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The breaking and remaking of everyday life: illegality, maternity and displacement in the Americas

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The breaking and remaking of everyday life: illegality, maternity and displacement in the Americas

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Content i THE BREAKING AND REMAKING OF EVERYDAY LIFE: ILLEGALITY, MATERNITY AND DISPLACEMENT IN THE AMERICAS by Gretel H. Vera-Rosas A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY) August 2013 Copyright 2013 Gretel H. Vera-Rosas ii EPIGRAPH De mi madre aprendí que nunca es tarde, que siempre se puede empezar de nuevo. –Facundo Cabral iii DEDICATION A las mujeres que me enseñaron que “nunca es tarde” A mi madre MANUELA ROSAS SALINAS y mi abuela FRANCISCA SALINAS BELLO (October 28, 1928- August 1, 1999) iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As a young girl, on various occasions, I woke up to my grandmother singing. She often sang as she watered her plants and swept the sidewalk before going to morning mass at the church of the Sacred Heart. I must have been five years old when my parents separated and my mom, sister and I moved into my grandparents’ house in the northeast of Mexico City. Mis abuelos, Francisca Salinas Bello and Leobardo Rosas Guzman, made room for the three of us in a house crowded with cousins, aunts and uncles (and a parrot whom always warbled along with my grandma’s morning singing). In the same way that they showed their support for my mom when her marriage did not work out, they supported her when she decided to embark on a journey to the United States, hoping to provide for a better future for her two daughters. My grandparents never questioned my mother’s choices even if these caused them pain. In her absence, they took care of my sister and I with unconditional love and devotion, raising us as very happy children despite our circumstances. Mis abuelos were kind, grateful, and beautiful people who made magic with very little and gave themselves to others without expecting anything in return. It has been many years since my sister and I left their house and reunited with my mother in Los Angeles. It has been many years since they passed away; but everyday, I feel their assuring presence, always guiding me, reminding me that their love always had (and continues to have) the capacity to transform me. It was from my grandparents that I learned at an early age that one must never take for granted the wholehearted help of family, friends, and strangers. It would be impossible for me to provide a dimension of how fortunate I have been to have plenty of people in my life who have given me their love, trust and support. Indeed, this dissertation—a project that at times felt like a colossal and unachievable task—could not have been completed without a multitude of generous individuals. Their faith in me is a most precious gift that has carried me forward… v First, I would like to thank Mrs. Sandra Hopwood, who now works as an Administrative Assistant for the History Department, for caring so much about my emotional wellbeing ever since I arrived at the University of Southern California. Through out these years, she has nurtured me with her laughter and unconditional love and advice about the things that really matter in life. Gracias Mrs. Sandra! I would also like to extend my gratitude to the fabulous and loving staff of American Studies and Ethnicity, my home department: Jujuana Preston, Sonia Sanchez and Kitty Lai. Jujuana, Sonia, and Kitty have patiently provided me not only with administrative support and guidance, but also with plenty of hugs and smiles. Their support has been indispensable to “my survival” at USC. I am deeply grateful to my dissertation committee members for their brilliant scholarship, incredible patience and stalwart support. Thanks to Jack Halberstam for his sound advice and encouragement, as well as for the many lessons on critical generosity and for insisting on the value of low theory and alternative knowledges. Anikó Imre has been quite wonderful and supportive ever since she became part of my committee. She has provided me with thoughtful and challenging feedback and has always been incredibly responsive and attentive. She has encouraged me not to hide the personal history that drives and grounds this project. And finally, to my advisor, Macarena Gomez-Barris, I owe a debt of gratitude for her persistent faith in me. Maca’s commitment to writing about the ways in which there are no boundaries to the intimate reach of political violence is invaluable. Thank you for modeling how to write with grace, passion, and fortitude about topics that are personal and politically urgent. Every time I got stuck, I turned to your book as guidance and source of inspiration for overcoming my writing blocks. Maca te estoy eternamente agradecida por tantos años que me has dedicado y ha sido un honor trabajar contigo. Through out these years, I have also benefited from the generosity, critical insights, and cheerful support of professors Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, Rosalinda Fregoso, Dorinne Kondo, Roberto Lint-Sagarena, Lanita Jacobs, Jane Iwamura, Sarah Benet-Weiser and George Sanchez. I vi also feel extremely blessed to have been professor Fred Moten’s student. Fred’s humble and caring personality was invaluable during my first years of graduate school. Thanks Fred for always taking the time to listen to my ideas and helping me sound “more like myself.” I have missed you very much since you left USC. When I began this doctoral program, students in older cohorts showed me what it was like to be part of a community of graduate students committed to ensuring a healthy and supportive environment for all students. Thank you so much Carolyn Dunn, Anthon Smith, Wendy Chang, Anthony Sparks, Micaela Smith, Hilary Jenks, Nisha Kunte, Sionne Rameah Neely, Emily Hobson, Laura Fugikawa, Laura Barraclough, Jesús Hernández, Imani Kai Johnson, Michelle Commander, and Perla Guerrero for welcoming me to ASE. Un agradecimiento muy especial a mi querida Perla (la Guerrera Vengadora) por todas nuestras chocoaventuras. I also extend my gratitude to other ASE folks, particularly Abigail Rosas, Anthony Bayani Rodriguez, Mark Padoongpatt, Thang Dao, Tasneem January-Siddiqui, Anjali Nath, Margarita Smith, Christina Heatherton, and Jih-Fei Cheng for their encouragement and support during the past years. All love and thanks to Terrion Williamson, Todd Honma, Sharon Luk, Araceli (Cheli) Esparza, Orlando Serrano, and Yushi Yamazaki for their kindness, brilliance and loving friendship. I specially would like to thank Sharon, Orlando and Cheli for taking the time to read drafts of my work and providing me with feedback. Above all, my dear Cheli has been an exceptional friend and role model. Thanks not only for reading “my stuff” and helping me prepare for presentations, but for being there for me at both my most vulnerable and happy moments. I also feel very fortunate to have worked with Jose Navarro and Victor Garcia. Jose’s and Victor’s commitment to work with underrepresented youth is truly empowering and inspirational. Y a mi querida amiga de Critical Studies, Noelia Saenz, no tengo palabras para agradecerle su amistad (y su sarcasmo). vii Outside of USC, professors Barbara Jaffe and Juan Poblete have been incredibly amazing mentors, teachers, and friends. While attending El Camino College, professor Jaffe not only taught me how to write well written essays, but she showed me how a caring, committed, and dedicated teacher can change the world one student at a time. She is a woman with a divine gift who has truly been a blessing in my life. Professor Jaffe is always in my heart and I hope and dream to one day be like her, a mentor who puts the needs and dreams of her students first. Thank you for always making me feel capable and talented. Some of my fondest memories as an undergraduate student are the moments when I sat by my bedroom window trying to finish my readings for professor Poblete’s classes. Even if at times I felt overwhelmed by either the amount or the density of the readings, it was then that I began to grasp the importance of cultural mediation and the politics of the quotidian. With no role models in my family with college or doctorate degrees, I would not have considered graduate school without Poblete’s trust and support. He has continued to unconditionally be there for me, providing me with bibliographic references and diligently reading portions of my dissertation. Después de tantos años, el continua contestando mis emails y mis llamadas telefónicas. Me sigue escuchando y cuestionando mis preocupaciones personales y profesionales, siempre aconsejándome desde la realidad de mis experiencias como mujer inmigrante. Saber que cuento con su apoyo y su confianza es un gran honor y una gran responsabilidad. Mil Gracias, Juan! The great boxer Muhammad Ali once said that “friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It's not something you learn in school. But if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven't learned anything.” Needles to say, I would not have gotten through so many years of schooling without the love and encouragement of many of my dearest friends. And while the responsibilities of graduate school did prevent me from spending a lot of time with them in the last few years, their phone calls, text messages, and occasional visits made all the difference. viii I really want to thank my friends from my kickboxing class who have taught me to appreciate life in a new way. Each one of my instructors taught me the importance of breathing, movement and balance. After three years of taking their classes, I can honestly say that the hours I spent working out with them contributed, in immeasurable ways, to making me a happier and more mindful human being. I am especially grateful to Stephanie Iwasaki for inspiring me to try harder and to smile more often. Maritza and Charlene are the best exercise buddies whose personalities inspire me to be more carefree and less self-conscious. I would specially like to thank Maritza for her kindness and her advice on letting go and learning to be happy even if “the Master Plan” does not work out. And then there are those friends who defy category, friends who have sustained and loved me in indescribable ways, among them Daisy Echeverri, Sugey Rebollar, Nicolas Sandoval, Angelica Jimenez, Isidro Cerda, Allegra Padilla, Ricardo Rocha y Xilomen Rios. A ell@s quiero agradecerles no solo su amistad incondicional, pero el haberme enseñado que es posible crear un mundo diferente “donde quepan muchos mundos.” Gracias por aceptarme tal y como soy, y por darme más de lo que yo a veces puedo darles. I am so fortunate to not only know you but to have you as constants in my life. A very special thanks goes out to Daisy. Amiga no tienes idea de cuanto te admiro, respeto y quiero. Gracias por ayudarme ha echar raíces y crecer como mujer y ser humano. Many thanks also to my dearest friend Karina (Kari) Zelaya who has been a most powerful source of inspiration. A survivor of the Salvadoran civil war, Kari has taught me much about Salvadoran history, but more importantly, she has given me many lessons on hope and determination. She has shown me the meaning of writing from the heart with passion and defiance. I look forward to many more days of talking, writing, eating, walking, and laughing with you. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the AB540 students-members of the Active Dream Coalition for welcoming me into their lives and allowing me to build dreams with them. Working ix with you has been one of the most beautiful and rewarding experiences. You have my deepest admiration and respect. While coming to the United States prevented me from growing up with my consanguineal family, the Torres-Servin-Garcia family have proved to me that fictive kin is sometimes thicker than blood. Thanks tía Bertha, Ara, Rafa, y Denise for adopting my mom, sister, and I and giving me the joy and opportunity to call you family. I am truly lucky to call Andres Torres, Adrian Garcia-Torres, Alexa Garcia-Torres, and Sebastian Servin my sobrin@s. I love you more than you can imagine. I look forward to more days of hiking, games, and family gatherings. Thanks also to my bother-in- law, Benjamin Gonzalez, for his support during my many “crises” and for letting me borrow his truck lots of times. A mis queridos suegros Margarita García y Álvaro Márquez les agradezco todo el cariño que me han brindado. No me pude encontrar mejores suegros. Though most of my life I grew up far away from my father, in the past years we have grown closer, developing a relationship grounded on forgiveness and acceptance. Gracias papá por las charlas por teléfono, por tus consejos, y por dejarme quererte a mi manera. Gracias también a Lolita por su cariño y por enseñarle a mis medios herman@s Alejandro, Natalia, y el Josefo a buscarme y quererme. Mi papá es muy afortunado por tenerte como su compañera. Ever since we were little my sister Claudia I. Vera-Rosas has pushed me to be more adventurous and less afraid of the world. If I were to be born again, I would like to be more like her so I can have her wisdom and daring spirit. I do not have enough or good enough words to express my love for her. Thank you for being such a wonderful sister. Y mil gracias por darme uno de los regalos más lindos de mi vida, a mi querida Ayelén. To my beautiful niece Ayelén Gonzalez Rosas, thank you for bringing so much joy, wonder, and inspiration into my life. While you are the first one in our family to be born on this side of the x border, I hope to see you grow up curious about history and the place your grandma, your mom, and I call “home.” Mi nena hermosa, tía Tetel te ama con todo su corazón. Four years ago, while picking up my mail from the American Studies Department, a new graduate student approached me to ask me if we could talk about a paper he had to write for one of his classes. As time went by, we became good friends and through many conversations and walks around the Silver Lake reservoir, I began to share my life and myself with him in a way that I never thought possible. Alvaro D. Marquez has lived these pages with me through thick and thin. And I can honestly say that I would not have finished this dissertation without his enormous commitment to helping me complete this project. Alvaro has listened to my ideas, written emails for me, has read every chapter (multiple times), and has also helped me prepare for conference presentations. But more importantly, he has cared for me through my many bouts of stress, frustration and anxiety. As graduate students, the years we have been together have not been easy, but I have learned that life could not have given me a better partner and best friend. Gracias por quererme tal y como soy y por enseñarme a ser una mejor mujer. Te amo, flaco. Finalmente quiero darle un enorme agradecimiento a mi madre, Manuela Rosas Salinas, por su amor incondicional, sus sacrificios, y todo su apoyo. Desde muy chica ella me enseño el significado y el valor de la interdependencia, la solidaridad, y la entereza. Este proyecto ha sido mi manera de tratar de entenderla mejor y acercarme aún más a ella. Mamá gracias por enseñarme a soñar y a no agachar la cabeza. Estas páginas están dedicadas a ti con todo mi amor y admiración. xi TABLE OF CONTENTS Epigraph ii Dedication iii Acknowledgements iv-x Abstract xii-xiii Chapter I: A Feminist Meditation on Maternity and Illegality 1 Chapter II: Re-imagining Life from the Debris of Empire and State Violence: Political & Cultural Representations of Latin/a American Undocumented Mothers 31 Chapter III: Entre Rosas y Rosarios: Narratives of Colombian Displacement and the Cultural Representation of the Female Body 62 Chapter IV: Affective (Dis)connections: Motherhood, Friendship and Sex Work in Beatriz Flores Silva’s “En La Puta Vida.” 110 Postscript: A Foretold Deportation 140 Bibliography 154 xii ABSTRACT The Breaking and Remaking of Everyday Life: Illegality, Maternity & Displacement in the Americas is a hemispheric feminist study that examines political and cultural representations of mothers who exist outside the boundaries of legality. Legality in the dissertation is defined by the legal structures that subjectify immigrant women and their reproductive lives, situating them within lifelong networks of surveillance and disciplinary relations. My inquiry specifically focuses on contemporary independent films that evoke the experience of Latin/a American transnational single motherhood in relationship to sex work, drug trafficking, and undocumented migration. By focusing on the complex terrain of cultural representation, I discuss the ways in which liberal models of citizenship and agency have historically policed, repressed and extracted surplus from feminized bodies. I additionally delve into the ways in which these visual texts represent forms of female intimacy and social space that mitigate coercive conditions of labor and social abjection. The Breaking and Remaking of Everyday Life is animated, on the one hand, by my personal quest to make sense of my experiences as the daughter of a transnational mother. On the other, it is driven by my questions regarding the political dimensions of cultural production in the lives of women whose happiness and survival, as Argentinean philosopher Enrique Dussel asserts, often times necessitates the breaking of the law. Incorporating film critique and interpretative, textual, and discursive analysis, my dissertation demonstrates how these films are visual registers of forms of cultural memory and daily struggle that stretch beyond certain kinds of sociological work about illegality and raced motherhood and what is available within mainstream media. These cinematic texts, though often in contradictory ways, operate as important sites for narrating the social, political and cultural obstacles to fulfilling daily life. I argue that illegality produces extreme vulnerability for mothers who are outside of the possibility of familial normalcy, a precondition to achieving full citizenship standing. I further contend that the body of the transnational Latin/a American mother xiii becomes a historical archive for both modernity’s violence and hope as an affective state that propels these mothers forward in daily life. This dissertation moves towards a critical frame that centers on female displacement and immigrant maternity in the post 1990s era of immigration and state security policies, exclusions and proliferation of political discourses regarding maternal representation. I theorize motherhood and illegality as contradictory sites of subjection and possibility, contributing to transnational feminist work that challenges normative depictions of “unfit mothers” as “irresponsible subjects” whom are always already in need of regulation. This project also adds to the breadth of scholarship that posits popular culture as an important site for the enactment of identity, belonging, and cultural and political contestations. 1 CHAPTER I A Feminist Meditation on Maternity and Illegality From Mexico City to Tijuana: 2880km/1792miles August 17 th 1990-August 19 th 1990 From Tijuana to Los Angeles: 135miles/216k August 20 th 1990 My sister and I arrived in Tijuana, the westernmost city of Mexico, in August 19, 1990 to reunite with our mother who migrated to Los Angeles in 1987. While for us traveling north brought us closer to our mom, for our grandma and aunt the journey meant a greater separation. Both had taken care of us for three years; and now these two women had traveled from Mexico City only to deliver us to our mother. My mom was the very first one in her family to immigrate to the U.S. Like many immigrants, she promised that she would only be gone for a year. But life is complicated and sometimes, like rules and laws, promises have to be broken. …And so the next morning my mom, my sister, and I crossed the border. A site of multidirectional transits, rencuentros, and often times final destinations, Tijuana is a city of rampant urbanization where shrines are erected to The Most Holy Death, and the veneration of unofficial folk saints like Juan Soldado and Jesús Malverde bespeaks the reality of the undocumented subject (in the double meaning of the word: occluded and undesirable histories and illegal migratory status). 1 Once the land of the Kumiai Indians, Tijuana is now the “home” of approximately two million people (mostly Mexican born, but also U.S. and Chinese nationals, as well 1 Practiced by expendable populations (gang members, queer people, drug addicts, the sick, prisoners and families living in highly marginalized neighborhoods), the cult to unofficial folk saints, especially to La Santa Muerte, is particularly visible along the border regions. In a Religious Dispatches article (May 6, 2009), Joseph Laycock states that in an attempt to fight the drug war, the Mexican government, “expanded its war on drugs by demolishing shrines of [La] Santa Muerte” (http://www.religiondispatches.org). According to Laycock, though the Mexican government’s actions to “put down” La Santa Muerte are narrated as the state’s efforts to combat the drug cartels, there is an official discourse comparing the cult to The Most Holy Death to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, thus, linking the cultural and devotional practices of the poor to global narratives of “narco-terrorism.” As this article and studies on immigration and the war on drugs and terror reveal, along the border, the drug and immigrant crack down are already one and the same. The Obama administration has restated its strong support for Calderon’s decision to deploy the Mexican army to fight the drug war and for the Merida Initiative, which provides U.S. military support for the drug war. For a useful history and discussion see the research publish online by the Immigration Policy Center (http://www.immigrationpolicy.org). For a cultural studies analysis of unofficial folk saints see the work of Manuel Valenzuela Arce (1992; 1997). 2 as Salvadorans, Argentineans, Colombians, Guatemalans, and Koreans). Here, as Olivia Cadaval (1993) states, old “tires create stairs that lead up to hillside houses, and they are built into retaining walls that keep homes from sliding downhill:” a style that, as she explains, has been appropriated as an aesthetic trait in the wealthy neighborhoods; thus, making it a distinctive architectural landmark of this border city (http://smithsonianeducation.org/migrations/bord/intro.html). In the national imaginary of both Mexico and the United States, border regions are imagined as treacherous terrains where close proximity to the other side means exposure to invasion, loss of sovereignty and national identity. Like many other towns along the Mexico-U.S. border, for the United States, Tijuana stands for a multiplicity of overlapping signifiers: backwardness, profligacy, social and moral degradation, as well as the availability of inexpensive holiday leisure, psychedelic pleasures, and cheap and disposable labor. For Mexicans, near vicinity to the “good neighbor” reminds them of a history of territorial loss and disadvantageous relations. While for the North American nation the discourse of invasion is articulated through the menace of the illegal-alien- terrorist (a triad that post 9/11/2001 has been mobilized to fortify physical and legal borders), for those in the interior of Mexico, border populations have historically represented, as Jose Manuel Valenzuela Arce explains, “the dangerous possibility of entreguismo, or surrendering to [the United States’] foreign influence” (1993). However, “along that very border we find important sociocultural movements which articulate their goals with verbal symbols, visual images, and reinterpretations of regional history that assert a cultural identity formed” in a complex relationship to the United States (http://smithsonianeducation.org/migrations/bord/cultid.html). 2 A border city encircled by ragged 2 For more discussions on Mexican/Chicano identity and the border see, for instance, O. Paz, El laberinto de la soledad y otras Obras, (New York: Penguin Books, 1997); G. Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4 th ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012); G. Bonafil Batalla, Mexico Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996); N.García Canclini, Culturas Híbridas: Estrategia para entrar y salir de la modernidad (Distrito Federal: Editorial Grijalbo, 1990). 3 canyons, Tijuana is a city of unofficial shrines and fortified entries, assembly factories and anonymous crosses: 3 A threshold of death, excess and hope. For many families, Tijuana represents an interface that simultaneously marks our separation and our refusal to be separated. Until the recent closing of El Parque de la Amistad, a half-acre cement plaza sitting in a high steep bank of Border Field Park, relatives divided by the border would gather to visit through the fence. 4 Despite the watchful presence of the border patrol and the materiality of the steel poles that run a few feet into the ocean until they disappear, the landscape of this park was one of public intimacy and affect constrained by and exceeding regulation. While it is easier to blame family break-up on migration, family separation is a historical legacy for colonized peoples: it is the result of structural conditions and regimes of racial violence that propel our scattering in the first place and make displacement the order of the day (Spillers 2003; Smith 2005; Menjivar 2006). As a ten year old girl, I was indelibly marked by my mother’s departure to the United States, and later, by my own experience of migration and illegality as a young undocumented high school student in South Los Angeles. While writing this project, I have often listened to Ely Guerra’s song El Viaje de Teo, a track that evokes the experience of migration, family separation, and its aftermath. In the song, Guerra’s voice is almost a whisper revealing the tribulations of a young boy getting ready to travel North with a father he hardly knows. Father and son are on their way to cross the El Paso/Juárez border to reunite with the boy’s mother. The track was composed for Walter Doehner’s film of the same name. As a cinematic text El Viaje de Teo (2008) makes the border, music, and oral culture central to the retelling and (re)membering of the Mexican nation as a country 3 My usage of anonymous crosses alludes to both the flows of people and the actual crosses that have been placed by human rights activists along the Mexico-US border. The crosses are a way to remember all those who have died while attempting to cross illegally to the United States. 4 See Julieta Martinez’s article “Cierran parque de la Amistad en Frontera Tijuana” published in El Universal (December 29, 2008) (http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/565629.html). 4 impacted by the constant flow of its people to the United States. The film captures the perils of illegal border crossing and the trauma of separation and migrant disappearance from the perspective of Teo, a twelve-year-old Oaxacan boy. Both visual and sonic interpretations are generative cultural renderings that grapple with absence and loss in relationship to people’s daily sacrifices and the desire to provide for alternative individual and collective futures Elsewhere. I first saw El Viaje de Teo during the 2009 Hola Mexico Film Festival (HMFF) in Los Angeles. Unlike the Los Angeles Latino International Film Fest (LALIF), which has a pan-Latino orientation, the HMFF only pays tribute to recent Mexican cinema 5 . According to the festival’s organizer, Samuel Douek, the HMFF’s objective is to bring a sample of the rich diversity of contemporary Mexican culture and film to audiences in the United States and Australia every summer. In terms of its films, the HMFF includes productions with commercial success as well as art-house films with less circulation within Mexico and abroad, thus, making the HMFF appealing to different types of movie goers (while undoing the divide between high and low art). Besides the theme of state- corruption, migration has been one of the recurring subjects at the Hola Mexico Film Festival. Whether in comedies like Álvaro Curiel’s Acorazado (Mexico-Spain-France, 2010) dramas such as Norteado/Northless (Mexico-Spain, Rigoberto Pérezcano, 2009) or in documentaries like Carlos Hagerman’s and Juan Carlos Rulfo’s Those Who Remain (Mexico, 2008), the magnitude and impact of migration has been a frequent concern of some of these Mexican filmmakers 6 . While portrayals of male (im)migrants in film are not necessarily new, the depiction of Latin American female flows across international geopolitical borders has been less visible within the media landscape. Speaking specifically about a European context, Cultural Studies scholar Isolina Ballesteros 5 According to Samuel Douek, the goal is to showcase “the real Mexico and share [a] vision of what life in Mexico is really like on a day-to-day basis” (my italics). (http://www.holamexicofest.com/somos.html). 6 David R. Maciel suggests that the filmic figure of the male immigrant dates back to the 1922 silent film El Hombre sin patria. See David R. Maciel and María Herrera-Sobek, Culture Across Borders and Popular Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998). 5 (2005) explains that the feminization of Spanish “immigration cinema” began to take place during the mid 1990s. Ballesteros analyzes the phenomenon of female migration to Spain as it is represented in what she calls immigration film, a fairly recent cinematographic trend in European film addressing immigration and xenophobia. 7 According this author, Spanish films such Flores de Otro Mundo (Icíar Bollaín 1999), Poniente (Chus Gutiérrez 2002) and the documentary Extranjeras (Helena Taberna 2003) address gaps that sociological scholarship and immigrant studies have tended to overlook. As she states, until recently, immigration scholarship either ignored ethnic-minority female flows to Europe or framed them as a product of male migration, addressing their movement(s) in terms of family reunification and wives’ and daughters’ dependency on either their fathers or husbands. The absence of gender in migration studies is also evident in U.S. scholarship, which until the last two decades had a tendency to concentrate on male circular migration and examined gender as a variable rather than as a construct that organizes social life (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1997; Menjivar 1999; Zavella 2007, 2011). Though historically specific state and racial formations, debates about international migration to Europe reflect those taking place in the United States as they center around the so-called scarcity of ‘national resources,’ desired migration (guest workers, professional and skilled labor) and/or unwanted flows (asylum seekers, illegal migrants, and sex workers). 8 Whereas women from the global South move about for various reasons and under 7 Though her essay mostly focuses on Spanish productions, she also mentions the ways in which, at least in the past decade, French cinema has incorporated and problematized the theme of migration and nationhood. Please see Isolina Ballesteros, “Embracing the Other: the feminization of Spanish immigration cinema,” Studies in Hispanic Cinemas. Vol. 2, No. 1 (September 2005), 3-14. 8 The incorporation of Latin Americans varies depending on the historical relationship of these countries to the host nations. For instance, during the 1980s, Latin Americans had certain privileges that made legalization processes and naturalization in Spain easier than in the United States. However, restrictions and regulations have increased as more “undesired migration” takes place. In addition to this, Andrew Geddes argues that debates about immigration to Europe have become intensely focus on social rights, welfare state integration and social cohesion. In order to analyze the dynamics underpinning relations between migration and the state, one has to distinguish between different kinds of State (i.e. Welfare State, Post-Social State, etc.), form of migration, and the specific historical moment. See, Andrew Geddes, “Migration and the Welfare State in Europe,” The Political Quarterly 74 (August 2003), 150-162; Cynthia Wright, “Moments of Emergence: Organizing by and with Undocumented and Non-Citizen People in Canada after September 11,” Refuge 21, no. 3 (May 2003); Jonathan X. Inda, Targeting Immigrants: Government, Technology and Ethics (New Jersey: 6 different circumstances, hegemonic representations of ethnic-minority female immigrants tend to encapsulate them as always socio-economically and culturally determined. According to Irene Mata, “one of the most popular means of portraying immigrant workers is through the employment of the hegemonic immigrant story, an anachronistic narrative that continues to be perpetuated both in cultural productions and in the general debate about immigration” (2007, ix). This hegemonic immigrant story creates a binary opposition between the country of origin and the host country, where the latter always already exist as a land of equality, democracy, and material prosperity. On the one hand, as a narrative of progress, the hegemonic immigrant story structures knowledge about home and receiving nations in very specific ways. On the other, it conceptualizes how and why people (particularly women) move in ways that do not acknowledge the dense texture of individuals’ experiences at home and abroad. Erased from these dominant stories are the structures of power and domination that create the conditions for displacement, captivity, or movement (and the production of certain immigrants as unwelcome but as a needed source of cheap and disposable labor). In other words, the marginalized immigrant, as a historical subject, is effaced from these hegemonic portrayals. Cultural narratives about the daily struggles of marginalized female immigrants are important because they disarticulate the dominant immigrant story, a narrative founded on capitalist notions of success and myths of upward mobility and assimilation (Lowe 1997; Sharma 2006; Mata 2007). Entitled The Breaking and Remaking of Everyday Life: Illegality, Maternity & Displacement in the Americas, my dissertation is animated, on the one hand, by my personal quest to make sense of my experiences as the daughter of a transnational mother. On the other, it is driven by my questions regarding the political dimensions of cultural production in the lives of women whose happiness and survival, as Argentinean philosopher Enrique Dussel (1986) asserts, often times necessitates the Wiley-Blackwell, 2005). 7 breaking of the law. As a hemispheric feminist study, these chapters examine the political and cultural representations of mothers who exist outside the boundaries of legality. Legality in the dissertation is defined by the legal structures that subjectify immigrant women and their reproductive lives, situating them within lifelong networks of surveillance and disciplinary relations. My inquiry specifically focuses on contemporary films that evoke the experience of Latin/a American transnational single motherhood in relationship to sex work, drug trafficking, and undocumented migration to the Unites States and Spain. The study of film, particularly in a context in which the discourse of invasion is articulated through the menace of the illegal-alien-trafficker- terrorist, is of utmost relevance as mainstream and independent filmmakers are increasingly interested in the experiences of the border, illegality and the circulation of bodies (Marciniak, Imre, and O’ Healy and et. al 2007). The films that I explore in my dissertation fall under the category of transnational independent films. They are neither what might be (perhaps problematically) identified as “art cinema” nor highly commercial productions. While these cinematic texts are all concerned with migration, particularly the movement of Latin American mothers, the directors of these films are Latin American, European or U.S. citizens. Adding to the transnational quality of these films is the fact that the financing for some of them was made possible by both state-funded agencies as well as independent or private foundations from various countries, among them Argentina, Spain, Canada, the U.S., Uruguay, Cuba, and Belgium. In this sense, these films reflect the (neoliberal) globalization processes that impact both (immigrant) lives and the film industry itself. As the film and media feminist scholars in the edited volume Transnational Feminism in Film and Media suggest, the growing thematization of foreignness in trans(national) co(productions) raises questions about national cinemas, spectatorship, production and the consumption of marginality, as crossings and flows of people, information, and capital are marked by unequal power relations and an uneven value of 8 (human) life and livelihoods (Marciniak, Imre, and O’ Healy and et. al 2007). 9 Films, as vehicles with the ability to widely circulate “cinematic images’ for various modes of consumption, work to shape or (potentially) rupture common sense knowledge about peoples and places (Rojas 1999; Keeling 2007). While female migration is not a new phenomenon, it can be said that the cinematic appearance of the female immigrant corresponds with and responds to the increasing global feminization of labor and migration. It is Ballesteros’ contention that the feminization of “immigration cinema” functions as a sort of counter narrative that makes immigrant women visible and provides positive representations of them (2005). If as Stuart Hall (1996) states, popular culture is understood as dialogic rather than strictly oppositional it is my contention that some of the films that address female migration can function not only as contestations or to make an abject subject commensurable or visible, as Ballesteros suggests, but as complex cultural forms that provide a space for the re-articulation and reimagining of dreams and desires of alternative or emerging (and at times paradoxical) subjectivities and/or incommensurable experiences. 10 The representations of these experiences complicate rigid notions of identity and identification, as well as social imaginaries of past, present, and futures. Much like Ballesteros, I am concerned with how filmmakers confer all forms of marginality or illicit ways of being onto their female characters; however, informed by the work of “Third World” feminist and queer scholars, my analysis is not necessarily interested in the 9 This is particularly important in a context of Hollywood’s dominance as an (inter)national cinema and the financial control of what is produced and circulated. 10 Hall suggests “popular culture, commodified and stereotyped as it often is, is not at all, as we sometimes think of it, the arena where we find who we really are, the truth of our experience. It is an arena that is profoundly mythic. It is a theater of popular desires, a theatre of popular fantasies. It is where we discover and play with the identifications of ourselves, where we are imagined, where we are represented, not only to audiences out there who do not get the message, but to ourselves for the first time. As Freud said, sex (and representation) mainly takes place in the head. Second, though the terrain of the popular looks as of it is constructed with single binaries, it is not. I think Bakhtin has been profoundly misread. The carnivalesque is not simply an upturning of two things which remain locked within their oppositional frameworks; it is also cross-cut by what Bakhtin called the dialogic” (474). See Suart Hall, “What is this “Black” in Black Popular Culture? in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan- Hsing Chen (New York: Routledge, 1996). 9 recuperation of more respectable representations of women—since corrective images are often framed by or linked to dominant notions of good citizenship and respectability. Rather, I am interested in how various social identifications refract and interact, how these representations— stereotypical or not—showcase the contradictions of what sociologist Avery Gordon identifies as complex personhood: Complex personhood means that all people (albeit in specific forms whose specificity is sometimes everything) remember and forget, are beset by contradiction, and recognize and misrecognize themselves and others. Complex personhood means that people suffer graciously and selfishly too, get stuck in the symptoms of their troubles, and also transform themselves and others. [It] means that even those called “Other” are never never that. (Gordon 1997, 4-5) I am primarily concerned with a set of questions that requires a multi-layered analysis: firstly, how do film and filmmakers articulate and challenge dominant globalization and consumer capitalism through their representations of female illegality and Latin/a American transnational motherhood? Secondly, if these films operate as counter-hegemonic visions, how can/do these cultural texts potentially offer alternative social imaginaries to the death force intrinsic to a global neoliberal order? Lastly, how is transnational motherhood a potential site of expressive politics that disrupts, showcases, or provides consensus to notions of illegality, the “good life” and citizenship? Incorporating film critique and interpretative, textual, and discursive analysis, my dissertation demonstrates how these films are visual registers of forms of cultural memory and daily struggle that stretch beyond certain kinds of sociological work about illegality and raced motherhood and what is available within mainstream media. The Breaking and Remaking of Everyday Life argues that these filmic narratives dislocate normativity by eliciting a female figure who is not ashamed of her condition as a single parent, a transnational mother, an illegal subject, and a stigmatized laborer (i.e. undocumented garment worker, drug trafficker or sex worker). By asking the viewer to identify with mothers who do not represent an idealized or positive form of motherhood and who are marked by multiple forms of illegality these films push us to reconsider our own moral assumptions about what 10 constitutes not only a good female citizen or mother but also a decent job in a world structured by dominance. The portrayal of a shameless criminalized maternal subject is of outmost importance to my overall discussion of the emancipatory aspects of illegality as a social and political practice of struggle against the order of the Law. A lack of shame can be seen as a refusal of the ways in which social morality functions to create, what E. Dussel (1986) calls, subjective culpability. For Dussel, morality exists or is (re)produced by the regime of law; therefore, it is within the order of death. This author’s discussion of the relationship between morality and the Law is important because he insists that goodness is not a matter of legality. He contends that the illegalities of the oppressed are an assertion of communal survival and a complete disavowal of what the system (dominant order) proclaims to be good. The films that I explore in my dissertation make hyper-visible the damage done by the Law; but they also present us with female characters that do not apologize nor claim innocence for their illegality. The Breaking and Remaking of Everyday Life considers illegality and the maternal as sites of regulation and contradiction from which I critically examine the discursive-material dynamics of global capitalism. Beyond this, however, my study seeks to return to the maternal and to claim illegality as sites of radical possibility from which one can pose questions about Latin/a American multivalent subjectivities, motherhood and citizenship. Central to this project is a critical examination of the ways in which liberal models of citizenship and agency have historically required particular forms of manhood or masculinity while rendering—through the systemic policing, repression and hyper-productive surplus extraction of the feminized body—women of color more vulnerable and exposed to premature death. Each chapter analyzes gender, sexuality, and race through visual texts to enumerate the various structural and political reasons why Latin/a American women, particularly economically 11 disadvantaged females, move and are being forcibly dislocated. I additionally delve into the ways in which these films represent forms of female intimacy and social space that mitigate coercive conditions of labor and social abjection. I contend that through some of these visual texts one can see the structural changes introduce by globalization and specific neoliberal reforms. 11 Furthermore, I argue that cultural production provides us with means to imagine spaces for becoming, undecidability and difference where Latin/a American women’s desires and dreams can potentially generate identities and spaces that are not necessarily determined by sex, patriarchy and/or capital. My focus on contemporary independent transnational films with small or limited circulation allows me to study a constellation of regions in order to critically examine the historical and ongoing extraction and unequal distribution of wealth and labor in the Americas; these socio-historical processes force poor women to leave their children behind in order to try to attain the dreams they have for themselves and others. As these women imagine and produce new ways of being in the world, the state and patriarchal structures mobilize to criminalize their social relations and survival strategies, marking their perpetual illegality. Through the study of these cultural texts, I rethink Latin/a American motherhood beyond the trope of collective motherhood that has been the frame for thinking about non-normative Latin/a American mothers. Thus, I move beyond placing non- normative motherhood in the context of authoritarian state violence during the civil wars and dirty wars that has dominated many discussions of Latin/a American motherhood. My dissertation moves towards a critical frame that centers on female displacement and immigrant maternity in the post 1990s era of immigration policy, exclusions and proliferation of political discourses regarding maternal representation. Scholar Hondagneu-Sotelo notes that transnational motherhood poses a radical break with “deeply gendered and spatial boundaries of family and work;” however, this alternative 11 Among these reforms are the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or the 2002 Andean Trade Preference and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA). 12 manifestation of mothering “continues a long legacy of peoples of color being incorporated into [the state] through coercive systems of labor that do not continue to recognize family rights, including the right to care for one’s own family members. As others have pointed out, slavery and contract labor systems were organized to maximize economic productivity, and offered few supports to sustain family life” (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1997, 51). Similarly, I argue that the particular experience of Latin/a American transnational mothers disrupts traditional notions of good mothering. Their experience reveals the theoretical limits of trying to understand the social life of working poor mothers in terms of the public and private sphere since the idealized maternal space is always already inaccessible for working poor women of color. I expand Hondagneu-Sotelo’s analysis of transnational motherhood and its potentiality in the realm of culture and politics by calling for the critical querying and queering of the maternal. I theorize the overlapping(s) of Latin/a American motherhood and illegality as contradictory site(s) of subjection and possibility that can challenge traditional logics of mothering therefore of normative frameworks of being, temporality and space. 