravans, marches, and other performative protests that have borrowed not only from the gay rights movement but also from the civil rights movement and from Latin American social movements that use the strategy of testimonio, or testifying to one’s own experience as exemplary of the experience of an entire group.13

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From Fitting into Coming Out Cultural production that dramatizes undocutime and undocuspace diverges from the many narratives of successful assimilation, or tragic deportation, that have dominated U.S. Latinx theater and performance since at least the 1960s, when Luis Valdez mocked the ultra-assimilationist Miss “JIM-enez” and her attempts to buy a token Mexican for the administration of California’s Governor Reagan as a form of selling out in Los Vendidos (1967). In some Latinx theatrical works written in a relatively tolerant era, around the time that President Reagan signed the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act that regularized the status of some 2.7 million people, undocumented status seems more of an amusing inconvenience than a life-threatening disaster. Josefina López’s Real Women Have Curves (1987), for instance, plays for laughs the fear that some characters have of being deported by immigration officials. In the end, the protagonist Ana Garcia attains her dream of entrance to university and sets out on the path to happy assimilation. As Gad Guterman notes, however, the play’s final image—the other four women characters pose for a photo for Ana while holding up their Temporary Residence Cards and smiling as they say “Green!!!”—suggests that legal status confers a happy ending, while also implying that the United States as an imagined community has been changed by their Latina presence: “through the women’s performance, the United States as a nation is also reborn.”14 In this work, unlike in the Valdez play, assimilation need not constitute the betrayal of one’s roots. Many Latinx plays, however, continue to focus on the struggles and conflicts experienced by Latinx protagonists attempting to fit into Anglodominant spaces. More than two decades after Real Women, in the Broadway musical In the Heights (Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes, 2008) the Puerto Rican protagonist Nina Rosario faces external financial obstacles and internal psychological conflicts provoked by pressure to assimilate into the new milieu she finds when she leaves her New York City neighborhood for Stanford University. Nina has such difficulty adjusting that her grades suffer and she loses her scholarship. Yet her father is so eager to help her stay in school that he sells his business to fund her college tuition. In what is depicted as part of the work’s upbeat ending, she returns to Stanford. The play thus suggests that educational achievement is a requirement for successful assimilation and attainment of a middle-class American Dream, even for legally recognized U.S. Latinx

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citizens such as Puerto Ricans. The Puerto Rican protagonist of José Rivera’s contemporary classic, Marisol (1992), similarly displays internal conflict about cultural assimilation yet expresses it in a different manner: Marisol publicly assumes an Anglo identity at work while keeping her many tokens of Puerto Rican identity hidden at home. And in yet another type of assimilationist behavior, the protagonist of Octavio Solis’s Lydia (2008), the Mexican maid to a Mexican-American family, insists on always speaking English, even to other native Spanish speakers. In the end, nevertheless, the mother of the family that employs Lydia arranges for her to be deported. As she is dragged away by a border patrol officer she shouts, “I’m American…I’m American!”15 Perhaps because DREAMer identity is relatively new, beginning to coalesce only after the DREAM Act was introduced by Illinois Senator Richard Durbin in 2001, so far few works of performance have thoroughly explored the emotion that Lydia expresses—a feeling of cultural belonging despite unauthorized legal status and lack of acceptance by U.S. citizens. One significant exception to this general theatrical neglect of the effects of undocutime and undocuspace on the DREAMer psyche is Carlo Albán’s one-man show Intríngulis (2010). Developed with LAByrinth Theater Company in New York, Albán embodies the paradox of belonging-yet-not-not belonging: he was an undocumented child actor from 1993 to 1998 on the quintessentially American (in the sense of pertaining to the United States) children’s television show Sesame Street.16 Brought to the United States from Ecuador by his parents when he was seven years old, Albán (b. 1979) began acting at the age of eleven, when he was cast as the lead in a community theater production of Oliver! By the time he was thirteen, he had submitted forged documents authorizing his residency in order to become a regular on Sesame Street playing a character with his same name, the neighborhood teenager Carlo. In Intríngulis , Albán recounts an anecdote that depicts his participation as a cultural citizen coupled with his terror of being discovered as a legal noncitizen. Because of his role on Sesame Street, he was invited to participate in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, for which he would have to submit his forged identification once again. Yet the green card had the wrong birthdate on it, and since he had recently celebrated his actual birthday with the cast of Sesame Street, he feared that someone would notice. He wanted his father to somehow reforge the document. When his father couldn’t do it, Albán punched him in the chest. Nevertheless, his father drove him from their home in

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New Jersey into Manhattan so that he could participate in the parade: “I rode that float and waved to the people lining the streets of Manhattan, hundreds and thousands of people and they all waved back and smiled, as if I was one of them. And then he drove me home, in the deafening silence, and nobody noted the car.”17 Albán’s double-performance of cultural citizenry—first as a member of the Sesame Street cast and second as a participant in a Thanksgiving Day parade—only intensified his fears surrounding his undocumented status and the possibility that he would be discovered, shamed, and humiliated. His physical attack on his father channeled his anxiety into hostility; years later, his “coming out” performance in Intríngulis , releases and dispels that anxiety while at the same time making what Chávez calls a “coalitional gesture,” that is building solidarity both within the community of undocumented migrants and out toward the queer rights activist community.18 As Chávez argues, DREAMer protesters who adopt the coming-out strategy from the gay rights movement simultaneously display both a radical impulse in “their departure from inclusionary politics” and a normalizing impulse toward respectability and individual challenges to marginalization.19 These tensions are clearly displayed in Intríngulis , as well as in Nine Digits and Undocumented and Awkward, which are all coming-out performances that foster a sense of community among undocumented spectators while also helping documented spectators better understand and feel what it is like to live in the shadowy limbo of undocutime and undocuspace.

Albany Park Theater Project’s Nine Digits The Albany Park Theater Project is both a performance ensemble and an educational tutoring program for its ensemble members. Based in a diverse immigrant neighborhood on Chicago’s northwest side, ensemble members conduct ethnographic interviews, sometimes with each other and sometimes with outside community members. From the narratives gathered they create movement and performance to stage social problems that affect urban teenagers. Since its founding in 1997 by Yale School of Drama MFAs David Feiner and Laura Wiley, the company has grown from a two-person operation that provided weekly theater workshops, some weeks only to a single teenager, to an ensemble of thirty youth with a budget of more than one million dollars. For its first ten years, APTP’s works were staged primarily in the Eugene Field Park field house in a 110-seat theater; during its second decade, the company has continued to

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perform in its home space while also staging five productions in a 400-seat space at the Goodman Theatre in downtown Chicago. Some of APTP’s most prominent works have focused on immigration, child abuse, home foreclosures, education, poverty, and hunger. After Nine Digits , the fulllength APTP works Home/ Land (2012) and Ofrenda (authored by Isaac Gomez, 2018) also explored the theme of undocumented migration and constitute protests against state persecution of the undocumented, particularly the practice of deportation. Yet we focus our analysis on Nine Digits because of how effectively it captures the affective consequences of DREAMers’ enforced stasis and how cleverly it twists the conventions of migrant melodrama that we have elucidated in previous chapters. A thirty-minute piece of dance theater, Nine Digits premiered in 2003 and was staged with new material in 2007, on a double bill with another short dance-play, Amor de Lejos [Love from Afar], about the challenges for migrants of maintaining loving relationships across long distances. Nine Digits and Amor de Lejos were presented as a double bill under the title Aquí Estoy [Here I Am]. Under the direction of Feiner and Maggie Popadiak, in 2007 Julio was played by Mourtaza Ahmadali as a hard-working, fast-moving, and ambitious would-be professional modern dancer who lives in a state of suspended animation, dwelling in a kind of pre-present, a prelude to a life that he imagines will feel more meaningful at some indefinite moment in the future when a change in life circumstances will signal the start of “real” present time. Alvarez is eager for inclusion and advancement yet ultimately stuck in a time warp, as his chronological age advances while his educational and career prospects remain stymied. In a narrative structure reminiscent of DREAM Act activists who “come out” as undocumented in public rallies, Julio (Ahmadali) addresses spectators directly as he narrates key events in his life, from age 6 to 22, stressing his constant struggle to get ahead despite his undocumented status. He underscores his age at certain key points, creating a kind of verbal clock that marks an episodic structure, heightens audience awareness of the passing years, and lets spectators know how old the actor is supposed to be at any given moment: “When I was six,” “When I was eight,” “When I was sixteen,” “When I was seventeen,” “Now that I’m eighteen,” “Gutierrez was twenty-two, like me….” The story is based on the actual life story of an APTP ensemble member who was born in Colombia and brought by his parents to the United States at the age of six. Short scenes of dialogue with his mother (Ana Ovando) and with

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an embodiment of the U.S. government called Mr. J. Wilbur Worker (Jesus Matta) are accompanied by continuous dance movement choreographed by the APTP ensemble. Mostly confined to a small wooden platform of a stage, Julio begins relaxed and barefoot, telling a joke as he stretches in straddle splits, then moves into a series of more than a dozen alternating confrontational duets with his mother and with Mr. J. Wilbur Worker, interspersed with short monologues in which he reflects on his interactions with them and with the world (Fig. 7.1). Despite the mostly episodic structure, the play has two climaxes: a verbal climax in which Julio “comes out” to the audience as undocumented and a movement climax several beats later in which he performs a technically challenging breakdance solo. The language and the dance come together at the end as his movement resolves into stillness and his words also stop: he sits down on the floor, knees up, arms wrapped around his shins, to pronounce the last words of the play, which far from bringing closure, look to the future: “a better life.”

Fig. 7.1 Nine Digits, Albany Park Theater Project production, directed by David Feiner and Maggie Popadiak, Chicago, 2007 (Photo by Amy Braswell. Courtesy of Albany Park Theater Project)

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Besides a structure that avoids the kinds of tidy resolutions typical of denouement, another formal element of Nine Digits that diverges from melodrama is its lack of musical accompaniment. All of the movement— depicting Julio’s past, present, and future—takes place without swelling strings or crashing chords. Sounds are limited to dialogue spoken by the characters, sounds, and other nonmusical noises that the characters create with their voices and bodies. For instance, the mother sometimes shushes Julio with a long “shhhhhhhh” that underscores their clandestine existence. The absence of melos also underscores how Julio is a dancer waiting for the music of his life to start as he moves through a past marked by lost innocence, a present marred by frustrated hopes, and an uncertain future that seems to depend largely on the actions of others, others who unlike Julio can openly occupy space in the United States and claim to belong within its nation-state borders, others like the senators and representatives who could pass the DREAM Act, if only they would.

The Past in Undocutime and Undocuspace Julio’s childhood is associated with the Spanish language, which marks prelapsarian moments of joy and potential, before words like “illegal” mean anything. “¡Avión grande, cielo grande!” [Big plane, big sky!] Julio shouts as he runs in an arc outside the boundaries of the dance-floor stage with his arms outstretched.20 His body moves like a powerful machine in an imaginary space that seems to stretch to infinity; by contrast, the older Julio is mostly confined to the wooden platform of the small dancefloor stage, which resembles a corner of a dancer’s sprung-floor studio. To the young boy Julio the world still seems full of possibilities, a sensation identified and described vividly by philosopher of the utopian, Ernst Bloch: “Bold youth imagines it has wings and that all that is right awaits its swooping arrival, in fact can only be established, or at least set free by youth.”21 At first, Spanish language is a part of that swoop; as Julio begins to forget his Spanish, however, the language begins to become part of a “code” to him, something he hears his parents murmur at night in hushed, anxious tones from behind their bedroom door. The language of innocence has become a barrier to complete understanding. The parents’ preoccupations, the play hints, stem from their undocumented status, a status that they keep from Julio—perhaps in an attempt not to burden him—until the last possible moment.

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As mentioned earlier, the moment of the loss of innocence comes for Julio, as for many undocumented youth, when he turns the age of sixteen. The importance of this moment is underscored by an almost-rhymed couplet, one of several striking departures from the play’s mostly naturalistic language. “When I was sixteen it became my secret to keep. When I was sixteen it became my code to speak,” Julio says, looking out at the audience. For the undocumented, sixteen marks a significant life turning point, not only because it marks sexual or social maturity, but because it is often the age at which teenagers discover that they lack the legal standing to acquire a social security number or a driver’s license—markers of identity and self-worth in the United States. When teenagers tell their parents that they want to drive a car or get a part-time job, parents often respond by revealing the undocumented status of some or all of the family’s members. In a foreshadowing of Julio’s coming out to the APTP audience, his parents first come out to him. For Julio, that parental coming-out marks the moment when he realizes that he cannot take advantage of a tantalizing array of opportunities that have begun to present themselves: the Reserve Officer Training Core (ROTC), an out-of-state college, and a dance internship. Regular time goes on for documented U.S. citizens who can take up such activities. For Julio, trapped in undocutime, any activity that would require a driver’s license or a social security number has to be indefinitely deferred. A crucial part of Julio’s past is his relationship with his mother, called Mami, who is depicted as fearful, inconsistent, and controlling, yet by no means a villain. The play thus avoids the migrant melodrama of the child victimized by criminal parents. Julio’s interactions with his mother are staged as flashbacks, as if spectators are alone with Julio in the present yet can leap back in time with him because they are privy to his memories. Mami at first refuses to let little Julio go on a school field trip to the zoo, then relents yet scrawls his address on his chest with a felttip marker. On the other hand, despite her general risk-aversion, she pushes him to get a fake social security card so that he can begin to work and contribute to the household’s economy. Finally, she refuses to allow him to confess his undocumented status to the leaders of a dance program that has offered him an internship. She worries that confessing his status might get the entire family deported back to Colombia, where she believes that Julio would be required to serve in the military. Deportation would destroy the dream of a better life, for which she and his father brought Julio to the United States: “Are you crazy?!

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Do you want to get deported?! Do you want to get us all deported?!” Mami dampens Julio’s expectations of what that “better life” can include—employment, yet not necessarily a creative or well-paying career. Julio works a dead-end job at a Holiday Inn and drifts from major to major at his local college. In this sense, he exemplifies what Gonzales calls “Early Exiters,” young adults whose undocumented status so narrowly constricts their options that their lives more closely resemble their parents’ lives of limited options than the lives their parents had dreamed of for them, or that they had dreamed of for themselves.22 The emotional conflict between mother and son in Nine Digits is intense, as is typical of melodrama, both as a style of playwriting and as a style of acting, yet the mother is not the villain, nor is Julio her victim. The villain in Nine Digits comes from a past that predates Julio’s life span. The character of J. Wilbur Worker (Jesus Matta), is based on a cartoon character from a 1950s Social Security Administration pamphlet brought to life as a creepy, campy figure in white-face, decked out in an elegant beige three-piece suit, bow tie, white gloves, and leather wingtips (costume and makeup, Debbie Baer). J. Wilbur opens his suit jacket to reveal a large image of a social security card sewn into each side of the lining. In a menacing Southern drawl, he invokes the Social Security Act of 1936, the law that makes it necessary for everyone to “protect the family you love by protecting your Social Security number.” Throughout the play, as Julio tries to develop as a young person and as a dance artist, J. Wilbur pops up repeatedly to taunt him with the refrain, “Social Security number please.” As embodied by J. Wilbur, the social security number seems like a dangerous anachronism that imposes the temporal limbos of undocutime, the education that takes much longer than it should if one can’t get financial aid, the well-paying job that remains out of reach, the inability to obtain a driver’s license or passport that would offer opportunities to travel. His condescending tone as he parrots lines from the actual pamphlet—“Social Security is family security”—seem absurd in the context of the family destruction wrought by current anti-migrant laws that make it a felony punishable by detention and deportation to use a false social security number to obtain employment. The white-face makeup serves as a visual reminder that these laws were created by a white majority. For the less privileged, the actual threat to family security emanates from the nation-state that began to use the social security number as a system of national identity and surveillance, to help discern those who

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belong from those who do not and to expose those who supposedly deserve punishment. J. Wilbur’s duets with Julio cement his role as evil enforcer of a punishing regime. At one point, he takes the lead, whirls Julio around, spins and dips him, evoking the breathtaking possibilities available to those who possess the seemingly magical nine digits. When Julio makes the mistake of admitting that he is not an American, however, J. Wilbur abruptly lets him fall to the ground and strides offstage, remarking before he leaves: “Come back when you are ready for a real relationship.” Julio’s pitiful subsequent cries, “I am an American! I am an American! I am an American! I am an American!” go unheeded by J. Wilbur while they remind spectators that culturally Julio is in fact a U.S. citizen. Later, J. Wilbur rolls up chain-link walls-on-wheels to box in Julio on his small wooden platform of a stage, trapping his rejected dance partner in a cage-like structure that recalls detention facilities, the euphemism for prisons for undocumented people. Beyond the lack of a social security number, this powerful image underscores how Julio is imprisoned by the construct of illegality. In the tradition of reform melodrama, he is a victim who suffers unjustly, not only at the hands of J. Wilbur but, more importantly, at the hands of the nation-state security apparatus that J. Wilbur represents. Nine Digits depicts Julio’s suffering as a consequence of an unjust immigration system, yet unlike many migrant melodramas, it does not suggest that Julio deserves rights because he has suffered, and suffered in the right way. On the contrary, as the years slip by, Julio’s suffering is depicted as a pointless waste of his time. The play thus calls into question mindless nationalism, which purports that the nation-state always knows best.

