Puga & Espinosa - 2020 - Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration - Introduction

Ana Elena Puga · Víctor M.
Espinosa
Performances
of Suffering in Latin
American Migration
Heroes, Martyrs and Saints
Ana Elena Puga Víctor M. Espinosa
Departments of Theatre and Spanish Department of Sociology
& Portuguese The Ohio State University
The Ohio State University Newark, OH, USA
Columbus, 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
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Acknowledgements
This book project began while Ana was teaching in the Department
of Theatre at Northwestern University and Víctor was a graduate stu-
dent in the Department of Sociology there. We benefitted from the sup-
port 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 Con-
quergood, 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 di-
mensions 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 coura-
geous 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
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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 field-
work and worked alongside us as a shelter volunteer; her warmth and con-
viviality 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 migrant-
rights activists and migrants, and by helping us understand certain di-
mensions 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 re-
turned migrants and offered great insight into Honduran culture and po-
litical history.
At The Ohio State University, where Víctor is now an assistant profes-
sor 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
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
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 Brunner-
Sung (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 Po-
dalsky 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 com-
ments on the manuscript helped us to both focus on details and gain
perspective on the project as a whole. The graduate students who orga-
nized 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 inter-
disciplinary intellectual community on campus.
The chairs of both the departments of Theatre and Spanish & Por-
tuguese 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 re-
search 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 San-
tillán, 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 invita-
tion 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 Col-
lege) 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
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Library Seminar on Borderlands and Latino Studies, the Migration Work-

ing 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 Per-
formance 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 1
Part I Rescuers
2 Heroic and Empathic Rescuers in Foundational Migrant

Melodrama 47
3 Rescuers as Saints and Martyrs in Contemporary Migrant

Melodrama 89
Part II Mothers and Fathers
4 Madre Dolorosa: Casting Competitions in Mother-Activism 143
5 Wounded Warriors: Corrective Castings in Male Activism 185
xi
xii CONTENTS
Part III Children and Youth
6 Unaccompanied Migrant Children: Orphan-Martyrs in

Motion 233
7 DREAMer Youth Artist-Activists: Queering Migrant

Melodrama 281
Epilogue 319
Bibliography 337
Index 355
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 twen-
ties 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 intergen-
erational 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 Mex-
ico 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 1

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
2 A. E. PUGA AND V. M. ESPINOSA
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 Sal-
vador 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
1 INTRODUCTION 3
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 circum-
stances? 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 expe-
rienced 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 suffer-
ing. 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 displace-
ment 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, Mar-
tyrs 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 suffer-
ing—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 collab-
orate 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
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 repre-
sent 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 understand-
ably 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 fur-
ther 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 com-
prehend such suffering. Melodramatic performances of migrant suffering,
we argue, are especially valued and earn rewards on a global market in cul-
tural production, which in turn reinforces how we perceive future suffer-
ing. 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
1 INTRODUCTION 5
migrant melodrama merely construct communities of privileged senti-

mental 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 strip-
searched at the border?”3 To which we might add, given the accumu-
lating horrors of the past two decades: Who gets kidnapped, tortured,
raped, massacred, and dumped in a ditch or dissolved in acid at the bor-
der? 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 multina-
tional 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
performance practices incorporate displays of suffering as mechanisms to

promote social inclusion and exclusion, to define who belongs in a com-
munity 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 journal-
ists, 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. Migrant-
rights 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
1 INTRODUCTION 7
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 pro-
duction. 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 iden-
tity.”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 human-
ize 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 Mex-
ican migrant agricultural workers in the 1970s and 80s, the play’s cen-
tral 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 estab-
lishment of maquiladora systems that began in Mexico in the 1960s, the
anti-communist economic experiments in Chile in the 1970s, the conse-
quences of the North American Free Trade Agreement since its incep-
tion in 1994, and the vast market for narcotics in the United States have
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 cen-
tury, 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 authoritar-
ian 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 “back-
yard.”
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 devel-
oped by the Scalabrinian order, founded in 1887. Though we consistently
point out how melodramatic tropes from the nineteenth century are recy-
cled in contemporary migrant melodramas, we do not attempt a step-by-
step 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 pub-
lic 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
1 INTRODUCTION 9
a vulnerable source of cheap labor for their U.S. employers.9 The per-
formances 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 uninten-
tionally 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 bor-
der areas near San Diego and beginning a militarization of the U.S.–Mex-
ico border that has steadily intensified.12 Since it became more difficult
to move back and forth across the border, migration became more per-
manent, family reunification became more difficult, and the smuggling
industry was soon dominated by criminal mafias connected to the busi-
ness 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 immi-
gration 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 stepped-
up 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
it became clear that Congress was not going to pass any sort of immigra-
tion reform, Obama used his executive powers to create the Deferred
Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provided defer-
ment of deportation and approval to work for some 800,000 youth
between the ages of 15 and 30 known as DREAMers. Their parents, how-
ever, 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 coun-
tries, he has singled out Latin Americans for condemnation as gang mem-
bers, 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 econ-
omy, 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 consti-
tutes 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 Commis-
sion 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 com-
mission 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
1 INTRODUCTION 11
by the Calderón administration of more than 26,000 people reported dis-