12 Moreover, my study specifically describes the importance of technology to the scenario of transnational motherhood. That is, I pay close attention to the ways in which communication and visual technologies such as film, the telephone and video assists, transforms, and enables the birthing of a different type of maternal affect and mother-child relation. 13 Before turning to the sociological and anthropological literature that informs my research, it will be useful to briefly and schematically discuss particular theorizations of film that guide this 12 The work of J. Halberstam has been extremely important in my querying and queering of the maternal. In Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, Halberstam states that “ All kinds of people…will and do opt to live outside of reproductive and familial time as well as on the edges of logics of labor and production. By doing so, they often live outside the logic of capital accumulation…sex workers, homeless people, drug dealers…perhaps such a people could be productively called “queer subjects’ in terms of the ways they live (deliberately, accidentally, or of necessity) during the hours when others sleep and in the spaces (physical, metaphysical, and economic) that other have abandoned, and in terms of the ways they might work in the domains other people assign to privacy and family” (2005, 25). 13 Regarding my interest on technology and maternal affect, the intellectual insights of Avital Ronnel (1997) Jesus Martin Barbero (1993, 2002) and Fred Moten have been immensely helpful. 13 project. My literature review of the theoretical debates on illegality, migration, and sex and work will be followed by a chapter breakdown. Scholarly work that probes issues concerning the relationship between politics and aesthetics have been invaluable to my understanding of the cinematic representation of the female (despised and marginalized) body and subject. For instance, the contributors to the book Redirecting the Gaze: Gender, Theory, and Cinema in the Third World (1998) have provided valuable insights regarding female subjectivity and oppositional cinema beyond a potentially prescriptive analysis of gender. For authors such as Diana Robin, Ira Jaffe, Rosalinda Fregoso, and Catherine Benamou contemporary (post 1980s) filmmaking practices, particularly those of women, propose alternative modes of resistance than those elicited in Third Cinema, which tended to valorize the male (revolutionary) subject (See Dissertation Chapters 2 and 4). In a similar vein, scholars such as Laura Podalsky (2011) and Juan Poblete (2006) have tried to understand the success of contemporary Latin American films (mid 1990s to the present) beyond a cultural model of homogenization, on the one hand, and the binary between dominant and subaltern representations on the other (See Chapter 4). Building on Jesus Martin Barbero’s theories of mediation, these two scholars explore how this new type of Latin American cinema uses the genres of melodrama, comedy, or the thriller to always say or recall something else (i.e. past traumas and current anxieties). While they both draw on theories of cultural mediation, reception, and consumption, Podalsky’s study of film explores the sensorial appeals of these films. Like the work of Laura Marks (2000, 2003), she draws on theories of affect to study the ways in which these films might elicit the audience to feel differently or “plug us into” emerging subjectivities in times of globalization. She contends that many New Latin American films problematize the relationship between the knowable and the visible, rendering the visual record insufficient. As mentioned above, Podalsky’s work is in direct conversation with Marks’ theories of intercultural film and nonvisual and embodied knowledge. Important to this dissertation 14 is also Mark’s concept of haptic visuality (See Chapter 1). In this author’s words, haptic visuality “suggest[s] the way vision could be tactile, as though one were touching a film with one's eyes.” “Haptic images, [Mark’s] suggest[s], invite the viewer to respond to the image in an intimate, embodied way, and thus facilitate the experience of other sensory impressions as well.” (Marks 2000, 2) Collectively, these theories help me to think critically about the ways in which these films figure non-normative forms of motherhood, happiness and survival. THEORETICAL SCAFFOLDINGS THE TRANSNATIONAL: In this project “the transnational” is a material, symbolic and theoretical circuit of politico- cultural and epistemological production that destabilizes national cinema. Central to The Breaking and Remaking of Everyday Life are at least four different manifestations or ways of thinking through the transnational, including overlapping hemispheric, imaginary, maternal and feminist conceptualizations of the transnational. Yet, one must be vigilant of “trendy” or hegemonic deployments of such a category. Hegemonic representations of transnationalism either tend to encapsulate marginalized female immigrants as always socio-economically and culturally determined or reproduce celebratory renditions of transnationalism that often underestimate the power of the nation-state and overlook the financial, social, and emotional cost of peoples’ displacements (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1997). Though these are two polarized significations of subalterity, they both oversimplify the dynamics of female agency and subjection at the local, national, and global scale (Brown 1995; Doezema 1999, 2002; Fregoso 2003). By including these overlapping conceptualizations of the transnational, The Breaking and Remaking of Everyday Life questions the recurring, often romantic and simplistic, narratives that tend to suggest movement across borders itself as an act of resistance or that claim the dissolution of the nation-state. In spite of the fact that subaltern representation is ridden with complexities and always available for exploitation and commodification, I contend that some of these cultural texts question 15 the homogeneity of the nation and stress the ways in which processes of displacement are marked by historically colonial and imperial relationships with Europe and the United States respectively. That is, they hint at what some scholars such as Quijano (1992, 2000), Dussel (2002), Mignolo (2000, 2005), Walsh (2002), Escobar (2008), and others identify as the implications of the coloniality of power in the history of Latin America. Stated differently, these directors’ filmic analyses can potentially function as politico-aesthetic interpretations of how coloniality, as a model of power structured around the idea of race, became “the fundamental criterion for the distribution of the world population into ranks, places and roles” (Mignolo cited in Escobar 2008, 12). ILLEGALITY: Broadly speaking, U.S based anthropological and sociological theories on the discursive, legal, and social production of the illegal immigrant underscore the hegemonic expressions of institutionalized and symbolic violence that produce the illegal immigrant as a subject with less human value than legally recognized citizens (Inda 2006, 2007), that differentially include him/her depending on his/her conditions of vulnerability (De Genova 2005), render invisible the undocumented as political actors but visibilizes them as consumers (Davila 2001; Poblete 2006), and produce them as a legal impossibility, ethical failures, disposable, and/or burdens while being integral to the economic development and socio-cultural transformation of the nation-state (Lowe 1996; Ngai 2005; Inda 2006). While these studies take different approaches to flesh out the ways in which illegality is necessary for the reproduction of the nation-state and exclusionary definitions of good citizenship, as stated above, the lack of attention given to gender in (im)migration studies is evident in pre 1990s U.S. scholarship. As feminist scholars have argued, these studies had a male centered approach to understand migratory flows and family reunification (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1997; Menjivar 1999; Zavella 1987, 1997, 2007). This gap, as Ballesteros’ study of cinematic 16 representations of female migrants in Spain shows, is also evident in European migration theories (Ballesteros 2005). Especially useful to my project is the work of anthropologist Jonathan X. Inda because he specifically points to the articulation of maternity and undocumented migration in the context of a biopolitical order. In Targeting Immigrants: Government, Technology and Ethics, Inda provides us with a Foucauldian analysis of the production and formulation of the “illegal” immigrant as a governmental problem needing management and regulation. His post 1965 study traces the transition from the Welfare State to the Post-Social State in order to underscore the ways in which the illegal immigrant is constructed as a law-breaker incapable of being a prudential subject. According to Inda, the figure of the pregnant undocumented woman is the archetype of an “underclass of dependent subjects who lack moral character and are willing or unable to be self-sufficient and take responsibility for their own care… [She is] imagined as a mother prone to bearing children she cannot support. Indeed, it is the undocumented woman who has first and foremost been marked as a public charge and thus as an ethical failure” (Inda 2006, 112). While Inda’s work provides me with a fruitful point of departure, the theoretical contributions on Latin American maternalist politics (Jetter, Orleck and Taylor 1997; Bejarano 2002), Chicana mothers (Espino 1993; Hurtado 1996; Ruiz 1998; Zavella 1987, 1997, 2007) and Native American and Black maternity (Davis 1998; Ferguson 2000; Spillers 2003; Smith 2005; Hill Collins 2005; Gilmore 2007) have been highly influential and invaluable. As some of these scholars state, albeit the lived experience of motherhood is not homogenous, the institution of Motherhood with capital M operates not only to discipline the female subject (Hardy and Wiedmer 2005) but also to regulate, through racist reproductive politics, who is “good enough” to (be)come a mother. As Annalise Orleck explains, “personally, socially, and politically, it is impossible to speak of motherhood without speaking of social systems of power and domination” since pervasive notions 17 of good-mothering are tied to and shaped by the ideology of the conjugal-heterosexual-nuclear family” (Orleck 1997, 5). As mentioned above, relevant to this critical interrogation of home, family and race are the treatises on Black maternity by scholars such as Spillers (2003) and Davis (1998). Both theorists take into task the rewriting of gender categories by historicizing the conditions of black maternity in relationship to slavery and the Moynihan Report (1965). For Spillers, slavery not only made black women vulnerable to rape: “an interiorized violation of body and mind,” but also un-gendered her: the story of the black female slave is the story of the flesh turned inside out, of exteriorized acts of torture and brutality that we imagined as “the peculiar province of male brutality” (207). As slaves, the unprotected black females were equal to black men in their oppression and resistance to the slave system. Under these indistinctions (Spillers 2003), the right for paternity and maternity was negated for all captives. Ironically, through the indistinctions of the female and male body (that is through flesh ungendered), the institution of slavery produced, according to Davis, a Black female subject who asserted her equality by fighting to protect her kin (and through this assertion articulated her resistance to slavery). In a similar way, by focusing on the denial to bodily integrity that Indigenous bodies have experienced since the conquest, Native American scholar Andrea Smith contends that rather than a reaction to crisis, racism is a permanent part of the social fabric, a tactic rather than an effect through which “biologized” (internal) enemies are created (Smith 2005, 8). Informed by the aforementioned work, I argue that while illegality makes the undocumented woman a hyper- vulnerable subject of state intervention, it is not only the condition of illegality per se that makes her an ethical failure since racialized females, particularly single mothers of color, have been historically imagined as violable, impure and constructed as failing to (re)produce familial normalcy, therefore, 18 “the good life.” Such ideological battles also grow out of a longer history of racist genocide in the Americas underpinning U.S. national culture since modernity. Within this discursive context that frames and legislates the illegality of women of color motherhood, the undocumented pregnant woman emerges as burden and mother of anchor-babies, classifications that brand her as failure and threat since they presuppose dependency and incapacity: two nouns that historically have designated the “negative” space of the Other (in terms of gender, race, and geography). Consequently, within post-social regimes of rule, the illegal alien is constituted as always already a subject “existing outside the circuits of civility and responsible self-management” (Inda 2006, 18) As Inda states, “the figure of the prudential subject needs to be understood in relationship to its antipode: the oft-racialized anti-citizen unable or reluctant to exercise responsible self-government” (18). Inda’s work is illuminating because it points to one of the central analytical articulations of my project: the undocumented mother. Much like the underserving body of the undocumented mother figures in dominant discourses as a metaphor for a number of fears, anxieties and relations of domination, the figure of the ‘suffering Third World prostitute’, as Dozema explains, not only functions to reinscribe the moral superiority of Western feminists but “serves well to symbolize the excess of the global march of capital, and its negative effect on women” (Dozema 2003, 18). Contemporary definitions of trafficking in women and Western feminist demands—such as those advanced by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women’s (CATW)—collude prostitution, trafficking, and immigration, often times turning all prostitutes into victims regardless of consent or coercion and making immigration the overriding concern and problem. Like the figure of the undocumented mother, the figure of the Third Word prostitute is culturally and politically elicited as a threat to the national body. 19 SEX WORK: Sex work is a vexed issue and queries around the discursive-material dynamics that reproduce the value and non-value of the lives and bodies of sex-workers are not simple at all. Because prostitutes are figured as pathologically sexual, as symbols of complete dehumanization and/or immoral, our capacities to imagine the prostitute as a site of both subjugation and subversion from which to critique overlapping regimes of power are often limited by the dominant ideologies that shape our moral values about the “good” life. Building on contemporary discourses of sex work, The Breaking and Remaking of Everyday Life explores the common tropes through which the (undocumented) immigrant maternal body and the body of the “Third World” prostitute are produced as immoral and whose labor is stigmatized or undervalued. Consequently, theorizing female subjectivity through sex work allows me to examine the ways in which power constructs the social meaning and regulation of bodies. It provokes us to further explore the relationship between gender and work—and by extension question what constitutes work itself (Foucault 1997, 1998; Kempadoo 2005; Sswakiyanga 2006). The complexities and contradictions of prostitution become even greater when our subject of analysis is the Third World Woman: A female whose experiences are constituted by the legacies of empire and colonialism as witnessed through the contemporary conditions of transnationalism and globalization, such as the feminization of labor, sex tourism, and transnational motherhood (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1997; Sassen 2004; Fregoso 2003; Cabezas 2004; Wright 2006; Kempadoo 2005). Furthermore, when at the national and international scale, trafficking, immigration and prostitution become discursively conflated, the figure of the Third World Woman emerges as an abject-Other used by various political actors to advocate interventionist, protective and punitive legislations that, according to some feminists scholars, not only continue to reify the power of the 20 state, but reproduce dominant notions “in much of the world about keeping women close to home and hearth” (Doezema 2000). By historicizing these categories, how meanings of sex work, migration, and trafficking are constructed and circulated, Third World feminist scholars argue against their problematic conflation and stress how, to a certain degree, international debates around prostitution are intrinsically related to a western and racialized attraction and repulsion of the Other. Like feminist scholar Jo Doezema suggests, Western feminists’ desire to save the Third World prostitute is not a historical accident, but a legacy of empire. Abolitionist notions of consent, choice and female sexuality reproduced during early twentieth century campaigns against white slavery continue to influence national and international laws that not only prevent sex workers from organizing but pose restrictions on movement. Moreover, there is an Orientalist discourse that reinscribes a hierarchy of civilization in which the exploitation (and existence) of the Third World prostitute is conceived not only as the result of male sexual power, but as the product of cultural and religious backwardness (Alexander 1994; Doezema 1999; Cabezas 2004; Kempadoo 2005). 14 As the work of these feminist scholars notes, early twentieth century debates around the abduction and transport of white women for prostitution focused on notions of consent. While anti-white slavery campaigners advocated for either regulation or abolition, ideologically they all shared a common view about female sexuality based on Victorian values about women’s innate innocence, moral superiority, and sexual passivity. Early abolitionist feminists such as Josephine Butler (1828-1906) considered sex work incompatible with the dignity of the person and made no 14 As Kamala Kempadoo explains in Trafficking And Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives On Migration, Sex Work, And Human Rights, “while it has been established that most of the trafficking occurs not for underground sex industries run by criminal elements, but for sweatshops, farming, service and domestic work that are attached to formal sectors of the economy, state and public attention is quickly drawn to groups of middle-persons, who are held up as the ‘real’ menaces—recruiting agents and those who assist others to move without legal documents and money—who are commonly identified as greedy, immoral men from the global South and post-socialist states” (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), xvii. 21 distinction between forced and consensual forms of prostitution. According to Doezema, Butlerite feminists had “a moralistic middle class urge to protect the virtue of young, working class immigrant women;” thus, their political platform problematically advocated for the protection of female purity and the reform and disciplining of prostitutes (Doezema 2000, 23). As the negotiations around the UN Trafficking Protocol to Suppress, Prevent and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (December 2000) show, there is a legacy of consensual history and abolitionism embedded in contemporary definitions of trafficking. Despite the fact that the 1949 Trafficking Protocol does include the use of force or coercion “as an essential element of trafficking in the definition” (Doezema 2000) because there is little difference between the definition of trafficking in children from the ways in which trafficking in women is defined, there is a process of infantilization at work that continues to reinscribe female innocence. Additionally, CATW’s insistence on equating or collapsing prostitution and female trafficking or framing prostitution as a homogenized and static category, dismisses the overt link between abolitionist discourses as attempts to “purify” the state, the criminalization of non- normative sexualities, paternalistic protective legislations, and the restrictions of peoples flows. As Dozema suggests, CATW “backed a definition of trafficking in women that would severely restrict women’s ability to migrate both within a country and between countries. They call for all those who assist a woman to migrate, when at the end of migration the woman works in prostitution, to be charged as ‘traffickers’. This means that a relative who drives a potential sex worker could be charged with trafficking” (31-32). 15 15 Further more, as Nansita Sharma explains, “[The] main problem with [the most widely used definition of trafficking is that] it makes immigration the overriding concern and problem. Exploitation away from home is conceptualized as a separate problem from exploitative and /or untenable economic relations “at home”. This structures knowledge of home in particular ways. Exploitation comes to be defined with people’s movements abroad and loses it moorings from the organization and expansion of capitalist social relationships wherein people’s labour is alienated. In the process home is naturalized and therefore depoliticized as a site where harm is done to persons. As a result, the fact that capital is accrued and accumulated through employer’s appropriation of labour power is concealed. Moreover, the fact that people move because they have been dislocated from their homes is left unaddressed by the romantization of being “at 22 The figure of the Third World prostitute not only fulfills salvational desires, but also is also central to narratives of globalism (Fregoso 2003), nationhood, and citizenship (Dozema 1999, 2003). As the work of Third World feminist scholars shows, there is an intricate relationship between the articulation of gender, sexuality, race and labor and the discursive and legal representations of women from the global South. Often, these narratives condemn and/or reduce these females’ experiences, lives and identities to the realm of lack, injury and/or criminality (Brown 1995; Doezema 2003). As Melissa Wright argues in a different context, as the so-called embodiment of human disposability and abjection, she functions to reaffirm explicit power relations that attempt to reinscribe female sacrifice and suffering as the necessary condition for the development of a capitalist society. Wright states that the image of the disposable Third World Woman functions to call her into existence as a normalized subject. It naturalizes “her path of destruction which leads the way to the capitalist development that heralds modern progress” (Wright 2006, 6). Though Wright is speaking about the construction of the female maquiladora worker, her analysis is useful because she seeks “to understand how someone whose body represents a site of living waste can still create, with that same body, things so valuable. How does worth develop from worthlessness? How does discourse produce specific subjects and their spatiality […] their significance for global capitalism?” (2-3) Much like Wright is concerned with the reinscriptions of patriarchal dominance, gender and sexual violence, but writing about the Caribbean, M. Jacqui Alexander underscores “the evident relationship among monogamous heterosexuality, nationhood and citizenship. Although presumably universal and falling on every body…it is not just every and any body, for some bodies are not productive enough for the nation” (Alexander 1994, 20). In her essay “Not Just (Any) Body home” (54). See Nandita Sharma, “Travel Agency: A Critique of Anti-Trafficking Campaigns,” Refuge: Global Movements for Refugee and Migrant Rights 21, no. 3 (2003). 23 Can Be a Citizen,” she explores “the continuities and discontinuities between the practices of the colonial and the post colonial” to disentangle the ways in which the nationalist state continues to repress and criminalize non-reproductive sex (20). Through punitive laws such as the Sexual Offences Act, the Parliament of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago re-articulated the fiction that collapses identities and sexual bodies. It is through the legal text that the “appropriate” sexuality for citizenship is promoted and naturalized (7). Alexander’s study makes visible the ways in which, from the point of view of the state, “deviant” sexualities need to be disciplined and regulated in order to become economically productive. Alexander shows how nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas necessitates a Black masculinity modeled after a British ideal of paternal responsibility, discipline, decorum and morality (13). One of the contradictions of the nationalist state, according to Alexander, is that the Imperial continued to rule through the policing of Black masculinity. It continued to naturalize the conjugal family as the main institution in charge of reproducing “respectable femininity” and guarding culture (read proper values). However, while the nationalist state is concerned with the regulation of non-procreative desires, its investments in tourism operate as a form of political violence that recolonizes and sexualizes the land: woman-as- nation 16 (19-20). Feminist studies on sex work and sex tourism in the Caribbean stress the need to unpack the effects of capitalism and patriarchy, but also theorize the possibility to read other contending discourses in the realm of prostitution other than economics or the injury of sex. For scholars researching the different manifestations of commercialized sexual exchanges from the perspectives of sex workers, it is important to note that the lives of these people “combines horror and personal agency” (Castillo 2004). Feminist writers such as Cabezas (1999, 2006), Brennan, Kempadoo (1998, 1999, 2005), Alexander (1994), Castillo (2004) and others call for an analytic opacity or density that 16 According to Alexander, tourism reproduces a class of exploited and fetishized servants. 24 historicizes the colonial legacies of sexual and racial violence, stresses the ways in which the global North continues to consume the bodies of peoples of color, but also questions the post-colonial nationalist state repression and criminalization of non-reproductive sex. As opposed to CATW’s logic, this vein of Third World feminist scholarship frames sex work as legitimate labor. Rather than associating trafficking, prostitution, immigration, and complete female debasement as constitutive of each other, this position points to a series of contradictions, not necessarily to solve them, but to move beyond totalizing frameworks of victims and oppressors that prevent us from viewing prostitutes more fully: as women with various material and emotional needs and desires (not just as determined by their sexual behavior, class, and culture). From this perspective, the sexualized body becomes an inescapable labor category from which to organize the claims and demands of women who are socially stigmatized and criminalized. Because sexual exchanges do not always occur within a coercive space, the lives and identities of these women cannot be rendered solely in terms of injury or illicit and commercialized sexual transactions. As the work of Amalia Cabezas (2006) shows, there is an emotional economy at work that manifests in the various kinds of client-provider relations. Central to this scholarship, are the lived realities of sex workers and their interactions with family and friends, their communities and clients. Moving beyond totalizing frameworks of victims and oppressors, these scholars call for a more expansive understanding of sexuality and sex work, acknowledging the client-provider or guest-host relationship as more than simply commercialized sex. Thus I ask, what happens when the money sex workers earn within a capitalist framework is put into non-capitalist endeavors or distributed in non-capitalist ways? Furthermore, as Kempadoo suggests, oftentimes migration allows these women not only to provide for their families and send their children to school, but also to maintain an image of respectability in their hometowns (Kempadoo 2005, 251). In other words, there is a 25 complicated dynamic in which sex workers challenge but also become complicit in reproducing dominant ideologies about love, family, motherhood, intimacy, desire and self-worth. RETURNING TO THE MATERNAL: Time and again the maternal and feminism exist in a cruel, tense, and contradictory relationship. As Bolivian artist, writer and activist Maria Galindo writes in Evo Morales and the Phallic Decolonization of the State (2007) the space of the Father (or the masculine subject) is constituted through the simultaneous debasement of all that has been socially constructed as feminine and the negation and glorification of the mother. 17 In a similar vein, but writing from a different location, philosopher Lisa Guenther (2006) suggests that turning the act of giving life into a secondary act is bounded to the constitution of the self-possessed and self-made masculinist subject: a process that requires the mother to exists as an absence-presence. In The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Poetics of Reproduction, Guenther augments Levinas’ work on ethical responsibility and complicated French feminist treatises on motherhood. 18 Her vision of a feminist politics of maternity resists two seemingly opposing myths: the antifeminist notion of women as vessels of reproduction and the radical feminist myth of women as vessels of patriarchal order. In doing so, Guenther provides us with a critical rereading of the figure of the mother in Levinas, suggesting the feminine as a model for ethical giving that “commands me to become like her for another” (2006) to engage in a spiral of gift-giving without any expectation of reciprocation or return. 19 This author’s meditation on “responsibility” is based on the givenness of existence and a feminist politics that must imagine giving as a refusal of possession. As such, this is not an economy 17 Diana Taylor also states that “The idea of disease, degeneration, and deviancy associated with the feminine has long been part of the collective imaginary, and not just in the west…The Other is that which is given to be feared: the feminine, the “masses,” Jews, homosexuals, and indigenous populations…While different Others emerge geographically and historically…same patters we have come to associate with the language of conquest, colonialism, fascism, and the new Right (Taylor 1997, xi). 18 Guenther engages with the work of Irigari, de Beauvoir, Cixous and Kristeva. 19 Guenther recognizes the contradictions of this claim especially in the context of poor women of color; however, she works through a series of tensions in order to interrogate the exploitation of maternal generosity. 26 of indebtedness, but a theory of feminine embodiment that, as she writes, “requires me not that I forget the feminine Other but rather that I become like her in giving hospitality to the Other” (61). Guenther recognizes the contradictions of this claim (i.e. gift-giving without any expectation of reciprocation or return) especially in the context of poor women of color. After all, the dominant ideology of intensive and unselfish mothering continues to reproduce notions of socially appropriate mothering (Hays 1996; Chodorow 1999). 20 Moreover, this is a dominant ideology that structures social life in terms of the public and private spheres, binaries that collapse when trying to understanding the experiences of poor women of color as waged-workers and targets of state intervention (Davis 1981; Hurtado 1989; Ferguson 2002; Fregoso 2003; Spillers 2003; Smith 2005; Inda 2007). Thus, Guenther works with a series tensions and contradictions to provide us with a critique and elaboration that claims the maternal not as uncritical eulogy of the feminine that may reduce women to nonexistence or to give selflessly as the result of biological fate, but as a politics of justice that addresses and critiques the exploitation of maternal generosity and the construction of the feminine Other as “the pre-ethical condition for ethics” (2006). Thus, her claim of maternal embodiment (to be like a maternal body) “demands a reinterpretation of gender and sexual difference along ethical lines” in order to imagine non-patriarchal meanings of motherhood where familial relations are no longer constrained to the triad of mother, father and child (55). While Galindo and Guenther recognize the ways in which normative notions of Motherhood operate to discipline females, particularly those women who reside at the crossroads of racism, sexism and poverty, they call for a feminist politics of maternity that in Galindo’s words “recuperates the place of the mother, where women change from being objects of reproduction to subjects of maternity” (2007). In this project I ask: what exactly does it mean to 20 The notion of Intensive mothering refers to a cultural model of mothering that centers on mother-child isolation, unselfish nurturing, and time-consuming child rearing. See, Hays 1996; Chodorow 1999. 27 claim the politics of the maternal when the reproductive and notions of family and home are articulated through heteronormative definitions of time/space (Reddy 1998; Ferguson 2000; Halberstam 2005)? What is at stake in claiming the maternal when, under a biopolitical order, the “improvement” of the population depends on the actual disequilibrium of life and death, and, as Foucault argued, anything that disrupts “the norm” must die in order to make life healthier (Foucault 1997, 1998)? Above all, what does it mean to recognize the mother, as Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel (1997) once suggested, from the location of queerness and racialized illegality? Historically, as the work of J. Alexander (1994) illustrates, in the United States as much as any other capitalist modern state, conjugal sexuality, the policing of identities, and exploitation of labor are necessary for the re-production of the outsider, the criminal and the indecent. Alexander’s analysis of the Bahamas shows us that Western ideals of the family, nuclear home and conjugal sexuality are not particular to the U.S., but are colonial/ imperial ideological structures intrinsic to nation-sate formations. In the case of Latin America, the originally established catholic Republics were founded, like many other ex-colonies, on Enlightenment principles of reason and the domination of nature. The Spanish empire’s motto castigar la tierra y conquistarla illustrates the ideological imperatives that “imagined” an empty land, a nature without history that could be assimilated into a geometrical harmony where masculinity became the privileged category through which the colonies were consolidated as the Space of the Father (colonizer, clergy and patriarchal families) (Guerra Cunningham 2004). The universality of the capitalist family/home and the division between the private and the public sphere falls apart when we analyze the histories and quotidian struggles of peoples of color. The theoretical and activist work of women of color shows us that we need a nuanced and rigorous understanding of the relationship between motherhood, reproductive politics, and the ways the bodies of Third World women and females of color have been (un)gendered and violated. But we 28 also need an understanding that stresses the various ways in which these subjects become the sites for the imagining of new collectivities and ways of being that produce alternate forms of social life. The Breaking and Remaking of Everyday Life suggests that the cinematic figure of the Latin/a American transnational mother makes visible alternative social arrangement that threaten hegemonic formulations of raced and gendered subjectivities. Scholar Judith Butler (2000) notes that the repulsion against any deviation from the heteropatriarchal family, particularly the White capitalist family, is a protest not only against homosexuality or single parenting “as an assault on the family but also on the notion of the human, where to become human, for some, requires participation in the family in its normative sense” (22). But to become human or to be seen as human necessitates more than participation in the capitalist family, it requires particular ways of being, dreaming, desiring, and enactments of good citizenship that are dependent on the criminalization, disposability and exploitation of the Illegal: a category commonly used to refer to undocumented immigrants but that encircles a variety of dispensable subjects. It is in this context that I ask and expand Judith Buttler’s question: how does one not only grieve, but also act and form empathetic attachments from within the presumption of criminality, from within the presupposition that one’s acts are invariably and fatally criminal or illegal? (Butler 2000). CHAPTER BREAKDOWN Chapter 1 of my dissertation explores the ways in which concepts such as mother of “an anchor-child” and transnational motherhood circulate in both print and visual contemporary media. I specifically analyze the contemporary immigrant struggles in Arizona and the post-9/11/2001 environment. The second half of chapter 2 moves to a discussion of transnational motherhood through a careful examination of Almudena Carracedo’s documentary Made in L.A. The study of this filmic text specifically explores the ways in which, for transnational mothers, communication 29 and visual technologies assist, transform, and enable the birthing of a different type of maternal affect and mother-child relations. I then follow my discussion of motherhood and illegality through a feminist reading of the Colombian crisis and its cultural representations. My study disrupts dominant analyses by showing how female bodies are the site of much political economy through a close study of Jorge Franco Ramos’ novel Rosario Tijeras and Joshua Marston’s film Maria Full of Grace. This part of the dissertation explores the representations of Colombian migrant subjects and mobile mothers that carry the burden of armed political conflict, caught between simplified feminine images of global beauty, the flower economy, and romantic love, on the one hand, and subjects for use by the illicit drug economy, on the other. In the second part of my dissertation, I turn to Beatriz Flores Silva’s film En La Puta Vida to explore how this visual text unmoors discourses of illegality and morality. Here I think through the film’s main character, a Uruguayan transnational mother, undocumented migrant, and sex worker in Spain, as a metonym for the Third World sex worker in order to analyze the construction of the Third World prostitute in debates about sex work and trafficking in women. My dissertation concludes with a postscript that briefly explores illegality and motherhood through Patricia Riggens’ representations of masculinity in the film La Misma Luna (2008). This brief and last portion of the dissertation specifically traces the ways in which this visual text evokes the transformation of a male character into a “maternal figure.” Rather than presenting the audience with narratives of despair and total violence, through her representations of a child’s journey to reunite with his mother, Riggens’ cinematic narrative is a generative imaginary of absence, cultural memory, and affective connections. In The Breaking and Remaking of Everyday Life, the cinematic figure of the (undocumented) transnational Latin/a American mother operates as a sort of heuristic device for the exploration of various interconnected topics or problems: from questions of illegality, gender, sexuality, and labor 30 to their connection to the study of the role of cinema in shaping and challenging common-sense knowledge about raced motherhood and film's potentiality for producing new ways of knowing and feeling. I argue that illegality produces extreme vulnerability for mothers who are outside of the possibility of familial normalcy, a precondition to achieving full citizenship standing. Through the study of film, I further contend that the body of the transnational Latin/a American mother becomes a historical archive for both modernity’s violence and hope as an affective state that propels these mothers forward in daily life. This project contributes to transnational feminist work that challenges normative depictions of unfit mothers as “irresponsible subjects” whom are always already in need of regulation. It also adds to the breadth of scholarship that posits popular culture as an important site for the enactment of identity, belonging, and cultural and political contestations. My dissertation does not seek to solve whether the breaking of the law is at any moment morally right or wrong; but to reveal how there are moments in life when Latin/a American single mothers must choose between doing things legally or not so they might eventually provide toward better futures. This work offers a compelling account of visual culture, maternal bodies, and female agency and resistance in the face of political turmoil and hegemonic economic forces. The Breaking and Remaking of Everyday Life is a gift to my mother: a single parent, an immigrant, and a service worker. It is a return to the maternal, a feminist meditation on (transnational) dreams and alternate (often illegal) routes to happiness and survival. 31 CHAPTER II Re-imagining Life from the Debris of Empire and State Violence: Political and Cultural Representations of Latin/a American Undocumented Mothers In Latin America two factors contributed to women’s participation in the new social movements—the authoritarian regimes of the 1970s and the extreme hardship caused by debt crisis and neoconservative policies that have been put into effect without the protective shield of the welfare state. Despite “redemocratization,” the threat of authoritarianism and its consequences still cast shadows on national politics; and despite promises of economic miracles, the majority of Latin Americans have no access to the consumer society that is celebrated daily on television screens and billboards. 21 –Jean Franco We believe there is an undeniable responsibility to love and show compassion for the stranger among us. 22 —Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform I. INTRODUCTION The histories of colonization and patriarchy make religion and motherhood vexed social and cultural categories of analysis from which to think and imagine large-scale transformation. Because of the ways that maternal subjects have been historically inscribed through uneven gender, sexual, race and class relations, it is difficult to theorize the relationship between female agency, culture and futurity without also analytically thinking about the present-past overdetermination of femininity. In the Americas, theology of liberation and feminist politics have played an important role in the resignification of the church and the figure of the mother, where the maternal has been moved from being a symbol of passivity and indoctrination to a social signifier with oppositional potential. While a certain vein of feminist scholarship has rendered mothers’ politics in Latin America as movements that re-solidify gender roles and exemplify maternal thinking, the reclaiming of the polis and resistance to various forms of state-sanctioned violence “would not have been possible if mothers had not behaved as mothers” (Franco 1999, 33) 23 . As Jean Franco explains, 21 Jean Franco, Critical Passions (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 49. 22 Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform <http://faithandimmigration.org/content/about-ccir>. 23 Following Julieta Kirkwood, Franco makes a distinction between the impacts of human-rights movements, particularly those dominated by the church, and survival movements. As she explains, while the church did not “necessarily induct women into feminism,” it did provide women with certain forms of empowerment. According to Franco, authoritarian regimes “had the effect of enhancing the ethical value of private life, religion, literature, and art as regions of refuge from the brutal reality of an oppressive state. On the other hand, survival moments “come into being when the state can no longer deal with the day-to day- survival of its citizens…It is in these movements that awareness of women’s oppression has strengthened, although their activist often repudiate the label of feminism…In any event, 32 By refusing to regard their children as terrorist, by reiterating their mothering role, their particular regard for the continuation of human life, the mothers of Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador were able to interrupt the dominant discourse and resacrilize the body. That also helps to account for the religious tone of these movements and the ethical dimension they give to the struggle, a dimension which emerges particularly in the struggle over meaning. (Franco 1999, 33) In a similar manner, in the United States religious and maternal politics, as socio-cultural political formations, have played an essential role in the lives of female subjects who have been displaced by authoritarian regimes and market capitalism. 24 For instance, by assisting Central American refugees during the Central American civil wars, the US sanctuary movement maintained a position of political opposition during the 1980s. Such religious activism played a key role in refusing and contesting the violence of American imperialism during the Cold War era. More recently, the activist practice of sanctuary has re-emerged as a way to stand in solidarity with non- citizen aliens, that is, as a way to speak against the increasing deportation of undocumented persons, and as a refusal to passively accept the separation of families of mixed legal statuses. 25 For example, confronting her imminent deportation, Elvira Arellano, an undocumented mother and Mexican deportee who was branded as the mother of “an anchor-child,” turned a religious site— Adalberto United Methodist Church—into her shelter and congregational space for action in 2006. 26 Given the anti-immigrant backlash that has emerged again in the most recent period: How can we these social movements cannot be ignored. They exist all over the continent; they have produced their own organic intellectuals. And in many ways, they have a direct and an indirect impact on culture (Franco 1999), 51. 24 According to Franco, “Although it is easy to see that both military governments and redemocratization under the aegis of free-market capitalism alter the relation of the citizen to the state, it should also be emphasized that even in ‘welfare’ states (Chile, Uruguay and Mexico in the 1960s) the social contract rode on the inequalities of the sexual contract, which subordinated women to a reproductive rather than a citizen’s role. Though women’s participation in politics was not impossible, existing social arrangements did not encourage participation.” (Franco 1999),49. On a different note, it is also important to mention, that religion has also played a fundamental role in the lives of African American and Native American mothers. 