Undocutime and Coming Out A sense of immersion in the present moment is evoked most palpably during Nine Digits ’s two climaxes—the verbal climax of the comingout story and the movement climax of the break dance, which may be interpreted as a kind of coming out as an artist. For both queer people and undocumented immigrants, the act of coming out, as Chávez has noted, exemplifies performativity, or doing through the act of saying, acknowledging a status and certain types of conduct.23 The words that Julio chooses to announce his immigration status are delivered in a parodic tone at first as he announces himself as an “alien.” Yet the following words, in the 2007 production that we saw,—“I’m illegal, I’m not really

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supposed to be here.”—were delivered by the actor in a somber tone of voice, as if he had internalized a sense of illegitimacy of presence. That was the play’s saddest moment, made all the more grim by the use of the word “illegal” rather than alternatives such as “undocumented” or “unauthorized” that attempt to soften the stigma of criminalization. As part of the double bill titled Aquí Estoy [Here I Am], however, the play does not endorse the protagonist’s sense of illegitimacy of presence. On the contrary, the Here I Am title recalls the chants of immigrants and immigrant rights supporters announcing their presence in demonstrations, including the massive marches of 2006: “Aquí estamos y no nos vamos, y si nos echan nos regresamos!” [Here we are and we’re not leaving, and if they throw us out we’ll come back!] As Nicholas De Genova has pointed out, there is a “queer politics of migration” emblematized by the migrant chant’s similarity to the Queer chant: “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” Julio is a migrant who does not chant but whose bodily presence proclaims, as De Genova puts it, that deviation from the normal will persist [italics in original].24 Julio has no plans to leave the country of his own free will. Julio’s breakdance solo undermines some of his earlier gestures toward conformity with dominant values, such as normalization of his status, inclusion, and realization of the American Dream as defined by educational and work opportunities. Up until the solo, he dances in fairly conventional duets with his mother and J. Wilbur; now he bursts into a frenetic sequence of moves, including windmill-like whirling on the floor ending in a one-arm handstand, then rolling backwards and forwards in straddle splits. The impulse to abandon conventional physical movement and balance upside down on one hand, like Julio’s desire to be a dancer, is queer both for how it departs from the conventional use of time and space and for how, by exhibiting and valuing artistry, it implicitly questions the more materialistic and typical American Dream desires propounded by J. Wilbur Worker: a house of one’s own and a well-paying job.

No Future? Julio’s future appears bleak at the end of Nine Digits , as he sits curled up on his little platform of a stage inside his chain-link fence pondering his options aloud. His musings suggest that Coutin’s term, “space of nonexistence,” could be expanded to cover literal nonexistence, the deaths of the undocumented caused by U.S. laws and policies. Julio recounts how

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some versions of the DREAM Act would require young people who do not attend college to register for military service in order to be allowed on a legal path to citizenship. In the theatrical tradition of the Living Newspaper, he retells a story taken from the news: the fate of Guatemalan-born Marine Lance Corporal José Gutiérrez and Marine Corporal José Garibay of Mexico, who were granted U.S. citizenship only after they were killed early on in the Iraq War in March of 2003. His tone drips with sarcasm as he parodies a macho military official: “If a person is willing to die for their country that should be enough for them to become a citizen.” The melodrama of suffering to the point of death in order to win posthumous recognition of the sacrifice and virtue necessary to obtain citizenship rights becomes an absurdist farce in Julio’s satirical account. Though his voice turns sincere as he compares himself to Gutiérrez, who was also aged twenty-two, and to Garibay, “who like me did not choose to come to the U.S. but was brought here by his parents so he could have a better life,” spectators can appreciate the irony: parents who bring their children to the United States in hopes that they will have a better life instead face the loss of their children’s life. In a kind of Brechtian strategy reminiscent of how Ann Filmer staged an open ending for Our Dad Is in Atlantis (discussed in Chapter 6), the question of what will happen to Julio is left open, leaving it up to the audience to take measures to improve the prospects for his future and the future of other youth like him.

Undocuspace Throughout Nine Digits , undocuspace is depicted as confining and shadowy. The set is lit with low light and chain-link shadows are projected across the small, raised wooden stage floor, even at times when the chainlink walls are at a distance from the raised stage (lighting designer, Jeremy Getz). While Mami and J. Wilbur make many entrances and exits, apparently free to come and go, Julio remains on stage throughout the entire play, confined to the playing area, always subject to spectator scrutiny. Toward the end of the work, Mami first rolls two chain-link walls in on either side of Julio; J. Wilbur then rolls in the second pair of walls to trap him inside the chain-link cube. He thus appears thoroughly imprisoned between his family’s fears and his host country’s cruelty. His artistry is confined to this small space, as he is not allowed to travel outside of the country, nor even within the country to accept his dance internship in Washington, DC. The image of captivity contrasts with the central

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event of the play, Julio’s coming out as undocumented, since to come out implies to emerge into light and open space. Yet the image reminds us that coming out as undocumented has its risks, including imprisonment and deportation. Chávez divides those who come out into two camps: “For some coming out is a strategy that reflects a political orientation toward and around narrative and identity, but for others, coming out suggests being oriented toward and around systemic critique and change.”25 Julio as a coming-of-age character within the world of the play mostly reflects the former, an individual concerned primarily with revealing the truth of his own story in order to create his identity. Yet Julio as an outward-facing character embodied by an actor who breaks the fourth wall to acknowledge his audience, for instance, when he concludes his coming-out moment by noting “and now I’ve told a whole room full of people,” or when he connects his own story to that of the Marines who were granted posthumous citizenship, he reaches out of his cramped undocuspace to invite systemic critique and change. The ending of Nine Digits queers our sense of the future in a way that brings to mind the debate between queer theorists Lee Edelman and José Esteban Muñoz. Edelman mocks the “revolutionary waif” in the Les Miserables logo (the character of Cosette) and the song “One Day More” as emblematic of what he calls “futurism,” that is hope as unconditionally celebrated in the fantasy of the future child, no matter how dire the present may be for actual children and adults alike.26 Melodramas like the classic Les Miserables operate under a logic of futurism in so far as the acknowledgment of a character as virtuous, even a posthumous acknowledgment, is supposed to be enough to satisfy the spectator. Once virtue and vice have been exposed as such, the narrative concludes, the spectators experience catharsis, the dramatic tension is resolved, and spectators are often left with the vague hope that even a tragedy for this generation may result in a better life for future generations. Responding to Edelman’s rejection of futurism, José Esteban Muñoz defends utopianism as necessary “to combat the forces of political pessimism.” Moments of everyday fun and astonishment at the ordinary, a sense of “wow!” or “contemplative awe” in the face of quotidian pleasures, are essential to conjuring the queerness that Muñoz argues lies only in the future, though it may always remain an unfulfilled potential.27 The character of Alvarez in the end doubts the “better life” of the American Dream, rejecting the blind hope of futurism. His “wow!” moments come when he dances alone in the present, or acts out his childhood playfulness in a flashback. Yet there are

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few, if any glimmers of a utopian future in his present, as Muñoz would have it. Instead, the glimmer of hope presented by the DREAM Act fades as time goes by, both inside and outside the world of the play. When Alvarez projects himself into the future, as emblematized by the dead soldier with whom he identifies, what he imagines is the obscene joke of a posthumous recognition of citizenship rights. Neither Edelman’s insistent rejection of futurity nor Muñoz’s idea that the future can be glimpsed in the quotidian pleasures of the present exactly describe Julio’s attitude toward his future. Perhaps we need a new theory that could describe the future as glimpsed from the perspective of undocutime and undocuspace. Such a theory would have to consider what utopia would look and feel like for a population that cannot count on future legal inclusion. Despite its rejection of futurism, Nine Digits remains a migrant melodrama, we argue, primarily because of how its protagonist suffers unjustly and serves as a kind of emblem for the cause of migrant rights. Secondly, the protagonist faces off against a villainous antagonist, the character of J. Wilbur Worker, who would make migrants like Julio suffer unjustly. And finally, the play maintains and even emphasizes the power imbalance between the virtuous protagonist and the spectators to whom it appeals for empathy, spectators who have the means to help Alvarez, presumably by advocating for the DREAM Act. Though the play is not agitprop, and is never so crude as to openly ask spectators to advocate for the DREAM Act, it strongly implies that it is up to the spectators to help pass the legislation. In sum, though the work remains within the tradition of moral reform melodrama, at the same time, by refusing to portray human suffering as redemptive and by questioning dominant values such as nationalism and the American Dream, it queers melodrama in radical directions that encourage us to imagine an undocutime and undocuspace-based utopia.

Julio Salgado, Undocuqueer Salgado’s work includes posters, writings, lectures, and videos, and is widely distributed through social media, including his personal webpage, juliosalgadoart.com; the webpage that he founded with DREAMer collaborators who call themselves Dreamers Adrift, dreamersadrift.com; Facebook; Instagram; Tumblr; and YouTube. His drawings have increasingly been used to illustrate books and articles, including Papers: Stories by Undocumented Youth (2012, edited by José Manuel, Cesar Pineda, and Anne Galisky) and The DREAMers (2013, Walter J. Nicholls).

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Since 2011, he has worked with collaborators on CultureStrike to form a national network of socially engaged artists that have sponsored art exhibits, film installations, writing workshops, and solidarity actions with other groups such as Walmart workers who demanded a $15 per hour minimum wage. He has been invited to give workshops and artist’s talks at universities across the country, from Portland State to Princeton. In 2012 he appeared on the cover of Time magazine along with a couple of dozen other DREAMers. In the cover story, “We are Americans, just not legally,” written by Filipino undocumented activist and journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, each of the DREAMers is listed by name, country of origin, and a one-sentence quotation. Salgado said: “I want to use art to empower my community.” Salgado’s autobiographical narrative and performance, as he constructs it and relates it to his community through media interviews, in his poster art, and in the video series we analyze here, Undocumented and Awkward, at times deploys migrant melodrama and at times queers it so much that it may no longer even qualify as melodrama. Salgado challenges the aspect of DREAMer migrant melodrama in which a deserving victim is assumed to be straight, as if being straight were necessarily part of an ideal American identity that includes characteristics such as A-student, hard-working, and respectful of authority. By contrast to Julio Alvarez’s more normative expressions of sexuality (He lets spectators know that he has a girlfriend whom he may one day marry “for love.”), Salgado calls himself “undocuqueer,” a label that announces that he is both undocumented and gay, or queer, as he says he prefers to be called, signaling a nonconformist homosexuality: “The more I find out and experience what the word ‘gay’ means to the mainstream – this idea of clean, white, male, white picket fence ideal. Gay marriage. That’s what I think when I hear the word ‘gay.’ And that doesn’t necessarily represent who I am.”28 The intersection between his identity as queer and his identity as undocumented has been prominent both to Salgado’s public persona and to its fictional incarnations in poster illustrations and YouTube videos. In interviews, Salgado sometimes stresses that the undocumented should not have to conform to an image of perfection in order to merit inclusion in the United States: So we need to change culture – to write poetry, to make images and writings.

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Not to show us as the perfect immigrant, but that give us depth, the different layers of humanity that we have. We’re not perfect. That is what the politicians want to sell. “Look at the them – they’re perfect!”…It’s a huge mistake… By showing that we are not perfect – that’s the way to connect with other people.29

Yet Salgado’s story of how he and his family came to the United States, which he often repeats in interviews, nevertheless deploys melodrama’s appeal to empathy with suffering victims. According to Salgado, when he, his sister, and his parents entered the United States on tourist visas, they did not intend to remain here. Once they were here, however, they discovered that his younger sister needed medical treatment for kidney disease, and doctors suggested that she be treated in the United States. To save his sister’s life, then, Salgado’s parents decided to abandon their lives in Mexico and take whatever jobs they could get in California to help her get the treatment she needed. As Salgado tells it, and draws it in one of his most often-circulated poster images, his parents are heroes who made a brave decision by deciding to remain in the United States despite their lack of legal authorization.30 This narrative casts his parents as traditional melodrama protagonists—they sacrificed to save a suffering victim, his sister—and his work publicly acknowledges the virtue of that sacrifice. In the context of a public debate about migration that often casts the parents of DREAMer youth as criminals who victimized their children (as Arellano was cast by her detractors), Salgado’s image recasts the supposed villains as the heroes of the narrative. The potential pitfall of this recasting, as we discussed at length in Part II, is that even as it defends the parents, it reinforces melodrama’s demand for victims, heroes, and villains. In some of his poster art and in his video series, however, Salgado breaks out of the dualities of conventional melodrama.

Undocutime and Undocuspace in Salgado’s Posters Though we focus on his self-produced video series, Undocumented and Awkward, it is worth first briefly describing some of the poster work that established Salgado as one of the most prominent undocumented artistactivists in the United States today. Among Salgado’s posters, perhaps the most conservative in its melodramatic appeal relates to the narrative mentioned above, a visual representation of his past: an image of a father,

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mother, son, and daughter who exude heterosexual nuclear family unity as they face forward, in the standard family portrait pose (Fig. 7.2). The father is taller than any of the other figures and wraps one arm around his wife protectively while putting his other hand on his son’s shoulder, as if to reassure him. The figures are drawn as cartoon illustrations in bold, elegant lines and shaded various shades of brown skin tones; neatly dressed and hair neatly combed, clad in straightforward primary colors (white, red, yellow, and blue), their facial expressions exude an air of pleasant tranquillity. “MY PARENTS ARE COURAGEOUS AND RESPONSIBLE. THAT’S WHY I’M HERE!” read the words emblazoned above the parents’ heads. The explanation could be the thoughts or the words of either the boy or the girl, or both. Without referencing immigration status directly, the adjectives “courageous” and “responsible” nevertheless suggest that the parents deserve respect, admiration, and inclusion. Though on the one hand the title could refer to Salgado’s family struggle with his sister’s illness, on the other hand the praise for the parents remains generic enough that it could apply to any number of migrant families. While not fearful, unlike the mother in Nine Digits , this mother is also sympathetic, and in a different way also contests the casting of mothers (and fathers) as criminals who brought their children to the United States against their will. All four members of the family, like most of the figures, or characters, to use the language of performance, that Salgado draws are imbued with a kind of dignity that he says he emulated from the drawings of the Black Panther artist Emory Douglas.31 Other Salgado posters extend beyond dignified portrayals to depart from the melodrama of the suffering victims who deserve inclusion because they have overcome hardship and instead depict defiance of nation-state pressures to conform to normative ideals in order to merit inclusion. In one poster rooted in an adult world, far from the adolescent in a collared shirt of the clean-cut heterosexual-family poster, a cartoon version of a bearded Salgado stands nude from the waist up, shaded in Mexican pink, wearing monarch butterfly wings (Fig. 7.3). On his torso is written “I exist” in English and “Yo existo” in Spanish. The four sections of his butterfly wings are each shaded a different color— red, orange, green, and blue, against a yellow background, evoking an LGBTQ pride flag. The wing sections on the left side read, from top to bottom: “JOTERIA, MIGRANTE, AMOR, FAMILIA, UNIDAD, PAZ.” The wing sections on the right side repeat the list in English, though with the order of the first two items reversed: “MIGRANT,

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Fig. 7.2 My Parents Are Courageous and Responsible. That’s Why I’m Here!, digital artwork by Julio Salgado (Courtesy of Julio Salgado)

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Fig. 7.3 I Exist, Yo existo, digital artwork by Julio Salgado (Courtesy of Julio Salgado)

QUEERNESS, LOVE, FAMILY, UNITY, PEACE.” By contrast to the self-presentations of some DREAMers as so American that they speak no other language but English, the man in this image proudly announces his bilingualism, as well as his queerness and his more stereotypically normative family values. As we noted in Chapter 4 in our discussion of Javier Chavira’s portrait of Arellano, because of its migration patterns, the monarch butterfly is a common symbol for migrants. Salgado’s monarch butterfly, however, is also a queer butterfly, forcing the viewer to acknowledge that nonheterosexual migrants exist and are also a part of nature, as underscored by the declaration of existence scrawled across the male figure’s torso, which in a more abstract, philosophical way serves the same purpose as Julio Alvarez’s mother’s scrawl of an address across her son’s torso. Parallel to how the address served as a defense against losing a son, to declare that one exists claims a right to space and defends against a loss of self-identity. The most confrontational Salgado posters create new kinds of undocutime and undocuspace community. For his “I am Undocu-Queer” series, which includes dozens of images, Salgado put out an internet