appeared 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 presi-
dencies. 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 miss-
ing 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 conse-
quence of the war on drugs.17 Since 2014, unprecedented surges in the
number of migrants from Central America led the United States to pres-
sure Mexico to crack down harder on the undocumented in its territory,
including more arrests, detentions, and deportations. In short, the vari-
ety 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 rob-
bery, beating, or rape. Migrants and their advocates display the physical
evidence of such encounters: scars, wounds, and mutilations, bellies dis-
tended 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
raped by her traffickers.18 Though the media did not publish photos of
Noemí’s lifeless body, journalists and activists attempted to provide sen-
sory details that would allow us to imagine the dead girl. Many empha-
sized 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 sup-
port…” 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 cru-
cial part of creating martyrs, who in turn can serve as witnesses to polit-
ical 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 crimi-
nalizes 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 accom-
panying 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 for-
tunate compared to almost all the others with whom he had been held
hostage. Though suffering itself, as well as displays of that suffering dur-
ing 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
1 INTRODUCTION 13
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 per-
son 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 sociopoliti-
cal 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 undocu-
mented during air travel as if they were dangerous criminals or armed ter-
rorists who might somehow seize control of the flight. Equally humiliated
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 them-
selves—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 the-
orist of spectacle, Guy Debord, also suggests, in perhaps his most often-
quoted 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 spec-
tacle 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 cre-
ates 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 bio-
chemistry, 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 per-
formance 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.
1 INTRODUCTION 15
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, journal-
ists, 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 real-
ity, 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 con-
vincing 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, particu-
larly 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 trans-
form 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.
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 jour-
nalist. 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 popu-
lar genre is in fact also a vital contemporary mode of thought, a concep-
tual 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 per-
sonal, 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 culmi-
nation 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
1 INTRODUCTION 17
nonfictional people and events, which in turn fuels further cultural pro-
duction. 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 melo-
drama as a mode of imagination:
1. Migrant melodrama assumes virtuous suffering as the price of inclu-

sion 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 suf-
fered 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 interna-
tional 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 com-
bination of the two. When crafted by undocumented migrants
and/or their advocates, the power imbalance structures perfor-
mances 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
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. bor-
der, 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 Spanish-
speaking United States. Increased border security and punitive legislation
has unfortunately made this melodramatic device all too verisimilar: cir-
cular migration has become more expensive and dangerous, leading to
longer and more traumatic separations between children and their par-
ents. 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
1 INTRODUCTION 19
The title of a 2012 human rights report from the nongovernmental orga-
nization The Women’s Refugee Commission echoes the titles of Victorian
novels: “Forced from Home: The Lost Boys and Girls of Central Amer-
ica.”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 fam-
ily 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 cou-
ples and separated parents from their children, many migrant-rights advo-
cates 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 burn-
ing 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
definition uninteresting. Martha Stoddard Holmes’ assessment of melo-

drama 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 melo-

dramas 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 criminal-
ization, 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 cri-
sis 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 contempo-
rary 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 spec-
tators are familiar archetypes, both in the sense that they derive from
families (and their rescuers) and in the sense that they are instantly recog-
nizable 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,
1 INTRODUCTION 21
the innocent children searching for their parents, and the rebellious-yet-
talented 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 differ-
ent 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 perfor-
mances 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 gen-
erating 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 nineteenth-
century 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 affec-
tive 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 spec-
tators. For men who return from an interrupted migrant journey with a
disability, the capacity to conform to the ideal of a heroic male is com-
promised. The disabled migrant body becomes the spectacle itself, unfor-
tunately, once it has suffered visible, direct violence. The less dramatically
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 bod-
ies as the spectacle in migrant melodramas today build to climactic dis-
plays in contemporary tableaux intended, just as in the nineteenth cen-
tury, 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 cast-
ing 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 ser-
vice 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 indi-
vidual: 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 deter-
mine who merits inclusion and good treatment and who must be pun-
ished and excluded.
1 INTRODUCTION 23
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 under-
take 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 dom-
ination.”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 circu-
late 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 cre-
ate news-entertainment or entertainment-entertainment they participate
in an economic exchange that involves the commodification and circula-
tion of displays of suffering for profit. We use the term economy in the
sense of Merriam-Webster’s definition 3b of “economy”: “a system espe-
cially 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 sig-
nificant 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 migra-
tion which have noted that migrants are often commodified in the pro-
cess, 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 anthropol-
ogist Didier Fassin demonstrates, a new moral economy that emerged in
the late twentieth century sidelines the social origins of suffering in order
to focus on a few individual sufferers who are deemed worthy of human-