25 In the mainstream media Geraldo Rivera, host of Geraldo at Large (Fox News Channel) and Univision’s talk show host, Cristina Sagaregui, have covered the new sanctuary movement and the increasing deportations of undocumented parents of US born children respectively. The new sanctuary movement is a coalition of churches, synagogues and other houses of worship from across the nation. Religious leaders, such as Donna Schaper and Lutheran pastor Alexia Salvatierra, believe in the moral obligation to aid and provide shelter to the stranger 26 I will return to Elvira Arellano’s case in the postscript of the dissertation. 33 understand the figure of the undocumented mother and her political uses in a post 9/11/2001 world? In what follows, I explore the ways in which the figure of the undocumented mother and transnational motherhood circulate in both print and visual contemporary media. I analyze the discursive and symbolic construction of the undocumented female subject as dually a social burden, and, the mother of the much-maligned “anchor-baby.” The “anchor baby” as the emblem of the ability of first generation immigrants envisioned access to citizenship rights and ‘American’ privilege has become a key feature of post-9/11 rhetoric regarding immigration. As a consolidation of dominant discourses, the “anchor-baby” trope puts Latina immigrant women in a genealogy of branding, such as that of the Black welfare queen, las madres de la Plaza de Mayo, or Native American stigmatized forms of parenting. The maternal figure that mothers the “anchor-baby” is deemed as a social failure and cultural threat since she is at once cast as dependent and incapable in numerous mainstream media projections and right wing positionings. Indeed, these two nouns, dependency and incapacity, have historically designated the “negative” space of the Other in terms of gender, race, and geography. In this chapter, I follow anthropologist Jonathan X. Inda to argue that within the discursive context that frames and legislates the illegality of women of color motherhood, the undocumented pregnant woman is constituted as always already a subject “existing outside the circuits of civility and responsible self-management” (Inda 18). Inda’s post 1965 study traces the transition from the Welfare State to the Post-Social State in order to examine the ways in which practices of exclusion can be interpreted as the result of what Foucault theorized as biopower. The concept of biopower enables Inda to explore the ways in which exclusion, expulsion, and regulation operate to foster life 34 and the security of the body polity. 27 According to him, biopower always produces undocumented immigrants as a threat to the stability and wellbeing of the nation-state, wherein the undocumented maternal body, ultimately serves as an important terrain of biopolitical struggle. 28 Inda argues that in a post-social state in full retraction of its social contract a crucial distinction is made between deserving moral poor and undeserving immoral poor. However, informed by Third World/ Women of Color feminisms, I contend that while illegality makes the undocumented woman a hyper-vulnerable subject of state intervention, it is not only the condition of illegality per se that makes her an ethical failure since racialized females, particularly single mothers of color, have been historically imagined as violable, impure, and unable to achieve familial normalcy, a precondition to being an upstanding female and U.S. citizen. Such ideological battles also grow out of a longer history of racist genocide in the Americas underpinning U.S. national culture since modernity. Presently, the political struggles over immigration taking place in Arizona through state policy and activism have reached a most visceral antagonism; as such, Arizona has become an epicenter of neoconservative post 9/11/2001 immigrant rhetoric. Hence, the first section of this chapter, “Policing the Maternal: Unfit Motherhood and Undeserving Citizenship,” sets up this discussion by locating the mother of “anchor children” within the feminist and sociological literature on (transnational) motherhood and contemporary immigration debates and pro-immigrant rights 27 Later in this chapter I will explore the impact of immigration restriction and the production of the illegal alien by turning to scholar Mae M Ngai’s work. It is important to mention that while Ngai’s study focuses on the period from 1925 to 1965, Inda’s begins in 1965. Together, their work establishes a continuum of the long-term effects of restrictive immigration policy. 28 Inda’s post 1965 study traces the transition from the Welfare State to the Post-Social State. As his work reveals, in the context of a biopolitical order, the body of the undocumented mother and the border become two of the major sites of policing and govermentality. While the border is perceived as a threshold for foreign contamination, the undocumented mother is imagined as a “mother prone to bearing children she cannot support. Indeed, [Inda contends,] it is the undocumented woman who has first and foremost been marked as a public charge and thus an ethical failure” (Inda 2006), 112. Inda’s theorization is helpful for understanding how border policing/militarization and the attempts to deny undocumented mothers access to prenatal care during the 1990s (i.e. California’s Prop 187) are means through which one can trace the ways in which illegal lives and the children of undocumented migrants become expendable and exposed to premature death (2006, 135). 35 cultural/activist work in Arizona. In this first section, I shortly discuss the imagery that has emerged in public spheres there, and, in more general terms, the shape of conservative immigrant political maneuvering. In today’s US political climate, when historic levels of deportations of undocumented immigrants exacerbate the separation of families, alternative representations of undocumented mothers can effectively break dominant assumptions about these women by foregrounding the ways in which these females challenge normative notions of national belonging, mothering, gender and family. To counter the notion that this kind of rhetoric is absolutely hegemonic, I also briefly turn to the faith politics of Sojourners, a religious activist group. Sojourners is composed of people from different religious denominations who call for an end to the inhumane treatment of non-citizens and “fear driven anti-immigrant rhetoric in the media, which has often castigated all immigrants regardless of citizenship status.” 29 Those whose religious faith is understood as a “hermeneutics of hope” (Gutierrez 2009) believe that there is an undeniable responsibility to preach and enact a preferential option for the oppressed; that is to say, to be in solidarity with and show compassion for the stranger among us is to exercise “a commitment to the absent and anonymous of history” (319). This more critical or sympathetic discourse is important in that it interrupts what would otherwise be a homogenizing set of opinions and corporate mediascape regarding immigrants. Responding to Arizona’s anti immigrant climate, Sojourners hosted “A Movie Night for Arizona” to discuss Arizona Senate Bill 1070 (SB1070) 30 and inform audiences about the general struggles of immigrant communities. Among the films featured by Sojourners' “Movie Night for Arizona” is Almudena Carracedo’s powerful documentary film Made in L.A. (2005). Thus, the 29 See, <http://www.sojo.net/> 30 Signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer on April 23, 2010, the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (SB1070) is one of the strictest anti-illegal immigration measures in contemporary US history. See, http://www.immigrationpolicy.org/clearinghouse/litigation-issue-pages/arizona-sb-1070%E2%80%8E-legal- challenges-and-economic-realities 36 second section of this chapter, “Imaginative Routes: Communication/ Visual Technologies and Latin/a American Transnational Motherhood” follows my discussion on maternal bodies, visuality, and the post-9/11/2001 environment through a careful examination of the film to explore the technologically mediated relationship between undocumented transnational mothers and their loved ones. Here, I ask a subset of questions regarding maternal/child bodies, connectivity, and recent media transformations: How does Carracedo’s film render visible the important affective role that these technologies play in the lives of transnational (undocumented) mothers? How do communication and visual technologies assist, transform, and enable the birthing of a different type of maternal affect and mother-child relation? And finally, how do visual media function as potential oppositional technologies through which displaced subjects can recreate and imagine avenues or routes of communication, affect, and political action? These questions are important to the overall argument in this chapter because they suggest the texture of female immigrants’ daily struggle. I contend that Carracedo’s Made in L.A. challenges hegemonic images by documenting the quotidian, the absent or the often disqualified stories of working-poor undocumented mothers. II. POLICING THE MATERNAL: UNFIT MOTHERHOOD AND UNDESERVING CITIZENSHIP If we are going to have an effect on the anchor baby racket, we need to target the mother. Call it sexist, but that’s the way nature made it. Men don’t drop anchor babies, illegal alien mothers do. —Senator Russell Pearce In anti-immigrant discourses, the notion mother of anchor-child refers to undocumented mothers of US born children. It is a debasing term suggesting that these women use their children as their “anchor” to citizenship. As Senator Russell Pearce’s comment shows, because of their capacity for biological reproduction and their non-citizen status, undocumented females are constructed as irresponsible subjects who abuse the system. Historically, it has been through the myth of female incapacity that the productivity (or the value) of women, motherhood, housework, and female labor is hidden, or that reproductive work only appears as the creation of non-value or female dependency 37 (Fortunati 1995). But this logic of female dependency separates economics from politics and culture, therefore, motherhood (Duggan 2003). “Personally, socially, and politically,” as Annalise Orleck explains, it “is impossible to speak of motherhood without speaking of social systems of power and domination” since pervasive notions of good-mothering are tied to and shaped by the ideology of the conjugal-heterosexual- nuclear family,” thus, narratives of the nation and citizenship (Orleck 1997, 5). The defeasance of maternity, the social construction of hyper-fertility, and negating the right to bodily integrity are all part of a long history of racist and sexist (read genocidal) policing of female bodies, particularly the bodies of single mothers of color (Zavella 1987, 1997, 2007; Espino 1993; Hurtado 1996; Ruiz 1998; Davis 1998; Bejarano 2002; Ferguson 2000; Spillers 2003; Smith 2005; Hill Collins 2005; Gilmore 2007). Like in the case of other working poor mothers, undocumented women are always already preconceived as potential public charges, and therefore constructed as irresponsible subjects in need of management and regulation (Inda 2006; Fujiwara 2008). Given the recent immigrant debates and responses and considering Inda’s aforementioned conceptualization of the maternal body and illegality, I want to suggest that the present attempt to deny jus soli to the children of undocumented mothers (i.e. The Birthright Citizenship Act of 2009) demonstrates how portrayals of the maternal body (of color) and representations of the national body work in tandem to allegorize and re- configure notions of belonging, good citizenship, and responsible motherhood. Thus, from the conquest until today, racist practices such as rape, chattel slavery, miscegenation, coercion into sterilization, the privatization of social services, immigration quotas, and discriminatory uses of contemporary reproductive technology continue to further a system of racial inequality and oppression that makes single mothers of color their primary target. For instance, in 1996 the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) and The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act notably 38 criminalized citizens and non-citizens in poverty and increased their subjection to state surveillance and technologies. PRWORA transformed public assistance into a moralizing welfare-to-work program that terminated welfare benefits for non-citizens and construed poverty as the result of single parent households and children being born “out-of-wedlock” (Fujiwara 2008; Ngai 2005). The welfare reform mobilized the figure of the “Welfare Queen” as a way to reinscribe heteronormative relations, family values, and marriage while re-solidifying the racist and sexist ideologies articulated in the Moynihan Report (1965) and discourses on the culture of poverty (Fujiwara 2008). In a similar way, IIRIRA curtailed aliens’ rights, made removal mandatory for a broad rage of offenses, “and enlarged the grounds that turn legal immigrants into illegal aliens [and] made it nearly impossible for illegal aliens to legalize their status” (Ngai 2005, 268-269). Moreover, it was through IIRIRA that section 287(g) was appended to the Immigration and Nationality Act (1965). Essentially, 287(g) agreements authorize ICE to delegate federal immigration enforcement to state, county, and local law agencies (LEAs) in order to facilitate and expedite the identification and apprehension of non-citizens labeled as “high profile criminals,” a category including human smugglers, drug traffickers, sexual offenders and those engaging in money laundering and gang and organized crime activity. As Fujiwara suggests, these 1996 laws “made personal responsibility an inside-defined proviso for citizenship” (2008). The pages of these legal policies teem with allusions to poor immigrant women as inherently inassimilable and overly dependent. Here, it is important to note that the discursive construction of undeserving motherhood that creates socioeconomic and cultural ideologies of female over-dependency affects (unauthorized) immigrant women in at least three very specific ways: Firstly, the notion of female dependency circumscribes all women since it is founded upon the sexual division of labor of work subjects that reduces women to the realm of the natural, therefore, devaluing their labor power as workers, housewives, and mothers (Fortunati 1995). Secondly, through the axis of race and class, poor dark- 39 skinned single mothers—regardless of citizenship status—are branded as liabilities and threats to the national body. Lastly, immigration policy conceives of female refugees, migrants, and exiles as wives and daughters dependent on both the economic and legal status of a male migrant subject, thus, gendering and framing the relocation process in terms of male rather than female agency (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1995; Zavella 2007). Considering the above notions of dependency vis a vis male subjects and institutions, I want to stress that motherhood and womanhood are historically specific classed and raced subject positions through which the dialectics of female subjection and agency are experienced across the hemisphere. In this sense, the experience of policed maternity reveals the theoretical limitations of trying to understand the social life of working poor mothers in terms of the public and private sphere since the idealized maternal space of the private sphere is always already inaccessible for poor women of color. That is to say, the binary that structures social life in terms of the public and private sphere becomes a problematic distinction (and collapses) when trying to understand, on the one hand, that working-class women of color have historically been waged-workers (i.e. “public” workers) in white people’s private spheres. On the other, that home and family have historically been sites of constant state intervention for working class women and women of color (i.e. welfare programs, forced sterilization, police brutality, military drafting and interventions, and deportations) (Davis 1981; Hurtado 1989; Franco 1994; Ferguson 2002; Fregoso 2003; Spillers 2003; Smith 2005; Inda 2007, De Genova 2010). In lieu of any sort of immigration reform or amnesty, what we see expressed through policy and dominant culture are vestiges of the past that make the illegal alien, as Mae M. Ngai (2005) contends, an impossible subject. Ngai’s sociolegal history of the origins of the illegal alien and the making of modern America is important to my overall discussion because it does the work of showing how restrictive immigration policy in the U.S. not only created the category of illegal alien, 40 but also produced an ethno/racial system of exclusion and differentiation (i.e. citizens, citizen aliens, lawful residents immigrants, illegal aliens). These categories and hierarchies so central to the regime of immigration restriction posed enforcement, political, and constitutional problems for the modern state. As she states, “immigration restriction produced the illegal alien as a new legal and political subject, whose inclusion within the nation was simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility—a subject barred from citizenship and without rights…a person who cannot be and as a problem that cannot be solved” (Ngai 4-5). While restrictive immigration policy did occur prior to the tenure of the national origins quota system (1924 to 1965), as Ngai states, The Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 realigned and hardened racial categories, classifications that continue to cast specific ethnic groups as foreign and as threats to the nation. Ngai’s work is a history of U.S. immigration policy and practice that disrupts the dominant narrative of American exceptionalism and the universality of the nation’s liberal democratic principles. As such, it enables us to see how the legal edifice of restriction that began in the 1920s continues to inform American ideas and practices about citizenship, race and the nation-state. Her work provides us with a critique that rethinks American immigration history in the context of global developments and structures. By doing so, she frames restriction not only in terms of domestic politics but also as part of interstate system. That is to say, her globalist approach to restriction understands the ways in which foreign policy is often, if not always, implicated in the formulation of immigration policy. Inevitably, a global framework makes visible the role that the United States, as a world power, has played in creating the condition for people’s (forced) movements across nations and in the production of (illegal) immigrants as cheap and disposable labor, as agents of potential threat, and, ultimately, as impossible subjects. 31 31 I would add here that scholars such as Susan Bibler Coutin and Cecilia Mejivar have also theorize the precarious conditions of Salvadorans in the U.S. as a state of legal non-existence (Coutin 2000) or liminal legality (Menjívar 2006). See footnote 38 41 Thus, retorting the “biological nature” of so-called “mothers of anchor-children” enables Senator Pearce to disarticulate mothering from structures of inequality and cultural practices; consequently, like the underlining rhetoric of the Moynihan Report, today nativist portrayals of undocumented mothers can be conceived as another expression of the “welfare queen” mobilized to demarcate belonging through policy and reform. Contrary to nativist’s arguments, I argue that the undocumented mother is but one modality of the historical consciousness of policed maternity in the Americas (Franco 1994). I further contend that the undocumented mother embodies a mother whose displacement can be traced through the detrimental impact of market based reforms in Latin America and the realities of post 9/11/2001 surveillance mechanisms and discourses. But how does the category of transnational motherhood help us understand the discursive construction of the undocumented mother? As I have stated above, in a post-social state in full retraction from its social contract dominant representations evoke the figure of the undocumented mother as a law-breaker or “mother of anchor-children.” On the other hand, a particular vein of academic and cultural production has considered the figure of the undocumented mother as a distinctly immigrant cultural and social formation from which to stage key theoretical questions about the axis of power, female desire, and the American dream. For instance, sociological research on undocumented mothers has focused on the ways undocumented women negotiate the intersections of race, class, gender, and citizenship through the experience of transnational motherhood. Important to these discussions is the work of sociologists Pierrete Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine Avila who define transnational motherhood as a variant of mothering that describes the “arrangements, meanings and priorities that Latina immigrant workers have to make in order to care for their children at a distance” (Hondagnaeu-Sotelo and Avila 548). This scholarship analyzes the specific relationship between structures of late global capitalism and the shifting meanings of 42 motherhood. Focusing on Latina paid domestic workers, the authors argue that these rearrangements challenge and contradict both Latina and White middle-class traditional ideas of motherhood and monolithic notions of family. Affected by long distances of time and space, transnational motherhood breaks away from the middle-class model of mother-child isolation and the mother-child integration in the work place. While these new arrangements disrupt many traditional notions of motherhood by posing a radical break with “deeply gendered and temporal boundaries of family and work” (552) as they indicate, “this form of motherhood continues a long historical legacy of people of color being incorporated into the United States through coercive systems of labor that do not recognize family rights” (568). In the 1990s this work responded to changes in the global economy, paying particular attention to gender shifts and migratory roles. However, there have been many changes in gender paradigms in the years since, which require attention to the tactics of state- terror such as deportations, as well as the role of cultural representation. Alternative visual representations of these women can defamiliarize our understandings or common sense knowledge about these mothers by revealing the effects of state policy and violence on subjects’ lives. Latin American mothers continue to be excluded and expelled from the nation and as they resiliently carve out landscapes of hope and survival. In such conditions the cultural realm becomes, as Macarena Gómez-Barris has argued in a different context, “a critical arena of struggle, engagement, and identification, where the past gives vitality and social meaning for the present to those directly affected by violence” (2009, 6). While nativist arguments against illegal immigration tend to oversimplify the issue of unauthorized flows by resorting to the criminalization of the working poor, personal stories make conditions of exit in relationship to colonial/neocolonial projects and histories of empire and racial capitalism center stage. The repressive conditions in Arizona that predated and followed the partial passing of the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhood Act (SB1070) are not exceptional. 43 Nativist sentiments and the tightening of immigration law is not unique to the United States, in the global North places such as France, Germany and Spain are making it very much impossible for displaced subjects (especially “illegal aliens” and particularly undocumented mothers) to live and make a living outside of a state of persecution and hyper-vulnerability. 32 Thus, the state of emergency experienced by migrant communities at the local, national, and international level points to the disparate ways in which the world, as many scholars point out, opens up for the mobility of capital while inefficient and pernicious policies attempt to shut down the movements of peoples being displaced by the same unequal global circulation of power and capital (Poblete 2003; Ngai 2004; Ortiz 2010). This point of uneven circulation of power and capital is effectively conveyed by artist Jose Barraza’s poster, a sort of affiche people carried during anti SB1070 protests. Above the image of an “indigenous looking” woman carrying a baby on her back, Barraza writes la demanda popular del sujeto migratorio of immediate legalization: ¡Legalización Ahora! Below the image, written in both English and Spanish, it states that “If capital can cross borders so can we.” Unlike dominant renderings of relocation that underscore the masculine subject as the agent of social transformation or migration, Barraza’s poster not only frames a dark-skinned female as a moving subject, but it evokes the figure of the mother as displaced and illegalized by capitalist forms of corporate transnationalism. In Barraza’s image, however, the immigrant mother appears not only as a victim of capitalism, but also as a questioning agent challenging the inadequacies of a hegemonic system. The signing and partial passing of SB1070 is perhaps the ultimate expression of how (illegal) immigration is framed, as Inda suggests, as the result of individual and immoral acts rather than the product of a baleful capitalist 32 For discussions about this topic read Ballesteros 2005; Menjivar 2006, and Ellermann 2009. Also see BBC News “Spain tightens immigration Law” <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1132211.stm >. And read the guardian.co.uk “French Police Accused of Rough Tactics in Immigrant Eviction” <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1132211.stm>. 44 system dependent on the hyper and interlocking exploitation of human labor, family, and environmental rights. The legal realm then is mobilized as a way to reproduce such capitalist logic. Whilst the U.S. Department of Justice filed one of the lawsuits against Arizona’s SB1070, the federal government’s ineffective and detrimental approach to immigration policy and reform is partially at fault for creating the conditions that authorize and legitimize local and state officials to enforce federal immigration law through 287(g) programs. 33 The latest political effort to deal with the issue of illegal immigration is the push to reconsider the constitutional amendment that grants birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented parents, thus, rearticulating, race, the national, and the maternal body. If as Inda suggests, the figure of the (pregnant) undocumented mother is the archetype of an “underclass of dependent subjects who lack moral character and are willing or unable to be self sufficient and take responsibility for their own care” (2006), what is our obligation to a social subject who has been constructed, thus, marked as a public charge and ethical failure? 33 It is not surprising that in the face of fatally flawed border and neoliberal policies and in the absence of a comprehensive immigration reform anti (illegal) immigration blocs are turning to 287(g) agreements as a way to respond to so-called contemporary crises “caused” by illegal aliens. Through the collapsing of unauthorized flows (drug trafficking, human smuggling, illegal immigration) as national threat(s), non-citizens who are far from being what ICE formally identifies as high profile criminals fall pray of what can be defined as legalized tactics of racial profiling and harassment. In theory, these agreements, which operate either on a jail, task force or hybrid model, are designed to focus law enforcement capacities at border security and/or community safety. According to Cristina Rodríguez et al., “The Jail Model cross-deputizes local incarceration officers to perform immigration functions with respect to individuals already detained on state criminal charges. The Task Force Model authorizes officers to perform immigration-related enforcement in the community. [And] The Hybrid (or “jail and task force”) Model allows jurisdiction to combine the jail and task force functions.” (Rodríguez et al. 2010),9. In practice, however, the 287(g) programs have enabled the day- to-day policing and terrorizing of predominately immigrant spaces causing, on the one hand, an increasing tension and mistrust between immigrant working- poor communities and the police; and on the other hand, as evinced by the practices of Sheriff Arpaio, they are reproducing a climate of misapplication, abuse, and fear where families of mixed legal statuses are being torn apart through the detention and deportation of “lawbreakers.” As a Migration Policy Institute report states, In March 2009, for example, the Department of Justice announced that it had opened an investigation into the practices of Sheriff Joseph Arpaio of Maricopa County Arizona—perhaps the most high profile 287(g) jurisdiction. Investigators are considering whether Arpaio and his deputies engaged in “patterns or practices of discriminatory police practices,” such as “unconstitutional searches and seizures” and “national-origin discrimination,” including failure to provide meaningful access to service for persons of limited English proficiency”(9). See Cristina Rodríguez, Muzaffar Chishti, Randy Capps, and Laura St. John, “A Program in Flux: New Priorities and Implementation Challenges for 287(g),” Immigration Policy Institute (http://www.migrationpolicy.org), March 2010 45 As mentioned in the introduction, progressive faith organizations such as Sojourners have mobilized cultural production as a way to complicate conservative anti immigrant rhetoric. Sojourners’ “A Movie Night for Arizona” is part of broader efforts by Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CCIR) to mobilize film as a way to reach people and as a sort of didactic tool for action. One way in which CCIR is doing so is by sharing “Reel Images of Immigration: A Film Guide to Discussing Faith and Immigration.” The guide is composed of four main films: The Visitor (2008), Made in L.A. (2005), Farmingville (2004), and Dying to Live (2005), as well as questions and theological reflections and a list of other films that deal with relevant social issues on immigration. Movie screenings, thus, provide this activist group with the opportunity to discuss, educate and act. According to CCIR “few experiences can expose us to dynamic, complex issues as films do. Vivid images and narrative enable us to share a person’s story, connecting us to other humans in a way that public policy articles cannot.” In this section on Arizona I have advance my argument regarding visuality and the undocumented body by showing how this state has become an epicenter and precedent to ground national struggles, policies and debates about illegal immigration and notions of belonging. In the rest of this chapter, I focus my analysis on one of these films, Almudena Carracedo’s powerful documentary film Made in L.A. (2005). Carracedo’s documentary enables me to continue my analysis on how the body undocumented transnational single mother is visually evoked and represented. In particular, I will draw on Laura Marks’ notion of the haptic (Marks 2002) to explore the transnational mother relation to communication/ and visual technology to describe the sensibilities of contact in the realm of the maternal. Broadly speaking, the haptic refers variously to the sense of touch and its artificial replication, to kinaesthesis and to the emotionally touching. While the haptic has been theorized to explore the relationship between motion pictures and the spectator in terms of a physical response of the body and emotional response of the mind, in the 46 following of this chapter, the haptic constitutes an avenue for assessing the ways in which visual technologies help to foster and make possible a maternal affect in the context of separation. IV. IMAGINATIVE ROUTES: COMMUNICATION/ VISUAL TECHNOLOGIES AND LATIN/A AMERICAN TRANSNATIONAL MOTHERHOOD The documentary Made in L.A. traces the struggles of immigrants working under exploitative labor conditions in the garment industry in the fashion district of downtown Los Angeles. By threading the lives of three Latina immigrants, Maria, Lupe and Maura, Carracedo’s seventy minute documentary turns to the intimate and quotidian not only to follow the ways in which these workers organized to collectively bargain for fair wages, a 40-hour work week, and humane working conditions, but to effectively show the spectator how these three females were empowered by the three-year struggle to legally sue the retailer store Forever 21 for systematically demanding and perpetuating sweatshop abuses. Made in L.A. can be classified within the genre of what has been theorized as cine testimonio. According to Benamou, “cine testimonio [is] a variant of documentary cinema, based on the testimonial genre in revolutionary literature,” in which both camera and sound recorder are used to elicit and bear active witness to the character’s narrative, delivered in their own words” (Benamou 1998, 85). 34 Thus, documenting the quotidian kindles the rich texture of these women’s lives, enabling the audience to see the series of negotiations that Maria, Maura and Lupe have to make as working-poor immigrant mothers, wives, sisters, or daughters. Despite the fact that Carracedo takes up the lawsuit against Forever 21 as a way to structure a narrative that touches on issues of immigration and worker’s rights, by weaving together the personal stories of Maria, Lupe and Maura, Made in L.A. tackles the emotional underpinnings of patriarchy, transnational violence, and neoliberal globalization. 34 For a more expansive definition of testimonio as a literary genre see George Yúdice, “Testimonio and Postmodernism,” Latin American Perspectives 18, no. 3 (Summer, 1991): 15-31; and John Beverly, Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) 47 While the diegesis of the documentary is constructed by piecing together these three stories of female dispossession, resistance, belonging and, above all, hope, in this chapter I write about Maura’s testimony as a way to focus my analysis, as stated before, on how the body of the undocumented female worker, specifically the undocumented transnational single mother, is visually evoked and represented. By doing so, I do not attempt to neglect or silence the ways in which Maria and Lupe provide us with stories that attest to the resilience of women living in societies structured in dominance. Rather, what I wish to do is to show how through Maura’s life, as a very specific socio-historical set of experiences, Carracedo’s documentary enables me to trace that is which is often disqualified in the official or institutionalized records about undocumented peoples, and in this particular case transnational mothers like Maura. Overall, my analysis, like the film and the lives it documents, refuses to surrender and accept the neoliberal logic that makes economic policy, as Lisa Duggan states, a neutral and technical expertise separated from politics and culture (Duggan 2003). An audio-visual letter from El Salvador: The cinematic figure of the undocumented transnational mother first appears in Carracedo's documentary in a disquieting scene of Maura and her friend watching damaged homemade videotape. This scene is mediated through multiple screens in which Maura, like us, is a spectator watching her parents and children in what functions as a type of audio-visual letter sent to her from El Salvador: “Siempre cuando me quiero acordar de ellos pongo esa pelicula.” Every time Maura wants to remember her children, she watches the VHS, a constant replaying that after many years has caused the decaying of the videotape. To replay the tape, however, is a literal act of “rewinding” for Maura: To watch the video is to unearth a bygone life: “The wind would start and we’d be under the mango trees…” “Just waiting like monkeys” “For the mangoes to fall down” “how beautiful!” Maura’s nostalgia and haptic reaction (Marks 2002) to the images of her family, however, should not be seen only as an embodiment of complete dispossession or paralyzing loss. The videotape functions almost 48 ‘prosthetically’, as it aids Maura to rethread her ties and remain part of a collectivity that through the video expresses its need for her presence and economic help: Daughter, I need to see you before I die.” “Your dad is already sick.” “Maura you should start working.” “We need help.” “What if I die, what if she dies.” “And who will take care of the kids? The familial images solicit and elicit an emotional response. They incite a kinesthetic reaction from Maura who waves at the screen/her children. The VHS effects/affects Maura’s embodied experience as a transnational mother. Despite the fact that the videotape seemingly represents a temporal disjuncture (as an analog tape and as an audio-visual message sent to Maura more than a decade ago), as I previously stated, it is one of the technologically mediated ways in which Maura sustains a vivid memory and affective relationship with her children. In this sense, the replaying that causes the deterioration of the tape, produces a sort of melancholic elation in this woman whose subjectivity has been marked by eighteen years of separation from her family and by her status as an undocumented laborer: “ It’s been eighteen years since I have not been able to go visit them because I don’t have papers.” As the camera changes back and forth between close-ups of the TV screen and frames of Maura, we hear the grandmother telling one of the kids to greet his mother: “Saludos Mamita dile”. Unexpectedly (at least for the audience), a few minutes into the scene, the tape starts to fail, leaving the viewer with the image of Maura’s family dissolving into specks and white noise: “It’s messing up. I should have made a copy.” The images in the television screen call for Maura’s maternal gaze, a tactile look that as Laura Marks suggest, does not rely on a separation between observer and object. This sort of look, then, “is not just about death, but about loving a living but non-coherent subject, an image that contains the memory of a more complete self” (Marks 2002, 97). What we see in the scene of the failing VHS is Carracedo’s lens documenting and archiving the images emerging from the screen as refractions of pain and love, life and death since the impulse to watch her loved ones produces the aging of the 49 videotape, thus, the disintegration of the images. According to Marks, cultural producers incorporate and play with faded films, decaying videotapes, and projected videos as an analogue to memory. “Through the use of decay and disintegration,” Marks argues, “the cinematic object is gradually transformed from what the image represents to the complex histories of its destruction” (91-94). But how does the inevitable bodily decay of the analog video and the fading images of Maura’s children trigger other histories of erasure and destruction? Or to borrow from Avery Gordon, how do those images capture the “seething presence of that which appears absent”? I want to propose that while this scene operates as Carracedo’s way to introduce Maura to the viewer, this cinematic moment exceeds the main narrative thread or premise of the documentary: the plight of garment workers against exploitative labor conditions. That is, if the use of a disintegrating image is a way of searching for the traces of history, this scene confronts the audience with the limits of what is visible, with the “traces of power on subjects and their social world” (Gordon 1997). Thus, it can be argued that through the disintegrating images and Maura’s voice-over, the scene conjures up the destruction of a particular Salvadoran nation-state formation and ultimately the reconfiguration of many families as transnational entities. Maura’s brief reference to el país en guerra [the country at war] registers the seemingly less recordable or quantifiable traces of the Salvadoran Civil War on either the maternal body or analog tape. Through Maura’s voice-over, the audience learns that her economic and political displacement is the product of the Civil War and single motherhood: “The country at war, a single mother…It was only by coming here that I could help them and had to leave them.” In other words, the circuitousness and brutality of state-sponsored violence and the longevity of its effects, though not visibly perceivable, is nonetheless traceable in this scene. Solo aca…Only here indexes a painful historical irony: the presence and experiences of many Salvadorans in the United States, a country that was partially responsible and played a key military and economic role in supporting the atrocities of the civil war, 50 but that neither recognizes Salvadorans as political refugees nor its official involvement in soliciting the violence that produced the trans-generational and multi-directional displacement of many Salvadorans even after the war ended (Lauria-Santiago 1998; Coutin 2000; Menjivar 2005). Though only an incidental remark, it is not inconsequential for it complicates simplistic nativist narratives of (illegal) migration that erase the nation-state’s accountability for peoples displacements and that reduce relocation to a matter of free personal choice. That is to say, during the 1980s, the US mobilized political and economic resources not only to counter the threat represented by the revolutionary forces organized in the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), but to mainly restructure and reorganize the Salvadoran state and economy under a new model of free market capitalism. As William I. Robinson (2003) contends, US intervention in El Salvador was a modernizing force. This created the conditions that forced thousands of Salvadorans to relocate to the US and other parts of the world, reconstituting them as a transnational class. Like Maura, this class constitutes a denationalized immigrant pool that often times works in the service industry or garment production in the US. 35 To reckon with Maura’s brief reference to the war is to confront the fact that not only did a twenty-two year old single mother leave her country during the armed conflict, but that, in 1987, the year that the VHS was sent, El Salvador, the place that she misses and where she waited for the mangoes to fall, was still at war. Maura’s country, the smallest in Central America, experienced one of the longest civil wars in the hemisphere. As such, this historical reality cannot be decoupled from neither Maura’s alienation as an undocumented garment laborer nor the fading images of the children she has not seen in over eighteen years. 35 According to Robinson, US based garment production employs a great number of Central American women. “The reappearance of sweatshops in New York, los Angeles, and other US cities using child and undocumented labor is a reflection of the structural power capital has achieved over an increasingly transnational working class whose ability to exercise its own class power is constrained by the juridical and institutional structures of the nation state system” (2003, 274). 51 Through Maura, as a cinematic figure, the documentary eloquently speaks to how the body of the transnational undocumented mother becomes a historical archive for both modernity’s violence and “hope as an emotional modality” that propels these mothers onward (Franco 1999; Taylor 2003; Muñoz 2009). That is, while the present conditions of many transnational mothers are not disassociated from the type of Cold War politics that mobilized military and economic capacities across borders to forcibly install fundamentalist neoliberal governments around the world (Franco 1999; Menjivar and Rodriguez 2005; Gomez-Barris 2009, 2010), I want to suggest that transnational mothers, to the best of their capacities, re-construct and re-imagine their lives from the debris of empire and state violence, always struggling to make social life, if not “secure,” at least different from the predatory environments that forced them to separate from their children. In today’s US political climate, when historic levels of deportations of undocumented immigrants exacerbate the separation of families, Made in LA effectively breaks dominant assumptions about undocumented mothers, foregrounding the ways that these women challenge normative notions of national belonging, mothering, gender and family. At First You Feel Very Shy: The scene of the failing VHS jump cuts from a close-up of Maura’s face to a sequence of long shots of the streets of Los Angeles. Carracedo moves the audience from a heartbreaking moment of disintegration to slow motion images of people engaging in a dynamic informal economy. After capturing Lupe slicing cabbage in her kitchen while explaining to the filmmaker the conditions of undocumented peoples’ invisibility, the camera follows Maura walking through the cacophonous alleys of the Fashion District; as this Salvadoran immigrant gaits through the streets, she points her finger to the barely noticeable silhouettes of people sewing by the windows of rundown buildings: “Look, you can see the factories. See the people working? Don’t you see the little heads up there?” Maura’s questions direct Carracedo’s lens to those windows, a view that “only” captures the 52 upper body of a woman in front of a sewing machine but that can potentially be seen as a visual frame for the de-fetishization of clothing. That is to say, the shot makes visible the relationship between people’s garments, as commodities, and the social character of the labor that produces them (Marx [1867] 1976). Maura’s strolling with Carracedo is a walk through the architecture of the garment industry, from the dilapidated buildings that function as factories to the street signs where these factories post employment opportunities. Equally important for the audience’s understanding of these immigrants is Maura’s unexpected meeting with other garment workers during her walk with the filmmaker. Carracedo’s lens captures the ways in which, in between conversation, laughter, and cussing, garment laborers exchange information about themselves, their bosses, and labor conditions, thus, documenting casual chatting among garment workers as a necessary practice for social reproduction. Traversing the streets with Maura and riding with her on the bus, eventually takes the viewer to the Garment Worker Center (GWC), an organization she sought after being fired for demanding her unpaid wages: “I said, that’s enough. I am not stealing! I am working! I armed myself with courage and thank God I found help.” 36 The subsequent images of the Garment Worker Center portray this place as a space of human interdependence, a center where (undocumented) workers find a common ground and shared vocabulary to express their daily struggles as immigrants and laborers: At first you feel very shy because you’re just getting to know people, Maura tells Carracedo. But as the following images evince, this initial shyness does not impede workers from full participation at the GWC. The film transitions from Maura’s face to shots of workers, including Maria, Lupe, and Maura, fighting off their fear and timidity as they engage in workshops and attend meetings about labor law and workers’ rights. As the scene unfolds, the observer also becomes aware of the indispensable source of intimacy, recognizability, and empowerment emanating from this social site. When organizer 36 The Garment Worker Center was founded in 2001 after 71 Thai garment workers were found in a slave shop in El Monte, California. 