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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 March 2016
In an age when politicians and the mainstream media continue to divide immigrants into deserving and undeserving subjects, making them both hypervisible and yet invisible, the essays by Lauret, Krause and Schreiber are timely and compelling. Together, they map the historical and contemporary processes of state violence, legal erasure and cultural coercion that have shaped immigrant lives and subjectivities. Models of cultural conformity and whiteness, hyphenation, and either/or binaries that enforce the strict separation of old and new, legal and illegal, have affected the immigrant psyche and induced forms of individual and collective trauma, including ethnic shame, madness, family fragmentation and the physical exploitation of human bodies. In their essays on Americanization and Dominican American fiction, Lauret and Krause reveal the less than celebratory narratives that get lost in stories of emancipatory assimilation, ethnic persistence and hyphenated and multiple subjectivities. Likewise, in her essay on contemporary Latino/a music video and undocumented immigration, Schreiber asks us to see what is obscured from view, but also to find room in these new narratives for patterns of immigrant visibility, agency and activism. These essays suggest that immigrant testimony, literature and visual and aural media can be powerfully combined with historical analyses of immigration policy to unravel the complex realities behind the walls of national nostalgia and racial stereotyping. They also suggest alternative ways of seeing that demand we recognize every immigrant's right to humanity and a sense of belonging.
1 Dulce Pinzón, “Artist Statement: The Real Story of the Superheroes,” at www.dulcepinzon.com, accessed 9 Oct. 2015.
2 For example, see Bayly, Heather Jane, “Professional Wrestling and Contemporary Photography: The Case of Dulce Pinzón's ‘The Real Story of the Superheroes’,” Revue de recherche en civilisation américaine, 4, 9 (2013)Google Scholar, at http://rrca.revues.org/527, accessed 10 Oct. 2015.
3 Julio Salgado quoted in Janet Arelis Quezada, “Queer, Undocumented Visual Artist Julio Salgado Speaks Out,” GLAAD, 18 March 2015, at www.glaad.org/blog/queer-undocumented-visual-artist-julio-salgado-speaks-out, accessed 9 Oct. 2015.
4 For this image by Julio Salgado see Channing Kennedy, “Undocumented Artist Gives American Apparel's Farmer Ad a Political Twist,” Colorlines, 1 June 2015, at www.colorlines.com/articles/undocumented-artist-gives-american-apparels-farmer-ad-political-twist, accessed 10 Oct. 2015.
5 Julio Salgado quoted in Kyle Harris, “Undocumented Queer Artist Speaks Out,” Westword, 17 March 2014, at www.westword.com/arts/queer-undocumented-artist-julio-salgado-speaks-out-5790362, accessed 11 Oct. 2015; Salgado, Julio quoted in Seif, Hinda, “‘Layers of Humanity’: Interview with Undocuqueer Artivist Julio Salgado,” Latino Studies, 12, 2 (2014), 303–9Google Scholar, 308.
6 Michael Novak, “A ‘White Ethnic’ Differentiates PIGS from WASPS,” in Jon Gjerde, ed., Major Problems in American Immigration and Ethnic History (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin), 417–19, 417.
7 Tropicana, Carmelita, “Milk of Amnesia/Leche de Amnesia,” Drama Review, 39, 3 (1995), 94–111CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 95.
8 Báez, Josefina, “A 1 2 3 Portrait of a Legend,” Callaloo, 23, 3 (2000), 1038–40Google Scholar; Báez, Dominicanish: A Performance Text (New York: Ay Ombe Theatre Press, 2000), 49.
9 For example, see Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, “Families on the Frontier: From Braceros in the Fields to Braceras in the Home,” in Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Mariela M. Páez, eds., Latinos: Remaking America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 259–73; and Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette and Avila, Ernestine, “‘I'm Here, But I'm There’: The Meanings of Latina Transnational Motherhood,” Gender and Society, 11, 5 (1997), 548–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 For example, see Vicioso, Sherezada and De Filippis, Daisy Cocco, “Dominicanyorkness: A Metropolitan Discovery of the Triangle,” Callaloo, 23, 3 (2000), 1013–16Google Scholar; and Silvio Torres-Saillant, “Divisible Blackness: Reflections on Heterogeneity and Racial Identity,” in Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, eds., The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 455–56.
11 Freddy Rodríguez, “Collages,” at http://freddyrodriguez.com/artwork/collages, accessed 21 May 2015.
12 Junot Díaz quoted in Armando Celayo and David Shook, “In Darkness We Meet: A Conversation with Junot Díaz,” Molossus, 11 May 2008, original emphasis, at www.molossus.co/prose/fiction/in-darkness-we-meet-a-conversation-with-junot-diaz-test, accessed 22 May 2015.
13 For the latter see Josefina Báez, Levente no. Yolayorkdominicanyork (New York: Ay Ombe Theatre Press, 2011).
14 Salgado quoted in Seif, 307.
15 Yosimar Reyes quoted in García, Armando, “The Illegalities of Brownness,” Social Text, 33, 2 (2015), 99–120Google Scholar, 99.
16 Salgado quoted in Seif, 308.
17 Reyes quoted in García, 99.
18 See the statements by the artist collective, and the interviews with Orlando Lara and Delilah Montoya in the video to accompany the exhibition, “Sin Huellas: ‘Detention Nation’ at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art,” at www.stationmuseum.com/index.php/exhibitions/19-exhibitions/265-degrees-of-separation-sin-huellas, accessed 16 Jan. 2016.
19 Salgado quoted in Seif, 303.
20 The Dreamers Adrift collective quoted in Jorge Rivas, Colorlines, 14 Nov. 2011, at www.colorlines.com/articles/whats-it-be-young-and-undocumented-awkward-says-new-video, accessed 15 Jan. 2016; Julia Barton, “Julio Salgado: Undocumented and Awkward,” Studio 360, 29 June 2012, at www.studio360.org/story/219144-julio-salgado-undocumented-and-awkward, accessed 15 Jan. 2016.