itarian 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 com-

munity 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 econ-

omy 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 market-
places. These marketplaces exert a sometimes-unperceived pressure on the
formation of community, as they help to create the insiders whose suffer-
ing matters and the outsiders whose suffering does not concern us. Our
aim is to raise awareness and understanding of how and why those per-
formances 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 moth-
ers.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 Marx-
ist 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 suffer-
ing. 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 Undocu-
mented migrants are often aware that they must expend time and effort
1 INTRODUCTION 25
into communicating their suffering. Effective displays of suffering consti-

tute labor in the sense that they require conscious, focused energy and
can earn material benefits. They are a survival tactic every bit as neces-
sary 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 dif-
ference 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 suffer-
ing, 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 suffer-
ing. 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 photogra-
phers, 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 kid-
napping 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 trauma-
tized 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 volun-
teers 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
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 voice-
less; 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 mean-
ing of suffering, if suffering has a meaning; we instead interpret the mean-
ings 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 melo-
drama: yet another account of the evils of neoliberal globalization and
the commodification of everything trapped in its grip, even the perfor-
mances 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 addi-
tional 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
1 INTRODUCTION 27
soon after German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a more lenient

policy toward Syrian refugees and provided moral justification of her deci-
sion. Melodramatic representation remains undeniably efficacious, though
only up to a point, as Merkel’s subsequent difficulties in enacting her pol-
icy 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 undoc-
umented 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 vis-
ceral? When María weeps over her separation from her husband and chil-
dren 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 on-
camera interviews and breaks off contact with him, Ana almost cheered
aloud. Yes! The woman was taking matters into her own hands, exercis-
ing 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, impo-
tent and self-indulgent tears, since there was absolutely nothing we could
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 read-
ings 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 tran-
scribed 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 offi-
cials, 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 ethno-
graphic research was necessary to better understand how people “stage”
migrants in daily life and how migrants perform themselves. Because peo-
ple focused on migrants and involved in staging them in social life perfor-
mances 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 con-
ducting other participant observation in shelters for migrants: we baked
cookies for migrants to sell (and sometimes helped sell ourselves), pre-
pared 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 meet-
ings 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
1 INTRODUCTION 29
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 Jan-
uary–February of 2013, and three months in 2014. Thanks to a Ful-
bright, 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, Chi-
apas; 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 celebra-
tions between December 24–January 6 of 2012–2013 and 2013–2014
at Brothers on the Road Shelter in Ixtepec, Oaxaca where we also par-
ticipated in the life of the community, primarily by informally convers-
ing 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 north-
ern 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 Lat-
inx 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 inter-
views and participant observation in Mexico, Honduras, and Chicago.
Our very first interviews were with Rev. Walter Coleman and Rev. Emma
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, Mex-
ico; 10. Chicago, Illinois, United States
1 INTRODUCTION 31
Lozano in Chicago, for what later became Chapter 4. While in Mex-

ico, 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 cara-
van, especially Rosa Nelly Santos, that our study would not be complete
without some research in Honduras in order to gain a grasp on perfor-
mances 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 inter-
viewed 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 Disabili-
ties (AMIREDIS), sometimes interviewing the same person several times.
In July–August 2016 we spent ten days observing AMIREDIS’s perfor-
mative protests in Chicago, and reviewed the extensive media coverage of
their protests, which began in Honduras in 2012 and continued on-and-
off for at least eighteen months in the United States (June 2015–Decem-
ber 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 how-
ever 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 Immi-
grations 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
to consider poetry, political discourse, documentary film, fictional film,