53 Joann Lo asks workers about their problems, the camera moves from face to face recording all the laborers’ answers. The first scene inside the GWC registers through these workers’ testimonies the immanent ugliness of sweatshop industries: “The main problem is that we work 12 hours a day and we don’t even get $200 per week.” They tell us one rate and on pay day they give you less.” “There are tons of rats and roaches.” “ They made us work in Sundays paying us $3.25 per hour. So they gave us $25 for 8 hours. These laborers’ replies to Lo’s question remind the audience that engendering social misery is the de facto standard of capitalist development. Unapologetically, the film disrupts dominant imaginaries of the United States. Moreover, the workers responses challenge the frameworks of meritocracy embedded in the American dream. By making the audience witness the garment laborers participation at the GWC, Made in L.A. makes immigrants, their lives, longings and desires central to human rights and (global) social justice movements. Most of the scenes inside the GWC render a blooming world of human capacity, worker empowerment, and (im)migrant solidarity that tellingly presses the viewer to see the historical ruptures and continuities of working-poor peoples’ daily struggles. As the documentary shows, workers go to the Center to seek assistance on how to file complains about wage and hour law violations, and unsafe, deplorable and unsanitary working conditions that are not very different from those in the factories of the early 1900s. While Los Angeles is often represented as the “entertainment capital of the world,” at the time of the lawsuit against Forever 21, it was the main site of production for this retailer. Moreover, this global-city was California’s largest garment center and the sweatshop capital of the United States by 2002. The 19 workers’ lawsuit against the retailer and their public campaign against it illustrates the ways in which the city of angels is not only the setting for entertainment production but a sweatshop hub and a growing center for worker and immigrant led movements with global relevance and international connections. Despite federal judge Manny Real’s partial dismissal of the worker’s lawsuit, garment laborers, along with the Asian 54 Pacific American Legal Center (APALC) and the GWC, were not only able to develop strategies that kept the media and the general public’s attention but also won them an appeal in the 9 th Circuit Court of Appeals, enabling them to continue their fight against the retailer in state court. Mire Aqui Estoy Yo: Scholar Laura María Agustín states that “to grant agency to migrating individuals does not mean denying structural conditions, nor does it make them over-responsible for their fate, but it does consider their own perceptions and desires to be crucial” (2007,41). Made in L.A. exemplifies a cinematic narrative that, as Agustín suggests in a different context, considers the dynamics of structural conditions and females’ dreams by granting agency to the women the documentary attempts to represent. It does so by reversing the representational processes whereby these particular social subjects are denied a complex personhood: That is, through testimonio, as an avenue of self-representation and cinematic narrative crafting, the documentary foregrounds female immigrant workers as speaking (subaltern) subjects. In this sense testimonio works at two different registers: on one hand, it is the aesthetic narrative strategy through which Carracedo makes the audience bear active witness of these women’s struggles; on the other, testimonials functioned as one of the main communication strategies mobilized during the campaign against Forever 21, specially after the partial dismissal of the lawsuit. In this way, Made in L.A. makes “the representational” an indispensable political tool. As Carracedo follows Lupe and Maura speaking and staging actions at various places in the East Coast, she captures the historical dissonance produced by subaltern performances such as testimonios and public protests (Taylor 2003; Saldana-Portillo 2005). The spectator is confronted with scenes of incommensurability and historical amnesia as these women visit and take pictures of the landmarks and monuments that, as Lauren Berlant states, render America as a theoretical ideality while erasing the traces that domination “leaves on bodies, values, exchanges, and dreams (1993). 55 Images of Lupe and Maura’s visceral reaction to sites such as the capitol, the white house, the statue of liberty, and Ellis Island Immigration Museum reveal to the spectator the contradictions, disappointments, and grief produced by a (racist and imperialist) American project. As Lupe’s sarcastic reference to the statue of liberty illustrates, before arriving to the United States, women like Lupe, Maria, and Maura based their expectations on mainstream media and official narratives of this country. Once here, the stature of liberty is a “bit green” and seems “very cool,” but it is not, as Lupe expresses, as impressive as she had imagined. However, as Juan Poblete suggests, these images can also function to elicit, in what is expected to be a sympathetic American public, a feeling that these women do belong within the American dream, that they deserve to make it real. This is typical of all activist art: challenge and engagement, slap in the face and mobilization of sympathy (Poblete, 2011, email exchange to author). Scene after scene, the audience is confronted with the clash between the conditions of everyday life and the ideality of an American dream of freedom, justice and equality for all. During a scene of Maura speaking at Georgetown University, the filmmaker once again highlights the discrepancies between the histories of immigrant garment laborers and national narratives of inclusion and opportunity. Carracedo builds up this heartrending scene by tracing Maura’s changing emotions of joy, vulnerability, and courage before giving her testimony at this campus. The audience sees an image of a happy Maura holding a flyer with her picture. Proudly, she points to the piece of paper and with an open smile states: “Mire, aquí estoy yo.” [“Look here I am”]. This quick shot of Maura’s beaming expression, however, transitions to a scene that shows her conversing with Joann Lo. This time the audience watches a teary and anguished Maura who wonders why it is that she is such a coward. When Lo reminds her that speaking to others about her experience would have a great impact on other people’s lives, Maura distressfully responds: “I just don’t want to talk about it.” 56 Despite Maura’s hesitations, in the next scene, the spectator watches Maura, who only finished second grade, standing in front of a classroom of Georgetown University students. Nervous but willing to talk, she begins to tell them about her experiences in the garment industry. In a similar way to when the camera tracked the workers’ faces at the Garment Worker Center, the lens moves from one student’s face to the next. Intelligently, Carracedo brings the audience to a gripping cinematic moment as this Salvadoran immigrant breaks into tears when trying to explain to a student the reasons that propelled her to stand for her rights. As she recalls the experience that led her to the GWC, the camera captures the apologetic look and silence of a visibly distressed student. Carracedo’s choice not to edit these moments of female vulnerability and grief can be read as her refusal to render them as one-dimensional beings. Repeatedly, she tracks moments that expose the audience to the Other but that do not necessarily make marginal females totally transparent, knowable or predictable. The trip to the East Coast concludes with an empowering image of a group shot of dignified workers and organizers posing with their signs and banners that read “no more sweatshops” and “pay garment workers not lawyers.” Behind them, the advertising signs of J. Crew and Forever 21 are visible through the mall’s glass windows. Maura stands among her coworkers, proudly posing and holding a protest sign in the same way that she held the flyer to show the filmmaker that she was the woman in the flyer’s picture. Retracing the Memory of Separation: In the second half of Made in L.A., Carracedo brings into visibility Maura’s subjectivity as a transnational mother once again. The sequence develops around Maura’s decision to bring her three sons to Los Angeles. “My sons are coming to live with me,” she tells Carracedo. “It makes me nervous to think about the moment they would be crossing the border…Very nervous, but also hopeful that God willing, I will have them here soon.” Tellingly, the filmmaker documents this moment by using blurry images of streets in El Salvador as a visual backdrop to the mother’s voice-over. The scene portrays Maura’s 57 nervousness as occasioned by the collective popular knowledge that undocumented immigrants face a journey that can potentially turn deadly. It only takes a few interjecting scenes detailing the emerging tensions among the garment workers before the audience is taken aback by the unexpected disappearance of Maura’s children: “It has been more than 15 days since I don’t hear anything about my sons.” At this point, the camera transitions from Maura’s anguished expression to an image of her three boys in the old videotape. The children’s tranquil, almost incognizant countenance, serves as a visual counterpoint to their mother’s traumatic memory of separation: “When I left El Salvador, I left three babies behind.” This scene is important because it discloses the emotional and psychological pains of family rupture witnessed through transnational motherhood and border-crossing disappearance. Here, Carracedo’s use of blurry shots from El Salvador, the videotape images and a photograph of a younger Maura attempts to visually reconstruct the past while drawing attention to an unbounded sense of loss and the impossibility to really capture this mother’s pain: “ I remember my son was crying. He was yelling Mom, Mom don’t leave.” After filming Maura’s incertitude through various moments and contrary to a lot of cases, the viewer is told that the three young men are back in El Salvador. It is at this moment that, through a photograph, the audience gets to know Maura’s sons as young adults. It is fitting that this is the way that the documentary captures the passing of time and the painful weight of spatial separation for it is through a technologically mediated relationship that undocumented mothers are partially able to reconcile and make up for their maternal physical absence. In a time when hegemonic discourses about globalization and transnationalism emphasize the decline and fall of the nation-state, through the lens of gender, Carracedo redirects our gaze toward the body of the immigrant working-poor woman to evince the centrality of the state in 58 shaping and regulating immigrants’ lives at various scales. 37 Maura’s experience as a transnational mother, however, should not be equated with total despair or an overwhelming sense of complete loss for what is also communicated in Carracedo’s documentary are the ways in which, despite the impinging circumstances, displaced subjects are constantly imaging and re-creating themselves. While the figure of the undocumented transnational mothers does embody the effects of modernity’s violence, women like Maura do figure out imaginative ways to carve out unexpected cartographies of communication through inventive uses of visual and communication technologies, media that often time function to regulate and surveillance their moves, circulation, and reproduction. It is not a coincidence that the documentary’s last image of Maura captures her in a classroom trying to learn English. Carracedo last image of Maura shows the directors commitment not to render undocumented mothers through a lens of totalizing abjection. At least in this instance visual media (i.e. videotapes, photographs, and film) function as oppositional technologies 37 A way to expound on the material effects that state power has on the life on women like Maura (i.e. Salvadoran, undocumented laborer, transnational mother), is to bare in mind the national and inter-state dynamics that have shaped the experiences of Salvadorans in the United States. As Cecilia Menjívar explains, “Central Americans have been squeezed between an extremely harsh and even dangerous context of exit and an exceptionally inhospitable context of reception. This highly ambiguous character of Central American migration stems in no small part from these immigrants’ complex position vis-à-vis U.S. immigration law, which in turn has been a product of Cold War politics and the U.S. role in the civil wars in Guatemala and El Salvador”(Menjívar 2006, 1001). While a small population of Salvadorans did live in the United States prior to the civil war, massive migration began only after the 1980s. Categorized neither as strictly economic migrants nor as political refugees, Salvadorans residing in the United States have had very few or constrained avenues to legalize their status, thus, experiencing what Susan Bibler Coutin (2000) and Mejivar (2006) theorize as a precarious state of legal non-existence or liminal legality. Both Menjívar and Coutin draw on the long uncertainty inherent in Salvadorans’ legal status to show how political decisions embodied in immigration law permeate different spheres of life, not just access to services and labor force participation. For Coutin, the lack of legal recognition (legal non-existence) of undocumented Salvadorans exposes them to premature death since it is a state of subjugation and vulnerability that can have detrimental results from exploitative labor conditions, lack of access to healthcare and education to deportation. While her analysis does problematize discourses that exalt nonexistence as a way to disrupt celebratory notions of outlaws and transnationalism, she does underscore the ways in which Salvadorans re-create and remake transnational social world(s). Following and expanding Coutin’s work, Mejívar complicates binary categorization of Salvadoran’s legal statuses (legal/illegal, documented/ undocumented.) For her, the nation-state regulates and almost makes impossible for these people to move out of their illegal condition. As Cecilia Mejívar explains, in major receiving countries contemporary immigration law creates and recreates an excluded population and ensures its vulnerability and precariousness by blurring the boundaries of legality and illegality to create gray areas of incertitude, with the potential to affect broader issues of citizenship and belonging. See Cecilia Menjivar, “Liminal Legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan Immigrants’ Lives in the United States, American Journal of Sociology 111, no. 4 (January 2006): 999–1037; and Susan Bibler Coutin, Legalizing Moves: Salvadoran Immigrants' Struggle for U.S. Residency, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 59 through which those like Maura and her family recreate avenues or routes of communication, affect, and political action. And they do so by partially contesting US dominant discourses and by partially engaging or deploying them to other ends. IV. CONCLUSION One of my persistent concerns is to think about the possibility of a different future with respects to immigration and its representational constraints. This is an onerous and heart wrenching task since the future cannot be located purely without the policies of coercive social regulation and their effects on dreams, desires, and hopes. 38 In this chapter, I have thought about the present-day rendering of US Latina mothers to enable a dream of alternative futures of freedom from race, class, sex, and citizenship boundaries. Unfortunately, it is impossible to look at maternal immigrants as subjects of all kinds of cultural and political imaginings that render the labor, love, and desires of Latina/Latin Americans invisible. In fact, much cultural and political labor is performed to criminalize, moralize, and destabilize her subjecthood, to some extent deflating its potentiality as a source of political and collective agency in the US. Through out this chapter I analyze how illegality makes the undocumented woman a hyper- vulnerable subject of state intervention. Even so, it is not only the condition of illegality per se that makes her an ethical failure since racialized females, particularly single mothers of color, have been historically imagined as violable, impure, and unable to achieve familial normalcy, a precondition to being an upstanding female and U.S. citizen. Thus, dominant representations and policies have mobilized the figure of the undocumented mother to reinscribe heteronormative relations, family values, and marriage while re-solidifying the racist and sexist ideologies about national belonging. 38 Antje Ellermann defines policies of coercive social regulation “as measures that control individual behavior in highly intrusive ways, impose severe personal costs on the regulated, and often rely on the routine use of physical force for their enforcement.” “The use of physical force against individuals is an integral part of a wide range of law enforcement practices that span the areas of criminal justice, national security, drug control, and migration control” (12). See Antje Ellermann, States Against Migrants: Deportation in Germany and the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 60 Alternative visual representations of this women can defamiliarize our understandings or common sense knowledge about these mothers by revealing the effects of state policy and violence on subjects’ lives. The transnational flows of female racialized subjects in the Americas that I theoretically described in this chapter and their significance for understanding contemporary debates on immigration, cultural and religious activism and conservative politics and technology, as I have described here, together illustrate the degree to which “the reproduction of future immigrant generations” wreaks havoc on present day Latina maternal bodies, in both material and symbolic terms. As visual artist Ursula Biemann’s work reminds us, there is indeed a relationship between images produced by mainstream media, geographic information systems (GIS) surveillance technologies (ST), and the representations of female flows. These images are part of our popular and mediatized visual culture and are mobilized for social, military, and national security purposes that have, for the most part, a detrimental effect on the lives of working poor females; they inform the ways we think about illicit flows, the (de)regulation of the U.S.-Mexico border, and in this particular context, undocumented mothers. 39 In this chapter, I have explored the figure of the mother of “the anchor baby” to understand the ways that undocumented single mothers form part of a longer genealogy of racialized and stigmatized mothering in the Americas and are thus rendered hyper-vulnerable to state intervention and regulation. I do this while also looking to Made in L.A.’s cinematic portrayal of transnational motherhood and undocumented female workers in order to show that alternative representations can effectively break dominant assumptions about these women by foregrounding ways that challenge dominant narratives on national belonging, mothering, gender and family. In doing so, 39 See, geobodies.org 61 such representations also make evident the ways in which the violence of state policies impact these women’s lives. Building on this conversation, the following chapter centers on representations of female drug traffickers operating between Colombia and the “developed” world. Further demonstrating the extent to which the criminalized maternal body of color serves as a focal point for the collusion/convergence of discourses on illicit migration and drug trafficking, this chapter argues that discourses on illicit flows (whether they be of people or drugs) as evinced by state policies and the narratives which legitimize these, elide the structural conditions under which people, particularly women, are displaced. Importantly, the following chapter looks to another iteration of the figure of the maternal body of color to identify the way in which certain cultural texts rupture official discourses of criminality, particularly as they pertain to transnational Colombian female subjects. Thus, if in this chapter I examined the undocumented maternal figure to show its longer history of racialized maternity and to suggest alternatives to this dominant construction and the discourses which buttress it, in chapter three I look to the maternal figure who also transports drugs illicitly in order to build upon the larger conversation taking place between and within my chapters on the imbrication of discourses on migration and drug trafficking. 62 CHAPTER III Entre Rosas y Rosarios: Narratives of Colombian Displacement and the Cultural Representation of the Female Body Para decir lo que tengo que decir no hay palabras salvo, como dice Adrienne Rich, los de la lengua opresora. Para decirte esto, no asaltan mi memoria el náhuatl, el lenguaje de los aztecas, ni el chibcha la lengua de los muiscas. Ni el idioma de los mayas. Sus ruinas adoquinadas bajo ciudades ahogadas por las lianas de las matanzas son un condor desplazado que no vuela. D e s p l a z a d o s. Desplazados los códices mayas y las geometrías visionarias de la filigrana tejida de los muiscas, que hoy sé lo que significa, si acaso puedo argüir que sé algo: ser humano Muisca significa ser humano. Para decir lo que digo, me desdigo. Me limito a observar. No puedo inventar nada de lo que fluye de tan hondo. To say what I have to say I make a courageous use of this idioma: español. Para decir lo que digo, las palabras invasoras asaltantes, violadoras: Gun en la boca. Tapa de cerebro flying! Cóndor que migra a la ciudad de la Liberty para morir apaleado. Immigrant hacia un silencio amurallado. dólar-dorado-green en verde de mortecino d i s a p p e a r e d de borrado sin rastro. Para decir lo que tengo que decir en español en inglés o en espanglish da lo mismo “La Lengua Opresora,” Antonieta Villamil 40 I. INTRODUCTION I have chosen to begin this chapter with Antonieta Villamil’s “La Lengua Opresora” as a sort of epigraph because the poem draws attention to the political and ethical contradictions embedded in the representation of dispossessed subjects by connecting different temporal/spatial forms of displacement. “La Lengua Opresora” affected me in a way that, after many years, I still cannot fully describe. Perhaps the poem continues to linger in my mind because in very few words this Colombian poet powerfully pens the ways in which the past matters for the displaced while also expressing, line after line, how representation (in whatever language) cannot escape the operations 40 Born in Bogotá in 1962, Villamil immigrated to the United States in the 1980s and is an active advocate of immigrant and human rights, as well as an avid cultural promoter of Latin/a American poets in Los Angeles. 63 of power and domination. In general, Villamil’s work triggers memories of my early twenties in the 1990s, years when I met my first Colombian friends in Los Angeles: Immigrants and children of immigrants who used to hang out at Luna Tierra Sol Café. This was an independent, collectively ran, all-vegetarian eatery where the sounds of anarchist punk, Chicano hip hop, spoken word, vallenato and the transnational echoes of Zapatismo did justice to the raw material of my life as a young undocumented immigrant student. Unmoved and easily bored and disappointed by official historical accounts, through song, poetry, film and other cultural expressions, I learned to re-imagine the world and my relationship to others across time and borders. In this sense, Villamil’s poetry sets off an affective-political identification and memories of the years when I joined my friends and others to protests against the increasing militarization of Colombia during the Clinton Administration. 41 “La Lengua Opresora” situates the Colombian immigrant subject within a larger history of displacement in the hemisphere, one that, according to the speaker, began at the moment of conquest, continued trough military interventions, and the subsequent (forced) migration to the United States. Notwithstanding that the poem is a testament to the displaced animated by a critique of colonial, imperialist, and capitalist expansion, ultimately it is more than a poetics of dislocation since it concludes by reminding the reader that the language of the oppressor becomes the language of the oppressed. By emploting abjection through epistemological, linguistic, cultural and territorial displacement, Villamil’s poem reveals the ways in which the speaker has been marked by what Latin American scholars, such as Quijano and Mignolo, theorize as the coloniality of power—the logic of domination, exploitation and control “disguised in the language of salvation, progress and modernization”(Mignolo 2005, 6): Villamil’s words are haunted by the presence of los desplazados. 41 It must be remembered that the militarization of Colombia can be traced back to the 1950s. 64 Print and filmic narratives about Colombia in US popular discourse are important to my discussion of illegality and female subjectivity because they are culturally charged with global meanings about the illicit, gender, sexual and racial ideologies and particular messages about violence and underdevelopment. While in my previous chapter I argued that, as displaced subjects, (undocumented) transnational mothers do figure out imaginative ways to carve out unexpected cartographies of communication through inventive uses of visual and communication technologies, media that often time function to regulate and surveillance their moves, circulation, and reproduction, in this chapter I return to my discussion of technologies of reproduction and technologies of the state to think about mobility, motherhood, and illegality in a different context of displacement. My focus here is not about connecting to a disappeared or absent mother, but instead on technologies of transit and mobility, and the ways in which cultural narratives illustrate the ways in which female Colombian subjects dupe the state. Thus, I ask: What happens to displaced and disposable Colombian females bodies? Those migrant subjects and mobile mothers that carry the burden of armed political conflict, caught between simplified feminine images of global beauty, the flower economy, and romantic love, on the one hand, and subjects for use by the illicit economy, on the other. How are they elicited in contemporary cultural representation of Colombia? Despite the fact that cultural production has proved to be an important terrain of meaning making and contestation that complicates hegemonic representations of Colombia as un “país problema,” less has been said about the female images in these illicit economies. Some visual and literary texts have rendered visible the intangible or less palpable aspects of the quotidian, thus, revealing the human dimensions of the War(s) on Drugs and Terror (Fanta 2008). These include the paradigmatic works of Victor Gaviria (Rodrigo D: No Futuro, 1990; La Vendedora de Rosas, 1998; Sumas y Restas 2004), which have traced the irreducible matter(s) of everyday life, those affective and 65 emotional forces that escape statistics and policy documents. 42 Though a vast number of literary and visual works deal with the issue of Colombian violence and social destitution since the time of La Violencia, Gaviria’s work has been particularly important because it creates ruptures to official discourses of criminality. 43 As many scholars have argued, rather than turning to pornographic depictions of poverty and violence, his work offers the possibility to claim and reimagine social figures assumed expendable or criminal. Gaviria’s work poses harsh and unsettling critiques of those regimes of power that produce exclusion and negate life while pushing audiences to question their own values and dis/comfort with what dis/appears in his films. Unarguably, the complexities of the Colombian situation and its violence are certainly a major topic of contemporary political scholarship; but how this violence has a powerful effect on the construction of (maternal) female bodies and protagonists is vastly under analyzed. With varying degrees of emphasis, in this chapter I analyze two cultural narratives about Colombia that are locations of possible critiques of state and capital: Jorge Franco Ramos’ novel Rosario Tijeras, and Joshua Marston’s film Maria Full of Grace. While these two texts have been widely discussed, my analysis builds on these discussions to explore how these works make the representation of the sicaria, the mula, and the undocumented mother central to the retelling of Colombian history. Contrary to prior studies of these two texts, my analysis moves beyond binary reductions by paying close attention to the constructions of the female body, agency, subjectivity, and cultural representation. In the section entitled “Agent of Death/ Object of Desire: Jorge Franco Ramos’ Rosario Tijeras,” I explore the ways in which, despite its social critique, Franco Ramos’ novel reinscribes middle class values and masculinity through its representation of the figure of the sicaria. I think through the ways in which the female character emerges as a source of illicit desire and 42 Born in Medellín in 1955, Víctor Gaviria is a filmmaker, poet, and writer. Medellín and marginal populations are often at the center of his cinematic narratives. 43 See footnote 49 66 expendable labor. While the primary focus of my dissertation is film, I have chosen to analyze this literary text because it was one of the early sicaresca novels that had a female protagonist. Because of its high popularity, it became a very significant text in the construction of Colombian female illegality. As I will show later in this chapter, as a literary corpus, the sicaresca presented alternative accounts of criminality and the Colombian nation. Often times, these novels were made into films that either contributed to alternative economies of seeing or turned the cultural critiques of the sicaresca into spectacularizations of marginality. After my analysis of Rosario Tijeras, I continue my discussion of the female body as an axis of illegality and consumption in the section, “A Resistant (Maternal) Body: Joshua Marston’s Maria Full of Grace.” Contrary to what some cultural studies scholars have argued, I suggest that as a post 9/11/2001 narrative, the film destabilizes notions of femininity, the maternal and illegality through the main character’s challenge to different structures of domination and control. Through a feminist reading of the Colombian crisis and its cultural representation(s), I continue to disrupt a hegemonic analysis by showing how female bodies are the site of much political economy. That is, my reading contributes to a feminist vision of the War on Drugs to show that while on the one hand masculine images of narco-terrorist-guerrilla rebels function to conjure up this South American country as an unstable nation, dominant depictions of the female Colombian body are mobilized to promote and (re)imagine Colombia as a desirable land for capitalist development. That is to say, representations of the Colombian female body as erotic, malleable, and consumable forge and (re)articulate old and new meanings about the (trans)national and modernity as witnessed through corporate and mainstream narratives of beauty pageants, tourism, cyber marriage, the feminization of labor, and cosmetic surgery. Such evocations of the female body operate in peculiar and often contradictory ways that both solidify and rupture (dominant) notions of the raced, classed and gendered body and its practices. As scholar Felicity 67 Schaffer-Grabiel (2006) points out in her study of Mexican and Colombian cyber-brides, Latin American female bodies circulate, on the one hand, as either “bodies of (erotic) pleasure for the first world cyber-imaginary, evident in the gendered landscape of Web sites catering to Latina’s erotic, sexual, and domestic appeal through pornography, sex tourism, and cyber marriage”(899), or as dexterous and docile bodies for cheap labor in a post industrial technological economy and, in the particular case of Colombia, for export industries such as industrialized floriculture (or as I discussed in my previous chapter as cheap female immigrant labor for the garment industry). It is important to note that in Colombia beauty functions as a form of social mobility, thus, as a marker of acceptance and respectability. Hence, normative ideas about beauty and femininity are central to the ways in which the nation-state imagines and interpellates the (ideal) female citizen, as well as how women reinscribe, negotiate or challenge cultural expectations and dominant ideologies about the female body and self. In this context, beauty pageants and cosmetic surgery play an important role in the reproduction of the desirable (national and female) body/subject. For instance, mass mediated events such as El Concurso Nacional de Belleza Colombia (CNB) occupy an important place in this country’s national imaginary. As a contested space for meaning making, the CNB promotes Colombia’s cultural richness and racial/ethnic diversity through the beauty of its women, while also underscoring whiteness, hyperfemininity and domesticity as valuable attributes through which non-white populations are excluded as desirable national subjects. In Colombia, cosmetic surgery functions as a technology of the body through which women make bodies gain currency in the global economy as desirable. As Shaffer-Grabiel explains, its use “indicates new avenues for understanding the body in relation to scientific configurations of pliability, democracy, and mobility” (2006, 353). For her, women’s use of technologies (i.e. the Internet and cosmetic surgery) shows how “Latin American women do find ways to use technology and representations of their bodies as de-colonial tools that help them improve their lives and those of their families. Yet what is 68 oftentimes unexamined in theories of the body in cyberspace in the salience of the boundaries of cyber-subjectivity, such as how women in the global South negotiate the expectations of a U.S. palate in ways that eroticize their difference from U.S. women” (2006). For Afro-Colombian women, emphasizing their physique [through cosmetic surgery] may be more complex than merely conforming to the demands of the tourist market and patriarchal desire; it is also a chance to pleasurably accentuate characteristics (such as large butts) that have been degraded by mainstream notions of ideal beauty in Colombia, characterized by whiteness, straight hair, and large breast. Thus, in a highly stratified, catholic, and patriarchal society such as Colombia, women turn to technology, illicit economies, and other devices that narrow or widen the scope of female liminality. III. AGENT OF DEATH/ OBJECT OF DESIRE: JORGE FRANCO RAMOS’ ROSARIO TIJERAS The word sicario comes from Latin and means paid assassin. Its very antiquity, its Latinity, evokes a residue of premodern mentality, now reactivated by modern consumption. —Jean Franco 44 Such questions about the intersections of beauty, desire, and illicit drug economies emerge in Jorge Franco Ramos’ novel Rosario Tijeras (1999). In this section I ask what gendered logics are at work in illicit drug economies? How do these circulate differently across format? In answering these questions, I analyze Jorge Franco Ramos’ Rosario Tijeras, a sicaresca novel that imagines the socio- literary figure of the paid assassin. Through a melodramatic and patriarchal narrative structure, Jorge Franco’s story evokes the female body as an axis of illegality and consumption. I focus on the ways that castration, rape, scissors, and fatness function in the text function as tropes of loss and the “disfigurement” of the Colombian nation. While I read Rosario Tijeras as social critique, I argue that ultimately the novel recenters middle class masculinity by representing the Colombian female body through a masculinist gaze of desire, beauty, and femininity as well as reproducing pathological discourses of poverty, criminality, and the female body. 44 Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 223. 69 The word sicario evokes abjection and disposability. In Colombia this socio-historical figure emerged at the end of the twentieth century as cheap and disposable labor for the drug lords. That is, the illicit economy of the drug trade provided the opportunity if not for survival at least for temporary access to a lifestyle and social status that had been promised but never really delivered by modernity and consumer global capitalism to the poor. These young hired assassins from marginalized shantytowns were marked by the logics of expendability intrinsic to consumer globalization and the economic politics of the illegal drug trade (Fanta 2008). Stated differently, their survival was impinged by their very labor as agents of death at the service of drug cartels and by their very exclusion and alienation from current models of capitalist economic development. In a brief but illuminating essay about narratives of globalization, Jean Franco explains how the primitive lex talionis practiced among the sicarios and all “those cast aside in the explosive conjunction of consumerism and poverty” lurks behind “the shiny surface of globalization” (Franco 2002, 220-221). For her, a gap in the social made necessary the articulation of a law of retaliation, as a ghostly remnant of an old past, and consumerism. Abandoned by the Colombian state, society, and the economy, these bodies mill around a landscape of impunity, dispensability, and retribution (Franco 2002; Fanta 2009). Not surprisingly, this socio-historical subject also began to circulate in cultural production as an emblematic figure through whom to narrativize the effects of an excess of violence that, as Franco underscores, goes beyond self-interest (Franco 222). The marginal body of the sicario enabled some cultural producers to pose queries and challenges to officinal narratives about the Colombian crises and conflicts, particularly but not exclusively, about the drug wars. According to some critics, Fernando Vallejo’s La Virgen de Los Sicarios marked the beginning of a literary genre now classified as la sicaresca novel (Abad Faciolince 1995; Fanta 2008). Beginning in the 1990s, this literary corpus presented alternative accounts into the production of meaning, narrativizing the social processes that conditioned the emergence of these young assassins as a cheap 70 labor force for the drug cartels. For Héctor Abad Faciolince, la sicaresca antioqueña encompasses literary and visual accounts about these hired assassins from the comunas of Medellín. These could be either testimonial or fictional narratives that usually make the sicario the first person narrator and for the most part hail sympathy for this social subject (Abad Faciolince 1995). Others scholars conceptualize La sicaresca as part of a broader aesthetic movement coined as narcorealismo, which includes all those narratives dealing with the narco-worlds, and not exclusively with the lives of sicarios in Medellín (Lander 2000). 45 As Andrea Fanta describes, whether sicarios appear as spectators or agents of violence, the stories narrated in this genre retell the Colombian nation through those excluded by the nation. Significantly, both sicariato culture and the drug trade are presented as male dominated spheres and women in these narratives are secondary characters evoked as sexual objects, helpers or facilitators (Franco 2002; Benavides 2008). While Jorge Franco Ramos’ novel does elicit Rosario Tijeras as a hyper-sexualized female, his narrative also centers on her life as a hired assassin and her relationship to two middle-class males. From its original publication in 1999 to the present, Rosario Tijeras gained significant recognition and soon surpassed its original format as a novel. Rosario, the fictional character in many ways surpasses the popularity of the writer. As a sort of migratory fictional character, Rosario travels through various media texts as a figure that represents certain conditions of the present day. Through her circulation in Franco Ramos’ novel, Juanes’ song, Emilio Maille’s film (2004), and the telenovela produced in 2010 by RCN TV, a Colombian private television network, Rosario Tijeras has reached audiences beyond the national borders of Colombia. Rosario is popular in the double meaning that this word connotes in Spanish. That is to say, this female fictional character represents un sujeto popular in the Latin American sense, a marginalized young sicaria and prostitute from the 45 In the Mexican context, Oswald Hugo Benavidez (2008) has coined the termed narco-dramas to refer to those narratives that mobilized melodramatic narrative devises to make sense of what hegemonic mainstream media discourses identify as narco-violence. 