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call for people to send him a photo from the waist up along with a short quote that describes what it means for the person to be both undocumented and queer.32 He then drew his version of the person, along with their quote. Though Salgado may have refused to reproduce certain quotations, the content of the quotations that he did reproduce was not entirely under his control. Thus the project reflects a wide variety of stances and gestures, from those focused on individual self-acceptance to those that return the hostility of a violent nation-state with hostility of their own. “I’d rather be undocumented than die for your acceptance,” reads the caption above an image of a brown-skinned young man in a neon-lime-green graduation cap and gown who raises the middle finger of his right hand out toward the viewer (Fig. 7.4). In symbolic language far harsher than Julio Alvarez’s, the “up yours” gesture rejects the versions of the DREAM Act that would require undocumented youth who do not attend college to join the military in order to become eligible for citizenship. In no uncertain terms, the would-be DREAMer rejects the threat to his very existence that would be imposed upon him by some legislators. Yet perhaps the most elegant confrontational Salgado poster depicts a beautiful woman, eyes closed and mouth open, hair blowing back in the wind. Above her head read the words: “FUCK YOUR BORDERS!”. A more elaborate version of the same idea, FUCK YOUR BORDERS, Part 2, which does not appear to have been inspired by an image solicited by internet, depicts a queer utopian scene at a border wall (Fig. 7.5). A man’s eyes are just visible above the top of a wall or a fence; he hangs on to the barrier with hands decorated with hot pink nail polish. His hairy legs are spread and dangle from the knees over the edge, revealing vibrant blue nail polish on his toes. The writing between his knees reads FUCK YOUR BORDERS. Behind the man’s head, a woman in profile seems to pleasure herself. Behind her, two men stand close, face to face, their open mouths suggesting that perhaps they are masturbating each other. Behind the men are two women, and behind those women, yet another layer of even larger female forms. Without depicting nipples or genitals, the work suggests that all eight human figures are nude. Instead of provoking fear or compelling brown-skinned people to turn back, this border wall becomes a site of eroticism and sexual pleasure. The imaginary line of model would-be citizens patiently waiting their turn to seek entry into the United States, often imagined by conservatives as the legal, “right” way to immigrate, has been humorously tweaked by Salgado into a sensual parade of queers who are perhaps waiting their

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Fig. 7.4 I’d Rather Be Undocumented Than Die for Your Acceptance, digital artwork by Julio Salgado (Courtesy of Julio Salgado)

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Fig. 7.5 Fuck Your Borders, Part 2, digital artwork by Julio Salgado (Courtesy of Julio Salgado)

turn to jump the wall. Claimed by undocuqueers and converted into a utopian place of love and lust, instead of the militarized zone that the border actually is today, this imaginary undocuspace creates the antithesis of the clandestine spaces of fear and nonexistence in which migrants are often imagined to dwell. Playful, grotesque, and beautiful all at the same time, it also provides the antithesis of the clean-cut heterosexual nuclear family in Salgado’s “MY PARENTS ARE COURAGEOUS.” These contradictory impulses, to conform and to defy, to seek inclusion

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and to question the rules of inclusion, not only characterize different Salgado works, at times they are present in the same work.

Undocutime and Undocuspace in Undocumented and Awkward Undocumented and Awkward is a series of thirteen short videos, ranging in length from one minute and thirty-four seconds to six minutes and twenty-nine seconds, posted on the Dreamers Adrift website between November 8, 2011 and May 12, 2013.33 Like Nine Digits , many of the episodes are slices of life that reflect on the vagaries of undocutime and undocuspace. Yet Julio Salgado and his primary sidekick on the video series, Jesús Iñiguez, skewer the absurdities of their untenable position, sometimes by playing characters that seem very close to their actual selves and sometimes playing insensitive, loutish versions of themselves to comic effect. The cast includes several Asian characters and explores tensions and coalitions among members of different minority groups and different social classes within the same ethnic group. Some of the central themes sounded in the series include the humiliation of being labeled “illegal,” the difficulty in finding rewarding work after college, and the limitations on mobility imposed on undocumented bodies. While the series does not revisit the history of U.S. immigration policy’s discrimination against lesbians and gay men, one must keep in mind that it was only in 1990 that the ban against the entry of homosexuals into the United States was lifted. And it was only in 2013, after the Supreme Court ruling in United States v Windsor found the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional, that gay and lesbian U.S. citizens were allowed to sponsor their same-sex partners for residency visas. Even within DREAM Act activist circles, moreover, some leaders advocated keeping gay and lesbian identities closeted for fear that they might distract from the main cause of migrant rights or somehow tarnish the image of the ideal citizen that the movement was attempting to convey.34 Salgado is one of the DREAMer activist leaders who rejected that position and instead stressed the intersection of queer and undocumented identities, a stance that has now been embraced by most mainstream DREAMer activist groups. For instance, in 2012, United We Dream, one of the largest and most visible organizations, started the Queer Undocumented Immigrant Project to “organize and empower LGBTQ immigrants and allies to address social and systemic barriers by building

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and developing youth leaders.” A United We Dream report credits the Queer Undocumented Immigrant Project with working toward the end of the Defense of Marriage Act, providing deportation relief for immigrant youth, seeking to pass comprehensive immigration reform, and trying to end abuse of LGBTQ immigrants in detention.35 Some episodes of Undocumented and Awkward depart entirely from melodrama and even from narrative, venturing into playfully abstract styles. Yet two episodes that explore the theme of work in undocutime and undocuspace clearly toy with spectator expectations shaped by the pervasiveness of melodramatic imagination. In Episode 2, Julio emerges from a hotel room, wastebasket and towels in hand, only to run into an old classmate from high school who is a guest in the hotel and has been locked out of the adjacent room (Fig. 7.6). “Julio!” the high school friend, another Latino young man, Jorge, exclaims. Within seconds, he brags that he graduated from Brown University and is doing very well for himself. He seems shocked to see Julio cleaning hotel rooms. Yes, Julio assures him, he also graduated from college, though a less prestigious local school, and it took him nine years to do so. This backstory closely follows Salgado’s actual life trajectory: Because he could not qualify for federal financial aid, Salgado took eight-and-a-half years to work

Fig. 7.6 Undocumented and Awkward, Episode 2. YouTube video still (Courtesy of Julio Salgado)

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while attending school and earn his bachelor’s degree in journalism from California State University, Long Beach. The video’s plot sets up the spectator to expect either rejection from a mean, arrogant former classmate or support, and possibly rescue, from a good, true friend. Jorge seems to fall into the latter category: He listens to Julio’s mumbled explanation of how his “immigration status” has not been sorted out, yet nevertheless gives Julio his card and offers to give him “an opportunity.” What subverts expectations, however, is that rather than express gratitude or eagerness to grasp the opportunity, Julio simply faces the camera, grimaces, and shrugs his shoulders, as if to express “whatever.” The ending neither recognizes the friend as noble rescuer nor celebrates Julio as a particularly worthy victim. In fact it remains unclear whether Julio will even pursue the friend’s offer. The subversion of melodramatic expectations is significant because it diminishes the exchange value of suffering. Julio’s efforts at working at dead-end jobs while he went to school and after graduation have not ennobled his character in any way; neither has his suffering entitled him to any reward. Similarly, in Episode 4 Julio has found work in an office. (It is not clear whether this episode is connected to Episode 2 and whether the office job was obtained through his high school friend, or whether each episode is a discrete entity.) Once again, the happy-ending expectation is that Julio will be delighted to work in a higher-status setting, a space sometimes difficult for the undocumented to claim. After all, Julio notes in an aside to the camera, a formal strategy reminiscent of the television program The Office, his previous employment included washing dishes, construction work, and cleaning houses. Yet the reality of his new desk job is less than idyllic. While his boss ignores him, one of his coworkers, Deisy, watches the news on her desktop and rails against the undocumented: “God! They should just get deported already.” She makes the classic distinction between deserving and undeserving immigrants: “Don’t get me wrong. I love immigrants. I mean my parents are immigrants, OK? But they came in the right way. They didn’t sneak into this country and demand rights.” Her demeanor is so unpleasant and obviously hypocritical that it undercuts her message. While another coworker stands up for the undocumented, Julio remains silent. At the conclusion of the episode, the boss announces that starting the following week, the company will participate in E-Verify, the internet-based system that weeds out unauthorized workers by comparing the information workers provided to the employer with information on record with the Social Security

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Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. Julio muses: “I wonder if I can get my old job back?” Yet anti-immigrant Deisy has the last word: “It’s about time!” Julio’s efforts to get ahead, like Julio Alvarez’s parents’ wish for him to have “a better life” have come to naught, through no fault of his own. As a protagonist, he is depicted as neither extraordinarily deserving nor particularly undeserving. His fate is not determined by his degree of suffering: he is simply unlucky, in the wrong place at the wrong time. In this universe, evil (as represented on the individual level by Deisy’s character and on the structural level by the E-verify system) triumphs, yet Julio’s struggles do not make him noble or worthy of inclusion on the basis of his exceptionalism. While the character of Julio may provoke less empathy among some viewers for his apparent lack of ambition or talent, among other viewers his very ordinariness may encourage empathy, as Salgado himself suggests in the interview with Hinda Seif cited above. As we discussed in detail in Chapter 2, however, empathy can be dangerous for its tendency to obscure the subjectivity of the person with whom one empathizes in favor of one’s own experience. Episode 1 of Season 2 tackles this theme in relationship to a space and activity often associated with the undocumented, the unauthorized border crossing. During a get-to-know each other activity on the first day of summer session, a group of college students are encouraged to share something about themselves. One young woman shares that she crossed the Arizona desert with her family, prompting another young man to respond, with a sympathetic hand on her forearm: “Oh my God, I understand. I ran a 5 K once in Arizona and it was really hot. I almost didn’t even finish because it was like ‘Oh my God, I need water.’” From there the conversation rambles into a discussion of running techniques among the four students gathered around the undocumented woman, whose face betrays sadness at the trivialization of her experience. On the other hand, the same episode shows how an extreme lack of empathy may be just as brutal. When another young woman says that her family came from Peru on a tourist visa and remained in the country, her conversation partner exclaims: “You’re illegal!” The series shows how fraught the question of how one came to occupy the space that one occupies can be for the undocumented. At the same time, the series stresses how mobility is constrained for the undocumented. As implied by the word “adrift” in the producing collective’s name, Dreamers Adrift, being undocumented can make one feel unmoored, unstable, and buffeted by forces beyond one’s control.

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A couple of episodes highlight the inconvenience and embarrassment of not being able to drive (Episodes 3 and 5) and one depicts the inability of the undocumented to risk leaving the United States (Episode 6). With characteristic humor, the episode focuses on one young woman who cannot join her college buddies on a trip to the Philippines, even though she was born there. Rather than admit her immigration status, she fibs: “I didn’t want to tell you guys, but I just hate the Philippines, OK?” In a playful attempt to take mobility into their own hands, Julio, Jesus, and Marco devote Episode 11 to enumerating thirteen different ways to leave awkward situations provoked by one’s undocumented status. Using facial expressions, hand gestures, and physical movements, the group performs their own at times hilarious renditions of different styles of departure: balloon, snail, snowman, octopus, cell phone, horse, mustache, turtle, butterfly, face, starfish, escape, and hide-and-seek. Certain escapes are prompted by uncomfortable questions. The turtle’s departure, for instance, is triggered by the question, “What the fuck is an undocuqueer?” Jesús’s performance of “the face” as a mask of panic is accompanied by Julio’s question: “Are you OK? I just asked you if you had a license.” The young men’s clowning gives physical expression to the unease and desire to flee provoked by questions that might seem innocent but could also prove dangerous. Departure is always an element of an undocumented sense of space, since the undocumented live with the possibility of an abrupt interruption of their routines and a forced removal from the national territory. The young men’s comic performances of departure make a game out of the constant, nagging fear of deportation. The awkwardness referred to in the series title, Undocumented and Awkward, similarly understates the emotions generated by dangerous encounters in undocutime and undocuspace. At the end of each episode, a little voice sings out “Awwwkwaaard” as if to reduce the depicted unpleasant experience, humiliation, or threat to a moment of mild social embarrassment. This is the opposite of melodrama’s tendency to heighten and display emotion, a tendency mocked in Episode 8 when a leftier-than-thou young man approaches Julio and Jesus to tell them they should be “angrier.” Julio assures him, in a mild tone of voice, that they are angry, in their own way. The understated style of emotional expression in Undocumented and Awkward departs from that of the migrant melodramas we have previously examined. No one cries; no one screams. Its universe sometimes seems more absurd rather than Manichean. Suffering is represented as pointless rather than as a valuable

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currency. Some might not view Undocumented and Awkward as melodramatic at all. Yet we argue that the videos are tethered to the tradition of melodrama by their sense of justice and injustice, their villains who create “awkward” situations and the victims who must tolerate the insensitivity. As in moral reform melodrama, there are lessons for documented spectators in Undocumented and Awkward: stop calling human beings “illegal”; don’t humiliate people because of their undocumented status; don’t expect everyone to have the same privileges that you have. For the undocumented, the melodramatic elements of Undocumented and Awkward can help build a sense of solidarity among people who experience humiliations at the hands of the documented.

“Yo, No, I’m Gonna Tell My Own Story” Julio Salgado plays himself, or rather a version of himself that goes by the same first name, and writes his own scripts, together with his collaborators. Julio Alvarez’s story was more highly mediated: He was embodied by another young actor in the Albany Park Theater Project, and that actor in turn was coached by APTP’s adult directors. This is not to say that one performance is more true or somehow superior the other. Salgado insists in the quotation used for the epigraph to this chapter that one way to attempt to retain control of one’s subjectification and exercise agency is to reject the assistance of intermediaries in the narration and performance of self. On the other hand, without assistance some people might never find the wherewithal to tell or perform their stories for broader audiences. Salgado himself, through his writing and his drawing, tells the stories of others and often draws people of other genders, races, and ethnicities. His parody of a 2012 American Apparel advertisement, for instance, provides a counter-illustration to the ad’s photograph of a willowy young white woman in a silky sleeveless top and white hot-pants, described as “Robin, a USC student studying public relations,” hanging on to the arm of a husky denim-clad brown-skinned man described as “Raúl, a California farmer.” Salgado’s “Undocumented Apparel” triptych, by contrast, features quotations from three brown-skinned people. On the left panel, a woman in a white head scarf and a long-sleeved khaki shirt says “Things don’t get better, we get stronger;” smaller letters below describe her: “Maa is an undocumented activist from Illinois.” In the center panel, a man in a bright red cardigan says, “You went to an Occupy protest because you have a bachelor’s and can’t find a job? My parents had

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masters and worked at gas stations. We are the zero percent;” smaller letters below describe him: “Minhaz is in an ambiguous state of legality. He is a writer and a science and popular culture enthusiast.” In the right panel, perhaps a reference to Salgado’s mother and sister, a woman in a magenta business suit carrying a toddler girl in a ruffled dress says, “You backpacked across Europe and they called you adventurous. I crossed a border to save my daughter’s life and they called me a criminal.” The small print below reads: “Esperanza is a courageous and responsible mother. Claudia is her daughter, who is now 24 years old.” The two sets of letters on each panel shift the perspective from first-person to thirdperson, from a subjective to an objective voice, as if both positionalities are necessary to complete the stories that challenge the presumable privilege of an imaginary white, middle-class, documented-citizen spectator. Telling one’s own story, moreover, does not necessarily protect against the double-edged sword of migrant melodrama. As some of the examples we have discussed earlier demonstrate, because migrant melodrama is in the zeitgeist, performing one’s own story as a powerless, suffering victim who requires rescue from more powerful others may feel more natural and true to some people than avoiding melodrama. Finally, as we have shown, since melodrama is at times extremely efficacious, despite its drawbacks, strategic use of it may at times constitute the best option. Whether by telling one’s own story or by telling the stories of others, queering migrant melodrama in Nine Digits and Undocumented and Awkward challenges the normative ideals of nationalism and the American Dream. These two ideals are often intertwined: a preferential love for fellow citizens within sovereign borders, paradoxically, fuses with a competitive drive for economic success that pits one against one’s fellow citizens and noncitizens alike. Since the American Dream of a “better life” as defined by his parents eludes him, Julio Alvarez defines himself, at least partially, through the art of dance rather than through economic success. Similarly, Julio Salgado’s many day jobs do not define him; he defines himself instead by his work as what he calls an “artivist,” blending artist and activist, just as he blends “undocumented” and “queer” in the neologism “undocuqueer,” creating the possibility of an identity formed by two new words: “undocuqueer artivist.” Just as much or more than their obvious critiques of U.S. immigration policy, it is these artists’ more subtle critiques of nationalism and capitalism that create the kind of hope that Ernst Bloch called a concrete utopia, the vision of a world that could be otherwise.