television news, journalistic narrative accounts, fictional narratives, pho-
tography, painting, a YouTube video series, and last but not least, theater.
This approach allows us to highlight intersections of aesthetics and poli-
tics 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 com-
panion, 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 imag-
ination that still structures many aspects of migrant representation today.
In the second half of the chapter, we analyze the staging-of-self and writ-
ings 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, Mex-
ico 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 involv-
ing 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 humanitar-
ian assistance in Mexico: Olga Sánchez Martínez, a layperson who runs
a Tapachula shelter focused on the care of sick, injured, and disabled
1 INTRODUCTION 33
migrants; and Father Alejandro Solalinde, who in 2007 established a shel-

ter to try to protect migrants passing through Ixtepec, Oaxaca from cor-
rupt 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 con-
vention, and even Catholic Church officials, to take her domesticity to
the streets on behalf of migrant rescue. In order to illuminate how res-
cuers 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 perfor-
mances 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
her deportation order. Our analysis of the journalism and artistic work
depicting Arellano shows how quickly castings of migrants as good, self-
sacrificing, 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 vulnera-
ble to charges that she was a lawbreaker, an unfit mother, and an inade-
quate 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 sum-
moned 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 Hon-
duran 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 migra-
tion. We contrast the casting of the men by Univision, the largest His-
panic 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 pro-
vide 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 competi-
tion 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
1 INTRODUCTION 35
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 peo-
ple, 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 Chil-
dren: Orphan-Martyrs in Motion,” analyzes three well-known and influ-
ential 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” mes-
sage, 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 dif-
ference 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 undo-
cutime 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 Dig-
its and Undocumented and Awkward demonstrate how artist-activists can
push the limits of melodrama, and even react against it, while neverthe-
less still working within some of its conventions. In contrast to many of
the works discussed in the previous chapters, these examples of cultural
production exhibit facets that might seem to disqualify them from the cat-
egory of melodrama, including humor, satire, defiance, and anger. Yet we
argue that rather than reject melodrama entirely, these works take melo-
dramatic imagination in nonnormative directions, what theorists have
called queering.52 We argue, furthermore, that queering migrant melo-
drama, subverting some of its conventions in order to challenge normative
ideals, loosens the strictures of melodramas that would confine undocu-
mented migrants to the role of pitiful victims who deserve respect for their
rights on the basis of how much they have suffered. Queer migrant melo-
drama 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 por-
tray human suffering as redemptive and by interrogating dominant values
such as nationalism and the American Dream. Salgado’s video series sim-
ilarly 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 per-
secutors. President Trump’s policies have criminalized migrants to such
an extent, and created so much additional migrant suffering, that politi-
cal 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 melo-
drama, 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.
1 INTRODUCTION 37
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 (Car-
bondale, 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 Detain-
ability 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, Reinforc-
ing 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).
13. Ana Gonzalez-Barrera and Jeans Manuel Krogstad, “U.S. Deportations

of Immigrants Reach Record in 2013,” Pew Research Center, Octo-
ber 2, 2014, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/02/u-s-
deportations-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 mil-
lion 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 Inter-
americana 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-17-
INFORME-CIDH-Migrantes-no-localizados-y-restos-no-identificados-
en-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/mexico-
disappearances-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-mexico-
250-000-dead-37-400-missing-1542213374.
18. Months after the consul referred to her as a “girl martyr of immi-
gration,” 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-20150303-
0049.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.
1 INTRODUCTION 39
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 His-
toria, July 14, 2014, http://lahistoria.ec/2014/07/14/trafico-de-ninos-
de-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-details-
immigrants-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-levels-
of-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 Mex-
ico 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-honduras-
expande-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 Endur-
ing Phenomenon,” Migration Policy Institute, February 18, 2016,
http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/increased-central-american-
migration-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
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.
24. 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).
25. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
1994), 12.
26. Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 79, no. 22.2 (2004):
117–139.
27. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 2004), 42–53.
28. Vivian M. Patraka, Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism, and the Holo-
caust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 115.
29. Ibid., 115.
30. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melo-
drama, 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 Busi-
ness of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2008).
31. 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 Interna-
tional’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 Quemada-
Diez, 2013). Prominent contemporary narratives, besides Enrique’s Jour-
ney, 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 Hernán-
dez’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).
32. Gustavo López Castro, “Niños, socialización y migración a Estados
Unidos,” in El país transnacional: Migración mexicana y cambio social
1 INTRODUCTION 41
a través de la frontera, eds. Marina Ariza and Alejandro Portés (Mex-