71 comunas of Medellín who transgresses both the law and sexual norms. She is, as the novel’s tragic end suggests, expendable. At the same time, Rosario Tijeras is a globalized trans-media figure that “stands in” for masculinist interpretations of female desire, transgression, marginality and violence (Suárez 2010). Thus one can say that in more than one-way Rosario Tijeras “es de las masas:” She is a character that represents subalterity within a neoliberal order while also an eroticized image of the Colombian female body and violence sold by the cultural industries and consumed by mass audiences. The novel’s success has been attributed to Franco Ramos’ deployment of various genres and formats within the texts that contribute to the evocation of popular and fictional images of action heroines while narrativazing the local (and I would add distant) story of sicariato (Pobutsky 2005; Segura 2007; Suarez 2010). Scholars like Juana Suárez suggests that film and other forms of visual culture have influence most of the writers from the McOndo generation, producing a writing style often labeled as literatura light. Stylistically and narratively these writers incorporate linguistic and visual codes from popular, high, and mass culture. This has contributed to their literary success in a culture dominated by the visual and has facilitated the adaptation of these novels into formats like film and telenovelas (Suarez 2010). Their global circulation in the cultural industries has produced a series of paradoxes and at times the process of adaptation has led to a commercialization and spectacular visibility of marginality and difference that not always delivers the social critique that might have been intended by the novel. A case in point is Maille’s cinematic adaptation of Rosario Tijeras, which capitalized on the novel’s representation of Rosario’s hypersexuality and rendered a carnivalesque (Suárez 2010) and often-pornographic vision of death, poverty, and Colombia. A love story Repeatedly, Franco Ramos refers to Rosario Tijeras as a “love story.” Set in Medellín during the 1980s, the plot revolves around a love triangle between the seductive and murderous sicaria and 72 two upper middle class friends, Emilio and Antonio, the narrator of the story. Each character becomes the embodiment of specific values and mores that allegorize social relationships at a time when narco capital and violence began to transfigure rigid class divisions in Colombia. Emilio, as the narrator expresses, comes from “Latin American royalty, loaded down with ancestry and lineage” (Ramos 50). His family spoke English and loved the United States more than their own country. A sexual voyeur and entitled to disobedience and to the fulfillment of his capricious desires, Emilio is a metonym for the Colombian elite and the establishment. Less clear and more difficult to figure out is the narrator’s position. Antonio often criticizes Emilio; he is bothered by any kind of rejection made against Rosario, but he happily welcomes Emilio’s family's disapproval of her because such a rejection works to his own benefit. Ultimately, Antonio never stops being afraid of voicing his love for the main character. Interestingly, it is this middle class male, a figure embodying ambivalence and platonic feelings, that tells us the story. What concerns me about Antonio’s role is in how his platonic love and understanding of Rosario and her life works to enable the re-centering of middle-class male subjectivity. According to Camila Segura, Rosario Tijeras is part of a Latin American literary corpus that uses melodrama not necessarily as a literary genre, but as a narrative mode or imaginary to try to make sense of the personal and collective experience of violence (2007, 56-59). Much like in a telenovela or in a traditional melodrama, in Franco Ramos’ novel the “love story” functions to chart various tensions between the rich and poor while restoring the status quo. If one follows Segura’s line of argument, the novel uses somewhat schematic characters and a formulaic narrative to make sense of a period that, as I showed in my previous section, was marked by the increasing erosion of civil liberties and rights and the exploitation of an illegal accumulation of power and wealth by multiple actors. Despite it social and cultural reinscriptions the novel underscores the way in which illicit economies, such as the drug trade, offer people like Rosario consumer power, making material 73 objects and spaces that were previously the domain of the rich, at least momentarily and at a deadly cost, accessible to the poor. As the two following quotes illustrate: The club was one of those places that attracted the lower classes who were beginning to rise and those of us among the upper classes who were beginning to fall. They already had enough money now to spend in the places where we paid on credit, and they were already doing business with people of our class. Economically, were now equals. They wore the same clothing we did, went around in better cars, and had more drugs, which they shared with us—that was their biggest hold on us (Franco Ramos 1999, 24). She’d been involved with those who are in jail, with the toughest of the tough, men who were chased fro a long time by people looking for a reward, men who gave themselves up and then space, and with many who are worm food today. They brought her down from her old neighborhood, showed her the beautiful things money can do, how rich people live, how you can get whatever you want, without exception, because everything can be had if you want it. They brought her to where we were, brought her closer, showing her off to us as if saying, Look, you shit asses, we’ve got nice women, too, and sexier than yours,” and she, neither curt nor languid, would let herself be shown off. She new who we were, proper upright people, and she liked the deal and for Emilio, who swallowed it whole, without chewing (Ibid., 17). What is made available here is the narrator’s notions of propriety and class as well as his emphasis on the economic equality of the new social class created by the drug trade. This so-called economic power did not buy people like Rosario “class” or “culture,” nor did it present a meaningful way out of their abjection. A merciless sicaria who kisses her victims before killing them, Rosario is rendered as a social subject whose life is always already determined by violence (i.e. rape, poverty, prostitution, and murder). It is important to note that while there exists distinctions between Emilio’s lust and Antonio’s platonic love, both of these characters’ conceptions of Rosario are grounded on the elite’s fantasies about the Other, particularly the dreams, desires, and sexuality of poor women. Rape & Castration. A story infused by sex, drugs and violence, Franco Ramos novel begins and ends with Rosario’s death, a violent murder executed exactly in the same way in which this sicaria “took out” her victims—“shot at point-blank range while…being kissed” (1). Rosario’s murder, as an opening image, conjures up the Kiss of Death, an act of harm and betrayal disguised as affect. Hence, from the very first page Rosario’s body appears as the locus of injury and desire, a body that 74 the narrator progressively unveils as consumable and powerful only through its hyper-sexualization. A combination of victim and femme fatal, the female character’s mode of existence is conditioned by pain and retaliation. She is a woman who does not laugh, who is the source of male lust and infatuation, who looks more deathly when making love. Indicative here is the fact that besides the strong bond that Rosario has with Johnefe, her older brother, the novel does not really present any form of affective network or social relationships outside of those that view her as a sexual or disposable object. In the story, rape becomes the ‘original’ marker that determines Rosario’s future fate and behavior. In Antonio’s words, The earlier one gets to know sex, the greater the possibility that things will go badly in life. That’s why I insist that Rosario was born a loser, because she was raped before her time, at the age of eight…[by] one of the many men who lived with her mother…” He “put his hand over her mouth one night and climbed on top of her, opened her little legs, and drove into her the first pain Rosario had felt in her life (16). While eliciting sympathy for the victim, here, the narrator’s understanding of sexuality, trauma, and the female body and subjectivity borders on the moralistic and psychoanalytical. Rape is elicited as the injury that not only ruptures Rosario’s innocence, if she ever possessed such a privilege, but the incident that brands her as damaged and always already a loser. Moreover, the first rape is grounded as the grievance that severed the mother/daughter bond since Rosario’s mother, Doña Ruby, does not believe her daughter and sides with the perpetrator; that is to say, the sicaria’s mother embraces a patriarchal logic of violence and possession. The construction of motherhood in the novel is one that circumscribes Doña Ruby within dominant, and often pathological, discourses of poverty and maternity. While this character is highly underdeveloped, references to Rosario’s mother elicit her as the embodiment of frenetic reproduction, irresponsible and dysfunctional, as someone whose jealousy makes her distrust her daughter, a woman who as Rosario tells Antonio, “kept on having babies, as if she could afford to 75 feed them” (17). Rosario, Johnefe, and the narrator equally externalize this type of judgments regarding Doña Ruby’s lax sexuality and incapacity for being a good mother. In this narrative, the mother might be forgettable (and marginal to the story) but she is not forgivable. Interestingly, retaliation for a second rape completes the cutting of the mother-daughter filiation. Unlike the first time when Johnefe retaliates against Rosario’s rapist by “leaving him without anything to fuck with,” (20) when the protagonist is raped by Cachi, a rival gang member, the sicaria takes justice into her own hands. She embraces the law of retributive justice and becomes the castrating agent, an act that at the age of thirteen earns the young sicaria her nickname and symbolically liberates her from the burden of bastardy, from a last name that would associate her with the matrilineal: Tijeras wasn’t her last name it was her history. They’d changed her name against her will and to her great annoyance, but she never understood that what people in her neighborhood had done her a favor because in a country filled with children of whores, they took away from her the onus of having one surname, her mother’s, and gave her a nickname in its place. She got used to it later, and she even ended up liking her new identity (8). Suddenly, right after the narrator had made explicit to the reader that Rosario’s fate was the product of bodily violation, he now points to an a priori marker. Is Rosario’s fate the product of rape or is that which brands her as ‘different’ anterior to her subjectivity, originating in a lineage marked by illegitimacy? For Pobutsky, Rosario’s retaliation marks the character transition from victim to agent: “Through the act of castration, she sheds the cocoon of adolescent victimhood to unfurl the wings of an indisputable predator, a seductive victimizer who mirrors the murderous instincts of a praying mantis… She echoes the typical tough-minded and callus heroine described by Jeffrey Brown, killing every man “who tries to position her as object rather than subject, who dares to see her as a sex-symbol, a kitten” (2007). As this quote shows, Pobutsky interprets castration as an act of ultimate defiance that does not masculinize Rosario in the least “because such an assumption would require that she somehow embrace the protective wing of the patriarchal system” and instead she fights against all potentially violent males. While I find Pobutsky’s reading 76 productive, I am dissatisfied by its exaltation and romanticization. In the story, both rape and castration register the deadly logic of dominant masculinity that disavows the feminine. Contrary to what Pobutsky suggests, Rosario does not kill every man that positions her as object rather than subject. If there is one thing the novel leaves very clear is that from an early age Rosario learns to understand the value and disposability of her body as a commodity and she uses it accordingly, both to her benefit as well as for her own self-destruction. It is my contention that the performance of castration evokes the female sicaria as an orphan body, as one who embraces the logic of dominant masculinity as a necessary mode of survival but exists outside its protection because under this logic the feminine is always debased. Scissors—The act of castration cannot be disassociated from the highly symbolic meaning that scissors have in the story: Scissors are a weapon, a moniker, and an instrument of labor. Paradoxically, the act that erases the mother’s last name is perpetuated with the mother’s instrument of work. Rosario’s mother is a seamstress. As the narrator states, for Doña Ruby and many other women sewing represented the possibility of getting out of poverty. “From Esmeralda Topacio and Simplemente Maria, [Doña Ruby] learned that she could get out of poverty by taking sewing classes…but sewing didn’t let her out of poverty, not her and not anyone else, and the only women who got rich were the owners of the schools for cutting and dressmaking” (1999, 15). As cultural products, telenovelas bound Rosario’s mother into imagining alternatives to her reality as a rural subject displaced to the city. Hence, does Rosario’s cutting from the maternal last name imply a critique or rejection of the narratives of success that modernity failed to deliver to women like her mother? Or does Rosario’s cutting of the maternal signify an acceptance of a masculine regime of retribution as the only form of agency available to her regardless if its embracement reinscribes the very order that marks her as disposable? After her retaliation for the second rape, she emerges as someone without paternal or maternal history—an orphan and abandoned body. Indicative, here, is 77 the meaning that some cultures attribute to scissors as symbols that cut the chord with mortals: Tijeras evokes the passage from life to death. Produced, as a human residue and excess, the sicaria/o is a body without history, a body that only exists in the temporality of the present. Within a consumer capitalist temporality and logic, these are bodies without history and no future (Franco 2002; Fanta 2008). Fatness In Franco Ramos’ novel, binge eating is posited as a process of interiorization (compulsive food in-take) and exteriorization (putting on weight) that indexes Rosario’s highest instances of psychological instability. That is to say, binging and fatness are rendered as the by-product or aftermath of Rosario’s criminal behavior: “These lines are stretch marks,” exclaims Rosario as she shows the striae on her belly and legs to Antonio and Emilio. “I’ve been fat lots of times” (Franco Ramos 14). The scarring on Rosario’s skin is literally the residue of death and violence stretched across her body for she has been fat as many times as she has killed: Every time Rosario killed someone she would start putting on weight. She would shut herself up to eat, scared to death, wouldn’t come out for weeks. She would ask for candy, desserts, would eat everything that came her way. Sometimes she’d be seen going out, but after a short time she’d come back loaded with bundles of food (Ibid). Through Antonio’s descriptions, the fat body is interpreted as a voracious body that literally consumes Rosario’s beauty, thus, eats away the ideal and hyper-sexual figure that elicits a type of male desire: “About three or four months after the crime she’d stop eating and start getting thin. She’d put away the loose robes with which she hid her weight and go back to her tight jeans, her midriff-baring tops, and her naked shoulders. She went back to being as beautiful as she is always remembered”(my italics 14). Though marginal to the over all plot, through Rosario’s recurring binging, a series of associations regarding beauty, appearance, and self-control emerge as the fat body is elicited as a signifier of lack: unattractive, asexual, distressed, unfeminine, and asocial, literally out of control. The 78 representation of Rosario’s binging, as a coping mechanism to deal with abuse and violence, echoes dominant psychological discourses, which collapse the fat body into the traumatized body. 46 While literary criticism and Emilio Maillé’s filmic adaptation (2005) of the novel has rendered this aspect of Rosario’s subjectivity invisible, the main character’s recurring “bloating” as a simultaneous signifier of lack and excess is essential to the novel’s constructions of the criminal body, as much as it is in articulating dominant notions of femininity and beauty. In this sense, fatness represents a significant trope through which the novel makes explicit the relationship between consumption, illegality, and the racialized and classed Colombian female body. Critics like Pobutsky view Rosario Tijeras as a Latin American heroine, as “an ideological amalgamation of femme fatale, ‘action babe,’ and Colombian girl next door, [who] has hit the right note among the present-day public because she aptly mirrors the relation between global cultural mythology and local circumstances” (2010, 23). Within this analytical lens, Rosario’s popularity is also based on the figure’s embodiment of masculine and feminine qualities; that is to say, “she underwrites the reconcilability of femininity and fighting. At the core, she is both the girl next door and a street-smart survivor who is nobody’s fool” (31). As I have shown, my analysis centers on the construction of the sicaria’s body to contend that underneath the sympathy and acclaim that the text hails from the reader, persist a system of values and notions that circumscribe the marginalized female body as ontologically damaged and criminal. It must be remembered that Rosario is not really the girl-next-door prototype; her femininity is bound with notions of the Other, specifically those who reside in the most marginalized sectors of Colombia. But her portrayal also fits hegemonic global discourses of Colombian sexualized female beauty. Contrary to what Pobutsky suggests, Franco Ramos’s anti-heroine does not represent womanly ideals of decency, purity, and 46 See Le Besco and Braziel, Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 79 sweetness often associated with the concept of the girl-next door. As one of Antonio’s descriptions illustrates, women from the comunas were “[u]ninhibited women, as determined as their man, unreserved in their lovemaking, hot mestizo women with firm legs from so much climbing up the hills in their neighborhoods, belonging more to this land than our women, more agreeable and less snotty. Among them was Rosario” (Franco Ramos 24). It is through this dialectic that Rosario’s hypersexual body and attractiveness is constructed, through its differentiations from the female middle class body. As Nick Morgan (2005) suggests, the fetishization of Rosario’s body functions to reinscribe middle-class values of the beautiful that are normed by the elites’ fantasies and fears about the poor and “lo no-blanco” (52). According to Morgan, this ideology of the beautiful, as a discursive regime, ultimately, works to regulate desire, to keep everyone in their place, and to construct the poor, specifically la mujer no-blanca, as a locus of negative values. As the novel’s resolution shows, Rosario’s “beauty” and way of being does not help her escape poverty, punishment or death. Consequently, if there is anything the novel reconciles, it is the social order since it resituates each of the characters, Rosario, Antonio, and Emilio, exactly were “they belong.” While the novel’s appeal to global and local audiences can be partially explained, as Pobutsky suggests, through its deployment of globally/locally recognizable narrative formats, genres and strategies, I argue that part of the novel’s success resides in the fact that it reads as a liberal narrative that elicits sympathy for social subjects like Rosario while reinscribing bourgeois values and notions of them. As stated above, through Emilio Maille’s cinematic adaptation of Jorge Franco Ramos, the character of Rosario Tijeras acquired greater popularity and reached wider audiences. While I have chosen not to analyze this film, it is important to once again mention that Maille’s adaptation has been highly criticized by feminist critics for its pornographic rendition of poverty, violence and the female body. Some of these critiques have compared Maille’s film with Joshua Marston’s Maria Full 80 of Grace, charging that both visual texts are foreign visions of Colombia with messages that reaffirm national and international hierarchies of masculine production. While I concur with much of what has been said about Maille’s film, I am dissatisfied with much of the critiques of Maria Full of Grace and the comparison to Maille’s portrayal of the Colombian female body. In the following section, I continue my discussion on illegality, displacement, and the female body through a close analysis of Maria Full of Grace. Unlike Maille’s Hollywoodesque take on drug-trafficking and violence, I contend that Maria Full of Grace is an intimate and empathetic portrayal that turns to the entanglements of embodied lived experience and political economy to bring forward the deep textures of the main character’s life in a world where marginalized women make decisions that can potentially take them to a deadly destination, drive them closer to happiness and survival, or drift them further away from their dreams. IV. A RESISTANT (MATERNAL) BODY: JOSHUA MARSTON’S MARIA FULL OF GRACE One of the goals of the film is to ask: who is a drug mule? What is it that propels a person to make this risky decision? The idea is that by telling a drug story from the point of view of the person of the bottom you begin to humanize who the drug mule is and you realize that their problems are economic and social not military or criminal. So if there is one thing that this film can, I hope, contribute to is…to understand that the drug war is not working and we need to radically invert the way we invest our money to fight drug problems. –Joshua Marston Joshua Marston’s feature film directorial debut, Maria Full of Grace (HBO, 2004), is a representation of two working worlds: cut-flower production and drugs. 47 Marston’s opera prima effectively traces the frictions between structural forces and the power of female dreams that see beyond the confines of the present. He does this through the fictional story of Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno), a restless and defiant young Colombian flower worker who, after quitting her exploitative job dethorning roses, decides to become a drug mule that transports latex- wrapped drug pellets in her stomach from Bogotá to New York. Maria Full of Grace was an all- powerful debut for both Marston and Sandino Moreno, since first-time director and first-time film 47 In an interview for Offoffoff, Joshua Martson states, “The intention is to show one working world and then to show another working world — drugs and flowers. 81 actress gained significant global recognition for their respective performances. As the epigraph above illustrates, the filmmaker situates his cinematic narrative as a counter-hegemonic vision that attempts to unsettle commonsense knowledge and criminalizing notions about drug mules like Maria. Moreover, as Marston states, there was an overt intention to hopefully move audiences to think critically about deficient and fatal military approaches to the war on drugs. Broadly speaking, there are essentially two persistent critiques of Maria Full of Grace: the film’s rearticulation of a hierarchical geopolitical order through the portrayal of the US as a better place and the re-inscription of the reproductive body through the figure of the pregnant woman. For scholar Francisca Gonzales Flores (2010), as a product of transnational media corporations, Marston’s film serves both an economic and pedagogical purpose since it makes the Other intelligible, thus, consumable for First World audiences. For Gonzales Flores, this cinematic text is a narconarrative of female transgression attempting to show the ongoing socioeconomic and gender transformations that neoliberal globalization activates; however, she contends that the film is, ultimately, a middle class, masculine, and foreign vision of Colombian female marginality that restores the traditional social order. It does so by rescuing the natural function of the reproductive body. For this author, Maria’s pregnancy operates “as a simultaneous act of redemption and submission that makes the other acceptable for first world audiences; it restores harmony and offers the illusion of a happy end” (Gonzales Flores 2010, 297). In a similar vein, Stecey Alba D. Skar argues that cultural producers like Maille and Marston “offer their work to a global consumer marketplace with messages that reaffirm national and international hierarchies of masculine production” (2007, 7). Following Jean Franco’s theorization of narratives of globalization, Skar argues that the film presents the First World as a benevolent father that welcomes the migrant with open arms. Her analysis traces the masculine roles in the film in order to argue that the film links generous masculinity with the US while depicting Colombian as a 82 place of irresponsible or absent paternal figures. According to Skar, this assures Maria and guarantees the audience that life would be/is better in the US “where we find males capable of being benevolent” (2007). Lastly, Emily S. Davis presents us a more nuanced analysis of Marston’s film. She reads this text as using “bodily intimacy as a metaphorical language through which to represent contestations of national and ideological borders, as well as a means of literally demonstrating the impact of globalization on the bodies of the men and women whose invisible labor is the lifeblood of the global economy” (2006, 34). While she does pause to think about the ways in which Maria’s pregnancy can potentially reinscribe the female reproductive body, she reroutes her analysis to explain that the filmic text ultimately forces the US audience to see themselves as consumers of the products that necessitate Maria’s exploitation and that put her life at risk. In what follows, I suggest that while the film can potentially reinscribe certain hierarchies, Marston’s narrative destabilizes notions of femininity, the maternal and illegality through its representation of Maria’s challenge to different structures of surveillance and govermentality. While initially I felt a high level of dissatisfaction with the film because it lacks a historical scaffolding to actually show audiences the detrimental effects of US economic policies and its military approaches to the War on Drugs, the film does portray Maria, from beginning to the end, as a resistant (maternal) body. Rather than viewing Maria’s pregnancy as reincriptions of gender conformity, I return to the undocumented maternal body as a dispossessed and displaced body that we must claim. As argued in my previous chapter, the undocumented pregnant woman is a symbol of alterity; therefore, a threat to the national social order. To assume Maria’s social rebelliousness fails because she embraces her maternity presupposes that maternal bodies do not offer any possibilities to subvert norms. In the next paragraphs, I trace three specific sites, the flower factory, the airport, and the home as sites for the reproduction of specific values and ideologies to show how the film renders visible Maria’s refusal to comply with people’s expectations of her. 83 The Flower Factory: The opening sequence of Maria Full of Grace introduces the viewer to the dynamics between globalization and female rural experience in certain areas of Colombia. This is visually conveyed through a series of shots that begin with a dimly lighted, low angled frame of three silhouettes exiting a house and trotting down a hill. Soon, the silhouettes become three women waiting at a bus at dawn: Maria, her mother Juana, and, Diana, Maria’s sister. This is the first journey that the film charts: The main character on her way to the flower plantation where she works de- thorning roses. The bus ride is a series of intercuts between passing shots of the rural landscape and Maria staring inertly out the window. Beside the audience’s first encounter with the central figure of the film, on the bus, the spectator also sees the main character’s best friend, Blanca, for the first time. The shot of Blanca resting her head on Maria’s shoulder functions as a prelude to Maria’s motherly relation to her friend. This sequence transitions from the pastoral scenery of Colombia’s countryside to the inner-workings of floriculture (cut flower production). The images of the plantation’s locker room, workers’ hands hurriedly reaching for their time cards, the spraying of pesticides, and the mechanized rhythms of packing and dethorning of roses are cinematic glimpses of an industry that, as scholar Cynthia Mellon asserts, is highly promoted “as suitable [production] for some of the weak and in-debt economics of the so-called Third World” by the World Bank and US Agency for International Development (USAID) (Mellon 2007, 142). Tellingly, the dynamics at the factory expose the viewer to the shortcomings of floriculture as a decent working alternative. Here, I do not use italics lightly for I think this is one of the major questions posed through out Maria Full of Grace: When very specific socio-historical and economic circumstances bear upon people’s well- being and survival, what exactly is a decent work(ing) alternative? The only two scenes in the film that portray the rose plantation evoke this place as a labor intensive and highly disciplinary space where workers’ production is highly regulated. Ringing over these scenes is the voice of Maria’s supervisor whom not only demands careful and detailed oriented 84 work but fast production: “No more yellow roses at 60. I said the white ones at 40. What happened?” This visual rendering demystifies the value of flowers as simply purchasable gestures of love or decorative items. Roses become expressions of human labor as the audience witnesses the automated movements of the workers and listens to the sounds of the tools scraping the roses’ stems. The factory scenes center on the disciplinary atmosphere of Colombia’s flower industry, a laboring environment that can be compared, as Mellon argues, to other export processing industries such as maquiladoras because it is a labor market with short fixed-term contracts, disproportional wages, and poor labor conditions that predominately target young females and/or single mothers. As revealed by Mellon’s work on floriculture, one of the major issues at play is that the Colombian government defines flower production as agricultural activity regardless of all the aforementioned similarities with factory-like production. This classification, thus, legalizes and makes the industry eligible for economic and labor and border regulation breaks that worsen the workers’ labor conditions. For instance, under the Andean Trade Preference and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA), Colombian flowers enter the US duty-free (142). Essentially, the ATPDEA fosters economic development in Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru by granting duty-free access to certain exports in order to promote alternatives to cocaine production. Tellingly, the dynamics at the factory expose the shortcomings of these developmentalist alternatives to drug production and trafficking. That is to say, Maria’s experience shows us that under present conditions of production and exchange, industrialized floriculture does not radically reconfigure what neoliberalism offers— or does not offer for that matter—to the poor, particularly female workers. The tense interaction between the main character and her supervisor foregrounds Maria’s infantalization and dehumanization as a laborer in an export processing industry: Supervisor: “What’s wrong?” María: “Can I go to the bathroom?” Supervisor: “Again?” Maria: “I don’t feel very well.” 85 Supervisor: “You’re four bins under this hour, and three last hour. How will you catch up if you’re in the bathroom all the time?” Maria: “Please, I’ll be quick.” Supervisor: “I have 84 workers in this section and everyone else puts their head down and does their job. But with you, it’s like a constant tug-of-war. At this point I don’t know what I’m gonna do with you.” That is, perhaps, one of the manager’s nuisances, what to do with Maria who seems to be an untrainable laborer, therefore, an undisciplined subject. The factory’s manager’s complaints single Maria out not only as unruly but also as a liability. The presentation of the main character as such is significant because the notion of worker (un)trainability looms large in managerial narratives of export processing industries like maquiladoras. Drawing from the work of Cynthia Mellon and Melissa Wright, I would like to linger with the idea of the untrainable worker because it makes gender a critical marker for differentiating between trainable and untrainable laboring bodies (Wright 2007, 185). The factory scenes can be read as cinematic moments that introduce the viewer to the flower plantation as a zone of high surveillance where the worker is expected not only to produce commodities but also reproduce herself/himself as a disciplined, read, loyal and reliable laborer. The filmmaker, however, does not render this moment as one of total abjection, but effectively captures the ways in which Maria’s behavior challenges her normalization or assimilation to the demands of laboring under the conditions of corporate globalization; moreover, the factory scenes conjure this young female worker as a resistant body that also ruptures gendered narratives of female passivity and obedience. Wright’s analysis of Mexican maquiladora workers in Ciudad Juarez is relevant because it addresses the depreciation of the female maquiladora worker in relation to discourses of turnover. 48 For Wright, managerial discourses construct the female laborer as a personification of “waste in the making, as the materials of her body gain shape through the discourses that explain how she is 48 Wright explains the concept of turnover as “the coming and going of workers into and out of jobs, and it often comes up during interviews in relation to the problem of worker unreliability.” (Durham: Duke University Press 2007), 185. 86 untrainable, unskillable and always a temporary worker” (1999). Albeit, her analysis is specific to the Mexican context, as Mellon’s study of floriculture contends, there are a series of similarities between the laboring environment of industrialized floriculture and other export processing industries that circumscribe the female body within specific notions of gender and labor. The flower industry in Colombia, like the maquilas in Ciudad Juarez and export industries in other parts of the world, prefer to employ young females based on cultural and social assumptions regarding women’s capacities, such as the idea that women have greater manual dexterity and inclination for detailed work. Ironically but not surprisingly, in these managerial narratives the masculine subject emerges as the antipode of the female laborer. That is to say, under corporate globalization, male workers are reserved the supervision of other workers or jobs assigned to their so-called masculine intrinsic capabilities (i.e. construction and heavier jobs). As Wright explains, the masculine subject “emerges as the emblem of that other kind of variable capital whose value appreciates over time. He is the trainable and potentially skilled employee who will support the high-tech transformation...He maintains his value as he changes and develops in a variety of ways. She, however, is stuck in the endless loop of her decline” (2007, 186). The friction between Maria and her supervisor escalates when he refuses to let the main character go to the bathroom and she starts throwing up. That Maria literally vomits on the roses functions to foreshadow her pregnancy, however, the scene also shows the worker’s emesis damaging the commodities that we often associate with romantic love and femininity. “This is disgusting,” exclaims Maria’s boss. But what is so gross to the factory’s manager? Is it actually Maria’s vomit? Is it the decrease of profit implied by the marring of the flowers? Or is it, perhaps, the female worker’s refusal to be called into subjection and passivity that really repulses the factory’s supervisor? This scene is highly symbolic because it is the first moment that captures Maria’s bodily functions as externalizations that break or reproduce certain cycles. That is to say, vomiting in this 87 instance ruptures the chain of production and circulation as much as later in the film the act of defecating the latex-wrapped drug pellets ensures Maria’s survival and the successful trafficking of drugs across highly surveil transit zones. While this cinematic moment concludes with Maria agreeing to clean the roses off, in the following scene the audience learns that she actually quit her job, a job that, unlike her mother, she refuses to see as a decent job: Juana: There’s nothing but flowers around here. At least it’s a decent job. Maria: Oh please, what’s decent about it? Juana: Maria! You have to go back! Maria: Didn’t you hear me? I’m not going back... I’m not! The Airport: Much like the factory is elicited as a zone of worker surveillance, the film presents the airport as a site where the regulation of mobility necessitates the identification of safe or dangerous bodies. Here, it is important to note that Maria Full of Grace is a post 9/11/2001 production; as such, its representation of this zone of global transit needs to be understood within US discourses of national security that made the airport an even more critical site of modern governmentality through the construction of suspicious profiles with racial underpinnings. This is not to say that racial profiling emerged as a new technique for state surveillance but that it continued to operate not just to sort the usual suspects but also to reconfigure what kinds of persons are acceptable or safe for the national polity. Indicative here is the fact that airports became key sites of regular ICE raids. News’ images that captured the rounding up of undocumented airport workers functioned to create an atmosphere of eminent danger while asserting the public that the respective government agencies were taking appropriate measures to protect the citizenry. The increasing securitization of the airport hence worked to reinforce the discursive construction of undocumented immigrants as members of those groups labeled risky aliens. As my analysis of Elvira Arellano’s case 88 will show (See Postscript), one of the many casualties of the War on Terror are the increasing number of detentions and deportation that have lead to the separation of families of mixed legal statuses. Like racial profiling, this form of terror is not new since the separation of families has been historically (and unsuccessfully) used to break up/down peoples of color in the United States. Thus, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, airports became crucial sites of state surveillance where ICE raids and the deployment of invasive technology and search methods have been justified through discourses of terrorism, risk, attack, and invasion. While the function of the airport as an institution is less totalizing than the clinic or the prison, airports are interesting laboratories for the problematization and management of (inter)national mobility as well as the discursive construction of safe and dangerous movement (Salter 2008, xii). As Mark B. Salter explains, the study of the airport “requires the analysis not simply of state institutions involved in the administration of [it] as a site but also the governmental construction by various actors, discourses, and practices of (un)acceptable, (ab)normal, and safe/dangerous mobility”(xii). Salter’s analysis draws on Foucault’s theories of biopolitics and govermentality and Deluze’s notion of assemblage to argue that, much like the prison and the clinic, airports play an important role in the regulation and policing of the population. As Salter states, “the biopolitical organization of the modern state system is not simply exclusive or carceral but concerns the policing and monitoring of flows of bodies. Airports are not total institutions but rather nodes in a network of networks that include social, economic, and political actors with differing preferences, goals, logics, intensions and capabilities (xiii). Informed by Salter, I want to propose that through the factory scenes and the airport sequence, Marston’s lens reveals different structures of surveillance and the technologies and mechanism deployed by those in power to control and monitor both the mode of production and the economic and geographical mobility of the global poor. Yet, these are not homogenous or monolithic spaces and as the film shows there is always the possibility of rupture(s). 89 Maria’s trajectory from Colombia to the United States is narrativized in a three-part sequence that begins at the inspection line in Bogotá’s airport, transitions to the interior of an airplane, and concludes at John F. Kennedy airport in New York. From the point of departure to the moment of arrival, the filmmaker dramatizes tension, complicity, and secrecy through the camera’s focus on the drug mules’ gazes, the x-ray screens and the invasive nature of security checkpoints. As such, it effectively plays with different structures of visibility, exteriority and interiority, transparency and concealment. The first part of this sequence begins with a frame of Maria’s luggage being placed at the x-ray conveyor belt. Slowly the camera moves to Maria’s face and pans through a number of x- ray screenings of travelers’ luggage. Through the spaces separating the computers’ monitors, the spectator follows Maria moving through the inspection line. The panning of the conveyor belt, the x-ray images intermixed with Maria’s face reveals the luggage as an extension of the passenger. That is to say, at the airport, one is presumed to literally be what one carries. As the security guard screens all contours of Maria’s body with a metal detector, the main character sees her friend Blanca inside one of the airport’s perfume stores. The audience watches the two friends fixing their eyes on each other, a conspiratorial stare among friends that the penetrating power of the x-rays is incapable of detecting. The cinematic moment that captures Blanca and Maria locking gazes is followed by the representation of the flight to the United States. According to the filmmaker, the scene inside the plane alludes to a practice identified as shotgunning, which consists of sending several drug mules in the same airplane so that if one gets caught it creates enough distraction for the rest to evade suspicion and detention. This practice is explained to Maria by Lucy during one of the brief exchanges they have in the plane. As the film illustrates, shotgunning functions as a sort of Russian roulette since chance almost dictates whom might or might not get caught. As Marston commented during several interviews, after months of research, learning about this practice provided him with “a sort of a way 90 in, narratively, to construct a plot line” and develop a more credible story. Marston’s cinematic portrayal of shotgunning as a trafficking tactic effectively conveys the vulnerability of those situated “fairly low on the totem pole.” Rather than the spectacularization of violence and drug trafficking á la Miami Vice, his interests lay on the everyday, the mundane, and particular social subjects’ constrained forms of agency. The first shot inside the plane is an image of Maria tightly holding a crucifix hanging from her neck. Much like the title’s allusion to the Hail Mary prayer, the visual image of Maria holding her crucifix plays on and problematizes our notions of morality, compassion, and the “good life.” For scholar Emily S. Davis (2006), the film plays on the trope of the virgin and the whore arguing that Maria stands as a double for both the Marys of Catholicism: the virgin mother and the so-called whore Mary Magdalene. The film, thus, mobilizes religious references as a way to hail sympathy, articulate complexity, and problematizes the spectator’s notions of good and evil. Though Maria is the carrier/vector of two illegitimate products (a child out of wedlock and the latex drug pellets), she is not necessarily elicited as the sinner in this narrative. But neither can one say that she is a blessed or innocent subject. What kinds of values and morals propel the main character to make certain decisions? What drives her? Aurally and visually, the airplane scene is realistically crafted through the sounds often associated with aircraft noise and flight: automated dings, the bucking and unbuckling of belts, passengers conversation, people walking down the aisle. While the reduced space in the plane creates an almost claustrophobic atmosphere, the camera gliding on Blanca, Lucy and Maria’s gazes produces a feeling of both secrecy and tension. In the same way that the lens captures Maria and Blanca looking at each other prior to boarding, gazes and stares play an important role in the crafting of this scene; the drug mules’ eyes, the way that they look at each other visually registers the unsaid, the secret between and inside (of) them. The airplane scene gives the spectator enough cues 91 into the fate of each drug mule: the blond woman who eventually gets caught at John F. Kennedy Airport does not utter a word in the film and appears almost as an extra in the film; this is a character who is arrested and disappears from the screen without any trace. Lucy's signs of physical discomfort prior to landing also foreshadow her fate. Eventually, she is brutally murdered, literally cut open when one of the pellets bursts inside of her stomach. It is important to note here that Maria and Lucy represent an interesting female bond. Without really knowing each other and without any expectations, they engage in acts of female solidarity and caring: while Lucy teaches Maria how to swallow the pellets and provides her with a bit of information about the trade, Maria comforts and looks after Lucy in the plane and at the hotel room. Contrary to the arrested drug courier, Lucy becomes a haunting figure in the film, a death that elicits a visceral and ethical reaction from the protagonist (and hopefully from the spectator). In this sense, Lucy stands for a body and life Maria refuses to abandon and forget. As Maria states, procuring a decent wake and sending her body home is the least Lucy deserves. Maria caring for Lucy even after her death resignifies the value of a body that is discursively and socially constructed as waste. Significantly, inside the airplane the audience also begins to witness Maria and Blanca’s uneasy relationship. Thus, through the interactions and shots inside the plane, the film sets up and hints at the different ways in which the drug trade and other global economies literally penetrate, use, and dispose of the female body. The last part of this sequence begins when the camera transitions from a close-up of Maria looking out the airplane window to a wide shot that captures her walking in a crowded hallway. The lens focuses on Lucy, blurs, and frames Maria. It turns to the other drug mule and transitions from Blanca to the carrousel luggage. As the luggage circulates, the camera continues to move from one drug mule to the other. Maria observes each one of the drug mules getting their luggage and walk away. The lack of dialogue, the stares, and the music work to create a feeling of incertitude. Finally, Maria grabs her suitcase and unexpectedly an ICE officer exclaims in English: May I see your 92 passport, declaration card, and ticket, please? Maria stares at him blankly. After getting no reaction from Maria, the ICE officer asks her again in Spanish. Without uttering a word, Maria hands him her documents. “ Where are your arriving from? Colombia, Maria responds. Your destination? Are these all your bags? Come with me, please.” What makes Maria a suspicious traveler? What exactly do the immigration agents know about her individual identity, apart from her status as a Colombian citizen in transit? It is not difficult to assume that within hegemonic narratives of threat, her national identity always already circumscribes her as suspect. As I have pointed out trough out this chapter, within the economies of surveillance, management, and regulation advanced by the War on Drugs and later the War on Terror, the Colombian nation-state is conjured up as a hazardous zone mostly associated with insurgents, drug traffickers, and terrorist, thus, making Colombian nationals come into sight as questionable subjects. But the interrogation scene registers more than the presumption of Maria’s guilt: It exposes the audience to the dialectic between poverty and the control of mobility. That is to say, the information that Maria provides situates her within that part of the international population for whom mobility is neither affordable nor allowed: “We know you didn’t buy this ticket,” exclaims one of the immigration officers. “We know you couldn’t have saved that much money? Tell us the truth. Who paid for this ticket?” The ICE officers’ certainty when questioning Maria illustrate, as Salter states, that not everyone can be a tourist and/or a mobile subject; those who fall outside of such a category “confront red rather than green lights in the form of immigration desks and nationality laws” (Lyon 2008, 31). Stated differently, while US state policies allow the products of Maria’s labor to enter duty-free to the United State, Maria is expected to stay put: Maria Alvarez, is that your name? Is this your first time in this country? Where are you staying? Did you buy this ticket? How much did it cost? What do you do in Colombia? What do you do exactly? How did you get the money for the ticket? Why are you really here? You want to know what I think? I don’t believe you’re here on vacation. I think you’re bringing drugs into the United States. Do you have drugs in your stomach? We would like to submit you to an X-ray. Please sign this document authorizing us to do the X-ray. (Marston 2004) 93 The ICE officers presuppose that submitting Maria to an X-ray would disclose the drugs hidden inside her: an X-ray would render her criminality as true and fact. As mentioned before, in this sequence Marston plays with different structures of visibility and externalization that convey the architecture of the airport and the passengers’ bodies as sites that must be rendered transparent, completely exposed. The X-ray functions, then, as a technology that materializes transparency, a gaze that discloses a potential threat that might otherwise go undetected, unseen. As Guillian Fuller explains in his study of the securitization of the airport, Integrated into a medium of transparency, we witness our own multiple visualization as we pass through the stages of transit. The process of externalization—of being categorized, isolated, assessed, before being allowed “in” (into the country or onto the plane)—connects to the effectual drives of visualization as much as it does to disciplinary control. The possibility of always seeing more—more planes, more people, more places—elides traditional subject-object distinctions as vision machines modulate promise and threat into an ineluctable event scene: Visible to everyone, we disappear into the image matrix of the airport. (Fuller 2008, 165) Tellingly, as Maria waits for the results of her urine test, a door opens. The camera captures an image of a radiograph being carefully examined by a doctor and an officer. Here, the x-ray is evoked as figure and fact. As Maria watches an officer handcuffing a drug courier, one of the ICE officers asks: “Maria, you know you’re pregnant?” (Marston 2004) While most critiques of the film have viewed Maria’s pregnancy as the re-inscription of the reproductive body through the figure of the pregnant woman, as Emily Davis (2006) contends, it is Maria’s status as a pregnant woman that prevents the security officers from being able to use surveillance technology to gaze inside her body. Near the end of the film, when she goes to the clinic, she consents to look at the ultrasound images of the baby in her uterus, which are significant enough to her that she chooses to stay in New York. Here Maria co-opts the very technology she escapes at the airport to choose a particular representation of her interiority. The Home: As stated before, there are essentially two persistent critiques of the film: the rearticulation of a hierarchical geopolitical order through the portrayal of the United States as a 94 benevolent father, and the re-inscription of the reproductive body through the figure of the pregnant woman. A case in point is Skar’s reading, which contends that the binary between Third World/ First World is established through the film’s portrayal of masculine figures (2007). Skar references the Haitian taxi driver who patiently takes Maria and Blanca to Carla Aristizábal’s apartment in Queens, Carla’s husband, and Don Fernando, the community figure who assists the Colombian immigrant population in Jackson Heights, as trustworthy paternal figures, thus, examples of First World benevolence. Skar suggests that contrary to the male subjects residing in the United States, the film elicits the flower factory’s manager, the absence of the main character’s father, and Maria’s boyfriend’s behavior as registers of Third World masculine irresponsibility. For her, this functions symbolically to reposition the First World