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Notes 1. Alan Gomez, “Who Are the DACA DREAMers and How Many Are Here?” USA Today, February 13, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/ story/news/politics/2018/02/13/who-daca-dreamers-and-how-manyhere/333045002/. 2. See the cartoon autobiography Alberto Ledesma, Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer: Undocumented Vignettes from a Pre-American Life (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2017). An oratorio, Dreamers, by playwright Nilo Cruz and composer Jimmy López opened in 2019 as part of Cal Performances, sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley. Numerous exhibits of photographs featuring DREAMers have been organized online and in exhibition spaces around the country. See for instance, Matt Black’s photographs and Alicia Acevedo’s accompanying interviews in “California Dreamers,” Topic, no. 5 (November 2017), https://www. topic.com/california-dreamers. 3. Walter J. Nicholls, The DREAMers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 107. 4. Michael Warner, “Fear of a Queer Planet,” Social Text 29 (1991): 3–17. 5. Alejandro Monroy, “Undocutime,” in Migration Stories: A Community Anthology 2017, eds. Rachel Cohen and Rachel DeWoskin (2017), 128–29. https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/bitstream/handle/11417/ 992/Migration%20Stories%20Anthology.pdf. Licensed under https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. 6. Roberto G. Gonzales, Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). 7. Ibid., 120–148. 8. Coutin, Legalizing Moves, 29–34. 9. Karma R. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 79–111. 10. Christopher Goodson, “The Undocu-Graduation (2015–17): The Performance of Citizenship and Anti-ritual,” Theatre Topics 28, no. 2 (July 2018): 151–158. 11. Ibid., 154–156. 12. See Amalia Pallares, Family Activism: Immigrant Struggles and the Politics of Noncitizenship (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 97–131. 13. Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales, “Undocumented Youth Activism as Counter-Spectacle: Civil Disobedience and Testimonio in the Battle around Immigration Reform,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 40, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 87–112; Thomas Swerts, “Gaining a Voice: Storytelling and Undocumented Youth Activism in Chicago,” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 20, no. 3 (2015): 345–360.

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14. Gad Guterman, Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 59. 15. Octavio Solis, “Lydia,” American Theatre 25, no. 10 (December 2008): 82. 16. For an insightful analysis of Intríngulis focused on the work as a performance that creates “spaces of existence, even if only fleeting ones,” see Guterman, 1–5. 17. Carlo Alban, “Undocumented and Unafraid: Carlo Alban,” audio, 3:21, January 20, 2012, https://latinousa.org/2012/01/20/undocumentedand-unafraid-carlo-alban/. 18. See Chávez, 100–104, for a discussion of Salgado’s “I am Undocuqueer” posters as a coalitional gesture. 19. Ibid., 95. 20. Since Nine Digits has not been published, we cite from a DVD of the production provided by the Albany Park Theater Project. 21. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, vol. 1 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 117. 22. Gonzales, Lives in Limbo, 120–148. 23. Chávez, 79–111. 24. Nicholas De Genova, “The Queer Politics of Migration: Reflections on ‘Illegality’ and Incorrigibility,” Studies in Social Justice 4, no. 2 (2010): 107. 25. Chávez, 85. 26. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 11. 27. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 4–14. 28. Hinda Seif, “‘Layers of Humanity’: Interview with Undocuqueer Artivist Julio Salgado,” Latino Studies 12, no. 2 (2014): 304. 29. Ibid., 308. 30. Julie Compton, “Mexican-American Artist Julio Salgado Is LGBTQ, Undocumented, and Unafraid,” NBC News, September 9, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/mexican-american-artistjulio-salgado-lgbtq-undocumented-unafraid-n799786. 31. Seif, 304. 32. For an analysis of the “I am Undocuqueer” posters as resistance, see Carrie Hart, “The Artivism of Julio Salgado’s I Am Undocuqueer! Series,” Working Papers on Language and Diversity in Education 1, no. 1 (August 2015): 1–14. 33. Only one episode of Undocumented and Awkward seems to have been uploaded in its second season. The project may have been abandoned in favor of a new video series, Osito, which highlighted the gay–straight friendship between Salgado and Iñiguez, and ran from 2012 to 2016.

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34. Both Nicholls, 55–59, and Chávez, 100, stress this division within the DREAMer community. 35. See Zenén Jaimes Pérez, No More Closets: Experiences of Discrimination among the LGBTQ Immigrant Community (Washington, DC: United We Dream, 2016).

Epilogue

In the Introduction we posed the questions: Are certain ways of deploying melodrama more efficacious than others in representing the lives and promoting the rights of the undocumented? Can there be such a thing as strategic, efficacious melodrama? At first, we were skeptical of melodrama’s power to do more than create pitiful victims whose suffering could be commodified and traded on a global market in displays of pain. To sum up the drawbacks of migrant melodrama that we have explored throughout this book: First, displays that focus on individual suffering tend to obfuscate the structural elements that caused the suffering to begin with. As spectators, we are moved to want to rescue individuals but not necessarily to change structures of power nor to reflect upon our own complicity in maintaining those structures. Second, migrant melodrama creates a class of suffering victims who are presented to spectators as deserving, thus suggesting that others who are less than paragons of virtue, or do not meet certain normative ideals, or have not suffered enough, or have not suffered in the right ways, are undeserving. Third, while melodrama can make us feel for others, it can also make us focus more on our experience of pain than on that of others. And fourth, as a kind of currency in a political economy, displays of suffering are subject to inflation: ever more sensationalistic displays may be elaborated in an attempt to move spectators to ameliorate the pain of a particular group of sufferers.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. E. Puga and V. M. Espinosa, Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37409-9

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Nevertheless, as we delved into many different varieties of migrant melodrama, from Bishop Scalabrini’s 1888 call to “rescue these unfortunate people from so many and such bitter misfortunes” to Julio Salgado’s 2011–2013 Undocumented and Awkward YouTube video series, we gained a greater appreciation for the potential of the form to question cultural norms that mandate the exclusion of certain individuals. In attempts to combat exclusion, the contemporary rescuer-figures that we discussed in Part I—Rigoni, Sánchez, and Solalinde—regularly construct migrant melodramas as an almost unavoidable part of providing migrant care and advocacy. Migrant activists themselves, we showed in Part II with our analysis of Arellano’s performance of motherhood and the performances of disability by the male migrants in AMIREDIS, may either collaborate with rescuer-figures to help cast themselves as deserving victims or devise corrective castings to stage themselves more in accordance with their own sense of identity. The examples of children and youth that we analyzed in Part III demonstrated that the kind of melodrama that most nurtures migrant agency is often devised and cast by migrants themselves, avoids easy empathy, may involve a collective rather than an individual protagonist, does not imbue suffering with an exchange value, and queers the melodramatic form so as to challenge cultural norms that mandate the exclusion of certain individuals. In the decade since we began to think about the intersections between migration, suffering, and performance, unfortunately, migrant suffering has increased, not only in the Americas, but around the world. Migration from Africa to Europe peaked during 2015, when more than a million migrants attempted the journey, yet the death rate among migrants was even higher in 2018, when the United Nations Refugee Agency estimated that due to reduced search and rescue efforts, one out of every eight people who attempted the Mediterranean Sea crossing lost their lives.1 In Asia in 2017, seven hundred thousand Rohingya refugees were forced to flee from Myanmar to Bangladesh, bringing the total number of refugees to nine hundred thousand.2 While estimates of the numbers of Central American migrants disappeared in Mexico grew to tens of thousands, according to the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration, the number of deaths recorded among migrants attempting to cross the U.S.–Mexico border also increased, from 398 in 2016 to 415 in 2017. As the global population of migrants, refugees, stateless, and other displaced people has increased to record levels, some theorists have re-thought the “natural” human condition as nomadic rather than

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rooted.3 Yet much cultural production continues to focus on the undeserved, spectacular suffering of a few individuals rather than on the respect for human rights that we should all enjoy, both the human right to “life, liberty, and security of person” as well as the rights to leave one’s country and to seek asylum, as stated in Articles 3, 13, and 14 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. While the Declaration of Human Rights remains abstract and often ignored, migrant melodrama continues to be created by people trying to make sense of suffering and navigate through times of crisis. On a practical level, melodrama sometimes appeals more successfully to human decency than invocations of international law. Therefore, we cannot close this study by calling for a moratorium on melodrama. Rather than take a position for or against melodrama, we ask that scholars, activists, and artists be more self-aware of both the limitations imposed and opportunities offered by melodramatic imagination, that we attend more to the consequences of how we deploy and participate in melodrama. Under the administration of President Trump, U.S. news is full of migrant melodramas. From the administration’s perspective, migrants are often the villains and the United States is a victim-hero that must expel the villainous migrants in order to re-establish order and prosperity, or “make America great again,” in the words of Trump’s presidential campaign slogan. Under the logic of migrants-as-villains, citizens of Muslim-majority countries were banned from entering the country under a blanket suspicion of terrorism. Children were separated from their parents at the U.S.–Mexico border by a policy that construes the parents as suspected child traffickers: the parents and the children were imprisoned in facilities that were often distant from each other, or the parents were deported while the children remained in custody. Seven thousand troops were sent to the border to defend the United States against the purported threat posed by a caravan of Central American refugees winding its way north through Mexico that at its peak reached seven thousand—roughly one soldier for every migrant. The possible justifications for asylum claims were narrowed, the application process was made more difficult, and asylum-seekers on the U.S. southern border were required to remain in Mexico while awaiting the results of their applications. Migrants were construed as so evil that it was supposedly necessary to spend billions of dollars to keep them out of the country by reinforcing and adding to existing structures so as to build a wall

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along the entire 1954 miles of the U.S.–Mexico border. Political scientist Elisabeth R. Anker’s study of melodramatic political discourse during the post-9/11 war on terror also aptly describes the justification for the Trump administration’s war on migrants: “In melodramatic political discourse, the nation’s terrible injury becomes the foundational justification for violent and expansive state power.”4 Anker explains how by claiming to exercise heroic mastery and expel foreign threats the state justifies an investment in security: These melodramas further reveal how norms of neoliberalism do not necessarily diminish or devalue state power in the twenty-first century; they also incite dramatic increase in its use and values. Neoliberal policies decrease state support in the name of individual freedom, yet the vulnerability these policies create also leads people to reinvest in securitized state power in a misplaced attempt to end their vulnerability.5

Some of those who disagree with the Trump administration’s move to reinvest in securitized state power on the United States–Mexico border, however, have devised alternative performances intended to challenge the official melodrama. By way of an epilogue, we look at three final examples of migrant melodrama in the political economy of suffering. We have already offered evidence to demonstrate that there is such a thing as a spectacle of migrant suffering, that it is embedded in a sub-genre and mode of imagination we call migrant melodrama, and that such spectacles circulate in what we call a political economy of suffering, which exchanges displays of suffering for everything from small privileges to respect for basic human rights. Yet we want to make one final point: As the reality of migrant suffering continues to intensify, new, more creative and more extreme varieties of melodramatic responses continue to emerge. Our final examples gesture toward new areas of exploration in this growing body of work related to some of the topics that we have explored: empathy, casting, and the construction of melodramatic character, plot, and misè en scene in the service of migrant rights advocacy. We first examine a virtual reality art installation by the Mexican film director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, a fictional melodrama based on events taken from the news, then turn to melodramas created by political news commentators Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart, in reaction to the Trump administration’s policy of child separation and detention.

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Carne y Arena [Flesh and Sand] On September 9, 2017, Víctor paid $45 dollars at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for the dubious pleasure of signing a release form absolving the museum from any liability for his possible death, then following the instructions to take off his shoes in an icy-cold room reminiscent of the rooms in detention centers that migrants call “hieleras” [ice boxes]. He then donned a virtual reality headset with special eyeglasses and earphones, and entered a simulated desert environment barefoot, except for his socks, which he refused to remove despite instructions to the contrary. Through his socks, though, he could still feel the sand under his toes. In the distance, in what appeared to be dawn light, he made out a shadowy cluster of migrants walking, including men, women, and a teenage boy. Suddenly, he heard the whirring of an approaching helicopter, and saw bright lights beaming down on him. Even though he knew it was a simulation, he instinctively looked up toward the “sky” and put his hand to his brow to shield his eyes from the light. When a border patrol car pulled up and the migrants began to run, he felt a rush of adrenalin. The border patrol agents spilled out of their vehicles, weapons drawn, accompanied by viciously barking dogs. They ordered the migrants down on the ground. Víctor resisted the impulse to kneel in the sand along with them; remembering his duties as a participantobserver researcher, he instead moved back, to try to take in the entire scene. A woman was crying and a border patrol agent approached her to see what was wrong. She seemed to be dying. Suddenly Víctor was in the mind of the dying woman, experiencing her memory of three people gathered around a kitchen table in a poor household. Were they talking about heading North? He couldn’t quite make out the dialogue. The scene ended in an abrupt blackout, indicating the woman’s death. The rest of the migrants were herded into border patrol vans. Then an agent turned to Víctor, pointed his gun at him, and asked in a threatening manner: “And you, who are you?” This was Carne y Arena, a virtual reality installation in which Iñárritu and his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki took the production of empathy to a new high by immersing the participant in a three-dimensional world that for 6.5 minutes places one in the physical positions, the affective responses, and even the memories of a migrant. The day after Trump was elected president, Iñárritu shot footage for Carne y Arena in the Arizona desert with untrained migrant-actors who had actually crossed into the United States without authorization. Their

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stories are told in video portraits and accompanying text that you can read after exiting the “desert” portion of the experience. The suffering displayed in the stories echoes many themes touched on by the performances we explored throughout this book: enduring the dangers of the freight trains, surviving extortion and physical abuse, persevering despite bodies ground down by over-exertion, illness, and exhaustion. Though Iñárritu has insisted that his exhibition is about “reality” rather than “politics,” it obviously aims at empathic identification with migrants. The virtual reality technology, coupled with the sensorial elements such as air and sand, allows for a much more intense experience of physiological and affective empathy on the part of the participant than any of the displays of suffering we have previously discussed. The poster image used to advertise Carne y Arena provides a broad hint of its political aims: a ghostly image of a huge heart fills a desert sky, its upper and lower halves divided by a border line, with a “U.S.” demarcation on the top portion and a “T.H.E.M.” demarcation on the lower portion. It doesn’t seem like a stretch to surmise that the installation’s goal is to erase either the United States versus THEM dichotomy in the mind of the participant or any desire for a militarized border, or both. On a global scale, the divided heart suggests a divided human family. Though this is the work of a Mexican film director about the U.S.–Mexico border, like Iñárritu’s film Babel (2006), to which it is related in theme, it also constitutes an attempt to reunite a divided global family. Though it is difficult to know how much the installation actually changes people’s us-versus-them thinking, it is innovative in two ways: first, it casts the participant as a migrant in a far more intense way than just reading, viewing or even participating in other less immersive simulations can accomplish and second, it invokes what Iñárritu calls the “truth” of the body to attempt transcendence and transformation. Carne y Arena in some ways resembles the eco-park night hike known as the Caminata Nocturna in the central Mexican state of Hidalgo that offers tourists a chance to play at being chased through the desert by border patrol agents. The night hike has been discussed insightfully in separate studies by Scott Magelssen and Tamara L. Underiner as an event that can simultaneously entertain as tourist spectacle and build community among the participants, between the participants and the organizers, and within the organizing group. By contrast, due to its technological demands, Carne y Arena must be experienced individually.6 Because of this constraint, the intensity of the identification with the role in which one is cast perhaps