ico City: Universidad Autónoma de México/Instituto de Investigaciones
Sociales, 2007), 545–570.
33. 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 Cen-
tral America, October 1212, https://www.womensrefugeecommission.
org/uncategorized/2057-forced-from-home-the-lost-boys-and-girls-of-
central-america-background-and-report. See also Elizabeth G. Kennedy,
“Unnecessary Suffering: Potential Unmet Mental Health Needs of Unac-
companied 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.
34. Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Vic-
torian Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 16–17.
35. Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after Mod-
ernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 8.
36. Matthew S. Buckley, “Refugee Theatre: Melodrama and Modernity’s
Loss,” Theatre Journal 61, no. 2 (May 2009): 175–190.
37. Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race
and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
38. Amy E. Hughes, Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-
Century America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 13–
45.
39. Brandi Wilkins Catanese, The Problem of the Color[blind]: Racial Trans-
gression and the Politics of Black Performance (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2011).
40. Micaela di Leonardo, “Dwight Conquergood and Performative Politi-
cal Economy,” in Dwight Conquergood, Cultural Studies: Performance,
Ethnography, Praxis, ed. E. Patrick Johnson (Ann Arbor, MI: University
of Michigan Press, 2013), 304.
41. Merriam-Webster Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/
dictionary/economy.
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 (Berke-
ley: 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 Commu-
nity,” 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 emo-
tional 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 non-
governmental 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 deci-
sions 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 excep-
tional 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 ‘Si-
lent 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-cameron-
says-he-felt-deeply-moved-by-images-of-dead-syrian-boy-but-gives-no-
10484641.html.
1 INTRODUCTION 43
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-angela-
merkels-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.

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Ana Elena Puga · Víctor M.

ISBN 978-3-030-37408-2 ISBN 978-3-030-37409-9 (eBook)

and allowed us to volunteer and “hang out” as much as we needed to for

received helpful comments on portions of this work from Anna M. Babel,

Library Seminar on Borderlands and Latino Studies, the Migration Work-

2 Heroic and Empathic Rescuers in Foundational Migrant

3 Rescuers as Saints and Martyrs in Contemporary Migrant

Part II Mothers and Fathers

4 Madre Dolorosa: Casting Competitions in Mother-Activism 143

5 Wounded Warriors: Corrective Castings in Male Activism 185

Part III Children and Youth

6 Unaccompanied Migrant Children: Orphan-Martyrs in

7 DREAMer Youth Artist-Activists: Queering Migrant

My story is better than a Mel Gibson movie!

On August 24, 2009, on our second day of participant observation at a

© The Author(s) 2020 1

migrants had been kidnapped in a six-month period. Yet as we spent the

of directors of theater, in that they craft scripts, assign certain roles to

migrant melodrama merely construct communities of privileged senti-

Migrant Suffering: From South America, Central

performance practices incorporate displays of suffering as mechanisms to

transnationally, across media and genre, allowing us to compare the

all contributed to the conditions that encourage violence, displacement,

The Time of the “Latino Threat”

by the Calderón administration of more than 26,000 people reported dis-

Spectacles of Migrant Suffering

were discovered in San Fernando. The total number of bodies reported to

and additionally endangered are the Central American migrants deported

Like many scholars, we define spectacle in part by the intensity of the

Migrants themselves, to a variety of degrees, sometimes collaborate in

1. Migrant melodrama assumes virtuous suffering as the price of inclu-

The Family, Its Characters, and Their Casting

definition uninteresting. Martha Stoddard Holmes’ assessment of melo-

Melodramatic characters have little “character” per se; their Manichean

Yet we have found that the characters in contemporary migrant melo-

visible effects of structural violence—malnutrition (before it gets to the

The Political Economy of Suffering

to focus on a few individual sufferers who are deemed worthy of human-

We do not acknowledge the destruction of beings outside our moral com-

Our contribution to this line of thought—the idea of a political econ-

into communicating their suffering. Effective displays of suffering consti-

donation to a shelter). Though it was not part of a prearranged, formal

soon after German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a more lenient

Feeling Migrant Pain

volunteered, we were careful to observe how migrants interacted with all

Fig. 1.1 Map: Fieldwork locations: 1. Tegucigalpa, Honduras; 2. San Pedro

Lozano in Chicago, for what later became Chapter 4. While in Mex-

to consider poetry, political discourse, documentary film, fictional film,

migrants; and Father Alejandro Solalinde, who in 2007 established a shel-

men in a dignified collective masculine subjectivity that resists conformity

13. Ana Gonzalez-Barrera and Jeans Manuel Krogstad, “U.S. Deportations

a través de la frontera, eds. Marina Ariza and Alejandro Portés (Mex-

42. Susan Bibler Coutin, “Being En Route,” American Anthropologist 107,

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