as an ethical, just, and better place. While the film does mobilize what can be construed as celebratory discourses of the American Dream and US exceptionalism, it also captures a series of tensions that work to complicate dominant narratives about the United States and immigrant subjectivity. That is, Marston’s lens renders visible the contradictions between stories that people tell about the United States and how immigrants actually live in the First World. Skar’s reading of masculinity, however, simplifies the ways in which the film attempts to capture these contradictions and elides that the males that assist Maria after she escapes from the drug traffickers are all immigrants from the Global South. As such, these are men socialized in a world that has historically naturalized the subordination of women; but race, class, ethnicity and the experience of migration also mark these males. In my opinion, these are not representatives of First World benevolence; rather, these immigrants’ generosity speaks to the ways in which through quotidian encounters and practices displaced subjects aid each other and establish ephemeral or long lasting relations and networks. The participation of Orlando Tobón as co-producer and actor in the film illustrates this. 95 Tobón, a Colombian immigrant, accountant and travel agent, performed as Don Fernando, a character based on Tobón’s actual role as a popular community leader in Queens. As the film illustrates, Tobón’s services extend far beyond his role as an accountant and travel agent. In the film, like in real life, his small and crowded office functions as a sort of headquarters to assists the immigrant community with a wide variety of questions and problems. Known as the “Mayor of Little Colombia,” Tobón has taken up the task of repatriating or burying those who have died attempting to smuggle cocaine. Though news articles have often rendered this as Tobón’s mission, as he has stated in several interviews, the repatriation and burial of the drug couriers is a collective effort in which the Colombian immigrant community has actively participated. This collective commitment also includes aiding other dispossessed subjects since Tobón also assists Colombian immigrant families who lack the economic resources for funeral services and for the repatriation of their deceased relatives. Thus, trough Maria’s and Don Fernando’s efforts to find Lucy’s body, the film alludes to the ways in which the Colombian Diaspora in Queens enacts a certain kind of refusal to abandon their dead despite their “criminality.” That is to say, if Lucy acts as a metonym for those drug mules who lose their lives engaging in illicit activities, the search and claiming of their bodies is an act that embraces them as grievable lives, as bodies that, as Tobón contends, have a right to a decent burial. This is a collective avowal of the criminal as human. Hence, to simply read the character of Don Fernando as part of the three male figures through which First World benevolence is reinscribed obscures the affective and political significance of immigrant solidarity in a world structured in dominance. The collective efforts and generosity that the film elicits and that Tobón mentions during multiple interviews is not uncommon in poor Latino immigrant neighborhoods. These acts of solidarity are often obscured or undermined in hegemonic discourses, which often privilege narratives of moral panic, danger and invasion. Yet, as Orlando Tobón assures us and as this cinematic text shows, regardless of the limitations of economic or legal status, immigrants 96 recreate their lives and assists each other to help a friend, a relative, or stranger fulfill a final wish. That is, the dream of returning “home” to rest. This is both terribly sad and beautiful and cannot be reduced to First World paternalistic altruism. Paying close attention to the representation of the home and family in Maria Full of Grace can also help to problematizes Skar’s arguments regarding the functions of masculinity in the film. Maria’s house in Colombia and the Aristizabals' apartment in the US expose the viewer to non- traditional nuclear capitalist families; that is to say, familial arrangements that disrupt traditional notions of the family as well as the masculine and feminine. The households that the film portrays exist and function outside of normative middleclass understandings of privacy and the idealized gendered family structure. This is not to say that the cinematic text depicts these living spaces as horizontal arrangements untouched by patriarchy, but that it shows the audience the ways in which marginalized subjects out of necessity or choice negotiate, reject and challenge normative notions of home and family, as well as the effects that global/local processes, such as globalization, development and migration, have on familial and gender dynamics. Because narratively the film never focuses on the absence of Maria’s father, it seems unproductive to render it as symbolic of Third World masculine irresponsibility. There is nothing in the film that supports this. I want to take a different route and suggest that the portrayal of an all- female household can function to allegorize other manifestations of the familial that historically have been occluded by official historical narratives. If, as many cultural and literary scholars have argued, the depiction of the family as national allegory has played an important role in the formation of mores, gender values and roles, and national identity, how and where, if at all, does Maria’s matriarchal family fit in the history of the Colombian nation? Does the absence/presence of patriarchal figures in the film really function to reinscribe geographical hierarchies? If as Jean Franco (2002), points out in her essay Bodies in Distress migration and “flexible production and the 97 deployment of women sweatshop workers together with the surplus of underemployed males have destabilized male-female relations in many communities” (221), is the filmmaker’s representation of an all-female household an attempt at articulating the effects that displacement and capitalist development have on dispossessed families, particularly on the bodies of poor women and their dreams? The main character’s unhappiness at work and at home is posited as the result of unequal power relations; while at work she questions and challenges the exploitative nature of industrialized floriculture, at home she refuses to accept the unequal arrangements that make her almost the main economic caretaker. Maria’s boyfriend appears as immature and conventional, a guy who abides to societal norms; but viewed from the standards of traditional masculinity, his response is not one that can be read as “irresponsible.” After all, once he finds out about Maria’s pregnancy, he is willing to marry and do “the right thing.” Maria’s rejection of Juan’s proposition and her logic behind her refusal to marry him reveal to the audience the complex and contradictory ideological positionings embodied by the protagonist. Defiantly Maria asks Juan: “Look me in the eye and tell me you love me. What kind of person are you? You want to marry a woman you don’t love? A woman who doesn’t love you? What kind of marriage is that? How long is it gonna be before you’re sleeping with some other girl? A month?” (Martson 2004) Maria’s questions seem particularly interesting because they express both a challenge and a re-centering of romantic notions of marriage, monogamy, and female desire. While Rosario Tijeras, 49 the female character that I analyzed in the previous section, rejected the dominant logic that proposes love as a motivation for marriage, for Maria, love appears to be the necessary requirement for matrimony. Tellingly, Marston’s main character reproduces a heteronormative association between love, marriage, and monogamy while refusing to accept, as Juan suggests, that she has to marry him because she is pregnant. In this sense, 49 It is important to remember that being in love was not a good reason for Rosario to marry. 98 both Rosario Tijeras and Maria differently challenge notions of female decency and marriage by disqualifying societal expectation as the driving motive for their commitment to others while still holding to other societal values. But what exactly moves Maria? Throughout the film, she does not explicitly externalize her dreams or yearnings. What does she mean when she says that she does not want to end up like her sister? As the film underscores, single motherhood is not the issue, but there is something about Rosa’s life that Maria does not want to reproduce. Most of what the audience knows about the protagonist happens through her confrontations with others characters. That is to say, it is by witnessing Maria’s refusal to submit to others’ rules and expectations that the viewer is asked to make sense of the character’s relentlessness, her values and outlook on life. By doing so, the film constructs a character that challenges the spectator’s own notions of what is morally right and wrong. The protagonist’s desire for “something else,” for an alternative she cannot find at home or working as a factory laborer drives her to risk her life as a drug mule. Here, it is important to mention that just like Maria suggests that Juan lacks integrity for wanting to marry without being in love, later in the film, Blanca questions Maria’s capacity to be a good mother precisely for taking the risk of trafficking drugs. During one of their many arguments Blanca tells her friend, “I wouldn’t want you as my fucking mother. I feel sorry for your baby that it’s gonna have such a stupid mother. I mean swallowing drugs when you’re pregnant. That’s pretty fucking stupid, at least I wouldn’t do that” (Ibid). Blanca’s rejection of her friend as a good mother can work to disrupt, challenge, or rekindle the viewer’s own ideological refusals or expectations of women like Maria. The other presentation of the home that enables me to advance my argument regarding the film’s depictions of masculinity and the family is the portrayal of the Aristizabals' household. While Carla and Pablo Aristizábal appear to be a heteronormative nuclear family, the spectator soon learns that, like other immigrant or marginalized families, they share their domestic space with other 99 relatives, in this case with Pablo’s cousin. Skar’s analysis points to Pablo as one of the male figures through which the film resuscitates the First World as a better place. But as a working-poor immigrant, who is not elicited as the sole breadwinner of his family, Pablo can also be perceived as an “emasculated” subject. Rather than reading these figures as representatives of the First World, it is important to recognize the Aristizabals as a displaced and transnational family. This is a working- poor immigrant family that represents kinship but not its ideal form or radical outside. Through Carla’s memory of the first time she sent money home, the film hints at the pain of separation and the interdependence of third-world families across borders, as well as certain paradoxes embodied by many immigrant subjects: I remember when I got my first paycheck. I’ll never forget going to that office to send money home for the first time. You can’t imagine how it feels. Your heart feels so big like it won’t fit in your chest I just wanted to tell them how much I missed them. But it gets better, trust me. The real reason I stay here is for my baby. He’ll have so many more opportunities. I can’t imagine raising my child in Colombia, not with the situation the way it is. It pains me to say it, but it’s true (Ibid). While the film fails to address the ways in which the US contributed to turn Colombia into “una nación problema,” Carla’s words do more than adulate the United States; they express the happiness produced in being able to give to her extended family despite all odds and the irony of being in a nation that mobilized capital and bodies to militarize her country. Thus, the Aristizabals can be seen as an example of an immigrant family whose remittances not only help their relatives back home but the Colombian state’s economy. As a 2004 project titled The Colombian Remittance Industry in Jackson Heights, Queens shows, “Colombians are sending remittances back to Colombia on a fairly regular basis, and while the total sum of money may not be as large as that reported of other native groups, such as Mexicans, Colombians still remit a large proportion of their monthly paycheck—for some up to 12 percent of their monthly income is sent back. The remittances sent are largely for the provision of necessities (such as food), followed by health care/medicine and education” (Husson et al. 2004). In this sense, much like the depiction of Maria’s all female 100 household in Colombia reveals to the audience its dependency on floriculture, an industry that the World Bank and the Colombian state use to promote development at the cost of the workers, through the representation of the Aristizabals the film captures another aspect of Colombian history and the transnational experience. It is true that the film fails to contextualize or even hint at the historical dynamics that produced the Colombian nightmare; but Marston’s lens does generate visual ruptures that work to effectively challenge Manichaean representation of (im)migrant subjectivity. Indicative here is the way in which Carla’s embracement of the United States as a better place to raise her children is contrasted with the economic limitations that they face as a family. That is to say, while the film mobilizes the notion of the American Dream through Carla’s monologue, it visually disrupts a hegemonic and rosy picture of the North by documenting among many other things the smallness of the Aristizabals’ apartment. Because ideas of the American Dream often times equate notions of a better life to the ownership and the accumulation of material objects or capital, even if the film shows us a heterosexual marriage and a caring male figure, it does not necessarily reproduce normalcy or the United States as a land of equal opportunity. Marston’s film might not be as harsh as David Riker’s neo-realist portrayal of the Latin American immigrant experience in New York City (The City/ La Ciudad 1998) per say, but it sure is less deterministic and centers on immigrants’ agency and their embodied contradictions rather than hopelessness and desperation. While I do think that Marston does not accomplish his intended goal of making the viewer aware of the fatal impacts of the drug wars, I do think that his film is able to capture the complexities of peoples dreams and the ways in which dispossessed subjects navigate their experiences and make “good” or “bad” choices for themselves. Initially, my greatest dissatisfaction with the film is the lack of historical grounding to create a narrative that would contextualize the overlapping forms of displacement(s) and violence experienced by Colombian 101 subjects. But this might be too much to ask from Marston’s opera prima. My dissatisfaction might be located in my own desires to make the US government accountable for the horrid conditions that its international security and economic policies create. Ultimately, the film's success might be indicative of its actual power to elicit sympathy for a female “criminal,” a resilient woman who was not meant to survive or subvert the technologies of power deployed to constrain her moves. CONCLUSION: Historically, both the United States and the Colombian nation have been highly invested in the reproduction of local and international imaginaries of fear and crises. That is, the global circulation of Colombia, as a nation-state with charged cultural meanings, does not only take place through First World narratives of “potential Third World threat;” the Colombian state itself must be made accountable for the reproduction of local narratives of fear that construct specific bodies as threatening to hemispheric security (Barbero 2002; Menjivar and Rodriguez 2005; Curtis Marez 2004). For over five decades, the discursive classification of Colombia as “un país problema” has functioned to legitimate US/Colombian security and economic policies that have overtly taken a militaristic approach to counter insurgency and the illegal production and distribution of drugs, thus, creating a political landscape of impunity with caustic repercussions. This militaristic pattern of Colombia-US international relations turned more corrosive after September 11, 2001, when the George W. Bush administration, as part of its counterterrorism agenda, reformulated its support to this South American country. While the United States has often, if not always, protected its economic interest by historically framing its state policy in terms of national security, after the terrorist attacks of the World Trade Center, Colombian/US relations began to be reconfigured as inter-state efforts against “narco-terrorism.” 50 50 In a time frame of five decades (c.1960-2011) the United States and Colombia have advanced security and economic policies aimed at the capitalist development of the area and at placating of social unrest. In Latin America, as much as in other parts of the Third World, guerrilla movements, along with other non-armed social movements, sprang up as 102 In this way, state and media narratives have produced dominant ideas that suture the Colombian nation to narco-terrorism. Popular films such as Clear and Present Danger (1994), Blow (2001), Collateral Damage (2002), and Cocaine Cowboys (2006) have often glamorized and sensationalized the War on Drugs; and like other mainstream media representations, have occluded the hypocrisies and failures of (inter) state drug policies (Curtis Marez 2004). Today, post 9/11/2001 regimes of representation have reconfigured old narratives of civilization through the construction of the terrorist as a figure of death. This has regenerated colonial and imperial ideologies that legitimize the authorization of violence as an inexorable law of capitalist development while eliding the long history of US hegemony and terror (Rojas 2002; Smith 2002; Yúdice 2003; Mignolo 2005; Gómez Barris 2008, 2010). Much like the “narco-guerrilla” category coined during the 1980s and 1990s, the “narco-terrorist” homology functions today to account for a war against dissenting and/or criminalized bodies and against those who are guilty through association. For collectivities dreaming to transform the uneven relations of power emplaced by colonial, imperialist, and capitalist systems of domination that benefited local and global political elites. In the context of Colombia, guerrillas emerged as major social actors in the aftermath of La Violencia—a ten-year (1948-c.1958) civil war between liberals and conservative parties that erupted after the assassination of liberal presidential candidate, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. This was a period of unwarranted carnage that, as Maria Victoria Uribe describes, turned neighbors into suspects, tipsters, and strangers (Uribe 2004). La Violencia eventually left oligarchic rule intact through an undemocratic electoral agreement that allowed only for competition between elite-serving liberals and conservatives (Reif 1986). Preemptively, in an effort to abate any manifestation of unrest remaining from this period, the Colombian army implemented Plan Lazo (July 1962), a CIA backed counterinsurgency internal defense plan that was part of John F. Kennedy’s Alliance of Progress (Guevara 1960; 1998). Established by the United States and twenty-two Latin American countries at the Charter of Punta del Este, the Alliance for Progress (1961-1973) was a pan-American economic development program aimed at achieving “maximum levels of well-being, with equal opportunities for all, in democratic societies adapted to their own needs and desires” (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/intam16.asp.) In the midst of Cold War politics, hence, the figure of el guerrillero emerged as an embodiment of communist threat; consequently, a presumed enemy of the state, a menace to hemispheric stability, and an impediment to the encroachment of capitalism in the area. Consequently, whereas government initiatives such as Plan Lazo and The National Security Doctrine were devised and presented as benign counter communist and guerrilla warfare strategies, in essence, these type of hemispheric policies created the structural conditions that granted a significant degree of power and autonomy to the Colombian military, the state security forces, and the state security forces, and the paramilitaries while criminalizing labor organizers, unionists, peasants, Afro and Indigenous peoples, leftist students and academics, and (any)body that challenged the established socio-legal and economic order. Besides Plan Lazo, two historically distant examples perform this point: At the end of the 1970s, Julio César Turbay’s Colombian Security Statute of 1978 criminalized social protest, established media censorship, and allowed civilians to be tried in military tribunals (Duggan 2005). And more recently, Álvaro Uribe Velez publicly criminalized opposition against neoliberal policies, suggesting that those individuals who oppose the soon to be ratified U.S.- Colombia Free Trade Agreement are essentially guerrilla allies. Initiatives such as President Ronald Regan’s National Directive No. 221 (1986) and President George H. W. Bush’s Andean Initiative (1989) pushed further the militaristic approach to massive security assistance to Colombia and did the job of rekindling the representation(s) of this nation- state as un país problema. 103 instance, through the Andean Regional Initiative (2001), the George W. Bush administration reformulated US support as part of its counterterrorism agenda, pointing to FARC and ELN as major terrorist threats. 51 Similarly, Alvaro Uribe Velez launched his own Colombian version of the War on Terror. His Democratic Security Doctrine (2003) and Plan Patriota (2004) legitimized the rounding up of “subversives” and extended the military reach throughout Colombia, particularly guerrilla controlled territory (NACLA Report 2011). Unsurprisingly, presidents Uribe and W. Bush formed a strong conservative neoliberal brace, as their national and international security policies further pressed for “the push to the south” and for the protection of corporate capital. Tellingly, Álvaro Uribe Velez publicly criminalized opposition against neoliberal policies, suggesting that those individuals who oppose the soon to be ratified U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement are essentially guerrilla allies. Needless to say, the poor and displaced always already arise as primary targets. As Avery Gordon has argued, the dispossessed are always rendered suspect, arising as always already criminals without the entitlements of those properly and legally defined as human (2010). Presently, images of the guerrillero, drug trafficker and terrorist are elicited in mainstream corporate media and conservative political rhetoric as a type of demonic trinity; that is, as three different social actors discursively colluded into one and the same social evil. 52 Globally and locally, 51 While the Andean Regional Initiative (2001) was directed to seven countries in the Southern Cone, half of the funds were funnel to Colombia, mostly in military aid. 52 In Latin America, as much as in other parts of the Third World, guerrilla movements, along with other non-armed social movements, sprang up as collectivities dreaming to transform the uneven relations of power emplaced by colonial, imperialist, and capitalist systems of domination that benefited local and global political elites. In the context of Colombia, guerrillas emerged as major social actors in the aftermath of La Violencia—a ten-year (1948-c.1958) civil war between liberals and conservative parties that erupted after the assassination of liberal presidential candidate, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. This was a period of unwarranted carnage that, as Maria Victoria Uribe describes, turned neighbors into suspects, tipsters, and strangers (Uribe 2004). La Violencia eventually left oligarchic rule intact through an undemocratic electoral agreement that allowed only for competition between elite-serving liberals and conservatives (Reif 1986). Preemptively, in an effort to abate any manifestation of unrest remaining from this period, the Colombian army implemented Plan Lazo (July 1962), a CIA backed counterinsurgency internal defense plan that was part of John F. Kennedy’s Alliance of Progress (Guevara 1960; 1998). Established by the United States and twenty-two Latin American countries at the Charter of Punta del Este, the Alliance for Progress (1961-1973) was a pan-American economic development program aimed at achieving “maximum levels of well-being, with equal opportunities for all, in democratic societies adapted to their own needs and desires” (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/intam16.asp.) In the midst of Cold War politics, hence, the figure of el guerrillero emerged as an embodiment of communist threat; consequently, a 104 this conflation does the work of dehistoricizing the very specific sociopolitical conditions that triggered the emergence of each one of these social figures while justifying the accretion of US military aid to Colombia and the solidification of the Colombian paramilitary-state. According to scholars like Dugas (2005), Hristov (2009), Gill (2009) and others, the Colombian paramilitary-state is a death-producing system that mobilizes right-wing armed groups to enact tactics of terror such as torture, “social cleansings,” massacres, rape, forced displacement and the expropriation of lands as means for capital accumulation and for the eradication of armed and non-armed political “subversives” (Hristov 2009). For Hristov, paramilitarism explicitly moored the Colombian state led transition to neoliberalism because it ensured capitalist development and progress through illegal practices of capital appropriation and torture that created massive destitution, injury, and displacement. Significantly, Álvaro Uribe Velez’s purported demobilization of paramilitary groups circulated in mainstream media as a watershed moment in Colombian history, a representation that somehow begins to situate Colombia as a nation towards democratic (capitalist) progress among a band of leftist South American governments. 53 But as Jasmin Hristov (2006) tells us, Washington’s presumed enemy of the state, a menace to hemispheric stability, and an impediment to the encroachment of capitalism in the area. The 1960s, regardless of all the efforts to eradicate insurgency, “opened a dynamic era of communist- inspired guerrilla movements in Colombia” (The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, 1500-Present, 2010). Albeit their ideological differences and tactics to seize power and depose oligarchic rule, armed forces such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), The National Liberation Army (ELN), the Maoist Popular Army of Liberation (EPL) and 19 th of April Movement (M-19) were moved and inspired by visionary sketches of alternative structuring(s) of the word. At this particular moment in history, the Cuban Revolution represented, symbolically and materially, a paradigmatic instance against imperialist forces, in which guerrilla warfare, in spite of what we think today about its historical aftermath and the masculine subjectivities that normed a more traditional revolutionary imagination, signified for some social sectors and political actors the only possible avenue for rupture and transformation in the Americas. While the ELP and M-19 are no longer active, the FARC and ELN are the two most influential left-armed groups in Colombia. Classified by thirty-one states as a terrorist organization, the FARC is the oldest and largest guerrilla in Latin America. Ideologically the FARC “has a traditional understanding of taking power and of organizational hegemony and structure,” while the ELN is more oriented toward people’s power and movements (International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest 1500-Present, 2010). Despite the fact that today FARC and ELN are identified as the second violators of human rights and international humanitarian law in Colombia, it is of utmost importance to gaze back at the past and make visible the ways in which discourses of national and hemispheric security loom large in the historical and ongoing criminalization of dissident bodies and their naturalization as expendable. 53 During his term in office, Alvaro Uribe Velez, pushed for the so-called demobilization of paramilitary groups as part of the peace process. This was a political strategy that merely reconfigured the role of paramilitaries as part of the state coercive apparatus but did not dismantle these right-wing armed groups. See, Vallejo 2007; Hristov 2009, and Gill 2009 105 South American neoliberal golden boy’s “peace-making process” has been both a failure and a farce: 54 Paramilitary groups have never been, and are even less so now, a third actor in the Colombian armed conflict (the state and the guerrillas being the other two). On the contrary, since their inception in the 1960s as US-trained counter-insurgency forces, and their rearticulation in the 1980s as militias working on behalf of landed interest, they have been the Colombian establishment’s right hand. Then as in now, they deploy violence both for the sake of destroying civil and armed opposition movements and of accumulating capital for themselves and those they serve, most dramatically by driving entire communities off their land (2006, 14). In this sense, the misrepresentation of the Colombian situation as a three-party conflict exonerates the Colombian-state for its illegal use of right-wing armed groups and works in tandem with the discursive conflation of social subjects globally/locally identified as threats. Efforts at securitizing Colombia have produced unimaginable conditions of despair and displacement that surpass the life-devastating records of violence during military regimes in the Southern Cone throughout the 1970s and 1980s (Dugas 2005). The so-called intrinsic affiliation between the guerrillas, drug lords, and terrorists serves to obfuscate the complexities of the Colombian internal conflicts and disqualifies the political drives of armed dissent. This has increased the vulnerability of persons identified as los desechables, those socially undesirable victims of “social cleansings.” While it is true that differently criminalized and marginalized social subjects are specifically targeted by the state as desechables, as feminist scholars have argued, during political armed conflicts, women are hyper-vulnerable to sexual, physical, and psychological violence, threats and forced displacement. As Luz E. Romero states, in Colombia, “violence against women is not just a phenomenon of the current armed conflict, but has been ongoing throughout history and continues today. Gender based violence (physical and psychological abuse, and sexual violence in the domestic sphere), discrimination, sexual harassment, the dispossession of property, of economic rights and other forms of violence against women take place and are exacerbated during conflicts and are used as 54 As opposed to the current wave of left leaning South American presidents, Uribe has been embraced as a champion of democracy, progress, and capitalist development by the conservative constituencies in the global North. 106 weapons of war” (http://www.awid.org/News-Analysis/Friday-Files/Women-s-Rights-and-the- Armed-Conflict-in-Colombia). As kidnappings, guerrilla attacks, and coca cultivation increased in Colombia, the end of the 1990s culminated with Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002) and Bill Clinton (1993-2001) signing into effect Plan Colombia: Plan for Peace, Prosperity and the Strengthening of the State, an initiative that made this South American nation the leading country of US military aid and police assistance in the hemisphere. Presented as a multi-purpose plan that would focus on counter-narcotic efforts, the peace making process, and economic development in the region, Plan Colombia proved to be a misnomer from its inception: It neither brought peace or prosperity, nor did it strengthen the Colombian state. The addendum of economic, political, and military reforms that Plan Colombia institutionalized served to re-solidify the relationship between the state police forces and right-wing armed groups, while intensifying poverty, internal forced displacement, and the conflict with the guerrillas. 55 Despite the fact that counterinsurgency armed constituencies operated since the 1960s as the prosthetic arm of the state, during the 1990s, as several scholars point out, these illegal and private armed right troops became “increasingly autonomous in their structure and organization,” forming, under the leadership of Carlos Castaño, the national federation Autodefensa Unidas de Colombia (AUC) (Hristov 2009). In essence, as the breadth of scholarship on Plan Colombia contends, the Pastrana- Clinton strategy was in practice a counterinsurgency plan disguised as a counter-narcotic reform. That is, most funding supported military incursions into areas of coca cultivation, thus, ensuring the penetration of guerrilla territory in the southern regions of the country. These “counter-narcotic” strategies, exacerbated the already existing problem of internal displacement, leaving peasants in the area with very few viable options other than joining either left or right wing armed groups. Because 55 See NACLA Report on the Americas 42, no. 4 (July-August 2009). 107 most of the US funding for Plan Colombia financed surveillance and military operations, it added more fuel to an already lethal arsenal body: the Colombian parastate. Given that internal forced displacement is both a strategy and product of the on-going armed conflict(s) in Colombia, cultural producers have explored and made this phenomenon central to their work. Colombia is host to one of the largest populations of internally displaced persons, facing the worst humanitarian crisis in the hemisphere. While Villamil’s La Lengua Opresora underscores the displacement of Colombian nationals as encompassing epistemological violence, territorial uprooting, and cultural and economic exclusion from the time of the conquest to the present conditions immigrants face in the US, sociological and historical work has often addressed the problem as a largely internal conflict that began during the period of La Violencia and escalated during the 1980s with the illicit economy of drug production and trade in this South American country. The period from 1985 to 1991, popularly known as La Guerra de La Coca, marked a violent confrontation between the drug lords, particularly those from the Medellín Cartel, and the state security forces and paramilitaries. Central to the conflict were the United States’ imposed extradition policies on the Colombian state and the conditions proposed by Los Extraditables, those capos wanted by the U.S. authorities, among them Pablo Escobar Gaviria (Fanta 2008; Osorio 2008). Los Extraditables’ motto “Preferimos una tumba en Colombia a una carcel en Estados Unidos” encapsulates their unwavering stand against their extradition, as well as the drug lords’ taxing power, proposing to leave the drug trade in exchange of full judicial amnesty, the right to keep all their capital, and no extradition. This was an open war in which it became impossible to distinguish who was really outside of the illegal drug market, since drug money reached almost all sectors of Colombian society. It created a culture and aesthetic of excess, which according to Fanta, was ruled by waste and accumulation, by the here and now, fugacity, immediacy, and instant gratification. Ironically, while the war on drugs bolstered 108 impunity from all fronts, the drug trade also offered, albeit its deadly requirements, the guarantee of upper mobility to those persons abandoned by the state, society, and neoliberalism. Given this historical irony, what does my analysis of the maternal body of color contribute to our understanding of the Colombian situation and its attendant forms of violence and displacement? Furthermore, what does this case study contribute to my larger concern with the imbrication of discourses on migration and drug trafficking? As I have argued throughout this chapter, there exists a dearth of research conducted on the ways that the complexities of the Colombian situation and its violence have affected the construction of Colombian maternal bodies in both print and visual transnationally circulating media. As such, I have labored in this chapter to make central to the retelling of Colombian history the figures of the sicaria, the mula, and the undocumented mother precisely because female Colombian displacement has been occluded not only by the dominant narratives of the state, but also by masculine narratives of resistance that use the masculine guerrillero as the agent par excellence of political contestation. By looking to Colombia, moreover, I have suggested that the imbrication of discourses on illicit migration and drug trafficking are indeed mutually constituted through broader structures of patriarchy, geopolitics, and state policy which work in tandem to produce a logic of female disposability in which the illegal, deviant, or the criminalized are granted little to no value. Rather than focusing on the restrictive elements of this, however, I have highlighted the ways in which female Colombian subjects exercise their agency by turning to technology, illicit economies, and other devices in order to narrow or widen the scope of female liminality. As the follow chapter will argue, such forms of agency are critical to any understanding of the criminalized maternal body of color, especially when female negotiation and/or resistance takes place in the vexed and moralized terrain of something like sex work. As such, the following chapter of my dissertation explores the third and 109 final set of dominant narratives on sex work in order to demonstrate their mutual constitution with those on migration and drug trafficking. 110 CHAPTER IV Affective (dis)connections: Motherhood, Friendship, and Sex Work in Beatriz Flores Silva’s “En la Puta Vida” I. INTRODUCTION The camera’s extreme close-up of a tiny hand-written note reveals to the spectator the message that Elisa Sanchez (Mariana Santángelo), the protagonist of Beatriz Flores Silva’s film En la Puta Vida (Tricky Life, 2001), is secretly delivering: “Lulú cumple años! Veni a las 9” (It’s Lulú’s birthday! Join me at 9 p.m.). Zooming out, the camera shows Elisa walking away in her stiletto vinyl boots; it follows her turning around, winking and smiling at the sex worker 56 who just received her note. Elisa’s wink and smile, however, almost seem to be directed toward the viewer who watches her walk away. In a seductive stride, she continues to hand out little pink pieces of paper to the other sex workers. Elisa’s action registers a double secrecy: Not only must Lulú (Andrea Fantoni) not find out about the celebration, but also the joyful occasion makes for a clandestine gathering of sex workers. These are women who throughout the film are not allowed to talk amongst themselves, much less rejoice and value each other’s lives amidst a social context that alienates, negates, and criminalizes their existence. The birthday gathering offers the sex workers in the film a moment of conviviality that allows them, if only briefly, to escape from the isolation that Placido (Silvestre), one of the procurers, has imposed on them. The scene swiftly shifts from the red light district alleys of Barcelona to a full shot of the protagonist with two other women, and a waiter hurriedly lighting a cake’s candles. As the cake travels across the table from one woman’s hands to the next, it becomes the object of both the audience and characters’ attention. It passes from hand to hand as the prostitutes sing and celebrate 56 Through out this chapter, I use the terms prostitute and sex worker interchangeably. While I am aware that the terminology is highly contestable and discussions about the correct terms are part of ongoing feminist and labor and human rights debates, I deploy them without attaching any moralistic or negative value. 111 Lulú, Elisa’s best friend. Ecstatic, Lulú blows out the candles, wishing all the other women good luck and hoping for Elisa to soon be reunited with her children. In a teary voice, she exclaims: “My dream is kind of stupid; but since it’s my birthday, I’ll say it anyway. Me, I would like to take a walk on July 18th Avenue, around the obelisk on Independence Square.” It is at this moment, when Lulú conjures up memories of home and her dream to return to South America, that the camera jumps to a close-up of Placido observing the celebration through the glass-door entrance of the restaurant. Like many other instances in the film, this scene elicits this character as someone who is constantly watching. Having seen that Placido is a man who is always ready to exercise his power, the viewer learns to associate his watchfulness with imminent danger and control. The sex workers unawareness of his presence only increases the viewer’s recognition of Placido as a malevolent figure. Lulú’s birthday celebration concludes with a series of jump cuts that capture all of the sex workers’ facial reactions to Lulú voicing her (final) wish: “I want to go to Uruguay. I can’t take it anymore.” This scene is important because it positions Lulu’s party both as a horizontal social encounter and as a transgressive act that restores contact. In contradistinction, the intimacy of this clandestine celebration is followed by Lulú’s ominous death. Her murder, the second one that takes place in the film, is passively constructed as Placido’s form of retaliation against Elisa’s indiscipline, against her refusal to stay put and follow his orders. In fact, the two homicides that take place in En la Puta Vida, Lulu’s and Coco’s 57 , exemplify the ways in which homicide marks a most extreme form of (gendered) violence against prostitutes. Whereas the party does symbolize an assertion of, to borrow from Judith Butler’s words, a community of women “living beside” themselves, 58 the image of Lulú’s body, that is, the figure of an inert woman laying on the street with a bullet hole on her right temple, visually registers a (misogynist) logic of female dispensability, that as I have argued in 57 In the film, Placido also murders Coco, a Brazilian transvestite and prostitute. 58 In Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, Judith Butler explains, “that we can still speak of a ‘we’…[composed] of those who are living in certain ways besides ourselves, whether it is in sexual passion, or emotional grief, or political rage” (2002, 20). 112 my previous chapters, concedes little or no value to illegal, deviant, or criminalized lives. (Foucault 1977, 1978; Alexander 1994; Butler 2000, 2002, 2004; Inda 2006, 2007). Such disposability, as En la Puta Vida and the other films that I explore in this dissertation show us, is both of the state and beyond its reach in illicit economies. Flores Silva’s emplotment of female transgression through the tropes of sex work, illegal migration, and motherhood has lead me to consider En la Puta Vida as a visual archive that makes seeable dominant grammars and logics about gender-based violence, on the one hand, while making discernible alternative pursuits to happiness through its presentation of communal ownership, interdependence, and friendship, on the other. In other words, the film offers a close-up perspective of how (neo)liberal regimes address the Latin American immigrant sex worker and her labor. But it also offers a vision often erased in hegemonic traffic-oriented approaches to immigration that render these females as one-dimensional suffering bodies. That is to say, through its representation of the communal, the film calls (for)ward the inventive and intimate social worlds that women develop within and around moral and capitalist regimes of subjection. I argue that, regardless of obvious reinscriptions, En la Puta Vida presents the audience with a narrative that foregrounds sex work as a legitimate form of labor, pushing the audience to question and grapple with what constitutes the “good life,” the moral, and work itself. While En la Puta Vida was released in 2001, the film’s concerns with the feminization of migration flows, sex work and human trafficking continue to have political relevance in our post- 9/11 world. As transnational feminist media scholars Marciniak, Imre and O’Healy (2011) state “the post-9/11 anxiety, and the subsequent ‘war on terror,’ have amplified the desire of global proportions to police and discipline those who are classified as questionable others” (1). Contrary to scholars such as Tzvi Tal who reads the film as solely responding to “los interests del gran capital mediatico global,” it seems that the filmmaker’s portrayal of transgressive female subjectivity offers a 113 feminist vision of difference and (inter)dependence that makes gender central to a critique of (global) circuits of power. Informed by the writings of communication scholar Jesus Martin Barbero and the work of feminist scholars on gender, theory and cinema, in the first section of this chapter, I suggest that Flores Silva strategically uses the genre of melodrama to articulate the film’s feminist politics. After discussing the problems with a macro political economic analysis that does not consider the complexity of gender power, I explore the ways in which female friendship and the dream of business co-ownership function in the film. I suggest that through its portrayal of friendship and female dreams this visual text disrupts masculinist and capitalist notions of the self, property, and intimacy. In the last section, I bring attention to how motherhood, illegality, technology, and connectivity work together in the film by analyzing Elisa’s phone calls to her children. My argument is not that representation itself does not function as a normalizing strategy, but that En la puta vida is a highly contradictory film that brings forth a dialectics of hope, the beautiful and the dystopic without trying to affirm the main character as either good or bad, fully free or determined, or as a proper and ‘respectable’ subject. As Flores Silva stated during an interview, her goal was to leave the audience thinking about the ways in which norms do not always protect us 59 . Given the director’s intentions, En la Puta Vida can be seen as a critique of disciplinary power, which creates “the penalty of the norm.” As my analysis will show, it is the main character’s deviation from (or failure to reproduce) the norm that creates a break of the moral and legal code. Or, as Foucault suggests, “confronted with discipline on the face of the law, there is illegality, which puts itself forward as a right; it is indiscipline, rather than the criminal offense that produces the rupture” (Foucault 1995). Though there have been a number of critiques regarding Foucault’s lack of attention to the particularities of the female body, his formulation of illegality is generative and 59 Latina Magazine 2001. 