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more closely resembles some of the other simulations that Magelssen discusses in Simming, particularly the “Follow the North Star” simulation of slavery in which certain participants are singled out for verbal abuse and the aging simulation in which participants’ bodies are forced into positions and burdened in ways designed to make them individually experience the difficulties of mobility in old age.7 Iñárritu’s work, however, is even more extreme for how it places the individual participant at the center of an experience of suffering and bombards the senses so as to encourage one to forget for a moment that one is not an undocumented migrant. Some visitors sink to their knees at the command of the border patrol; others hide behind virtual reality bushes; still others run around the room in an attempt to escape.8 Two staff members accompany each participant, standing discreetly behind them, so as to ensure that they do not run into a wall or otherwise injure themselves. In an interview with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Director Michael Govan, Iñárritu invokes a “truth” of the body, or of embodied experience, something that has been a through-line in our study, as contact with physical suffering sometimes convinces those who experience it that the suffering is indeed real and that something must be done, either to alleviate it directly or to compensate for it by easing someone else’s burden. Feeling the weakness of Doña Olga’s adoptive son’s limbs as they lay across his lap, for instance, moved Father Cándido to ask the congregation to support her shelter for migrants (Chapter 3). Seeing the injured bodies with disabilities of the AMIREDIS men moved many spectators to donate money to them (Chapter 5). Riding the freight trains herself seemed necessary to Nazario to relate Enrique’s ordeal in Enrique’s Journey (Chapter 6). And though we found her book conservative in its “just stay home” message to Central Americans, she has since testified before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee that in her view many Central American migrant minors deserve the status of refugees.9 Iñárritu explains how he thinks extreme empathy can trigger transcendence and transformation: Even when people are resisting intellectually, ideologically, to what they are seeing, when your body is telling you this is happening, this is real, even in the five percent of your experience, that in a way helps people to, I think, sometimes, transcend to another perception or state of mind and shift identities. And people start one way and then the police come and you are not a visitor anymore, you are a participant and you become an

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immigrant. And you are threatened. And people feel what it is like to walk in the shoes of someone else. And that is when big change can happen.10

In Víctor’s experience, a sense of truth was established by his kinesthetic responses—the hand to the brow to shield his eyes from what he imagined was an approaching helicopter, the knees that weakened involuntarily in response to commands from the border patrol agent. The alternate reality was reinforced by his ability to see and touch, if he wanted to, objects strategically placed in the locker room where he left his shoes at the start—worn shoes, canteens, backpacks, and other actual objects left behind by migrants in the desert. Víctor is in fact an immigrant from Mexico to the United States who was conducting research for a book on performances of migrant suffering. And even he at certain moments forgot his role as researcher and “became an immigrant,” or rather, experienced discomfort and fear from the position of a less-privileged undocumented immigrant. What he felt in the end, though, was more guilt about his privilege rather than any transformative embodied knowledge of the migrant experience. Since there is no opportunity for communal discussion afterward, like all participants, he also individually experienced what could be interpreted as not only a threat but also as a concluding demand for existential reflection: “Who are you?” Whether such challenges posed to one individual at a time can promote systemic change remains an open question. Some reviewers wrote of shedding tears at the end.11 Are such tears merely cathartic, a sign of relief that the participant is not actually in the circumstances of an undocumented migrant, or of feelings of guilt that their lives are less difficult than that of actual undocumented migrants? Or for some participants, whether or not they cry, might they experience a transformation with real-world consequences? If so, it will have been worth the four years of effort and however many millions of dollars it took to produce the installation.12 Carne y Arena has received very positive reviews and won an Academy Award for Special Achievement in 2017, yet the number of people who can experience it is relatively limited compared to other media such as film or television or internet. It opened in Cannes on May 18, 2017 then toured to Mexico City, Milan, Los Angeles, and Washington DC. In Washington, DC the tickets were free, making it available to a much more economically diverse group of people than in the museum setting. Still only about 12,763 people experienced it in Mexico City, where it had the longest run, 285 days at the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco.13

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The melodramas staged by Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart for their vast television audiences, by contrast, were seen by more than three million viewers.

Maddow: A Performance of Muteness Rachel Maddow, a news anchor for MSNBC who hosts the “The Rachel Maddow Show” on weeknights at 9 p.m. Eastern Standard time, almost wept on the air on June 19, 2018 as she attempted to read an Associated Press report on “tender-age” shelters for babies, toddlers, and other children under the age of thirteen. “This is incredible,” Maddox remarked, as if speaking aloud to herself, before reading “Trump administration officials have been sending babies and other young children…” Maddox paused and covered her mouth with her hand before continuing “…to at least three…” She paused again, shook her head, brought her hand to her mouth, circled her index finger around her face as if to try to draw attention to (or wipe it clean of?) its anguished expression, emitted a cross between an exhale and a groan that ended in a forced chuckle, then while pointing her finger at the camera, requested a graphic. When none was forthcoming, after a pause, she began again: “…to at least three tender age shelters in South Texas. Lawyers and medical providers…” she trailed off once more, waving her hand in front of her face, as if to fan away unwelcome signs of emotional distress. “I think I’m going to have to hand this off. Sorry, that does it for us tonight. We’ll see you again tomorrow,” her voice trembling, she hastily signed off. Maddow later tweeted the complete Associated Press story and apologized for her breakdown: “Ugh, I’m sorry. If nothing else, it is my job to actually be able to speak while I’m on TV.” The following night she began the show by smiling and promising to “hold it together better than I did last night.” Maddow used gesture rather than words, and reduced speech to inarticulate sounds, to underscore the failure of language to capture the horror of family separation and detention of migrant children. She created a performance of muteness, as Peter Brooks defines a “text of muteness:” “symbolic of the defenselessness of innocence.”14 Her muteness signaled the defenselessness of the migrant children, how overwhelmed they must feel, and pointed to a suffering that is concealed yet must be revealed, as Brooks identifies the function of muteness in melodrama.15 By silencing herself, Maddow also gestured toward the silence of the victim-children, who are kept out of public view and are thus voiceless to us. She seemed

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overwhelmed and about to burst into tears, as perhaps we imagine that infants, toddlers, and other children cry when separated from their parents. Rather than stage directly observable migrant muteness, such as when Solalinde cast two silent migrants as Joseph and Mary (Chapter 3), however, Maddow served as a kind of surrogate mute who stood in for the absent children, described in the Associated Press report as “playrooms of crying preschool children in crisis.”16 Their crisis became Maddow’s crisis. After the broadcast, Maddow’s tweet of the complete article revealed and underscored the evil that had been previously “concealed.” In the end, perhaps her muteness drew more attention to the children than simply reading the article would have done, particularly since other news organizations, most prominently The Guardian, reported her reaction as if it were news, possibly raising greater interest in what had prompted the unusual outburst, while also continuing to circulate the now doubled spectacle of suffering—Maddow’s and the children’s. This participation in the political economy of suffering circulates the doubled spectacle to win additional empathy for migrants and shore up opposition to the policy of family separation and detention.17 By failing at speech, Maddow not only displayed her empathy, she modeled an empathic response for her viewers, who were implicitly invited to also react with horror at the Trump administration’s actions. Is this the sort of empathy that we have argued, building on Saidiya Hartman, obscures its object and reduces the systemic to the level of the personal? Do viewers empathize with the children, or with Maddow, or with both? And in the political economy of suffering does Maddow’s suffering matter as much or more than the migrants? Does her empathic celebrity suffering add value to their relatively anonymous suffering? By shifting the focus from the children to herself, Maddow at least temporarily makes her own suffering the focus of the viewer’s concern, which runs the risk of obscuring the suffering of the children with the spectacle of her reaction to their suffering. Whether her almost-tears were a spontaneous physiological reaction or a calculated display of horror (this was hotly debated online), it was only those MSNBC viewers who follow Maddow on Twitter or who sought out the complete Associated Press report who could then re-focus on the conditions under which the children were being held, rather than on Maddow’s display of empathic emotion. If she had any awareness that she was constructing a melodramatic spectacle of suffering innocent children in the hands of a villainous government, with herself, the empathic observer, in the role of protagonist,

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Maddow never said so. Instead, she apologized to viewers on Twitter for her deviation from the scripted text and promised on air to “keep it together,” in other words, to not display wordless emotion again. Her apologies were in a sense a meta-theatrical comment on her performance, in which she judged it a failure, not because she drew focus away from the issue at hand, but because she improvised rather than follow the script. She judged the interruption of the reading a failure of performance in the sense in which Jon McKenzie has used the term, failure to adequately carry out the function for which she is employed.18 By characterizing her actions simply as a failure to carry on with the basic function of a news anchor, Maddow ostensibly de-politicized the moment as a lapse in professionalism rather than a calculatedly political performance. Yet since she was broadcast on a cable television network show about politics known for its openly liberal, anti-Trump stance, for her 3.6 million viewers, anything she did or did not do was likely to be construed as a political performance.

Stewart: Competitive Casting in Satire A few days after Maddow constructed a melodrama with herself at its center, on June 28, the satirist Jon Stewart made a special appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which averaged 3.7 million viewers in 2018, to deliberately and explicitly create a counter-melodrama featuring President Trump. Facing the camera as if addressing Trump directly, Stewart rejected the casting of Trump as the heroic defender of a victimized United States and instead recast him as a cruel villain. Immigration, Stewart said, is “the seminal example of the Trump Doctrine, its goal best expressed by Governor Schwarzenegger.” The camera then cut from Stewart to a film clip of a stone-faced Arnold Schwarzenegger playing Conan the Barbarian in the film by the same name (dir. John Milius, 1982). “Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women,” Schwarzenegger intones, replying to a question about what is best in life. Stewart imitated Schwarzenegger’s Austrian accent as he repeated “hear the lamentation of their women,” then in a more serious tone, added: “Donald, you absolutely could have made a more stringent border policy that would have made your point about enforcement. But I guess it wouldn’t have felt right without a Dickensian level of villainy. You casually separated people seeking asylum from their children, from babies.” By contrast to Maddow, rather than dwell on his own feelings about this injustice, Stewart continued with

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a joke: “You may be orange. You may like hamburgers. You may be a clown. But you are no Ronald McDonald.” Switching back to his serious tone, he concluded, “I won’t allow you or your sycophants to turn your cruelty into virtue.” A clip followed of a series of administration aides and news personalities praising Trump. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said: “He’s a fighter. He’s a strong leader. And he’s somebody who deeply loves this country.” Lou Dobbs said: “He’s the exact right leader we need at this frightening time to make sure that America still leads.” After the clip, Stewart countered the heroic casting of Trump by the “sycophants”: “What Donald Trump wants is for us to stop calling his cruelty wrong, and to join him in calling it right. And this we cannot do.” Stewart’s performance exemplifies the kind of competitive rounds of casting and counter-casting that we explored in Chapter 4. Rather than make his own affective reaction or the suffering migrant children the focus of his intervention, he attempts to re-cast Trump, from the role of patriotic hero into the role of a villainous barbarian who takes pleasure in the laments of women, an allusion to the mothers whose children were taken from them at the U.S.–Mexico border. To frame his melodrama, Stewart explicitly references Charles Dickens, the nineteenth-century novelist who masterfully created sentimental heroes and villains, showing readers whom to trust and whom not to trust. As a latter-day Dickens of late-night television, Stewart attempts to re-cast the social performance melodrama by exposing Trump as a character who is untrustworthy and unworthy of our respect, thus creating a classic scene of melodramatic recognition. Stewart’s version of Trump-as-villain also fulfills the function that Blakey Vermuele ascribes more generally to fictional characters: “We use them to sort out basic moral problems or to practice new emotional situations. We use them to cut through masses of ambient cultural information. Our eternally premodern brains have simply not caught up to the speed and complexity of the vast moving world – so we use them in place of statistics as tools to muddle through.”19 Though late-night television viewers may not have the patience for graphics or statistics or in-depth information about why migrants are seeking asylum or how their human rights are being violated, they might welcome the entertainment provided by comedian-political commentators such as Stewart, Colbert, and others. Stewart’s use of humor and satire—the comparison of Trump to Conan the Barbarian and the Ronald McDonald joke—exemplify the strategy taken by works such as Under the

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Same Moon and Our Dad Is in Atlantis , analyzed in Chapter 6. Laughing at villainous characters can make them seem less threatening and less worthy of our respect, while at the same time strengthening the sense of community among like-minded spectators. The Stewart satire is perhaps even more similar to Salgado’s Undocumented and Awkward series, analyzed in Chapter 7, which not only seduces viewers by provoking laughter but also queers melodrama by questioning dominant values. Rather than invite spectators to experience empathy, as Maddow and Iñárritu both did in different ways, Stewart invites them to join him in mocking a hierarchy of values that accords demonstrations of strength the highest ranking and dismisses compassion as weakness. As of this writing in 2019 it is too early to tell whether castings such as Stewart’s will stick enough to preclude Trump’s re-election, or whether Trump’s own considerable skill for casting and re-casting his opponents will prevail. Yet the barrage of condemnation of the administration’s family separation policy, in which Maddow and Stewart participated, did lead it to abandon the practice of taking children from their parents. After Maddow’s show, but even before Stewart’s segment aired, on June 20, 2018, after eleven weeks and 2654 children separated from their parents, Trump signed an executive order ending the policy of family separation. “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” Trump said, reacting both to the visual and visceral dimension of spectacles of suffering that we have stressed throughout this book, and displaying his empathy and sensitivity to suffering in a manner that might be intended to undermine castings such as Stewart’s. The president’s decision was reinforced a few days later by a U.S. district court ruling that mandated an end to the policy and ordered the reunification of families. In his reaction to the ruling, Lee Gelernt, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which had sued the administration in federal court before it decided to end the policy on its own, summoned an image that invoked melodrama’s emotional intensity as the happy ending to a spectacle of unjust suffering: “Tears will be flowing in detention centers across the country when the families learn that they will be reunited.”20 In this casting, the migrants-as-suffering-victims of the administration have been vindicated and cry tears of joy at their triumph in the conclusion of this particular episode in the war on migrants. In Chapters 2 and 3, we asked whether inspiring pity, either for migrants or for ourselves as surrogates for suffering migrants, furthers migrant claims to a right to human mobility. We conclude that inspiring pity tends to further exceptions to

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unjust rules rather than lead to changes in the rules. When Trump ended the policy of separating families, for instance, he made an exception to his administration’s general policy of persecuting migrants. In response to the casting of migrants as criminal-villains and potential terrorists, Iñárritu, Maddow, and Stewart all fought melodrama with melodrama. Iñárritu and Maddow focused on generating empathy for the victims; Stewart mentioned “babies” once in an incredulous tone of voice, but directed most of his energy at constructing satirical counter-casting to mock his villain. Rather than create empathy for a victim-hero, he attempted to deactivate any empathy that Trump may have garnered as a heroic defender of foreign threats to the nation. All three works confirm what we have argued throughout this book: Families on the migration journey are easily woven into a huge variety of the action-and-adventure tropes of sensation melodrama, the pitifully suffering victim-protagonists of racial melodrama, and the family separation/reunification plot of domestic melodrama, as well as the many different hybrids that result when different types of melodramas overlap. Sometimes melodrama’s clarity and moral simplicity seems more suited than tragedy, comedy, parody, satire, or postmodern pastiches of all of the above, to capture the intense emotion surrounding injustice, when things seem obviously right or wrong. Other genres may seem too subtle, too cold, or too confusing in their complexity of character construction. Thus the Iñárritu and Maddow brand of apparently straight-from-the-heart melodrama is more typical than the Jon Stewart self-aware melodrama with a queer, satiric twist. All three works, however, create scenes that have implications beyond the American hemisphere and that can be witnessed around the world—migrants rounded up by the authorities, children separated from their parents, authoritarian rulers who revel in the exercise of power.

The Human Family On the largest scale, the image of the suffering family in migrant melodrama can symbolize an entire society or even of all of humanity, and encourage bonds of empathy among the members of the larger human family. Melodrama’s roots in religious imagery and discourse facilitate a kind of melodramatic allegory, in which the fate of the family unit represents the fate of humanity. In his theological treatise, Solalinde expresses this metonymic relationship: “All of the human beings who have passed, those who are here, and those who will come form a single family! Their

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past is that of all of us, their experiences, likewise, their evolution or setbacks also form a common legacy.”21 Directors such as Iñárritu and Alfonso Cuarón suggest as much in their films involving migration. In Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), a single pregnant migrant, Kee (ClareHope Ashitay), stands for the survival, or extinction, of the entire human race. Her survival at the conclusion of the film offers hope for the survival of humanity. Before Carne y Arena, in his film Babel Iñárritu also used the family unit as a trope to promote empathy among disparate peoples. In Babel, families from the United States, Morocco, Mexico, and Japan represent global positions, with the First World families (the United States and Japan) causing chaos in the Third World families (Mexico and Morocco). Despite their vast differences, however, the love between children and parents is depicted as essentially the same in all four families, providing a common denominator that is often invoked in activism seeking to inspire empathy for migrants. Other scholars have analyzed these films as melodrama in great detail; we merely bring them up briefly in closing to stress the global dimension of our study.22 Though rooted in the Latin American experience of migration, this study has implications for the study of cultural production and social performances in different contexts around the world. We hope that our work will prove useful both to future studies of migration and to future studies of melodrama in other political and social crises that involve the circulation of displays of suffering. Future studies of migration might explore, for instance, the casting and staging of disabled migrant women, melodrama in representations of detention, and melodrama in cultural production involving material culture, such as the objects associated with migrants and the many different kinds of cultural production created by migrants and their supporters. Future studies of representations of suffering could focus on cultural production surrounding any one of many crises around the world on topics such as the environment, disease, poverty, violence, or human rights. We close this study with questions that we expect may resurface in many different forms as spectacles of suffering and migrant melodrama continue to be produced in a myriad of modalities throughout the world. What does casting, spectacles of suffering, and migrant melodrama make of us? Why and how do familiar archetypes continue to be re-cycled, and to what end? How might we structure, or re-structure, our participation in the political economy of suffering?

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Notes 1. Jon Henley, “Sharp Rise in Proportion of Migrants Dying in Mediterranean, Says UN,” The Guardian, September 3, 2018, https://www. theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/03/sharp-rise-in-proportion-ofmigrants-dying-in-mediterranean-says-un. 2. “‘No One Was Left:’ Death and Violence Against the Rohingya in Rakhine State, Myanmar,” Doctors Without Borders, 2018, https://www. doctorswithoutborders.org/rohingya-refugee-crisis. 3. Thomas Nail, The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 2015. 4. Elisabeth R. Anker, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 3. 5. Ibid., 17. 6. Magelssen, Simming, 96–112. Tamara L. Underiner, “Playing at Border Crossing in a Mexican Indigenous Community…Seriously,” TDR 55, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 11–32. 7. Magelssen, Simming, 29–47 and 138–154. 8. Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Talks with the Director, The Director’s Series: Michael Govan and Alejandro G. Iñárritu, November 30, 2017, http://www.lacma.org/video/directors-series. 9. “Testimony of Sonia Nazario, Journalist, KIND Board Member and Author of Enrique’s Journey,” United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee, July 17, 2014, https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/ doc/Nazario_Testimony.pdf. 10. Ibid. 11. Carolina A. Miranda, “Walk a Mile in Migrant Shoes,” Los Angeles Times, November 28, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/ museums/it-takes-only-6-minutes-to-be-fully-convinced-of-the-immensepower-of-virtual-reality. 12. Philip Kennicott, “It Takes Only Six Minutes to Be Immersed in the Migrant Experience,” Washington Post, March 23, 2018, https://www. washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/it-takes-only-6-minutesto-be-fully-convinced-of-the-immense-power-of-virtual-reality. According to Kennicott, a spokeswoman for the event declined to comment on the cost of the project. Carne y Arena was produced by the Fondazione Prada, the Emerson Collective and Legendary Entertainment. 13. Notimex, “Más de 12 mil disfrutaron instalación ‘Carne y arena,’” La Jornada, June 28, 2018, https://www.jornada.com.mx/ultimas/2018/ 06/28/mas-de-12-mil-disfrutaron-instalacion-2018carne-y-arena2019286.html. 14. Brooks, 60. 15. Brooks, 56–80.

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16. Garance Burke and Martha Mendoza, “At Least 3 Tender Age Shelters Set Up for Migrants,” Associated Press, June 20, 2018, https://www.apnews. com/dc0c9a5134d14862ba7c7ad9a811160e. 17. The Guardian, “Rachel Maddow Breaks Down During Report on ‘Tender Age’ Shelters—Video,” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/ 2018/jun/20/rachel-maddow-breaks-down-during-report-on-tenderage-shelters-video. 18. Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (London: Routledge, 2001). 19. Blakey Vermuele, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press), viii. 20. Joanna Walters, “Judge Orders US to Reunite Families Separated at Border Within 30 Days,” The Guardian, June 27, 2018, https://www. theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jun/27/us-immigration-must-reunitefamilies-separated-at-border-federal-judge-rules. 21. Todos los seres humanos que han pasado, los que están y los que vendrán, ¡formamos una sola familia! Su pasado es el de todos, sus experiencias, de igual manera, su evolución o retroceso, su legado es también común. José Alejandro Solalinde Guerra, El reino de Dios: Replanteamiento radical de la vida (Toluca: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México), 59. 22. On Babel, see Laura Podalsky, “Melodrama, Babel , and Affective Communities,” Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 7, no. 1 (Janaury 2011): 47–58; Carla Marcantonio, Global Melodrama: Nation, Body, History in Contemporary Film, 79–109. On Children of Men, see Ipek A. Celik, In Permanent Crisis: Ethnicity in Contemporary European Media and Cinema (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015): 28–52.

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Index

A Abolitionism, 18, 19, 66, 166, 176, 257 Adalberto United Methodist Church, 157, 160, 161, 167 Adasme, Andrew, 248 affect, 14, 19, 51, 106, 132, 238, 246, 254, 265, 289 affective responses, 14, 21, 95, 145, 146, 156, 235, 253, 268, 323 mobilization of, 146 Águila o Sol (Heads or Tails) (fictional film), 239 Ahern, Maureen, 124, 139 Ahmadali, Mourtaza, 290 Ahmed, Sara, 14, 40 Albán, Carlo, 288, 289 Albany Park Theater Project (APTP), 35, 281, 289–291, 293. See also Feiner, David Albergue Hermanos en el Camino (Ixtepec, Oaxaca), 29, 111, 120 Albergue La 72 (Tenosique, Tabasco), 114

Alonso, Adrián, 250 Álvarez, Julio, 281, 300, 304, 305, 313, 314 Álvarez Quillay, Noemí, 11 American Dream, 28, 36, 127, 287, 296, 298, 299, 314 Amnesty International, 40, 80, 86, 111, 115, 119, 121, 122, 138 Amor de Lejos (Love From Afar) (play), 290 Anderson, Patrick, 67, 86, 164, 181 angel in the streets, 92, 99–100 Anker, Elisabeth R., 322, 334 anonymity, 71, 72, 281 Appadurai, Arjun, 255 Aquí Estoy (Here I Am) (play and dance), 290, 296 Aquí y Ahora (television), 200, 201, 212 Arbenz, Jacob, 8 Arellano, Elvira, 22, 29, 33, 34, 114, 146–148, 150, 152–159. See also Casa de Refugios Elvira as criminal mother, 18, 159

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. E. Puga and V. M. Espinosa, Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37409-9

355

356

INDEX

as madre dolorosa, 159, 170 as suffering mother, 18, 133, 158, 159 deportation of, 8, 11, 13, 143, 144, 147, 154, 157, 158, 163, 166, 167, 169, 172–175 in sanctuary, 33, 144, 153, 157, 160, 162, 165–167, 169, 182 Arellano, Saul, 144, 158–167, 173, 175, 179 Arendt, Hannah, 26, 249, 276 Aristegui, Carmen, 115, 137 Arjona, Ricardo, 219 Arriaga (Chiapas), 30, 87, 109, 114 Arrom, Silvia Marina, 99, 135, 150, 151, 177 artivism, 314 Ashitay, Clare-Hope, 333 assimilationism, 287, 288 Association of Returned Migrants with Disabilities (AMIREDIS), 31, 34, 187–189, 191–194, 197–202, 204, 205, 207–216, 220–222, 224–226, 283, 320. See also Correa, José Alfredo; Gámez, Jeremías; Gutiérrez, José Nain; Hernández, José Luis; Murillo, Benito; Varela, Norman; Vega, Fredy Omar caravan, 187, 189 logo, 215, 220 asylum, 2, 17, 28, 175, 189, 208, 209, 211, 249, 321, 329, 330 audience, 5, 18, 22, 36, 47–49, 52, 56, 57, 78, 82, 94, 95, 98, 106, 113, 114, 116, 117, 124, 126, 127, 129, 132, 152, 154, 166, 188, 195, 196, 200, 201, 208, 210–215, 234, 236, 258, 259, 262, 267–269, 273, 286, 290, 291, 293, 297, 298, 313, 327 August, Bille, 236

Auslander, Philip, 191, 209, 224, 227 authenticity, 78, 106, 133 Ayala Blanco, Jorge, 152, 177, 277 B Babel (fictional film), 152, 255, 277, 324, 333, 335 Baer, Debbie, 294 Ballesté, Enrique, 269, 271 Barragán, Ramón, 269, 270 Barraza, Adriana, 152 Bartletti, Don, 68, 87 Beer, John, 268, 279 beggar, 165 Behar, Ruth, 94, 134 Bejarano, Cynthia L., 153, 178 Benford, Robert, 118, 145, 175, 176 Bennett, Barry, 267 Berlant, Lauren, 16, 40, 67, 86, 236, 254, 260, 277–279 Berlie Belaunzarán, Bishop Emilio Carlos, 58 Bernstein, Sara, 249 Beta Group, 48 Bloch, Ernst, 292, 316 Boleslawski, Richard, 236 Borderlands Theater, 258, 268 borders, 5, 17–19, 21, 35, 60, 112, 148, 153, 189, 191, 210, 233, 235, 236, 241, 255, 292, 314 militarization of, 9, 10, 307, 324 Bor Galvez, Irene, 127, 139 Boytler, Arcady, 239 Brecht, Bertolt, 52, 267, 297 Brennan, Teresa, 14, 40 Brenon, Herbert, 237 Brewer, Jan, 266 Brigden, Noelle Kateri, 122, 137, 138, 186, 187, 213, 223 Brooks, James L., 152 Brooks, Peter, 16, 40, 51, 65, 81, 86, 139, 270, 276, 280, 327

INDEX

Brown, Henry Box, 21 Brown, Wendy, 147, 176 Buckley, Matthew S., 21, 41 Buenos Aires (Argentina), 53, 55 Buñuel, Luis, 240 Bush, George W., 8, 9, 157, 180 Bustillo Oro, Juan, 73, 87 C Calderón, Felipe, 10, 11, 62, 64, 179 Cameron, David, 26 Caminata Nocturna, 324 Cammisa, Rebecca dir., 80, 241, 247 Cannes Film Festival, 326 Capilla de San José de las Palmeras, 104 capitalism, 24, 74, 77, 132, 149, 151, 186, 197, 236, 261, 314 caravans, 31, 43, 114, 115, 173, 174, 182, 187–189, 209, 224, 321. See also Association of Returned Migrants with Disabilities (AMIREDIS) Caravan for Peace, 192 Caravan of Hope, 29 Caravan Towards the South, 114 Opening the Doors to Hope, 114 Carballido, Emilio, 256 Carmon, Jessica, 168 Carne y Arena (Flesh and Sand) (virtual reality), 36, 323, 324, 326, 333 Casa del Migrante Albergue Belén (Tapachula), 29, 50, 58–60 Casa Refugio Elvira, 29 Casillas, Daniela, 258 Castellanos, Rosario, 151 Castillo, Debra A., 134, 135, 250, 254, 276 casting, 4, 17, 22, 32, 34, 52, 78, 79, 82, 92, 93, 109, 133, 144–146,

357

150, 159, 163, 164, 166, 172, 174, 176, 187, 188, 195, 202, 207, 211, 221, 267, 283, 286, 302, 322, 330–333. See also angel in the streets; beggar; fallen soldiers; heroes; innocent child; madre dolorosa; martyrs; orphan; rescuers; saints; victims; villains; wounded warriors competitions, 17, 22, 34, 79, 82, 102, 144, 146, 150, 159 corrective, 22, 82, 187, 188, 211, 222, 283, 320 recasting, 34, 145, 331 Catanese, Brandi, 22, 41 Catholic Church, 31, 33, 55, 57, 58, 67, 78, 92, 103, 110, 116, 117, 187, 188, 191, 193, 196, 212, 215, 261 Center for Migrant Care FM4 Paso Libre, 29 Central American mothers, 114 Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI), 221 Cepeda, Esther J., 160, 166, 180, 181 Chahuites (Oaxaca), 114 Chaplin, Charlie, 238 character archetypes, 22, 143, 146, 282 charity, 14, 33, 47, 51, 57, 85, 92, 94, 99–101, 106, 111, 132, 133, 191, 198, 216 Chávez, Karma, 285, 315 Chavez, Leo R., 8, 37 Chavira, Javier, 143, 159, 170–173, 304 Chen, Michelle, 281 Chicago (Illinois), 29, 31, 33, 58, 114, 144, 156, 157, 161, 162, 167, 168, 175, 179, 181, 182,

358

INDEX

188, 207, 210, 212, 215, 225, 227, 258, 262, 266, 284, 289 Children. See also Operation Peter Pan agency, 234, 249, 282 as character archetype, 282 as functional orphans, 233, 260, 264 Kindertransport, 249 martyr, 7, 74, 147, 171, 239, 274 saving, 54 suffering, 7, 25, 28, 36, 41, 147, 234, 235, 237, 241, 242, 244, 247–249, 252, 260, 264, 273, 274, 279, 327, 328, 330 unaccompanied, 18, 35, 41, 234, 242, 247, 282 Children of Men (fictional film), 333, 335 Cincinnati (Ohio), 58 citizenship, 7, 13, 17, 112, 152, 153, 163, 168, 235, 252, 254, 274, 282, 285, 297–299, 305 Ciudad Juárez (Chihuahua), 11, 85, 147, 154 Clinton, Bill, 8, 9, 224 Coatzacoalcos (Veracruz), 29, 114 Colbert, Stephen, 330 Cole, Catherine, 215 Coleman, Rev. Walter, 29, 157, 158, 164, 166, 179, 181, 218 colonialism, 7 Comayagua (Honduras), 194, 224 comedy, 235, 241, 250, 255, 261, 332 coming out, 285, 286, 289, 293, 295, 298 Comité Pro-Defensa de Presos, Perseguidos, Desaparecidos y Exiliados Políticos, 155 Committee of Family Members of Disappeared Migrants from El

Progreso (COFAMIPRO), 193, 224 Como todas las madres (fictional film), 151 Conan the Barbarian (fictional film), 329, 330 Congregation of the Missionaries of St. Charles Borromeo. See Scalabrinians Conquergood, Dwight, 5, 23, 37, 41 Coogan, Jackie, 238 Cook, Amy, 188, 223 Corazón (novel), 55, 83 Córdoba (Veracruz), 55 Cormon, Eugène, 236 Coronado, Jesús, 35, 258, 259, 269–271, 278 Correa, José Alfredo, 210, 211, 215, 221, 227 Cortiñas, Jorge Ignacio, 258, 277–279 Coston, Bethany M., 186, 222 costume, 21, 49, 64, 83, 90, 93, 99, 214, 215, 221, 286, 294 Coutin, Susan Bibler, 23, 42, 247, 276, 285, 296, 315 Cri-Cri. See Soler, Francisco Gabilondo Cuarón, Alfonso, 333 Culiacán (Sinaloa), 258 cultural capital, 78, 235, 283 Cuore: libro per i ragazzi (novel), 55 Cuore: The Heart of a Boy (novel), 55

D Dalai Lama, 90 D’Alessio, Ernesto, 252 Dallas (Texas), 207, 266 Daly, Augustin, 201 Daly, Nicholas, 65, 86 Das, Veena, 23, 42 de Amicis, Edmondo, 55, 84

INDEX

Dean, James, 238 Debord, Guy, 14, 40 Declaration of Immigration (exhibit), 170, 172 Defense of Marriage Act, 308, 309 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), 10, 284 Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA), 10 De Genova, Nicholas, 37, 169, 182, 296, 316 del Castillo, Kate, 250 Delicias (Chihuahua), 212, 216, 227 Demir, Nilüfer, 25 De nadie (No One) (documentary film), 15, 27, 40, 80 d’Ennery, Adolphe, 236, 237, 264 Derbez, Eugenio, 240, 250, 252, 253 D’Erzell, Catalina, 151 DeSoucey, Michaela, 122, 138 Detroit (Michigan), 58 Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, 9, 13, 282, 283, 285, 286, 288, 290, 292, 297, 299, 305, 308 Díaz Boch, Marcos, 127, 130, 131, 139 Díaz, Porfirio, 150 Dickens, Charles, 238, 264, 268, 330 di Leonardo, Micaela, 23, 41 Dimples (fictional film), 238 Dirdamal, Tin, 15, 27, 40, 80 disability. See also Association of Returned Migrants with Disabilities (AMIREDIS); National Commission for the Support of Returned Migrants with Disabilities (CONAMIREDIS) amputation, 11, 90, 93, 191, 196 mutilation, 11, 34, 217 prosthetic, 16, 90, 107, 198, 205, 207, 210, 215, 220

359

stigma, 34, 124, 194, 215, 222, 296 disappearance. See Committee of Family Members of Disappeared Migrants from El Progreso (COFAMIPRO); Comité ProDefensa de Presos, Perseguidos, Desaparecidos y Exiliados Políticos Dobbs, Lou, 330 Domínguez, Rodolfo, 241 Don Francisco Presenta (television), 246 Douglas, Emory, 302 drama, 73, 146, 149, 169, 236, 257 DREAMers, 22, 31, 281–283, 285, 286, 288–290, 299–301, 304, 305, 315. See also Defense of Marriage Act; Queer Undocumented Immigrant Project; United We Dream Dreamers Adrift, 299, 308, 311 Dulce Nombre (Honduras), 248 Dumas, Alexander, 150 Durbin, Richard, 288 E East Lynne (novel, play, and fictional film), 149, 177 Edelman, Lee, 279, 298, 299, 316 El albergue (The Shelter) (documentary film), 115 El alma herida (The Wounded Soul) (telenovela), 153 El chorrito (song), 270 El eterno femenino (play), 151 El fistol del diablo (novel), 99, 135 El Progreso (Honduras), 30, 31, 185, 189, 192, 193, 198, 199, 202, 208, 211, 224, 225 El rey mago (play), 256 El Rinoceronte Enamorado, 258

360

INDEX

El tercer personaje (play), 151 Elvira (documentary film), 168 Elvira Arellano (painting), 161, 167, 171, 172 Elvira: The Immigration Play (play), 168 Emile: Or, On Education (novel), 249 empathy, 7, 20, 36, 49, 52, 64–67, 78, 93, 95, 101, 111, 120, 132, 133, 148, 160, 170, 201, 204, 299, 301, 311, 320, 322–325, 328, 331–333 Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother (journalistic narrative, book), 35, 90, 235, 241, 242, 247, 249, 250, 252, 261, 264, 273, 325 Escandón, Carmen, 150, 177 ethics, 22, 273

Feiner, David, 35, 289, 290 Félix, María, 99 Félix, Sandra, 258 Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín, 150 Fernández, Emilio, 96, 99, 239 Ferrara, Italy, 57 Fichtelberg, Joseph, 269, 279 Figueroa, Rubén, 114 Filmer, Ann, 35, 258, 262, 267, 269, 297 Five Foot Feat (dance), 215 Flórez, Guillermo, 202 Fonsenca, Bryan, 258 Fox, Vicente, 9, 157 Franco, Jean, 150, 177 Fuchs, Elinor, 20, 41 Fukunaga, Cary Joji, 15, 40, 79, 240, 277

F Fair and Secure Immigration Reform Program, 9 fallen soldiers, 212, 213, 222 Familia Latina Unida (Chicago), 156 family disintegration, 58, 236, 245, 257, 261 Holy, 124, 128, 130 reunification, 9, 12, 18, 233, 234, 242, 262, 332 separation, 13, 18, 19, 35, 147, 152, 158, 159, 179, 234, 245, 258, 259, 274, 280, 327, 328, 331, 332 unity, 158, 175, 180, 191, 243, 249, 257, 273, 302 Fassin, Didier, 23, 42, 131, 274, 280 fathers, 19, 32, 33, 79, 133, 156, 176, 192, 247, 263, 302

G Gaitán, Paulina, 240 Galeano, Eduardo, 75 Galisky, Anne, 299 Gámez, Jeremías, 208 Garber, Marjorie, 254, 277 García Bernal, Gael, 40, 80, 115 García Davish, Juan de Dios, 68 Garibay, José, 297 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, 74, 87, 201, 215, 225, 227 Garro, Elena, 256 gay rights movement, 285, 286, 289 Gelernt, Lee, 331 Genoa (Italy), 55 Gerardi, Bishop Juan, 116 Getz, Jeremy, 297 Girón, Norberto, 245 globalization, 5, 6, 26, 113, 149, 255 Gomez, Isaac, 290

INDEX

Gonzales, Roberto G., 284, 294, 315, 316 González Castillo, Fray Tomás, 110 González Iñárritu, Alejandro, 152, 277 Goodman Theatre (Chicago), 262, 290 Goodson, Christopher, 286, 315 Gould, Deborah B., 156, 176, 179 Govan, Michael, 325, 334 Graham, Chuck, 268, 279 Grande, Father Rutilio, 118 The Grapes of Wrath (novel), 268 Griffith, D.W., 237 Guadalajara (Jalisco), 29, 30, 58, 127 Guerra, Beatriz, 202 Guevara, Che, 197 Guterman, Gad, 287, 316 Gutiérrez, José Nain, 210 Gutiérrez, Luis V., 157, 212 Guzmán Aguilera, Antonio, 239 Guzmán Ávila, William, 199 Guzmán, Martín, 202

H Haenni, Sabine, 7, 37 Hardt, Michael, 112, 137 Harriet, Beecher Stowe, 147, 176, 237 Hartman, Saidiya V., 65–67, 86, 176, 226, 328 Heilman, Robert Bechtold, 270, 280 Hernández, Daniel, 163, 181 Hernández, José Luis, 198, 200, 211, 225 Hernández, Juan Orlando, 193, 199 Hernández, Luisa Josefina, 151 heroes, 4, 7, 20, 124, 146, 186, 187, 261, 274, 282, 301, 330 Hesford, Wendy S., 234, 275

361

Hewitt, Heather, 250 Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 24, 42 Holmes, Martha Stoddard, 20, 41 holocaust, 15, 75, 76, 78, 117 Holy Cross Church, 216 Home/Land (play), 290 Hooper, Tom, 236 How the Other Half Lives (book and photo essay), 7 Hudes, Quiara Alegría, 287 Hughes, Amy E., 21, 41, 80, 83, 108, 129, 130, 136, 139, 176, 225 Hugo, Victor, 150, 233 human rights, 1, 3, 10, 15, 17, 19, 26, 28, 39, 41, 49, 51, 64, 77, 90, 106, 111, 114, 118–122, 133, 175, 191, 197, 221, 224, 225, 235, 274, 275, 321, 322, 330. See also Inter-American Commission on Human Rights; National Commission of Human Rights (Mexico); Universal Declaration of Human Rights humor, 27, 35, 36, 129, 185, 256, 259, 261, 262, 264, 273, 283, 312, 330 Hunt, Scott A., 145, 175

I Ibarra de Piedra, Rosario, 155 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, 9 Imitation of Life (fictional film), 149, 177 Immigrant Nation (documentary film), 167, 273 Immigrant Voices (play), 258 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 9, 163, 164, 166, 207

362

INDEX

Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), 8, 9, 287 immigration reform, history, 8–10, 115, 167, 266, 273, 315. See also Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA); Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA); Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act; Fair and Secure Immigration Reform Program; Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act; Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA); Operation Gatekeeper; Social Security Act imperialism, 49 Infante, Pedro, 239 Iñiguez, Jesús, 308 injustice, 11, 12, 31, 35, 49, 55, 71, 93, 112, 113, 116, 124, 128, 147, 188, 237, 241, 258, 264, 265, 313, 329, 332 innocent child, 129, 162, 165, 234 Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, 114, 123 International Organization for Migration, 245, 320 In the Heights (play), 287 Intríngulis (play), 288, 289, 316 The Invisibles (documentary film), 15, 40, 80, 115 I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) (novel), 55, 83, 84 Irapuato (Irapuato), 29 Irwin, Dave, 268, 279 Islas, Alejandra, 115 Iturbide, Graciela, 110 Ixtepec (Oaxaca), 29, 30, 33, 120, 125, 128, 136–139, 175 Izquierdo, Martha, 119–121

J Jackman, Hugh, 236 Jackson, N. Hart, 237 Jasper, James, 118, 274, 280 Jauss, Hans Robert, 49 Jerrold, Douglas, 201 Jesus Christ, 132 Jiménez, Estela, 115 Johnson, E. Patrick, 41, 78, 88 Johnson, Harriet McBryde, 215 Johnson, Reed, 276 Juárez, Andrés, 202 Juchitán de Zaragoza (Oaxaca), 110 Juffer, Jane, 166, 181 K Kansas City, 58 Kaplan, E. Ann, 149, 177 Kennedy, John F., 221 Kershaw, Baz, 15 The Kid (fictional film), 238 kidnapping, 2, 3, 9, 10, 19, 25, 38, 111, 119, 122 Kimmel, Michael, 186, 222 King, Henry, 149 King Jr., Martin Luther, 157 Kleinman, Arthur, 23, 42 Kuppers, Petra, 74, 87 Kurdi, Alan, 25, 26 L La Bestia. See train La Bestia (The Beast) (documentary film and book), 40, 80, 92, 134, 200 La jaula de oro (The Golden Dream) (fictional film), 79, 277 La Quijotita y su prima (serial novel), 150 Lala Pomavilla, Luis Fredy, 12

INDEX

Laqueur, Thomas W., 257, 277 LARK Play Development Center, 258 Las dos huerfanitas (The Two Little Orphan Girls) (fictional film), 237 Las máquinas de coser (play), 256 Latino threat, 8 La vida precoz y breve de Sabina Rivas (The Precocious and Brief Life of Sabina Rivas) (fictional film), 40 Lazarus, Emma, 52, 53 Leñero, Estela, 256 León (Guanajuato), 258 Les Deux Orphelines (The Two Orphans) (novel, play, fictional film), 236, 237 Les Misérables (novel, stage, television, film), 233, 236, 238, 263 Living Newspaper, 297 Llamas, María Eugenia “La Tucita”, 237 Lloyd, Frank, 149, 238 Lobo, Rosa Elena de, 198 Lobo Sosa, Porfirio “Pepe”, 198, 224 Lock, Margaret, 23, 42 Long Island University, Brooklyn, 168, 169 López, Brandon, 241 López, Eduardo, 269 López, Josefina, 287 López Margali, Leticia, 240 Los Angeles (California), 8, 114, 115, 144, 156, 181, 210, 250–254, 266, 326 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 323, 325, 334 Los frutos caídos (play), 151 Los mutilados: la travesía de un grupo de indocumentados hacia Estados Unidos (The Mutilated: Journey of a Group of Undocumented

363

toward the United States) (television), 34, 188, 200 Los olvidados (fictional film), 233, 240 Los que vuelven (They Who Return) (play), 73 Los Tigres del Norte, 253, 277 Los Vendidos (play), 287 Lozano, Emma, 31, 158, 164, 166 Lubezki, Emmanuel, 323 Luna Jr., Joaquín, 13, 14 Lydia (play), 288

M Maddow, Rachel, 36, 322, 327–329, 331, 332 madre dolorosa, 159 Magelssen, Scott, 243, 324, 334 Malkin, Elisabeth, 123, 137, 138 Malpica, Javier, 35, 235, 256, 259, 263, 265, 269, 277–279 Mandoki, Luis, 40, 240, 277 Manhattan (New York), 289 Manzoni, Alessandro, 55, 83, 84 maquiladora, 7, 8, 49, 189, 221, 226 March, Fredric, 236 María en tierra de nadie (documentary film), 15 Marisol (play), 288 Martínez, Karen, 241 Martínez, Óscar, 40, 60, 117, 222 martyrs, 7, 12, 32, 33, 74, 79, 93, 97, 111, 116–119, 121–124, 129, 132, 133, 143, 144, 146, 154, 159, 167, 171–173, 236–239, 264, 265, 271, 273 masculinity, 74, 175, 186, 188, 190, 191, 201, 202, 204, 206, 208, 209, 211, 213, 221 Maternidad (play), 151 Matta, Jesus, 291, 294

364

INDEX

Matus Sánchez, Aracy, 92, 94 Mbembe, Achille, 5 McAllen (Texas), 2 McElmurry, Sara E., 162, 166, 180, 182 McKenzie, Jon, 329, 335 McWilliam, Rohan, 51, 81 Mejía Valle, Ismael Armando, 175 Meléndez, Esaú, 273 melodrama. See also migrant melodrama; melodramatic imagination and moral reform, 56, 299, 313 circular look, 250 conventions of, 7, 16, 33, 35, 36, 49, 50, 78, 99, 133, 170, 201, 256, 283, 290 domestic, 19, 65, 99, 149, 158, 177, 225, 332 dramas of affliction, 201, 226 monopathy, 270 sensation, 18, 19, 21, 27, 47, 80, 130, 131, 158, 240, 332 melodramatic imagination, 32, 33, 36, 49–51, 54, 55, 64, 65, 74, 79, 81, 111, 113, 130, 132, 144, 150, 242, 283, 309, 321 melos , 267, 269, 270, 292 Mena, Greisy, 240 Mérida (Yucatán), 258 Merkel, Angela, 27, 43 Mexican army, 2 Mexican National Institute of Migration (INM), 77, 108, 134, 191 Mexico City, 29, 80, 83, 86, 95, 114, 126, 155, 174, 237, 239, 256, 258, 269, 271, 326 Michoacán (Mexico), 168, 182 micro-entrepreneurs, 187, 194, 195, 197, 211, 221

migrant melodrama, 8, 16–22, 32, 33, 36, 48–50, 65, 73, 94, 101, 105, 106, 112, 131–133, 153, 154, 158, 191, 233, 239, 241, 266, 274, 282–284, 290, 293, 295, 299, 300, 312, 314, 319–322, 332, 333. See also melodrama migration autonomy of, 112 circular, 9, 18, 234 forced, 4, 8, 13, 34, 188, 191, 198, 261 transit, 59, 199 Milan (Italy), 84, 326 Milius, John, 329 Miranda, Lin-Manuel, 287 Missionary Sisters of St. Charles, 57 Mission (Texas), 13 Mitchell, Mary, 166, 181 Moeller, Susan D., 243, 276 Moeschen, Sheila C., 57, 74, 84, 101, 105, 136, 191, 223 Mojado (song), 219 Monsiváis, Carlos, 177 Montejo, Carmen, 239 Monterrey (Nuevo León), 12, 258 Moraga, Cherríe, 7, 37 moral character, 20, 144, 150, 256, 268, 330 communities, 24, 34 economies, 24 identities, 78, 118 messages, 35 protest, 144 reform, 201 responsibility, 7, 248 shock, 118 morality, 12, 51, 177, 268 Morris, David B., 24, 42 Mother Courage (play), 267

INDEX

mothers activists, 7, 22, 143, 144, 147, 148, 153, 156, 158, 175, 185, 320 and cult of domesticity, 148 suffering, 24, 98, 133, 144, 148, 152, 163, 164, 173, 239, 247, 252 Mothers Against Illegal Aliens, 164, 165 Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, 114, 179 Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano (MMM), 173, 174, 224 Mújica Arzate, Irineo, 115 Muñoz, Evita “Chachita”, 237 Muñoz, José Esteban, 298, 299, 316 Murillo, Benito, 200, 202–204, 208, 211, 225, 226 The Mysteries of London (novel), 165 N Napolitano, Janet, 266 National Commission for the Support of Returned Migrants with Disabilities (Comisión Nacional de Apoyo a Migrantes Retornados con Discapacidad (CONAMIREDIS), 193–195, 198, 202 National Commission of Human Rights (Mexico), 1, 10 National Human Rights Award (Mexico), 90 nationalism, 36, 295, 299, 314 National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, 172 National Network for Immigration and Refugee Rights, 31 Nazario, Sonia, 35, 80, 90, 235, 242–246, 250, 255, 261, 276, 325

365

Neeson, Liam, 236 Negri, Antonio, 112, 137 neoliberalism, 7, 111, 112, 259, 260, 322 Nepstad, Sharon Erickson, 117, 118, 122, 138 New Orleans (Louisiana), 126 New Sanctuary Movement, 145, 156, 158, 159, 164, 175, 181, 274 Nicholls, Walter J., 286, 299, 315 Nine Digits (play/dance), 35, 36, 281, 283, 289, 290, 292, 294–299, 302, 308, 314, 316 North American Free Trade Agreement, 7 Northern Triangle’s Alliance for Prosperity Plan, 221 No se aceptan devoluciones (Instructions not Included) (fictional film), 240 Nosotros los pobres (We the Poor) (fictional film), 239 No vayas a pensar que quiero verte (song), 271

O Oakland (California), 31 Oaxaca (Oaxaca), 258 Obama, Barack, 8–10, 199, 206, 207, 217, 219, 220, 222, 224, 228, 284 Oboler, Suzanne, 166, 181 O’Brien, Margret, 238 Occupy Movement, 113 Ofrenda (play), 290 Oliver & Company (fictional film), 238 Oliver! (novel, fictional film, play), 238, 288 Oliver, Sophie, 97, 98, 135, 238

366

INDEX

Ontiveros, Alberto, 258 Ontiveros, Sue, 162, 180 Operation Gatekeeper, 9, 11, 234 Operation Peter Pan, 249 optimism, 168, 259 cruel, 236, 260, 262, 266 radical, 235, 251, 260, 283 orphan, 86, 94, 233, 234, 236–238, 240, 241, 263, 264 Orphans of the Storm (fictional film), 237 Otay Mesa Detention Center, 209 Our Dad Is in Atlantis (play), 236, 273, 277, 297, 331 Ovando, Ana, 290

