Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration

Central to the Christian worldview is the idea that suffering is redemptive. For Ana Puga and Victor Espinosa, “undocumented migrants have become an emblem of human suffering in the age of neoliberal globalization” (5), and they want to know if their particular suffering—translated into melodramatic performances by journalists, novelists, playwrights, filmmakers, photographers and other visual artists, and migrants themselves—can also serve a redemptive purpose. Or, they wonder, is something potentially more nefarious also always at risk?By “melodramatic performance,” Puga and Espinosa refer not to a dated genre of popular theatre, but to 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” (16); they draw on the work of theorists Peter Brooks, Linda Williams, and Lauren Berlant to nuance the work of melodrama in the modern world. Nevertheless, they also make clear that latter-day spectacles of migrant suffering remain dependent upon familiar nineteenth-century repertoires of plot device and character type, themselves imbued in a Christian worldview. Saintly heroes and martyrs suffer on—to support innocent migrant mothers and children and to oppose heartless and faceless villains—in repurposings of the old race, domestic, and sensation melodramas now circulating in fresh forms. These in turn influence public discussions and political behaviors related to border issues and immigrant rights, with material effects. Puga and Espinosa ask: “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? (5).”To address these questions, the authors take us on a sweeping journey that begins in nineteenth-century Italy and ends in recent television coverage of the separation of children from their families and other detainment policies during the Trump administration. They spent more than a dozen years in research, starting with participant observation in immigration marches in the United States and continuing with long-term fieldwork in migrant shelters in Chicago, Mexico, and Honduras; along the way they interviewed hundreds of migrants, shelter workers, volunteers, and sympathizers. The resulting study is divided into three parts comprising two chapters each, focusing on key players whose “casting” is strategic, not only for the authors' argument but also in terms of the larger stakes involved for migrants and their supporters.Part I focuses on “Rescuers” and begins with an examination of the writings of the Italian Bishop Giovanni Battista Scalabrini (1839–1905), “Father of the Migrants.” His work on behalf of Italian immigrants to the United States in the nineteenth century introduced the trope of migrants as unfortunate victims in need of rescue. This attitude will find ambivalent echoes in the work of three latter-day shelter operators in southern Mexico, whose case studies follow in sensitive, sympathetic and yet critical detail, with attention also to the experience of migrants in their care. All of them operate in the shadow of “The Beast,” the freight train that transports Central American migrants through Mexico on their way to the southern US border—a powerful melodramatic motif not lost on the authors, and the source of much literal suffering and death for migrants along the way. But each shelter operator adopts a different orientation to the work of rescue, from empathetic companion, to saintly mother, to potential martyr on behalf of the migrants in their care. Puga and Espinosa show how these different advocacy styles helped enhance their distinct reputations and establish both their authenticity and authority within their local and transnational networks.Part II, “Mothers and Fathers,” focuses in on activist parent-migrants in two separate case studies, each viewed through the lens of casting and counter-casting within the melodramatic frame. In 2006, Elvira Arellano famously resisted a deportation order on behalf of her young son, seeking sanctuary in a Chicago church for over a year. As time went on, she was by turns publicly cast as a self-sacrificing and classically sorrowful mother (the Madre Dolorosa), and also as criminally unfit to be a mother at all. In 2015, a group of seventeen Honduran fathers who had been mutilated by The Beast formed a caravan and traveled back through Mexico and the United States, protesting outside the White House against the structural forces informing emigration from Honduras, and demanding government action to end what they considered to be forced migration. Univision covered the protests in a four-part news series, the basis for Puga and Espinosa's deeper exploration of the men's casting journey. In the 2015 news series they were treated as “emasculated victims” who could no longer provide for their families; by the time a smaller group of them appeared in Chicago churches a year later, they had self-transformed into to “wounded warriors,” who deployed the melodramatic frame on their own (culturally gender-norm-approved) terms, turning individual suffering into collective political action in the process.Part III, “DREAMer Youth Artist-Activists: Queering Migrant Melodrama,” examines the casting and self-casting of young people who make the journey. The first chapter analyzes the 2006 journalistic narrative Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario, Patricia Riggen's 2007 feature film Under the Same Moon, and the 2005 play Our Dad Is in Atlantis by Javier Malpica. While each tugs on the heartstrings in different ways, Puga and Espinosa reveal the conservative message lurking at the heart of Enrique's Journey (“immigrants: just stay home!”) and show how humor in the latter two expands the perceptual range of migrant subjectivity—but not quite enough to entitle them to rights by mere virtue of being human. The second chapter turns to two works by young DREAMers who push the limits of the form in promising “nonnormative” directions: Albany Park Theatre Project's 2007 Nine Digits and Julia Salgado's YouTube video series Undocumented and Awkward (2011–13). Puga and Espinosa argue that these works' refusal to find redemption in the suffering of migrant experience, or accept anything less than full humanity as the price for belonging, change the terms of engagement in the political economy of suffering represented by migrant melodramatic performances.No analysis of melodramatic performances of migration would be complete without an examination of journalistic responses to the plight of children separated from their parents at the border, a melodrama that almost wrote itself in the Trump era. In the epilogue, Puga and Espinosa briefly examine two such treatments to show how each responded within a melodramatic frame of reference: Rachel Maddow's abortive attempt to break that news in 2018, before she herself broke down in tears, and Jon Stewart's more distanced, satirical treatment on Stephen Colbert's The Late Night Show a few days later. Before they get there, however, Espinosa, himself an immigrant from Mexico to the United States, relates his immersive experience of Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Carne y Arena (Flesh and sand), a virtual reality border-crossing experience he experienced at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2017. Meant to evoke a kind of kinesthetic empathy, it provoked “more guilt about his privilege rather than any transformative embodied knowledge of the migrant experience” (326).This book is extremely well researched, argued, and written. The authors exquisitely render the dilemmas each “character” faces as they wriggle within and against the constraints of the melodramatic form that, like it or not, structures the way we receive and process information about this crucial experience that too many fellow human beings live and die through. If the arc of the book bends toward migrant agency and a hope for the “human family” that migrant melodrama allegorizes, its deeply nuanced readings of melodrama's susceptibility to reductive tropes and types reveal the risks we all run if we continue to trivialize its power

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