114 important to my overall claims in that his study places a positive value on crime as a mode of resistance. He makes possible the emancipatory aspects of illegality as a social and political practice of struggle against the order of the Law. Or as Enrique Dussel states, social illegality is a (communal) resistance and rejection of a system organized by violence and exclusion (Dussel, 1988). En la Puta Vida presents us with a character that embodies multiple illegalities: illegalities that reinforce her otherness and mark her a deviant. Thus, I argue that Elisa’s incapacity to follow the rules, the minute disciplines that differentiate the moral from immoral, the aberrant from the normal, and the unruly subject from the good citizen, make her a dangerous female. II. JOURNALISTIC NARRATIVES & THE LATIN AMERICAN MELODRAMATIC IMAGINATION: In his essay “Imágenes prostituidas: inmigrantes latinoamericanas en Princesas y En la Puta Vida,” Tzvi Tal offers an analysis of these two films’ representations of the Latin American immigrant sex worker (2011). Tal provides us with a succinct history of the representation of immigrants in Spanish cinema, as well as with a summary of theories on film and ideology. Such readings remind us of the importance of a visual analysis of immigration and the justifiable critiques that prior cinemas of resistance made of the cultural communication complex and Hollywood’s hegemony. Through a comparative analysis of Flores Silva’s and Fernando León de Aranoa’s work to that of cineastes of prior decades, particularly those of Third Cinema, Tal concludes that En la Puta Vida and Pricesas are solely determined by foreign capital and/or the imperialism of the cultural industries. In the case of En la Puta Vida, he argues that the film is conditioned by the demands of Avalon Productions, a Spanish production company and distributor of independent films, and one of the many co-producers of this cultural text 60 . He suggests that Flores Silva’s film only offers the 60 Interestingly, even if the film was funded also by production companies from Uruguay, Cuba, and Belgium, his study only looks into the role of Avalon, assuring the reader that this Spanish production company was the determining “voice” in the film. 115 spectator “prostituted images” for her/his gratification; as such, this visual text does not produce an authentic process of concienticization like the one called forth by prior cinemas of resistance such as Third Cinema. But what exactly does Tal mean by “prostituted images”? More importantly, what is an “authentic” process of conscientization? Who and what determine the authenticity of such a process? While sharing some of Tal’s concerns regarding the political economy of film and the spectacularization of marginality (la espectacularización de la marginalidad), my reading of Flores Silva’s film moves beyond a potentially prescriptive analysis of cultural homogenization, on the one hand, and the binary between dominant and subaltern representations on the other. Despite the fact that the new Latin American Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, has often been regarded as “the hallmark of aesthetically innovative [and] politically militant cinema” (Podalski 2011, 3), feminist scholars have underscored the ways in which Third Cinema, as an aesthetics of liberation, presented a totalizing and gender-neutral vision of power relations (Robin and Jaffe 1999). Authors such as Robin and Jaffe suggests that women filmmakers in the Third World have contributed to a critique of (masculinist) cinematic narratives of liberation by producing multilayered films that focus on local differences and alternative forms of solidarity. As they state, the protagonist in these films “do not work the parched earth, nor do they aspire to the militancy of Brazilian director Glauber Rocha’s ‘aesthetics of hunger.’ They nonetheless struggle to overcome a moral order that shrinks from and stifles passion, ideas, freedom, and difference” (1999, 2). Like these feminist theorists and without undermining the critical interventions of Third Cinema or Cinema Novô, Latin American cultural studies scholars have tried to account for the complexity of the changing structure of Latin American film industries in the last two decades. Informed by the work of media scholar Jesus Martín Barbero, critics such as Laura Podalsky and Juan Poblete have analyzed the success of contemporary Latin American films (mid 1990s to the present) to explore how these visual texts accommodate new realities or “plug us into” emergent 116 subjectivities in times of globalization. For Poblete, some of these new films pose a critique of the impact of neoliberalism by combining the formal tools of dominant Hollywood cinemas with more vernacular, regional forms and experiences, thus, producing a new type of cinematographic legibility through which filmmakers are able to make their films “accessible and productive for many glocal publics” (Poblete 2006). Similarly, Podalsky draws on theories of affect to explore how genres such as the thriller, coming of age stories, and melodrama are being used by contemporary Latin American filmmakers to evoke and employ emotion, thus, encourage their spectators to feel in ways that acknowledge alternative ways of knowing (Podalsky 2011). Building on and expanding the work of theorists such as Richard, Franco, and Avelar, Podalsky asks: “Do formulaic narratives laced with blatant emotional appeals work like sandpaper to abrade the face of the past to be easily forgotten, as Richard and Avelar suggest? Or might these particular genres—revolving as they do around the question of who knows what when—move us toward a heartfelt realization of the limitations of dominant epistemologies?” (7) Undoubtedly, any contemporary study of Latin American film and its economy must take into account the over lapping violences of imperialism and modernity in the hemisphere; as much as it should pay attention to the ways in which Latin American filmmakers have struggled against the hegemony of Hollywood and European auteur-centered cinema. Moreover, Spain’s increasing role as a foreign and leading telecommunications investor in Latin America should raise questions and concerns about the accretion of power that some Spanish monopolistic media conglomerates have in the area (Hoefert de Turégano 2004). This consolidation of power is particularly troubling due to the historical relationship that Spain has to Latin America, a colonial/imperial relation marked by (forced) labor extraction, the appropriation of natural resources, and mayhem. But, as Martín Barbero asserts, our theorizations of culture should also pay attention to “other cultural experiences of matrices” and recognize that “what gives the cultural industry force and the stories meaning is not 117 simply ideology but culture and the profound dynamics of memory and cultural imagination” (2004, 326). Henceforth, I want to propose that Flores Silva’s film is both a globalized product and a politicized narrative that strategically uses melodrama to articulate a feminist politics, revealing the ways in which the economies of motherhood, sex work, and human trafficking mark particular female bodies. According to Martin Barbero, the genre of melodrama functions as a mode of expression to articulate what he calls representaciones sin dialogo. In Martin Barbero’s view, “what is at play in the melodrama is the drama of recognition. What moves the plot along is always the unawareness of identities, the struggle against bewitching spells and false appearances, trying to cut through all that hides and disguises. In short, it is a struggle to make oneself recognized” (1998, 325). Martin Barbero’s theorization of recognition looms large in my analysis because rather than framing recognition in terms of alienation or lack of consciousness, he stresses the relationship between recognition, interpellation, and the constitution and reconstitution of individual subjects and collectivities. In this vein, I ask: what are these representaciones sin dialogo that the film elicits? How does the film, through its use of melodrama, restore to cultural memory the significance of “the role of the patriarchal state in creating the conditions of possibility for the proliferation of gendered violence” across geopolitical borders? (Fregoso 2003) 61 What social struggle(s) does Elisa embody and what types of identifications does she elicit as a sex worker, smuggled person, and transnational mother? Finally, how can these representations produce ruptures rather than reproduce routes of power as Tal would have it? Often associated with Uruguayan post-dictatorial cinema, Flores Silva’s films usually thread the factual and the fictional rendering an intricate picture of the lives and experiences of subaltern 61 In her book, meXicana encounters, scholar Rosa Linda Fregoso examines the role of cultural representations of Mexicanas and Chicanas in the formation of identities and the ways in which popular culture restores to cultural memory the significance of the role of the patriarchal state in creating the conditions of possibility for gendered violence. I draw on Fregoso’s work to study the formation of gendered subjects. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) 118 females. 62 Inaccurately translated as Tricky Life, En la Puta Vida (2001) is narrated in a tragicomedy style, reflecting the popular melodramatic aesthetic of Latin American telenovelas. Histrionic performances, music, particularly the use of tango, and intense colors punctuate a style of excess so typical of Latin American melodramas. The biggest box office hit in all of Uruguayan film history, En la Puta Vida tells the life story of Elisa Sanchez, a young single mother who shares the dream of opening up a beauty salon with her best friend Lulú. From the beginning, their yearning to own a place where they can beautify themselves and others is a collective dream: the act of saving money becomes a communal activity between these two women and cosmetology, in this instance, signifies the practice through which they can potentially take care of each other, financially and emotionally. Initially, Elisa works at a public marketplace selling meat produce for Garcia (her married lover who has promised not only to help her open the beauty parlor, but also to divorce his wife). After a falling out with Garcia and unable to save enough money for their beauty salon, Elisa begins to work at Doña Jacqueline’s El Rey de Paris, a brothel were her friend Lulú labors as a prostitute. Both women view sex work as a temporary form of employment that will allow them to earn enough money to open up their business. While working at the brothel the protagonist meets Placido, a pimp with a charismatic personality whom throughout the film is elicited as an archetype of evil. Impressed by him, the promise of romantic love, and the allure of the “First World,” Elisa and Lulú willingly migrate illegally to Spain. Once in Barcelona the friends begin to witness the daily conditions of isolation and violence that both Uruguayan women and Brazilian transvestites have to confront as workers in the sex industry. 63 As time goes by, the protagonist realizes that Placido only sees her as an exploitable and expendable body (and not as a business partner or “marriage material”). 62 Beatriz Flores Silva’s films include Polvo nuestro que estás en los cielos (Masangeles)(2008), En la Puta Vida (2001), La historia casi verdadera de Pepita la Pistolera (1993) and Les sept péchés capitaux (1992). 63 The film explicitly shows the ways in which Brazilian transvestites and Uruguayan prostitutes, as migratory subjects and sex workers, become differently racialized and excluded in the First World. 119 Disappointed and afraid for her life, the main character starts to suspect Placido’s intentions and tries to find a way out his control. Herein Elisa begins to experience the full weight of her deception, Placido’s abusive personality, and the state’s incapacity to tend to the needs of trafficked or undocumented persons. Following a Latin American telenovela format, the film concludes with a romantic and problematic resolution that suggests Elisa’s union to Marcelo, a Spanish policeman who helps her to denounce Placido and his accomplices for sexually exploiting her and, as I described in my introduction, for killing her best friend. Despite this seemingly positive resolution, the film’s final shot, a rosy image of a happy nuclear family fades from the screen as a caption strategically reminds the audience that no one really knows what happened to Elisa after the court trial, no one has bothered to find out if there have been any reprisals against her. 64 This final caption, hence, unsettles a perfect moment of reconciliation, returning the viewer to the film’s concerns with international female trafficking and the multiple discourses around it. That is to say, as an issue-oriented film, in the last instance, En la Puta Vida implicates the viewer in responsibility: “No one has cared to find out what happened to Elisa.” Though the film is never framed as a “true story,” it is based on Maria Urruzola’s book El Huevo de la Serpiente: Trafico de Mujeres Montevideo-Milan: El Nacimiento de Una Mafia? (Montevideo: Ediciones Pluma, 1992): an exposé of a highly organized transatlantic network of Uruguayan female trafficking for the sex industry in Milan. Urruzola’s investigation made headlines in the early 1990s. Initially working from the testimonial of a sex worker, the journalist denounced the complicity of an important Uruguayan travel agency, a well-known lawyer and owner of a famous Uruguayan soccer team, and the participation of several INTERPOL constituencies in the trafficking of women. The findings had an unprecedented impact in both sides of the Atlantic since both Italian and Uruguayan 64 This is the full quote: “A pesar de los juicios realizados en Uruguay y en Europa, la red no ha podido ser desmantelada. Los hombres encarcelados fueron sustituidos por otros. Las mismas mujeres siguen hoy paradas en las mismas esquinas. Si alguna represalia ha caído sobre Elisa, nadie se ha preocupado de enterarse. Su paradero actual, y el de los niños, es en realidad desconocido.” (Flores Silva 2001) 120 courts opened juridical cases. While mainstream media has often sensationalized the issue of human trafficking, it is important to note that, in Uruguay, it is through press releases and news reports that most cases have been made public. It is also important to mention here that the role of women journalists has been crucial in denouncing issues of gendered violence such as feminicide, child pornography, and human trafficking for exploitative forms of labor across the Americas. 65 As Margarita Navarrete explains, as of September 2005, the Uruguayan government had not recognized the existence of human trafficking in this South American country (Navarrete 2005). Human rights organizations and journalists, however, have challenged these official national discourses, arguing that Uruguay is a site for the daily departure, transit, and destination of forced labor, as well as a place with a high degree of female and child trafficking for sexual exploitation. Given this official silence, journalistic reports have become important interventions and public archives since there are no official state records regarding human trafficking and its effects on people’s daily lives. The role of the journalist (or the importance that journalistic reports play) is explicitly highlighted toward the end of the film when Elisa, after being deported to Uruguay, is met by a mass of reporters. Climbing up the fence of the Spanish embassy in Montevideo and looking into the camera, the protagonist states: I am talking to all the prostitutes in Uruguay. Don’t believe in the trip to Spain or any other tale of that sort. It’s hell. I was blind. I lost my best friend and almost lost my kids and I am back with no money. Believe in yourself. Fight! Now I am talking to all the women and girls in Uruguay. Don’t let this society treat you like lesser people; this hypocritical society treats you like you are nothing. Fight! Defend yourself. You are important! You are life! And you Mr. President, I am making you responsible for the physical safety of these Uruguayan women, who are like slaves in Spain. Give them a decent job. Bring them back, take action, take these women seriously. And one more thing: Give me my children back. (Flores Silva 2001) As Elisa’s speech shows, it is by asserting her political identity as a mother, a woman, and sex worker that she makes herself visible in front of the camera, as this scene is constructed as if it were 65 I case in point is the work of Lidia Cacho, a Mexican journalist who has played a key role in denouncing, even at the cost of retaliation, persecution and torture, the linkages between Mexican politicians, the corporate class, and organized crime in child pornography and the sexual exploitation of young girls. 121 a breaking-news live broadcast. Moreover, it is at this moment, when the audience sees the protagonist appear in a television screen, that the spectators (those within the cinematic text and those of us watching the film) hear the protagonist explicitly making the Uruguayan state responsible for undervaluing the lives of women and creating the conditions of possibility for gendered violence across geopolitical borders. (While this is not the first time that the film alludes to the state’s complicity in the production of gendered violence; it is however, the first time that the protagonist, a criminalized subject, calls for state accountability). As a cultural text, then, En La Puta Vida draws on and expands these journalistic accounts, contributing to ongoing debates about (human) trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation, thus, functioning as a culturally significant visual register of what otherwise remains occluded, unrecorded, or misconstrued in state narratives. Contrary to what Tal argues, this filmic narrative can be viewed as part of a larger feminist project that makes the patriarchal state accountable for producing the conditions that make women more vulnerable to variegated forms of violence. Rather than longing for a more radical and revolutionary cinema, as stated above, Third Cinema no longer provides a viable prescription nor description for present day filmmaking practices, particularly those of female subjects (Robin and Jaffe 1999). As these scholars suggest, some contemporary women filmmakers propose alternative models of resistance by mobilizing diverse aesthetic practices. Seen in this light, it is my contention that on the one hand, as a vernacular and popular aesthetic, the telenovela format not only mediates a script based on a journalistic account, but also functions as a ‘legible’ and ‘recognizable’ narrative for transnational Latin American audiences (Barbero 1993; Poblete 2002). On the other, I argue that the filmmaker uses the conventions of the genre but queers or subverts melodrama to propose an alternative model of resistance grounded on female friendship, interdependence, and collective, rather than private, ownership. 122 As televisual melodramas, Latin American telenovelas traditionally turn to romantic love and close family relationships to deal with Manichean notions of morality, particularly in relation to a sexual double standard between women and men. Keeping with these conventions, the film presents Elisa, Placido, and Marcelo, if not necessarily as a love triangle, as embodiments of contesting positions (antagonistic forces) about sex work and sex trafficking that in turn reveal to the audience different views about notions of love, intimacy, financial sustainability, and reciprocity. In contrast to hegemonic discourses about the “Third World” prostitute, the film portrays Elisa as a round and contradictory character, showing the spectator the multiplicity of motivations driving those women who are engaged in sex work. The two main male figures in the film, however, are rendered as schematic characters whose investments in Elisa, in my opinion, are grounded in different modalities of male privilege. That is to say, while for Placido the protagonist represents another exploitable body, a prostitute whose dreams are unrealizable fantasies, the film constructs the bond between Elisa and Marcelo as one triggered by the their roles as “victim” and “savior.” In other words, through its depiction of the male figures as archetypes of good and evil, the film is able to allude to dominant inter(national) discourses that construct prostitution as solely the result of male sexual power and cultural backwardness or that predicate the salvation of the “Third World” prostitute in terms of (“First World”) intervention. The film, thus, uses the conventions of the genre (archetypes of good and evil, exaggerated characters, the tropes of romantic love, and a happy resolution); but contrary to a traditional telenovela, En la Puta Vida does not reinscribe female abnegation nor innocence. Neither does it reduce a woman’s identity to the social roles she performs. In fact, Elisa is elicited as a fluid or unfinished subject who refuses to be morally or legally condemned. 66 For instance, the first time that the film shows the protagonist questioning the criminalization of her labor is during a raid of El Rey 66 As Enrique Dussel argues in a different context, Elisa is a criminalized woman who lacks “subjective culpability” (Dussel 1988). 123 de Paris. The scene begins with a shot of a white van’s back door that reads “sirviendo a la sociedad” (serving society). As the door opens, the camera captures a quarrel between a sex worker and a marine. In a matter of seconds, the spectator watches people being pulled out of the vehicle, Doña Jacqueline arguing with an officer, and a policeman forcing Elisa out of the van: “Ahora que hice”(Now, what did I do?), exclaims the main character. It is at this moment that the camera switches to the brothel’s singer’s face, whose fixed wide-open eyes express a look of both panic and confusion. She is singing the tango song “La Comadre,” as she watches the police take away all of the sex workers: “también viví con igualitas ilusiones, también creí que porque llevaban pantalones.” It is important to remember here that the tango, as Martín Barbero asserts, is another modality of a Latin American melodramatic form of expression. Interpreted by Giovanna Facchinelli, this tango becomes an evocative aural register of the film’s feminist politics, since it is a critique of male betrayal and false promises, themes often mobilized to articulate a critique of male privilege. The audience hears Facchinelli singing “la Comadre” twice in the film: first when Elisa sees Placido at El Rey Paris, and then during the aforementioned scene of the raid. As such, the song functions as a stylistic device to foreshadow what is to come in Spain. Facchinelli’s voice carries over and suddenly fades away as the scene of the raid transitions to a close-up of Elisa’s hands while she is being fingerprinted: “Why am I here?” she asks. “You were in the wrong place,” the officer responds. “And if I had been in the street?” “You can’t do tricks in the street.” “Why not?” Elisa replies. “You should just stay home.” And, can I do tricks at home?” “If you follow the rules,” the officer asserts. “You know what, the street belongs to everyone. The air is free. I’ll do as I please.” “If you go on, I’ll put you in jail for disrespecting an officer,” the policeman rebukes. “I don’t give a damn,” states Elisa. As this scene shows, while it is true that the film turns to notions of romantic love and the heteronormative family, through its portrayal of the Latin American sex worker, Flores 124 Silva critiques the equation of work, social roles, and identity, rejecting a false dichotomy of exploitation/liberation. Let me draw on another example that illustrates my point regarding the deployment of romantic love as a convention of melodrama and the film’s feminist politics: One of the most telling moments in the film is one that captures the first time that Elisa and Placido have sex. The scene elicits Elisa as gullible and preoccupied with love, however, the protagonist troubles the social script that reinscribes her only in terms of masculinist desire, passivity, and objectification by refusing to accept Placido’s money for sex: “What is this?” Elisa asks him, as he gives her stack of bills. “I always pay for everything.” “I am not going to charge you.” “You are a good prostitute.” “I am not a prostitute; I work as a prostitute.” She puts the money back in Placido’s pocket and states: “I do not work when I am with you. I am with you because I want to.” As this exchange between the main character and Placido reveals, the film does not provide a comforting representation of sex work and marginality; rather it complicates the audience’s understanding of female identity and the ways in which an unequal gender-sex system coupled with an unjust economic system creates the conditions of possibility for violence in the lives of women. Read from this perspective, melodrama then becomes the narrative genre through which Flores Silva gives visibility to new gendered subjects within the nation-state. Although En la Puta Vida is an anti-human trafficking film that does conflate prostitution, migration, and human trafficking, through her portrayal of feminized forms labor, female friendship, and communal ownership, the filmmaker effectively troubles the victim narrative often associated with hegemonic anti-trafficking and anti-prostitution campaigns such as the United Nations’ Trafficking Protocol to Suppress, Prevent and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (December 2000) and those advanced by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW). As I stated in the theoretical chapter of this dissertation, abolitionist notions of consent, choice, and 125 female sexuality reproduced during early twentieth century campaigns against white slavery continue to influence national and international laws that not only pose restrictions on movement and prevent sex workers from organizing but turns all prostitutes into victims regardless of consent or coercion. Moreover, there is an Orientalist discourse that reinscribes a hierarchy of civilization in which the exploitation (and existence) of the “Third World” prostitute is managed as not only the result of male sexual power, but also as the product of cultural and religious backwardness (Doezema 1999; Kempadoo 2005). In other words, Western feminists’ desire to save the “Third World” prostitute is not a historical accident, but a legacy of empire. As these feminist scholars stress, while early twentieth century debates around the abduction and transport of white women for prostitution focused on either notions of consent, regulation or abolition of prostitution, ideologically, all these discourses shared a common view about female sexuality based on Victorian values about women’s innate innocence, moral superiority, and sexual passivity. As Doezema writes, It is important to register that the suffering body of the third world prostitute is not a one- dimensional image whose sole function is to reassure western feminist of their moral rightness and superiority. This body figures in non-western feminist (and other) discourses as a metaphor for a number of fears, anxieties, and relations of domination. For example the figure of the “suffering third world prostitute” serves well to symbolize the excess of the global march of capital, and its negative effect on women…current anti trafficking campaigns are embedded in culture and national history. Of course many third world feminist reject the image of the third world woman as helpless victim of either patriarchy or a ‘crude, undifferentiated capitalism.” (Doezema 2003, 18) En La Puta Vida draws on many of these (liberal) discourses to understand how they shape social life; and, as a cultural text, rather than providing the audience with a definite answer, the filmmaker upsets normative claims about sex work by refusing to reduce the lives of prostitutes to the realm of lack, injury, and/or total abjection. Yet, Flores Silva’s film is not, as I stated before, a narrative of redemption; for even after it creates the illusion of a happy ending, through the final caption, the director reminds the audience of the restrictions of freedom and livability experienced by sex workers. The final caption not only implicates the viewer in responsibility, as I stated before, but, 126 indicts the legal system and the silence of the state. That is to say, just when the viewer assumes that the prostitute (Elisa) has been saved and that she is going to be happily married to her savior (Marcelo), Flores Silva offers the viewers a final word: “Si alguna represalia ha caído sobre Elisa, nadie se ha preocupado de enterarse. Su paradero actual, y el de los niños, es en realidad desconocido”(Flores Silva 2001). This said, it seems to me that Elisa’s relationship with Lulu, and not her relationships with the male characters, that offer us an alternative form of sociality to understand the sex worker as a figure who exceeds the image of the “suffering Third World prostitute.” III. LULÚ & ELISA: THE PRACTICE OF BEAUTY What I would like to explore now is how the portrayal of female friendship becomes one of the most compelling aspects of the film, as it presents the affective connection between these women as an alternative amidst corroded or deadly social bonds. In this section I argue that the film elicits Lulú’s and Elisa’s connection as a relationship that challenges and transforms masculinist and capitalist notions of property, individualism and intimacy, thus, foregrounding their friendship as central to the making and re-crafting of these characters’ daily lives. In many ways, the film’s representation of female attachment brings to mind the Foucauldian formulation that postulates friendship as a way of life that can potentially engender “new alliances and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force,” thus, unsettling law, rule or habit (Foucault 1981, 204). For instance, when Lulú takes Elisa to work at the brothel she asks, “Do you want me to stay the first time?” “I have never done it in front of someone else,” exclaims Elisa. “I am not someone. I’m your best friend” (my italics). What does Lulú’s offer and response mean? How does the portrayal of their friendship trouble normative notions of privacy, the self, and the body? Whereas stories about prostitution or the dream of owning beauty parlor might have little or nothing to do with grandiose or traditional narratives of revolution and social transformation, in this story, it is what animates and insinuates 127 the possibility for change and female non-capitalist sociality. I say all this, perhaps longwindedly, in order to emphasize the ways in which, despite all of the problematic reinscriptions of normative femininity and domesticated beauty, at least in this instance, sex work and cosmetology become ways of taking care of each other; the beauty parlor becomes a symbol, a means to communal ownership through friendship. Let me make myself clear by analyzing a key scene in the film, one that not only introduces Lulú to the spectator, but also reveals Elisa’s and Lulú’s dream. The first time the audience sees Lulú is when she walks through the door of the ramshackle room that Garcia (Augusto Mazzarelli), Elisa’s married lover, rents for her and her children. As opposed to the opening scene, which begins to construct the film’s melodramatic tone through an exterior shot (a slow panning of a shore after dusk) and mostly through aural elements (the clashing of waves, the extradiegetic sound of tango, and the, at first, off-screen sound of a heated quarrel between Elisa and her mother), the scene that introduces the observer to Elisa’s best friend is crafted through close framings that create a feeling of clutter and disorder. A medium shot captures Lulú walking through the door with a cheerful smile, warmly welcoming the kids’ excitement as they run to give her a hug: “Hello my precious! Hi my love!” says Lulú. “Look what I brought for you. One for each so you don’t fight.” Despite the storage-like condition of the dilapidated room, Lulú exclaims: “How original Elisa, I love it!” Her statement seems almost farcical since the room, like one of the children expressed when he first saw the place, is really a “pig sty” (es una porqueria.) Lulú’s comment, however, coincides with the tragic-comedy narrative style established from the beginning of the film; one that, as I stated before, enables the filmmaker not only to recount a story of deception and abuse, but to use comedy to unsettle our perceptions of reality and the “good life.” To a certain degree, and in terms of character construction, Lulú’s response to the room also introduces the spectator to Elisa’s best friend’s chimerical, kindhearted, and hyper-emotive personality (despite the overdetermination of the sex worker as gloomy and depressive.) Rather than 128 focusing on the stacks of old furniture that clutter the room, once Lulú appears in the scene, the two women become the focus of the camera, making them visually more relevant than what first appears as an unlivable space. Lulú’s attention immediately shifts from the “originality” of her friend’s room to a small plastic bag she is carrying: “Mira lo que traje! She utters. The camera follows the two friends as they enthusiastically empty the contents of the bag, zooming in to reveal a cascade of bills falling on the table: “There must be 1.583 pesos. Something like that,” affirms Lulú. How do you know? Elisa asks. “A quick look,” Lulú says. “I look and evaluate.” “What’s this? Is it real?” Elisa wonders. The camera continues to frame their faces as Elisa holds-up a bill against a light bulb; it rivets on the two women while they fixate their eyes on one of the bills: “Of course, it’s real,” responds Lulú. “It looks like a Monopoly bill,” states Elisa in awe. “We should frame it for the hair salon,” Lulú replies. The scene continues to unfold through medium close-ups that capture the two friends smiling, counting, and recording all of the money in a little notepad. Near the end of the scene, Elisa gets another stack of bills hidden inside the top of a salon stand bonnet hair dryer. Once all the cash has been counted, Elisa assures Lulú that Garcia has promised to help them with the rest of the money. While this is the first time that the film shows these two friends counting their savings, throughout the film, the director portrays scenes of saving and owning not as individuated practices, but rather as communal practices and experiences of sharing the goods. That is to say, for Elisa and Lulú, their dream of the beauty salon not only creates an intangible hope, but the radical possibility for non-capitalist sociability or at the very least an opportunity for joint entrepreneurship. Despite the fact that the practice of cosmetology is a paradoxical site from which to theorize female agency (since it can be bound to the reproduction of normative femininity and domesticated beauty), in the film, cosmetology signifies a self-forming activity. Flores Silva’s insistence in making these friends’ aspiration for communal ownership central to the overall narrative is important because it allows the 129 audience to see the ways in which collective dreaming structures their everyday (inter)actions; that is, their reality as women, friends and business partners. Once in Barcelona, even though neither one of them sees any of the money they have been making, these two friends continue to keep a record of all of their earnings. Moreover, they “steal time away” from their corner by secretly meeting at Elisa’s room to talk and beautify each other. While the desire for owning a beauty parlor is expressed throughout the film, it is the scene when Elisa confronts Placido, demanding to see all the money they have made to open their salon, that the director more explicitly brings forward the dialectical relationship between dreams and reality. While for Elisa and Lulú their dream grounds the possibility of a future otherwise, Placido conceives of Elisa’s dreams and fantasies in opposition to reality. For him, Elisa is only a prostitute whose desire for marriage and business ownership is nothing but female chimeras. The scene progressively turns violent as Elisa shows him the little notebook where Lulú has kept a record of all their earnings since their arrival in Barcelona. “What is this?” Placido asks angrily. He slaps the protagonist, telling her to quit the fantasy. The reality is that she has no money, no papers, and he has expenses to pay. But as Judith Butler affirms, “Fantasy is not the opposite of reality, it is what reality forecloses, and as a result, it defines the limits of reality, constituting it as its constitutive outside. The critical promise of fantasy, when and where it exists, is to challenge the contingent limits for what will and will not be called reality” (Butler 2002, 29). If, as Butler muses, fantasy holds a critical promise, what is the radical potentiality of Elisa’s fantasy? What exactly is the filmmaker trying to convey by creating a character that despite all trials and tribulations never stops dreaming, never stops asserting her right to act upon her dreams? Undoubtedly, the film elicits prostitution as a legitimate form of labor and social life, intelligently showing the audience the ways in which the lives of sex workers are impacted by economic, security, and immigration policies that encroached upon these women’s freedoms to make a living and travel. 130 Yet, one of the most moving aspects of this visual narrative is Elisa’s insistence in trying to reproduce with the male characters the type of filiation she has with Lulú. However, as opposed to her friendship with Lulú, which is grounded on accountability, interdependence, and egalitarian forms of giving, the film portrays the protagonist’s affiliation with the male characters as social relations marked by different modalities of male power and privilege. Throughout the film, the protagonist invites Garcia, Placido, and Marcelo to be part of her dream. In other words, Elisa wants him to be her business partner, to join her and her friend in communal ownership. If it is true that she does articulate her desire for marriage, she always does so in relationship to her dream to open the beauty parlor. Thus, I argue that it is precisely by underscoring Elisa’s desire to reproduce with the male characters the type of relationship that she has with Lulu that the film, on the one hand, poses a critique of capitalism, and on the other, makes social and financial horizontal networks central to a critique of normative (and unequal) legal and social arrangements (e.i. husband/wife, boss/worker, man/woman). Let me explain my point further: One of the critiques leveled against the film is its reinscription of the heteronormative family; and though there is some truth to the form of representation enabled by the film, there are opportunities for a different reading of familial arrangements. For instance, Elisa’s idea of marriage is not a desire to reproduce a capitalist patriarchal union; after all, she tells her children that they are better because they have two fathers. She is not invested in monogamy or happy domesticity. She hopes for something else. And the film evokes this something else through Elisa’s friendship with Lulú as a way of life. That is to say, a future otherwise is evoked through these women’s dream to co-own a place for aesthetic reproduction. It is precisely this sense of female radical interdependency, collective dreaming, and understanding of the self that Placido tries to regulate and bring to an end. Consequently, Beatriz Flores Silva articulates the radical potentiality of friendship and female dreams as everyday practices of solidarity and alternative routes to happiness. 131 IV. DIALING HOME In this section I continue to advance my analysis of motherhood and illegality by looking at En la Puta Vida’s representation of Elisa’s phone calls to her children in Uruguay. I suggest that the phone scenes can be viewed as cinematic moments that reveal to the audience the restriction of freedom and livability experienced by the protagonist, as a transnational mother and sex worker. The film shows Elisa dialing from a different location every time she calls, thus, connecting her relocation from her mother’s house to an old apartment that Garcia rents for her, from Montevideo to Barcelona, and from Spain back to Uruguay. This sense of movement, however, is troubled by the fact that the protagonist makes all her calls from payphones or landlines, phones that are fixed, and that, as opposed to mobile phones, restrain the caller to a particular location. The tension between circulation and fixity is important because it foregrounds one of the central contradictions of free-market global capitalism. That is to say, while neoliberalism ensures the opening up the world to the mobility of capital, it restricts “the movements of people produced by the same unequal global circulation of capital” (Poblete 2003, xxvi). But the telephone scenes also document alternate rhythms of life and familial sociality. What flows through the telephone are the affective and emotional connections and disconnections that exceed the sociological or material readings of sex work and technology as only material aspects of global capital consolidation. As a particular vein of feminist scholarship argues, the figure of the suffering “Third World prostitute” not only fulfills the salvational desires of the Global North, but it is central to narratives of globalism (Fregoso 2003), nationhood, and citizenship (Doezema 1999, 2003). Doezema writes that the figure of the “Third World prostitute” “serves well to symbolize the excess of the global march of capital, and its negative effect on women” (Doezema 2003). Thus, narratives about female movement, trafficking, and sex work need to be understood within a broader context of 132 globalization and the routinized recourses of statecraft and law enforcement that reproduce old modes of captivity and regulation deployed against populations that often exist outside the boundaries of legality. As I argue in my previous chapters, often times the use of what seems obsolete visual/ communication technology affords marginalized/policed populations ways to circumvent surveillance and produce unforeseen routes of connection (and contention) across borders. Throughout this dissertation, I have paid close attention to the role that such technologies play in the lives of transnational mothers, particularly those marked by the conditions of illegality. In a similar manner that the VHS effects/affects Maura’s embodied experience as a transnational mother (See Chapter 2), the telephone represents for Elisa a medium through which she sustains an affective connection with her sons. Elisa’s calls to her children are marked by secrecy, interruption, static, and time restrictions since dialing home requires escaping Placido’s regulation and, hopefully, his punishment for not remaining in her corner. The restoration of contact, if only sonically, then, depends on stealing time away from work. Both joyous and risky, the phone call becomes an audible disruption of time and space, since not only does it interrupt, if only momentarily, the separation between the mother and her children but also requires Elisa to breach the time/space of labor. Being on the phone, then, will come to mean, as Avital Ronnel suggests in a different context, “that contact with the Other has been disrupted; but it also means that the break is never absolute…that contact is never constant nor is the break clean” (Ronnel 1991, 20). Thus, it can be said that though the phone call becomes part of a routinized expectancy, the mother’s voice breaks the everyday life and remakes it. For Elisa, as for many other transnational mothers, dialing home minimizes the physical inaccessibility of the mother who “is not there,” but is always there. The telephone scenes make both seeable and audible the mother who reaches out to say I am here/there. The maternal call renders visible the ways in which the 133 telephone mediates the particular embodied experience of Elisa and her children. As a communication technology, the landline enables closeness in spite of distance, allows for the emotivity of oral discourse without bodily proximity. While the two first calls to her children are made from a street payphone, Elisa makes her last call to Uruguay from the police headquarters. This is one of the most gripping moments in the film because it reveals more explicitly the paradoxes embedded in the protagonist’s condition as a smuggled person, a deceived and exploited sex worker, and a transnational mother. That is to say, it is there, at the police station, that the camera more strikingly exposes Elisa’s hyper-vulnerability as someone socially and legally constructed as both criminal and victim across geopolitical borders. Whereas this cinematic moment can be read as a reinscription of the European male subject as a savior; here, I am less concerned with the film’s sympathetic portrayal of Marcelo as a hero and more with the subtle strategies of narrative subversion that the filmmaker uses to ultimately elicit Elisa as an unapologetic subject who is entitled to the right to movement and who views prostitution as a legitimate way to earn a living and achieve her dream. The scene opens with a shot that captures Elisa sobbing at the police headquarters where she was taken after finding Lulu’s body. She is visibly undone and unresponsive to Marcelo’s attentions. As the scene unfolds, the observer is made aware of the very disparate concerns that weigh down on Marcelo, as a representative of the Spanish state, and Elisa, a displaced and criminalized subject. Whereas Marcelo is concerned with convincing the main character to collaborate with them to catch Placido and his accomplices, the protagonist can only think of claiming her friend’s body, of returning home, and speaking to her children. Breathing heavily, Elisa exclaims: “I want to go back to Uruguay. I have to take Lulu home. Take her home.” “Of course,” Marcelo responds. “Do you have any papers? ID, driver’s license?” Elisa’s negative answer to this question not only lays bare the precariousness of her situation as an undocumented subject, but her 134 ‘no’ and explanation affirms her as a smuggled person, therefore, a criminal who not only entered Spain illegally but as a consenting subject who used forged documents. Flores Silva intelligently conveys the protagonist’s vulnerable situation by overlapping Nicolas’ phone call with the Uruguayan consul in Spain with Elisa’s and Marcelo’s conversation, revealing the issues at stake when women like the protagonist appeal to the law. As opposed to the two previous phone calls in the film where, trough interjecting shots, the camera grants equal visual weight to both speakers, this time we only see and hear Nicolas’ frustration, as he is trying to convince the Uruguayan consul to collaborate with them by providing Elisa with a passport. Nicolas progressively becomes agitated when, apparently, the Uruguayan council is unable to understand the gravity of the situation: “Put whatever name you like, that’s the least important, what is important is that she be free to travel.” It is important to note that this is not the first time that the Uruguayan authorities in Spain are represented in the film as incompetent and unresponsive to Elisa’s situation, for she had sought assistance from them right after Placido began to be physically abusive. Unarguably, the film’s Manichean representation of the Spanish and Uruguayan authorities is reminiscent of dominant human rights discourses, which construct the Global North as the bringer of justice and the bodies of “third world peoples” as the objects of human rights. Given that the film deals with issues of human trafficking and sex work, this is very telling, since this binary opposition is grounded, as many feminist scholars state, on colonial and imperial legacies that specifically construct the body of the Third world prostitute as the site of intervention. But while Nicolas’ conversation with the Uruguayan council does reproduce normative notions of the Global north as the bringer of justice and the “third world” as the object of human rights, Elisa’s response to Marcelo challenges or ruptures dominant discourses of passivity and innocence by portraying the main character, despite her grief and distress, as a woman who 135 questions Marcelo’s understanding of her situation: “Who do you think you are?” “Do you think you are some type of hero? You should start with the guys who spend half of their salary to spend seven minutes with us. Start with them.” Rather than simplifying the issue by strictly blaming Placido, Elisa’s queries posit her situation within a broader network of relations and complicities. Certainly the sympathetic portrayal of Spain can be understood, as Tal argues, as the byproduct of co-production. However, it can also be contextualized within cultural and activist efforts to make sense of the Spanish state’s role in maintaining and expanding the hegemony of a neoliberal order, as well as its involvement in contemporary transnational struggles for human rights and state accountability, like in the case of Augusto Pinochet’s extradition proceedings 67 . It is my contention that this scene does not absolve Spanish institutions from the production of violence against migrants, sex workers and other marginalized subjects; rather, it actively captures the limitations of state institutions to “protect” and assist a woman whose multiple illegalities are produced and necessitated by the patriarchal state and the law that Marcelo represents. Let me return to the last phone call Elisa makes in the film. After Nicolas fails to obtain a passport for the protagonist to return home, the camera captures the main character getting up and trying to walk out of the station. She is visibly overwhelmed by Marcelo’s questions; and even after he tries to explain to Elisa that she can end up like her friend if she does not do anything about it, the protagonist can only offer one response: She wants to go back to Uruguay. However, this time she also expresses her desire to talk to her children. By then, as stated above, Nicolas’ conversation with the Uruguayan counsel is over and the audience sees him turning to Marcelo to exclaim: “There is no one in that country that is serious or responsible.” Marcelo responds with another question “What’s the country code for Uruguay? “What do I know! Do you think I call Uruguay every day?” Says Nicolas. “There must be a phonebook somewhere!” As Marcelo is looking for the phonebook, 67 Pinochet’s arrest was only made possible by Spanish magistrate Baltasar Gazcon’s indictment of the Chilean dictator. 