P Pallares, Amalia, 153, 154, 178, 274, 280, 315 Pantoja, Father Pedro, 111 Papá está en la Atlántida (Our Dad Is in Atlantis) (play), 35, 235, 256 Papers: Stories by Undocumented Youth (book), 299 Pardavé, Joaquín, 151 parents absent, 149, 233, 247–249, 271 abusive, 34, 236, 248, 263 neglectful, 248 Parks, Rosa, 34, 144, 166, 168, 169 Pastoral Care of Human Mobility, 193 pastorela, 125, 129 Patraka, Vivian M., 15, 40 Pavón, Blanca Estela, 239 Payno, Manuel, 99 Peloso, Father Alessio, 58 Peña Nieto, Enrique, 11, 136, 199, 213 Penhaul, Karl, 92, 134

Peralta, Loreto, 240 Pérez, Father Cándido, 104–106, 136 performance. See also performance of suffering and protest, 4, 143, 269 command, 17, 21, 326 of muteness, 327 persuasive, 17 political, 23, 24, 51, 147, 207, 209, 222, 235, 282, 322, 329 self-, 92, 111, 133, 159, 212, 313 social, 6, 14, 17, 21, 28, 32, 34, 49, 51, 52, 57, 59, 83, 111, 124, 143, 145, 153, 154, 175, 186, 289, 330, 333 performance of suffering, 25 Perkins, Judith, 50, 81 Phoenix Theatre in Indianapolis, 258 photo of pain. See Sánchez Martínez, Olga Piacenza (Italy), 53, 82 Pilsen (Chicago), 29 Pineda, Cesar, 299 Pinzón, Gerardo, 202 pity, 27, 52, 56, 73, 74, 98, 101, 102, 106, 127, 133, 186, 188, 201, 215, 238, 249, 265, 268, 331 Plascencia, Raúl, 199 Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Tlatelolco, Mexico), 155 Plaza de Mayo (Argentina), 147, 153, 154 Podalsky, Laura, 94, 134, 255, 277, 335 Popadiak, Maggie, 35, 290 Pope Francis, 116 Pope John Paul II, 64 Pope Leo XIII, 56 Portillo, Lourdes, 255 power, 17, 106, 319, 322

INDEX

imbalance, 17, 106, 299 state, 322 structures, 17, 319 protest, 13, 14, 21, 28, 31, 111, 113, 143, 145, 154, 155, 160, 165, 171, 175, 185, 188, 192, 197–200, 210, 211, 216, 219, 225, 271, 285, 286, 290, 313 die-ins, 13, 286 marches, 156, 266, 286 performance of. See caravans Protestants, 54, 126, 148, 188, 212, 240 Puebla (Mexico), 86, 114

Q Queens Theatre in the Park, 258 queering, 36, 282–284, 314 Queer Undocumented Immigrant Project, 308, 309 Quemada-Diez, Diego, 40, 80, 115, 241, 277 Querétaro (Mexico), 258 Quispe, Greta, 169

R Rankin, John, 66 rape, 11, 27, 38, 66, 72, 111, 213, 217 Ray, Nicholas, 238 Reagan, Ronald, 8, 287 Real Women Have Curves (play), 287 Rebel Without a Cause (fictional film), 238 Reed, Carol, 238 Regan, Tom, 24 Reichman, Daniel R., 196, 224 remittances, 54, 149, 186, 197, 211, 217, 246 The Rent Day (play), 201, 225

367

rescuers, 19, 20, 28, 32, 33, 47, 48, 50, 55, 56, 65, 78, 79, 86, 92, 94, 101, 102, 131–133, 143, 164, 166, 188, 234, 235, 282, 283, 310 resistance, 21, 111, 112, 316 Reynolds, G.W.M., 165 Reynosa (Tamaulipas), 2 Rhodes, Rosamond, 188 Riggen, Patricia, 35, 235, 251 Rigoni, Father Flor María, poems by. See Casa del Migrante Albergue Belén (Tapachula) Riis, Jacob, 7, 37 Río Escondido (fictional film), 99 Ríos, Guillermo, 240 Risorgimento, 55 Rivera, José, 288 Rivero, Fernando A., 236 Robbins, Jerome, 238 Rodríguez, Archbishop Óscar Andrés, 196 Rodríguez, Ismael, 239 Rodríguez, Roberto, 237 Rojo, María, 253 Rome (Italy), 93 Romero, Archbishop Óscar A., 33, 116–118, 124 Rosario (Argentina), 55 Roseberry, William, 23 Rossini, Jon D., 4, 37 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 148, 249 Ruiz Parra, Emiliano, 117, 137, 138 Russek, Dan, 233

S sacrifice, 24, 35, 67, 74, 96, 98, 99, 119, 121, 122, 147–149, 156, 235, 239, 240, 252, 297, 301 self-sacrifice, 67, 73, 149 value of, 24, 209, 310

368

INDEX

Sada, Concepción, 151 saints, 7, 90, 93, 97, 98, 101, 120, 143, 144, 146, 154, 159, 173, 215 Saint Teresa of Ávila, 89, 94 Saivetz, Debbie, 258 Salem Evangelical Free Church, 213 Salgado, Julio, 36, 281–283, 286, 299–302, 304, 305, 307–309, 311, 313, 314, 316, 320, 331. See also Dreamers Adrift; Undocumented and Awkward (YouTube video series) Salina Cruz (Oaxaca), 127 Salinas, Carmen, 253 Salinas, María E., 202 Salisbury, Joyce E., 171, 182 Salón México (fictional film), 96 Saltillo (Coahuila), 111 Sánchez Martínez, Olga, photo of pain. See Shelter of Jesus the Good Shepherd Sánchez Soler, Marta, 114, 174 Sanctuary Movement. See New Sanctuary Movement Sandahl, Carrie, 191, 209, 224, 227 Sanders, Sarah, 330 San Diego (California), 9, 210 San Fernando Massacre (Mexico), 12 mass graves, 12–13 San Luis Potosí (Mexico), 2, 258, 269 San Pedro Sula (Honduras), 30, 31, 39, 106, 189, 192, 194, 199, 200, 209, 224 Santa Maria Addolatara, 58 Santos, Rosa Nelly, 31, 185, 193, 224 satire, 27, 36, 283, 330–332 Scalabrinians, 8, 28, 29, 32, 50, 58–60, 66–68, 74, 77, 85, 193–196. See also Congregation of the Missionaries of St. Charles Borromeo

history of, 74 in Latin America, 58, 76 Scalabrini, Bishop Giovanni Batista, 32, 49, 50, 52–57, 59, 60, 64–66, 72, 78, 79, 82–84, 89, 94, 320 Schmidt Camacho, Alicia, 153, 178 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 329 Scribner, George, 238 Seiter, William A., 238 Señorita extraviada (documentary film), 255 Sensenbrenner, James, 266 sexual assault, 154, 234 Sharp, Kurt, 267 Sheehan, Cindy, 147, 179 shelter Hermanos en el Camino, 125, 128 Shelter of Jesus the Good Shepherd, 29 shelters for migrants, 2, 19, 28, 29, 174. See also Albergue Hermanos en el Camino (Ixtepec, Oaxaca); Albergue La 72 (Tenosique, Tabasco); Casa del Migrante Albergue Belén (Tapachula); Casa Refugio Elvira; Center for Migrant Care FM4 Paso Libre; Shelter of Jesus the Good Shepherd Sicilia, Javier, 114, 179, 192 Silver, Marc, 15, 40, 80 Simplemente María (telenovela), 152 Sin Fronteras, 115, 258 Singer, Ben, 65, 86 Sin Nombre (ficcional film), 15, 40, 79, 240, 277 Sirk, Douglas, 149 The 16th Street Theater (Chicago), 258, 266–268 slavery, 19, 21, 53, 147, 176, 237, 258, 325

INDEX

Smith, Sidonie, 3, 37 Snow, David, 118, 176 Sobrino, Father Jon, 117, 118, 122, 129, 132, 138 Social Security Act, 294 Soconusco (Mexico), 60 Solalinde Guerra, Father José Alejandro, 110, 120, 335 as celebrity, 115 as human rights activist, 115 as martyr, 33, 119, 122, 132, 133. See also shelter Hermanos en el Camino Soler, Domingo, 236 Soler, Fernando, 151 Soler, Francisco Gabilondo, 270 solidarity, 1, 72, 73, 95, 111, 113, 118, 124, 126, 156, 289, 300, 313 Solis, Octavio, 288, 316 Solórzano Casarín, Javier, 168 Spanglish (fictional film), 152 spectacle, spectacles of suffering, 4, 11–16, 21, 22, 25, 32, 33, 40, 48–50, 65, 74, 92, 94, 101, 108, 112, 113, 131, 144, 145, 176, 191, 207, 210, 234, 322, 324, 328, 331, 333 spectator, 15, 17, 20–22, 27, 33, 35, 36, 49, 57, 66, 71, 78, 79, 97, 98, 102, 105, 111, 131, 145, 168, 169, 199, 201, 204, 206, 207, 209, 215, 219, 220, 222, 234–236, 238, 241, 247–249, 251–254, 256, 259–262, 264– 270, 273, 289, 290, 293, 295, 297–300, 309, 310, 313, 314, 319, 325, 331 staging, 28, 35, 49, 52, 69, 92, 96, 108, 125, 236, 246, 266, 268, 270, 271, 273, 283, 285, 290, 333

369

Stahl, John, 149 Statue of Liberty, 52, 53, 208 Stella Dallas (fictional film), 149 Stephens, Judith L., 149, 177 Stewart, Jon, 36, 322, 327, 329–332 St. Joseph Roman Catholic church, 215 St. Raphael’s Society for the Protection of Emigrants, 57 Sue, Eugéne, 135, 150 suffering as redemption, 65, 131 circulation of, 3, 5, 23, 37, 333 commodification of, 3, 5, 23, 26, 77 displays of, 6, 12, 23–26, 34, 42, 49, 52, 77, 93, 95, 101, 133, 148, 210, 319, 322, 324, 333 performances of, 3, 4, 6, 8, 17, 24, 26, 31, 34, 42, 52, 207 political economy of, 26, 27, 32, 33, 36, 50, 65, 79, 93, 101, 118, 133, 175, 187, 191, 207, 210, 222, 255, 284, 322 suicide, 11, 13, 14, 73, 74, 190 T tableau vivant , 11, 129, 130 Tábora, Rocío, 186, 222 Tal, Tzvi, 240, 275 Tapachula (Chiapas), 29, 32, 50, 60, 62, 68, 79, 85, 87, 89, 90, 95, 96, 98, 100, 101, 103, 106, 107, 109, 134, 135, 202 Tayleure, Clifton W., 149 Taylor, Diana, 40, 154, 178 Tegucigalpa (Honduras), 30, 31, 189, 196, 198 telenovelas , 18, 96, 152 Temple, Shirley, 237–239 Tenosique (Tabasco), 29, 30, 111, 114

370

INDEX

testimonio, 81, 216, 286, 315 Tibagy Valley (Brazil), 53 Tijuana (Mexico), 29, 32, 58, 59, 71, 72, 85, 86, 163, 173, 209 Till, Emmett, 147 Torres Bueno, Francisco, 12 trafficking drug, 9, 60, 77, 129, 190 human, 10 sexual, 9 tragedy, 54, 55, 147, 204, 208, 209, 239, 277, 280, 298, 332 train, 6, 11, 18, 19, 21, 27, 29, 40, 41, 47, 48, 58, 67–69, 73, 75, 76, 79, 80, 86, 90, 98, 109, 110, 114, 126, 130, 131, 193, 196, 199, 200, 202, 204, 211–213, 215, 216, 233, 240, 243, 247, 249, 256, 324, 325 transnational affective community, 94, 101, 255, 273, 279 Trump, Donald, 8, 10, 36, 122, 221, 222, 246, 284, 321–323, 327–332 Tucson (Arizona), 253, 258 Tucumán (Argentina), 55 Tuñón Pablos, Julia, 177, 240, 275 U Ultreras, Pedro, 40, 80, 90, 92, 134, 188, 200–210 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (novel), 147, 176, 237–239 Underiner, Tamara L., 324, 334 Under the Gaslight (play), 201, 225 Under the Same Moon (fictional film), 35, 152, 235, 241, 250, 264, 265, 273, 277, 283, 331 Undocumented and Awkward (YouTube video series), 35, 282, 283, 289, 300, 301, 308, 309, 312–314, 316, 331

undocumented migrants and activism, 33, 143 and agency, 169 bodies, 12, 273 criminalization of, 19 deportation of, 34 exploitation of, 24 from Africa, 60 from Colombia, 6 from Ecuador, 6, 288 from El Salvador, 126, 224 from Guatemala, 124, 247 from Honduras, 186, 187 from Mexico, 5, 33, 59, 265, 266 from Myanmar, 320 from Peru, 311 from Philippines, 312 human rights, 5, 6 in films, 15, 48 in literature, 5 in media, 128 in poetry, 32, 64 in social media, 35 in television, 5 in theater, 4 in visual art, 282 movements, 295 organizations, 15, 24 returned, 12, 14 undocuqueer, 282, 300, 307, 314 undocuspace, 35, 282, 284, 285, 287–289, 297–299, 304, 307–309, 312 undocutime, 35, 282, 284, 287–289, 293, 294, 299, 304, 308, 309, 312, 315 United We Dream, 308, 309, 317 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 17, 321 Univision, 13, 34, 187, 200, 202, 205–207, 210–212, 221, 226 Urrea, Luis, 40, 242

INDEX

U.S. civil rights movement, 147, 156 Ustedes los ricos (You the Rich) (fictional film), 239 utopia, 299, 314 V Valdez, Luis, 287 Valencia, Sayak, 5, 37 Vallejo, Demetrio, 155 Varela, Norman, 197, 198, 200, 204–208, 210, 211, 215, 220, 221, 225, 226 Varese, Checco, 251 Vaughy, Mac, 267 Vega, Fredy Omar, 210 Vega, Paz, 152 Veracruz (Mexico), 107, 114, 126, 258 Vermuele, Blakey, 330, 335 Vicinus, Martha, 149, 165, 177, 181, 225 Víctimas del pecado (Victims of Sin) (fictional film), 239 victims, 2–4, 13, 18–20, 22, 36, 47, 48, 55, 56, 65, 74–78, 80, 98, 101, 119, 129, 132, 146, 147, 160, 164, 166, 187, 191, 203, 205, 207, 211, 216, 221, 222, 235, 237, 239, 246, 250, 270, 274, 283, 294, 295, 300–302, 310, 313, 314, 319, 320, 332 Vidor, King, 149 villains, 3, 4, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 36, 47, 48, 75, 76, 79, 101, 102, 109, 118, 121, 146, 163, 166, 169, 181, 186, 201, 234, 239, 241, 257, 263, 274, 293, 294, 301, 313, 321, 329, 330, 332 Villalobos, Ligiah, 253 violence, 2, 5, 6, 8, 13, 15, 16, 21, 28, 29, 42, 49, 60, 66, 75, 77, 79, 93, 111, 112, 114, 116, 123,

371

124, 129, 130, 147, 155, 164, 179, 189, 195, 205, 213, 219, 221, 225, 240, 261, 264, 265, 273. See also kidnapping; rape; sexual assault Virgin Mary, 34, 159, 173 Virgin of Guadalupe, 34, 125, 128, 148, 156, 160, 167, 170 Vogt, Wendy A., 42, 137, 186, 187, 213, 223

W Wallace, Aiden, 169 walls, 104, 121, 123, 167, 193, 254, 297. See also borders war on migrants, 322, 331 war on drugs, 10, 11, 179 Washington, DC, 114, 115, 126, 200, 210, 221, 273, 297, 326 Wayne, Anthony, 199 Wells, Karen, 101, 136 Welter, Barbara, 148, 177 West Side Story (play), 238 Which Way Home (documentary film), 40, 41, 80, 241, 247, 249, 250, 252, 253 Wiley, Laura, 289 Williams, Linda, 16, 40, 83, 176 Wills, Misti B., 169 Wilson, Keegan, 168 Wise, Robert, 238 Wood, Henry, 149 Working Theater, 258 wounded warriors, 188, 211, 221, 222 Wright, Melissa, 154, 155, 178

X Xalapa (Veracruz), 258

372

INDEX

Y Ybarra, Patricia A., 7, 37, 86 Yo también hablo de la rosa (I Too Speak of the Rose) (play), 256 Yukich, Grace, 145, 175, 176, 181

Z Zamora Chamorro, Marcela, 15, 117 Zavala, Margarita, 62, 64 Zelaya, Manuel, 196, 224 Zorrilla Tessler, Eva, 258, 268