136 the viewer watches Elisa dialing home. The camera lingers on the protagonist’s face as we continue to hear Marcelo yelling: Does anyone have the list of country codes? Damn it, does anyone know the country code for Uruguay? “For God’s sake, no one in this office knows the area code for Uruguay?” It is at this moment, when the camera is focused on Marcelo’s futile effort to figure out how to dial to Uruguay, that we hear Elisa talking on the phone: “Hola Hola Teresa.” What? He didn’t send you any money? But, where are they? In what orphanage? No, what orphanage? I have to talk to them! The scene turns very emotional; the camera remains on Marcelo’s face. It captures his astonishment as Elisa desperately yells at Teresa, who abruptly hangs up, leaving the main character uttering to the receiver. At the end, the scene renders both the Uruguayan and Spanish state representatives incapable of really assisting or grasping Elisa’s situation. This is a cinematic moment in which Elisa’s alterity becomes hypervisible. The protagonist’s knowledge of Uruguay’s international area code situates her in a particular domain of experience: as a transnational marginal subject who is always dialing home to remain connected, to give form and direction to her maternal affect. It is only after this call, when she finds out that her children have been taken by the Uruguayan state, that she agrees to collaborate with the Spanish police. Ultimately, the scene at the police station is important because it explicitly posits Elisa as always already outside the protection of the law, outside the possibility of familial normalcy, and outside of good citizenship standing. The link between technology and modernity is often thought as a form of social determinism. Contrary to other technological devices, research on the telephone is very limited. According to Amparo Lasen, the role the phone has played in modernization has to be understood in relationship to the uses of this device. As she explains, The telephone offers the possibility of mixing heterogeneous social worlds. That is at the same time a useful opportunity and a dreadful threat of intrusion. The phone embedded the social risk of permitting outsiders to cross boundaries of race, gender and class without penalty. In this way it altered the customary orders of secrecy and publicity, as well as the customary proprieties of address and interaction. For instance, the anonymity of the telephone facilitated courtship beyond parental control, promoted infidelity but also helped to track down the adulterous. It fed the sexual fantasies 137 (in the early days many of those concerned the mainly female operators). The most disturbing assault in social distance exploited telephone anonymity (Lasen 2003, 22). As this quotes shows, historically the phone, like other technologies, has functioned to track down undesired behaviors and improve police surveillance; but it has also provided the possibility to subvert social control. As the film shows, as a technological object, the telephone plays an important role in the constitution of Elisa’s and her children’s (inter)subjectivities. The phone calls, as a means to promoting care amidst displacement and regulation, literally call Elisa’s transnational family into existence. The maternal call is a refusal to familial disconnection. Whatever flows through the telephone, whatever affective or emotional exchanges between the mother and her children, as part of their private memories, escapes and exceeds the ways in which the State sees these women, their role in the society, and their relationship to others. In her study of objects and transcultural cinema, Laura Marks suggests that “objects encode both the discursive shifts and the material conditions of displacement.” Meaning, she argues, “is encoded in objects not metaphorically but through physical contact…Objects are not inert and mute but they tell stories and describe trajectories”(2000, 79-80). While Marks’ study focuses on transnational objects, her study is important for my discussion of the telephone because it considers the ways in which objects encode social processes. For Marks, cinema is capable of “discovering the values that inheres in objects: the discursive layers that take material form in them, the unresolved traumas that become embedded in them, and the history of material interactions that they encode” (78). What are the stories and the unresolved traumas that become embed in the telephone once the transnational mother comes in contact with it? While the telephone (i.e. the landline) cannot necessarily be identified as a transnational object in the ways that Marks defines them, the film does shows, how Elisa partially incorporates this technological object “in the process of reorganizing her subjectivity” away from home. The phone calls reveal to the viewer the deeper texture of her life, dreams and fears as a female and mother who resides outside the boundaries of legality. Like the 138 VHS video that Maura plays to remember her children, the landline that Elisa uses to communicate can be perceived as an “obsolete” form of technology; but for subaltern subjects these are objects that carry the traces of their memories, their histories, and daily struggles. In a world in which global regimes of surveillance and law enforcement ensnarl new and old modes of regulation and captivity, these “obsolete” technologies are crucial to the imagination and rearticulation of new forms of subjectivities, practices, and relationships with both objects and people. IV. CONCLUSION The incorporation of Latin Americans into host nations varies depending on global historical relationships. For instance, during the 1980s, Latin Americans had certain privileges that made legalization processes and naturalization in Spain easier than in the United States. Some of these privileges were based on the role that many Latin American nations played in granting political asylum to many Spanish citizens during the Franco regime. However, restrictions and regulations have increased as more “undesired migration” takes place. In addition to this, as Andrew Geddes argues, debates about (im)migration to Europe have become intensely focused on social rights, welfare state integration, and social cohesion. In order to analyze the dynamics underpinning relations between migration and the state, one has to distinguish between different kinds of states (Welfare State, Post-Social State, etc), forms of migration, and the specific historical moment. 68 Though historically specific state and racial formations, debates about international (im)migraton to Europe reflect those taking place in the United States, as they center around the so-called scarcity of ‘national resources,’ desired migration (guest workers, professional and skilled labor) and/or unwanted flows (asylum seekers, illegal migrants, sex-workers). 68 See, Andrew Geddes, “Migration and the Welfare State in Europe” (2003); Cynthia Wright, “Moments of Emergence: Organizing by and with Undocumented and Non-Citizen People in Canada after September 11” (2005); Jonathan X. Inda, Targeting Immigrants: Government, Technology and Ethics (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell 2005). 139 Though much has been argued about the negative implications of collapsing the categories of migration and prostitution with trafficking, Flores Silva boldly conflates all of these value-loaded markings in the character of Elisa. By conferring all forms of criminality and illicit ways of being into a single transnational mother, the director grapples with the ways in which delinquency and sexual deviancy are often linked to the most marginalized sectors of society. Rather than distancing or disavowing the representation of a highly stigmatized subject, she turns to these “negative” categories as a way of complicating our notions of female identity, the “good” life, agency and subjection, and one-dimensional understandings of sex work. Flores Silva’s work opens the door to critique the representation and construction of the Third World prostitute. As Doezema explains, “dominant discourses regarding the “Third World prostitute” and human trafficking attempt to “purify” the state through the criminalization of non-normative sexualities and by restricting women’s ability to migrate both within a country and between countries (Doezema 31-32). En la Puta Vida challenges hegemonic narratives about sex work and female identity by moving beyond binaries of subjection and agency, coercion and consent. The protagonist’s dream of co-owning a beauty parlor allows us to ask what happens when the money sex workers earn within a capitalist framework is put into non-capitalist endeavors or distributed in non-capitalist ways? Perhaps, one of the most powerful aspects of the film is its portrayal of a sex worker and transnational mother whom, despite her circumstances, never stops imagining the possibility of co- owning a beauty parlor. Her dream or fantasy offers a future otherwise, a challenge to what is and will be called her reality. 140 POSTSCRIPT A Foretold Deportation On August 19 th 2007, on the same day but seventeen years after I reunited with my mother, Elvira Arellano, a 34 year-old Mexican undocumented immigrant and single mother, was separated from her U.S. born child and deported to Tijuana. In a post 9/11 anti- immigrant climate, Arellano’s case circulated widely in the media and her figure as an undocumented mother was strategically mobilized by both nativist and pro-immigrant rights activists. Arellano’s story first became news in August 15, 2006, when she courageously challenged a final order to report to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for deportation by taking refuge and seeking sanctuary at Adalberto United Methodist Church in Humboldt Park, Chicago. Her act of disobedience to U.S. immigration authorities, as scholar Nicholas De Genova (2010) posits, necessitated her radical “immobilization” and the politicization of her life as migrant worker and mother, as she “voluntarily” confined herself to the church’s premises. That is, through sanctuary, as an intentional form of captivity, Arellano enacted her supplicatory yet powerful refusal to be coercively removed from the space of the U.S. nation-state. Though not an exception, Arellano’s case impacted me deeply because it exemplifies the ways in which economic, security, and immigration policies wreak havoc on the everyday lives of marginalized peoples, particularly those populations who often exist outside the boundaries of legality. If as de Genova suggests, “the freedom of movement remains the freedom of life itself, not merely the mundane necessity to make a living, but the freedom to truly live” (2010, 58), how does the figure of the undocumented (transnational) mother come to symbolize transnational violence and nativist ideologies of belonging? What forms of sovereignty and selfhood trouble these constructions? Where and how do displaced mothers look for “better” opportunities? How do they re-make their lives despite the modes of regulation and captivity that impinge on their dreams, desires, and their pursuits for (alternate forms of) happiness? How do the stories of these mothers 141 push us to critically rethink what exactly it means to be a “good”, “responsible”, and “deserving” subject? While Arellano’s refusal to appear before the immigration authorities in 2006 marks the beginning of her notoriety, therefore, her hypervisibility as the mother of an “anchor-child,” her history of dispossession and subalterity predates her claims for sanctuary and her illegal crossings of a densely militarized topography: Born in San Miguel Caurahuango, Michoacan, an agricultural town in the southwest of Mexico and one of the main states of Mexican migration to the Unites States, Arellano belongs to a peasant class that historically has been affected by a series of land reforms, binational labor contracts and the long shadow of structural violence. As the granddaughter of a guest worker for the Emergency Farm Labor Program (commonly known as The Bracero Program, 1942-1964), her family was part of a cross-border labor market and engaged in transnational circuits of caring even before she was born. Impacted by NAFTA and Salinismo, Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s technocratic vision of neoliberal reform, Arellano first migrated to the United States in 1997: a first attempt that culminated in her detention and deportation. Two years later, she made her way to Oregon. Already a single mother, by the year 2000, she was working as a janitor at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, one of the main sites of surveillance, raids, and detentions after 9/11/2001. In 2002, soon after the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) became part of the Department of Homeland Security, and all immigration functions where transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Arellano was arrested during a security sweep, convicted of Social Security Fraud, and ordered to appear before the immigration authorities. After a long year in sanctuary at Adalberto United Methodist Church, public protests by immigrant rights activist, and a vocal refusal to appear before the immigration court, she was arrested while coming out of an immigrant-family rights talk at Olvera Street. 142 Her foretold deportation shows us that although indocumentation is the historical condition through which this woman experiences her maternity, her marginalization predated her illegal crossing(s). As many scholars contend, histories of Latin American migration are, for the most part, embodied stories of overlapping regimes of subjection that position specific subjects, particularly those females marked by subaltern or colonial difference, as always already residing in a terrain of displacement, extreme vulnerability, misrecognition and death (Franco 1999; Mignolo 2005; Coutin 2000; Menjivar 2005, 2006). Here, it is important to note that Arellano’s year of sanctuary and deportation in August 19 th 2007 took place right after massive mobilizations against The Border Protection, Anti Terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Act of 2005, popularly referred to as H.R. 4437 or the Sensenbrenner bill. Across the United States, a myriad of histories enlaced as thousands gathered to protest a congressional legislation that divested value from immigrant lives, collapsed terrorism and illegal migration, and construed caring for unauthorized aliens as a felony. An image of excess, the grotesque body of the alien over-flooded the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, Denver, New York, Washington and other cities (Duran 2007; Hondagneu- Sotelo 2008; Summers-Sandoval 2008). Participants turned into an embodied economy of symbols, as they carried signs, banners and flags that gestured toward the illegal immigrant as a body constituted in the contradictory space where capitalism meets nationalism (Summers-Sandoval 2005). It was during this moment of nativist sentiment and immigrant rights mobilizations that Elvira Arellano came to embody a mother whose displacement articulated the detrimental impact of market-based reforms in Mexico’s agricultural sector, the realities of post 9/11/2001 surveillance, and the painful results of tactics of state terror through deportation. According to Amy Skonieczny “a particular discursive construction privileging traditional, dominant American myths made [the North American Free Trade Agreement’s,] passage in Congress possible” (Skonieczny 2001, 435). As this author argues, public discourses about the 143 American Dream and American Exceptionalism constructed NAFTA as the extension of US values of “democracy, freedom, and liberal economies around the world.” 69 As this dissertation has shown, these same American myths continue to be mobilized after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to advance punitive (and often fatal) policies that conflate terrorism, illegality, and trafficking. For females like Arellano there is, literally, no easy way in or out. Labeled as a mother undeserving of US citizenship and ineligible for political asylum because she is not at risk of persecution, incarceration, or death in her country of origin, Arellano’s conditions of exit, both from Mexico and the United States, reveal the inner workings of systemic patterns of disadvantage and hyper- exclusion across geopolitical borders: Her case forces us to critically rethink what exactly it means to be at risk. Arellano’s case and the sanctuary and immigrant rights movements advocating in her favor make visible the otherwise unacknowledged ways in which US foreign and national policy has a detrimental impact on people’s daily lives. The story of Mexican deportee Elvira Arellano shows us how, as social subjects, these females do not exist in a historical vacuum. The mobilization of Elvira Arellano’s case and her image as the mother of “an anchor-child” and as the embodiment of immigrants’ struggles illustrates the effects of displacement and its cultural meaning in contemporary immigration debates. What would happen if the immigrant rights movement makes the undocumented mother the center of its claims and demands? Why are alternative cultural representations of mothers like Arellano important? What kind of work do films about motherhood and illegality do, for whom, and to what end? How do they elicit caring for the illegal alien as a way of opening up alternative forms of sociality, politics, and collective and individual futures? 69 Amy Skonieczny states, that “NAFTA came to represent two opposing sensibilities: one that emphasized U.S. national identity as positive, strong, hopeful, and economically prosperous and one that emphasized the negative image of Mexico to call for protection of American identity from corrupt outside forces. A battle of contrasting American myths and cultural symbols resulted in a dominant NAFTA discourse that allowed the simultaneous acceptance of Mexico as inferior and as a valuable trading partner” (2001, 435). 144 The same year that Arellano was deported, Patricia Riggen’s La Misma Luna (Under the Same Moon) was released. Like Beatriz Flores Silva’s En la Puta Vida, La Misma Luna has been criticized for being a highly sentimental old-fashioned family melodrama with a recognizable storyline. Though the film is not necessarily about a deportee mother, like El Viaje de Teo, La Misma Luna narrates the perils of illegal border crossing, the threat of deportation, and family separation from the perspective of a Mexican child. Essentially, Riggen’s film tells the parallel stories of nine-year-old Carlitos and his mother Rosario. After the unexpected death of his grandmother, the boy embarks on a journey to find his mother who has been working in Los Angeles as a domestic worker for four years. He is smuggled across the border by Martha (America Ferrera) and David (Jesse Garcia), a young Chicana and his brother, who are trying to make money to pay for college tuition. Lamentably, the immigration authorities confiscate their van because they have a record of unpaid parking tickets. As the van is being towed, the spectator sees Carlitos hiding inside the backseat. After encountering a risky situation with a guy who attempts to trade him for money, Carlitos meets Reyna, woman who feeds and houses a group of undocumented male immigrants. Instructed by Reyna, these men take Carlitos with them in order to drive him to L.A. after work. Unfortunately, the factory where they work picking tomatoes is raided by immigration authorities whom arrest most of the laborers, except for Carlitos and Enrique, an undocumented worker who rejects Carlitos from the moment they first met. Henceforth, the film follows Carlitos and Enrique until they make it to East Los Angeles. La Misma Luna eventually concludes with the mother and child reuniting after the boy’s one-week journey. Riggen’s first feature film is not subtle about its pro-immigrant politics. As she states in one interview, when people ask her if the film is a true story, she responds that it “is based on 4 million true stories.” For her, immigration is not just about statistics. It is about people’s struggles, 145 suffering, and dreams. 70 But En la Puta Vida and La Misma Luna are not only similar in their deployment of melodrama, they also make the maternal body central to the political stakes these two female directors are trying to articulate. Much like Flores Silva’s film, La Misma Luna, makes the maternal call constitutive to the transnational subjectivities of the undocumented mother and her child. Furthermore, Riggen’s film proposes the maternal as a function by evoking the transformation of a male character (i.e. Enrique) into a “maternal figure.” I do not think it is a coincidence that films such as En la Puta Vida and La Misma Luna give so much cinematic relevance to the maternal call. The filmic rendering of the undocumented mother calling her child makes visible the complex texture of the social relations that are produced and constituted trough the routinized act of calling “home.” These relations are of course different from the type of technologically mediated experiences that privileged subjects with visas and work permits might have while traveling or working abroad. That is to say, if there is one thing that the maternal call reveals is how phone calls are integral ways in which undocumented mothers and their loved ones understand and remember their experiences as marginalized transnational families whose freedom of movement has been denied. But, as I have stated before, while the phone call might express the (im)possibility of reunification, it also calls forward the wholeness of people’s lives. The phone call expresses joy, sadness, anger, fear, frustration and hope all at once, showing the viewer that these mothers are more than disposable and exploitable bodies. Much like the homemade video fostered and made possible the materialization of different type of maternal affect in the context of separation for Maura (Chapter 2), the phone call assists, transforms, and enables the birthing of a interconnection through a sort of ritualistic quotidian practice: a Sunday call. These films, as visual media, thus, render visible the important affective role that these technologies play in shaping the experiences of (dis)connection between undocumented 70 See http://www.nycmovieguru.com/patriciariggen.html 146 transnational mothers and their families. While La Misma Luna opens with Rosario having a nightmare about the time when she illegally crossed the border, the film intelligently turns to the quotidian, the repetitive Sunday morning activities of mother and child, to bring attention to the overlooked aspects of lived experience. We see Carlitos and Rosario getting up, making the bed, cooking breakfast, but we are unaware of who they are and their spatial separation. The sequence is crafted so that their parallel morning activities make the viewer believe that they are in the same house. But their separation becomes visible when the camera captures them marking different calendars: For every Sunday, Rosario has the name Carlitos written. For every Sunday, Carlitos has a drawing of a telephone with the word mami next to it. The audience is able to figure out that it is Carlitos’ birthday because Rosario marked it in her calendar. As such, the Sunday phone call marks a kind of annular time, a weekly moment when the call is anticipated, expected, or awaited. In their calendars both mother and child mark the time set aside for the phone call that is regularized such that routine is broken by ritual. It is through this Sunday birthday phone call that the viewer starts to hear the fears, dreams and desires that ground Rosario’s subjectivity as a transnational undocumented mother. The sequence of the maternal phone call effectively dramatizes the specific socio-historical context of Rosario’s and Carlitos experiences. It captures the fluctuation of the mother’s and child’s emotions, as it shows how their initial excitement slowly fades away when Carlitos tells his mom that he is ready to go to Los Angeles. In a teary voice, Rosario tries to explain that it is not easy to bring him without papers; she has been working really hard, looking for another lawyer since the other one defrauded her. But when Carlitos expresses to his mother that four years is already too long, Rosario changes the subject and simply asks Carlitos: Do you need anything? I need you, responds her son. Both question and answer produce tears and silence, making visible the cost of providing for a better future. It is then that Carlitos asks her mom to describe her surroundings. Given Rosario’s 147 reaction, the viewer realizes that this is also part of the Sunday ritual since Carlitos seems to know all the landmarks of this corner by memory. As she begins to describe the corner where she is standing, the film shows Carlitos opening his eyes and imagining that he is now standing in East Los Angeles. By doing so, the filmmaker shows the viewer how the maternal phone call produces East Los Angeles in Carlitos’ social imaginary; in this sense, the call imbues a distant place, a place often elicited in Hollywood as a “bad” neighborhood, with a different type of social meaning and value. But just when the filmmaker has made the viewer aware of the ways in which the phone call draws mother and child emotionally closer, an electronic voice on the phone reminds them that the only have 20 seconds left on their call. Later in the film, the possibility of reuniting with his mother would depend on Carlitos finding this corner, the payphone from where his mother calls him every Sunday. That is to say, to find his mother Carlitos has to re-call this place from memory. As I have argued throughout the dissertation, the instrumental visuality typical of capitalism, consumerism, surveillance and ethnography has often rendered raced motherhood as aberrant, in need of management and control. Cinematic representations of transnational motherhood and illegality can potentially rupture or complicate normative notions of gender, the familial and mothering without effacing the radical difference of these females. The visual rendering of the maternal phone acknowledges the ways in which “people are more than they appear to be, and [that] life means more than can be seen, known, or understood. 71 ” For Kaja Silverman (1995), visual texts have the capacity to reeducate the look, to teach us how to see socially devalued bodies or the persecuted Other differently. As such, visual texts can activate a different ethics of vision. I want to suggest that the cinematic power of the maternal call resides in its potentiality to illuminate memories of (dis)connections that normative representations attempt to cast away. Thus, the image of the maternal call can function as a “borrowed memory.” It is through these borrowed memories 71 See, Sam B. Girgus, Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics, and the Feminine (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 148 that, according to Silverman, “we can accede physically to pains, pleasures and struggles which are far removed not only from our own, but from what normative representation validates as well” (1995, 4). But as Silverman contends, identification with what is culturally disprized is not enough. “It is crucial that this identification conform to an externalizing rather than internalizing logic—that we identify excorporatively rather than incorporatively, and thereby, respect the otherness of the newly illuminated bodies” (2). That is to say, this sort of identification does not do away with the alterity of subaltern female experiences. Open to the unfamiliar and extra-familial, to both male and female subjects, this type of identificatory space must be non-appropriative. But just as the film makes the phone call central to elicit the viewer’s identification with the transnational mother, as I stated above, the reunion of mother and child is made possible by progressively turning Enrique, an undocumented immigrant, into a maternal figure. In other words, in order for Carlitos to make it to his destination, Enrique has to assume responsibility for a stranger and identify with the transnational mother. He must assume a role he does not want to perform: the maternal. While every other male immigrant in the film embraces Carlitos, Enrique rejects the boy from the beginning. When Carlitos starts to follow him after the immigration raid, he tells him that he does not want to take care of a child. Despite Enrique’s explicit refusal to help him, Carlitos clings to this guy as his only source to get to his mother. Through out the film Enrique is portrayed as aggressive, resentful, and guarded. And it is only when he perceives that the boy might be in danger that he shows any concern for the child. For instance, there is a scene in the film when he yells at Carlitos to stop following him, to leave him alone. As Carlitos starts to walk away, he sees a suspicious guy walking behind the boy. Enquire yells at Carlitos to wait for him: “Espereme mijo” (wait for me son). Against his will, Enrique starts to warm up to the child. And it is through the interactions between these two characters that the viewer learns that Enrique’s main concern and fear is the threat of 149 deportation. When Carlitos confesses to Enrique that he has never met his father but that he knows that he lives in the town where they are staying, Enrique convinces the boy to call his father and ask him for a ride to L.A. The articulation of an immigrant politics with a unapologetic feminist orientation become hyper visible when, during the meeting with his father, Carlitos has to defends his mom when the father angrily accuses her of being an irresponsible mother for leaving her son for so many years: No tanto como tu (Not as irresponsible as you), the boy exclaims. The child defends his mother against the moralistic logic of the father, a father who despite agreeing to take Carlitos to Los Angeles leaves him waiting and never shows up. The depiction of the father as someone who rejects Carlitos’ request for help can be seen as the film’s feminist critique of dominant masculinity, a normative subjectivity constituted through the simultaneous negation and glorification of the mother. The father’s behavior elicits a change in both Carlitos and Enrique. This is the first time that the audience sees the young boy angrily questioning his mother’s love for him. It is at this point that Enrique agrees to take him to L.A. And in the same manner that Carlitos stood up for his mom when her actions were judged as the evidence of bad parenting, Enrique refuses Carlitos’ indictment of Rosario: “Wait a minute! I know you are pissed off, but don’t take it out on her! You can’t blame her for what your dad did. Your mom loves you Carlitos. What do you mean why [did she go so far]? So you had a better life. You ungrateful brat! Tell me how you’ve liked these past few days? You liked picking tomatoes? Hiding from the INS? Or washing dishes just for a meal and a place to sleep? No one chooses to live this way Carlitos…unless they have a good reason.. And I am sure that for her you are that reason! (Riggens 2008) This is a different Enrique, a person who slowly begins to show his affection through sarcasm, someone who recognizes Carlitos’ mom as a subject in struggle whose decisions cannot be measured by the moral law of the Father. Once in East Los Angeles, finding the corner with all the landmarks (the phone booth, a Pizza Hut, a Laundromat, a party supply store, and a mural) becomes a demoralizing task. By then, 150 Enrique has changed from being distant and apathetic to a supportive figure who tries to encourage Carlitos. After a long day of looking for the pay phone without success, they end up sitting at a park. The instrumental music played during this scene elicits a feeling of both hope and melancholia. Carlitos asks Enrique if he can tell him a secret. “Another one? I don’t think so. Remember what happened when you told me about your dad?” But even though Enrique says no, Carlitos continues talking: “You said that people change. When I came on this trip I thought that my mom didn’t love me anymore but I was wrong.” At this point, the audience sees the boy getting up and taking a spinning top from one of his jacket’s pockets. The boy puts the spinning top in Enrique’s hand and says: “Thanks for everything Enrique.” This is probably the very first time that the viewer sees Enrique becoming undone, completely moved by the child’s gesture. The young immigrant smiles and looks away. The camera captures Carlitos holding Enrique’s hand as he says: “We are never going to find my mom.” But Enrique grabs the boys’ hand and says: “What do you mean? Of course we will! I didn’t come all this way to give up now. At what time does your mom call you tomorrow.” “10 am sharp,” responds Carlitos. “So we get up early and keep looking.” “Before dawn? Asks the boy. With a full and reassuring smile Enrique responds, “Sure…now go to sleep.” As stated before, the film makes the threat of deportation central to the everyday experiences of undocumented immigrants. La Misma Luna’s critique of deportation as an increasingly routinized recourse of statecraft and law enforcement that restricts freedoms and livability is explicitly articulated at the end of the film, when Enrique is arrested by the LAPD. The scene of the arrest begins with the image of Carlitos and Enrique sleeping in a beach at the park. The camera captures Enrique waking up and walking away from the park. Suddenly, two police officers drive by and see Carlitos sleeping by himself on the bench. The officers approach the boy who wakes up and panics when he does not see Enrique: What are you doing here boy? Why don’t 151 you come with us? The officers ask. “No, no, no, I’m with my friend.” At that moment, the camera transitions to a wide shot of Enrique walking towards the bench, holding a cup of coffee. But when Enrique sees the cops, he stops and starts to walk away. “Is that your friend?” The officers ask. Realizing what is at stake, Carlitos looks down and says no. As Carlitos’ starts to wrestle with the cops, Enrique’s profile appears on the screen. The camera focuses on Enrique, who is looking away, simply hearing the young boy screaming. The background music, a track with intense drumbeats, heightens the sense of terror and fear. Contrary to the boy’s father, Enrique responds to the child’s call for help: “Hey, leave him alone?” Enrique yells. And in order to get the officers’ off Carlitos, he throws the coffee at the officers, who turn around and start chasing him. Petrified, Rosario’s son witnesses the officers chasing his friend, who keeps yelling, commanding Carlitos to run: “Corre, corre vete. Corre corre!” Slowly the boy begins to run but looks back, stops and looks at his friend, who is now on the ground being handcuffed. At this point, the camera fixes on the undocumented immigrant’s face. Enrique lets out an affirmative smile and nods yes. Carlitos stares at him, turns around and begins to run. After his initial rejection of the boy, at the end, Enrique surrenders for/to Rosario’s child. In his book Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics, and the Feminine, Sam B. Girgus states, that for Levinas, ethics means breaking from the self for the Other (2010). According to Levinasean philosophical ethics, moments of inexplicable generosity or unimaginable sacrifices for others offer us something that exceeds the logic of consumption or instrumentalization 72 . While Levinas’ work can be criticized for “objectifying women to facilitate the dominant male as subject in is ascension to transcendence,” his insistence on radical alterity above the notion of totality has been generative for some feminist scholars (Girgus 173). As I stated in my theoretical introduction, 72 See, Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, Eds. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernascon, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996). Also see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/levinas/ 152 philosopher Lisa Guenther has developed a feminist theory of maternity that rereads the figure of the mother in Levinas. Guenther states that turning the act of giving life into a secondary act is bounded to the constitution of the self-possessed and self-made masculinist subject: a process that requires the mother to exists as an absence-presence (2006). Informed by Levinas’ treatise on hospitality to the Other, she suggests the feminine as a model for ethical giving that “commands me to become like her for another.” Guenther’s meditation on responsibility is based on the givenness of existence and a feminist politics that must imagine giving as a refusal of possession. This theory of feminine embodiment “requires me not that I forget the feminine Other but rather that I become like her in giving hospitality to the Other” (61). Thus her claim of maternal embodiment (to be like a maternal body) “demands a reinterpretation of gender and sexual difference along ethical lines” in order to imagine non-patriarchal meanings of motherhood where familial relations are no longer constrained to the triad of mother, father and child (55). Enrique becomes like a maternal figure, and it is in his becoming like a maternal body that the film offers us the possibility to imagine a kind of giving that emerges from giving; a giving that emerges from a kind of refusal to forget that which has been debased and criminalized: the undocumented mother. What would this mean in a political context that criminalizes not only those who reside outside the boundaries of legality, but those willing to aid them? 73 The film’s last scene is highly emotional, in my opinion, almost painful to watch. After running away from the cops, Carlitos coincidentally finds the phone booth from where his mother has been calling for the past four years. Rosario is there, standing next to the phone, waiting. He sees her and yells, Mamá. While the director could have concluded this story by allowing these two 73 Among these bills and protocols are The Border Protection, Anti Terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Act of 2005, Arizona’s Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (2010) and The Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, and more recently, California Proposition 35, Ban on Human Trafficking and Sex Slavery (2012). 153 characters any sort of physical proximity (a hug, a kiss), even until the end they stand away from each other, separated by a street with continuous flow of traffic, almost reminiscent of the border: “No, no, don’t cross”, Rosario yells. “Mama, I am here.” Rosario pushes the button so the light might change sooner. The camera transitions from a wide angle of the street to a close-up of Rosario’s teary face and moves back to Carlitos’; then it moves back to Rosario’s and again to the boy’s face. Then, an extreme close up of an image of a traffic sign with a red-hand signaling stop fills the screen; suddenly, it changes to a silhouette of a walking figure indicating GO. It is with this visual symbol that Riggens concludes Under the Same Moon, a traffic sign signaling, perhaps, that borders need to be transgressed in order for true ethics to be possible, that the freedom of movement remains the freedom of life itself. 74 74 The postulation that “borders will need to be transgressed in order for true ethics to be possible” comes from Eileen A. Joy’s essay “Exteriority Is Not a Negation But a Marvel: Hospitality, Terrorism, Levinas, Beowulf.” Referring to Levinas’ infinite and unconditional hospitality she asks, “How… might Levinas' thought be seen as a provocation to think the passage between the ethical . . .and the political, at a moment in the history of humanity and of the Nation-State when the persecution of all of these hostages—the foreigner, the immigrant (with or without papers), the exile, the refugee, those without a country, or State, the displaced person or population (so many distinctions that call for careful analysis)— seems, on every continent, open to a cruelty without precedent?... One could even say that present crimes against humanity actually intensify the urgency of Levinas' voice on the matter, and we might also ask how Levinas' hospitality marks (or opens) an important door [porte] into a dwelling that must ultimately be "beyond the State in the State"? 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Abstract (if available)

Abstract "The Breaking and Remaking of Everyday Life: Illegality, Maternity & Displacement in the Americas" is a hemispheric feminist study that examines political and cultural representations of mothers who exist outside the boundaries of legality. Legality in the dissertation is defined by the legal structures that subjectify immigrant women and their reproductive lives, situating them within lifelong networks of surveillance and disciplinary relations. My inquiry specifically focuses on contemporary independent films that evoke the experience of Latin/a American transnational single motherhood in relationship to sex work, drug trafficking, and undocumented migration. By focusing on the complex terrain of cultural representation, I discuss the ways in which liberal models of citizenship and agency have historically policed, repressed and extracted surplus from feminized bodies. I additionally delve into the ways in which these visual texts represent forms of female intimacy and social space that mitigate coercive conditions of labor and social abjection. ❧ "The Breaking and Remaking of Everyday Life" is animated, on the one hand, by my personal quest to make sense of my experiences as the daughter of a transnational mother. On the other, it is driven by my questions regarding the political dimensions of cultural production in the lives of women whose happiness and survival, as Argentinean philosopher Enrique Dussel asserts, often times necessitates the breaking of the law. Incorporating film critique and interpretative, textual, and discursive analysis, my dissertation demonstrates how these films are visual registers of forms of cultural memory and daily struggle that stretch beyond certain kinds of sociological work about illegality and raced motherhood and what is available within mainstream media. These cinematic texts, though often in contradictory ways, operate as important sites for narrating the social, political and cultural obstacles to fulfilling daily life. I argue that illegality produces extreme vulnerability for mothers who are outside of the possibility of familial normalcy, a precondition to achieving full citizenship standing. I further contend that the body of the transnational Latin/a American mother becomes a historical archive for both modernity’s violence and hope as an affective state that propels these mothers forward in daily life. ❧ This dissertation moves towards a critical frame that centers on female displacement and immigrant maternity in the post 1990s era of immigration and state security policies, exclusions and proliferation of political discourses regarding maternal representation. I theorize motherhood and illegality as contradictory sites of subjection and possibility, contributing to transnational feminist work that challenges normative depictions of “unfit mothers” as “irresponsible subjects” whom are always already in need of regulation. This project also adds to the breadth of scholarship that posits popular culture as an important site for the enactment of identity, belonging, and cultural and political contestations.-

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Asset Metadata

Creator Vera-Rosas, Gretel H. (author)

Core Title The breaking and remaking of everyday life: illegality, maternity and displacement in the Americas

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 08/10/2013

Defense Date 08/08/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag film,illegality,OAI-PMH Harvest,sex work,trafficking,transnational motherhood,undocumented migration

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Gomez-Barris, Macarena (committee chair), Halberstam, Judith (committee member), Imre, Anikó (committee member)

Creator Email elipse.carmin@gmail.com,verarosa@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-320442

Unique identifier UC11292598

Identifier etd-VeraRosasG-1993.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-320442 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-VeraRosasG-1993.pdf

Dmrecord 320442

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Vera-Rosas, Gretel H.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA