Alma College, USA

“What can account for the fact that certain bodies are hyper-exposed, brightly visible, and magnified, while others are hidden, missing, and vanished?” Monica Casper and Lisa Jean Moore, Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility

“The category of the ‘human’ retains within itself the workings of the power differential of race as part of its own historicity. But the history of the category is not over, and the ‘human’ is not captured once and for all. That the category is grafted in time, and that it works through excluding a wide range of minorities means that its rearticulation will begin precisely at the point where the excluded speak to and from such a category.” Judith Butler, Undoing Gender.

“I want to humanize migrants” says Rebecca Cammisa, director of the Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning documentary Which Way Home (2009). “With my film, I want to humanize migrants in a dehumanizing system; put a human face on discourses of immigration.” She wants to “vizibilize” invisible migrants, specifically children, through the vérité style documentary that follows unaccompanied child migrants. These children travel by freight train across Mexico in their quest to reach the U.S. for reasons such as longing to reunite with family members, planning to work to send money home to help support their families, and hoping to be adopted and to be “re-born.” I worked with Rebecca on this film as a field producer and translator—my first foray behind the scenes of a film rather than sitting in the audience or viewing a film from behind a scholar’s critical lens. Working with a film and a director with such goals—humanizing the dehumanized; making visible the invisible—inspired me to question the representation of migrants on the big screen. Not wanting to analyze documentary (for fear of being too close to my own film), I wondered how similar questions might play out in fiction films. Through examples from primarily Mexican films (and co-productions) from the past ten years that take up the topic of immigration, this article analyzes the participation of recent border fiction films in the discourses of (de) humanization and (in)“visiblization” of celluloid migrants. [2]

What does it mean to be human? Humanized? Dehumanized? Even if we can agree upon the universal category of human as referring to the scientific species of Homo sapiens, we must also concede that the conceptualization of what it means to be human is far from universal, but rather (re)constructed through time and space according to specific socio-cultural (and economic) lenses. Colonial (and neo-colonial) discourses are rife with the suggestion that some humans are more or less so than others (questioning whether a particular group has a soul, cognitive functions, animalistic qualities, etc.) as justification for the domination of one group of humans over another (the Conquest, the slave trade, and the Holocaust come immediately to mind). Parting from a contemporary gender studies perspective, Judith Butler asks, “Which populations have qualified as the human and which have not? What is the history of this category? Where are we in its history at this time?” (38). [3] And, I would add, what is at stake here? How do the images around us, like those we see in film, help shape contemporary conceptualizations of categories of humanity? I frame this essay with Butler’s reflections that expand questions of gender to broader considerations of humanity, reminding us that there are populations that, at this moment in history, are dehumanized.

A New York Times photo from April 24, 2010 of a young girl holding a “We are human” poster at a march in Phoenix to protest Arizona’s SB 1070 (Archibold) and the ubiquitous signs declaring “No human being is illegal” at various pro-immigrant marches, [4] offer telling responses to Butler’s query (especially considering the latter phrase’s origin in the discourse of Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel). Arguably, government policies, some of which date back to the 1800s, have contributed to public discourses that, intentionally or not, have contributed to the dehumanization of different groups of immigrants at different points in time. I suggest that recent policies and anti-immigrant attitudes stem in large part from the failed promises of NAFTA (The North American Free Trade Agreement), a trade agreement signed in 1993 that was sold to the public as a panacea to reduce illegal immigration, but instead has contributed to its increase. [5] For this essay I concentrate on fiction films that reflect concerns of the post-NAFTA era and that in this context offer alternative representations of migrants than those portrayed in main-stream media where they are often reduced to political talking points, statistics, and gross generalizations. I am particularly interested in considering how these films, some of which explicitly dialogue with government policies, work to rearticulate the category of “human” to include migrants from South of the Rio Grande first by showing them to us—making migrants visible, and then by “humanizing” them through a variety of cinematographic techniques.

Visibility through erasure: invisible labor forces

Since it took effect in 1994, NAFTA has opened borders for products, but not for human beings [6]—something that hasn’t changed under the last two administrations in spite of discussions suggesting possible renegotiations. [7] Arguably a side-effect of NAFTA on both sides of the U.S. Mexico border has been an increased sense of the invisibility of the human aspect of the labor force where the product is valued over the person that makes it, grows it, or constructs it. The same year that the trade agreement took effect, California saw anti-immigrant movements like the famous proposition 187 supported by Governor Pete Wilson. [8] This legislation, also known as “Save Our State” (or SOS), inspired the short film, “Un día sin mexicanos,” (Sergio Arau, Mexico, 1997) which used a “mock-documentary” or “mockumentary” style to imagine what would happen if all the Latinos (regardless of their immigration status) suddenly disappeared from the state. Clearly contextualized not only by references within the film, but also by the final text that dedicated the film to the governor—to whom the filmmakers sent the film as a Christmas gift in 1997 (Arau 26), the short film sought to enter the immigration debate through satire and comedy. Several years later, the same team of Sergio Arau and Yareli Arizmendi took their idea to the big screen with Arau’s first feature film, A Day Without a Mexican / Un día sin Mexicanos (Sergio Arau USA/Mexico/Spain, 2004), whose goal was to “visibilize the invisible”[9] and to emphasize Anglo ignorance of immigrant contributions to California’s economy.

Once again in “mockumentary” film style, A Day Without A Mexican envisions what would happen if all the Latinos in California disappeared through following the stories of Senator Abercrombie (an anti-immigrant senator named governor when the Latino governor disappears), ranch owner Louis McClaire (friendly to immigrant concerns, though his son is a member of an anti-immigrant group that resembles the Minute Men), teacher/housewife Mary Jo Quintana (whose musician husband has disappeared), and reporter Lila Rodríguez (presumably the only Latina inexplicably left behind) interspersed with “experts” who offer testimony regarding possible explanations for the mass disappearance (an “alien” abduction, a form of apocalyptic ascension, a protest for having been taken for granted, etc.). As they day goes on, the state of chaos progresses and the California economy comes to a halt as fruit and vegetables rot in fields or in delivery trucks, trash overflows, children are left without teachers and nannies, restaurants cannot serve food, stores close, lawn mowers are left abandoned, and the border patrolmen complain of boredom and resort to hiring actors to apprehend. Eventually, “the realization that what has disappeared is the very thing that keeps the ‘California Dream’ running—cooks, gardeners, policemen, nannies, doctors, farm and construction workers, entertainers, athletes, as well as the largest growing market of consumers—has turned Latinos and their return into the number one priority in the State.” [10]

The film aspired to humanize “Mexicans” and other Hispanic migrants, [11] however, scholars Marambio and Tew suggest that the film failed to meet this goal, in part due to the decision to use a collective character and in part due to the use of a pseudo-documentary style with talking heads and titles to inform the audience of the many contributions of Latino workers, with the criticism that “the titles […] are impersonal and do not put a human face on the Latinos who are missing” (483). Although I do agree that the film is flawed in its humanization of migrants, especially in its overuse of hyper-stereotypes, I would argue that the choice to use “mockumentary” serves to question the transparency of “truth” in the documentary film genre. [12] The film also questions “truth” and representation in mass media with the inclusion of satire of news broadcasts within the film, complete with the “whitening” of the character of reporter Lila Rodríguez who has been advised to go by “Lyla Rod,” thus “invisibilizing” her ethnicity (until, of course, it becomes useful from a ratings standpoint for her to “come out” as Latina).[13] Together, these questions of “truth” in representation highlight the ways in which migrant bodies are figuratively “disappeared” in dominant media discourse.

The authors also astutely problematize the passivity of the disappeared Latinos (they are not active agents—and when they reappear, they don’t even know they were gone) in comparison with the active role of the Anglos (484). I agree with this criticism, though it may come from targeting the film towards an Anglo audience (that it was released in the US rather than Mexico is telling) [14] with a goal to inspire consciousness in the public, as it does in the film. A Day Without a Mexican is more about the non-Latinos in the film coming to appreciate the contributions of Latinos—coming to see these bodies through their absence—than about Latinos recognizing their own contributions and agency. There is a sort of irony present in the suggestion that this visibility actually requires erasure, which then begs the question of whether the film is subverting notions of invisibility or reinforcing them.

All of this changed in 2006 when, regardless of the film’s actual message regarding Latino agency, it was recontextualized so that it, like the short film it is based on, entered into dialogue with anti-immigrant legislation—this time HR 4437, a law that, according to the film’s directors, “represented on a national scale what Wilson and Proposition 187 represented for California” (Arau 26). The film itself enjoyed renewed interest and many of the marches that took place between March and May spanning more than 160 U.S. cities across 40 states (Bada et. al.) are known by names (some self-selected and some given by the press) that resembled the film’s title: “A Day Without Immigrants,” “A Day Without a Latino,” etc. [15] More than three million immigrant bodies filled the streets to claim visibility for immigrant rights (documented and undocumented) and protest the anti-immigrant “Sensenbrenner Law” that had been approved by the House of Representatives in December of 2005. Part of their strategy mimicked the film with a two-fold symbolic attack on the U.S. market: first by refusing to work in the hopes that, like in the film, their labor contributions would be felt and recognized; and second by boycotting consumerism to demonstrate the role of immigrants as consumers as well. However, unlike the film’s resolution, which is full of new found appreciation for Latino contributions shown through embraces between Anglos and the returned Latinos (including final images of the border patrol celebrating and embracing the Mexicans who have just crossed the border), recent rhetoric continues to call for closing and fortifying the border in the name of security.

In 2008 a film premiered that takes the invisibilization of a Latino workforce to another level as it visualizes a time when the border is completely closed to immigrants from the South and explores the limits of an invisible labor force of “cybraceros” in a world “connected by technology, but divided by borders.” Alex Rivera, director and screen-writer of the science fiction film, Sleep Dealer (US/Mexico 2008), explains in the director’s comments on the film’s website that “This ironic reality pushed me to imagine a future in which borders are sealed, and immigrants no longer come to America. Instead, in the world of Sleep Dealer, immigrants stay in their home countries, connect their bodies to ‘the net,’ and send their pure labor to robots in America. This is what used to be called the ‘American Dream,’ five minutes into the future.” Rivera’s film interrogates the relationship between technology and a variety of political issues including immigration, global economic systems, privatization of natural resources (water), and the war on terror. It is precisely through a visualization of the dehumanization of migrants through technology that the film engages with their humanization. In the words of film critic Steve Ramos in his review of the film for Indiewire.com, “‘Sleep Dealer’ is a film with something to say about humanity and its relationship with technology. This sense of humanity, more than its numerous mind-blowing fantasy images is what ultimately sets ‘Sleep Dealer’ apart.”

This human connection comes through protagonist Memo Cruz’s physical and psychological migration from his traditional (and technologically disconnected) hometown in rural Mexico to bordertown Tijuana, “City of the future.” Memo, a young farmer from Oaxaca obsessed with technology, spends his evenings among circuits and parts listening to the radio and inadvertently intercepts a transmission between drone workers hunting aqua-terrorists. Believing the source of the transmission to also be an aqua-terrorist (who overheard the killing of an unarmed civilian), drone pilot, Rudy Ramirez, followed orders to “eliminate the terrorist intercept.” In a metacinematographic scene that problematizes our role as spectators of violence, the film’s audience sees the diegetic audience of the live reality TV show “Drones” (where “high tech heroes use cutting edge technology and blow the hell out of the bad guys”) cheer to the image of Memo’s father’s charred body as he attempts to crawl from the burning rubble and cheer even louder when Rudy, who first hesitates to follow orders when he sees his human “terrorist” target, finally complies with orders to finish the job and riddles the already mutilated body with bullets. [16] Through this scene, the film asks us to confront the media spectacle of violence (in the names of both reality TV and counter terrorism) and our role as spectators in perpetuating this violence on living bodies. After witnessing his father’s murder, for which his brother blames him and his “pinche radio,” Memo leaves home and migrates from southern Mexico to the northern border in search of work at one of the many cyber-maquilas, known as “sleep dealers.”

Rivera first introduced this invisible workforce in the short-film “Why Cybraceros?” (1997), a mock propaganda announcement modeled after those used during the Bracero Program. (In fact, the short includes some stock footage from original Bracero propaganda films.) The term “Cybracero” bears unpacking. “Bracero” directly engages with the U.S. Bracero Program of 1942-1964, a program that, taking its name from the Spanish “brazo” or “arm,” linguistically fragments migrant bodies and contributes to a discourse of dehumanization. [17] In their article “Fronteras seguras, cuerpos vulnerables: migración y género en la frontera sur” (“Secure Borders, Vulnerable Bodies: Migration and Gender on the Southern Border”), Christine Kovic and Patty Nelly refer to “Brazos sin personas” (arms without people) to describe the program and criticize it for being “based on counting arms (workers), not human beings” (74). The authors connect the attitudes of the Bracero Program with those of today that continue to look for cheap labor but without wanting “human beings with rights” (76), a concern echoed in the short film in its definition of “Cybracero”: “In Spanish Cybracero means a worker who operates a computer with his arms and hands. But in American lingo, Cybracero means a worker who poses no threat of becoming a citizen. And that means quality products at low financial and social costs to you, the American consumer.”

The short film comically represents this idea by showing an animation of a Mexican flexing his arm muscles as he bounces (in 90’s video-game style) towards a border wall, where his body bounces back and his disembodied arms detach and cross. Similarly, Rivera’s first feature film, Sleep Dealer, takes up the technological possibility of disconnecting the “brazos,” the labor, from the people that do the work. They connect their bodies to “nodes” and become part of a globalized machine and are completely dehumanized for their employers— those who receive the fruits of this labor do not have to consider human beings with rights because the body never crosses the border. In the words of the manager of the cyber-maquila, “Este es el sueño americano. Les damos a los Estados Unidos lo que siempre han querido. Todo el trabajo sin los trabajadores” (This is the American Dream. We give the United States what they’ve always wanted—all of the work, without the workers).

As a worker for the “Cybracero” company, the migrant body, invisible in the U.S., becomes a “cyborg” “bracero.” What are the implications here? What does a migrant body cum cyborg mean? [18] Donna Haraway, in her landmark essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” claimed that the cyborg would transgress borders and hierarchies. No longer defined by the material body, for her, the cyborg represents the possibilities of a post-gender, post-race/ethnicity world. More recent scholarship questions this utopic vision, suggesting that the division between human and machine must be considered in terms of gender and class by calling into question who has access to machines versus who is expected to behave like them (González 60). Afro-Cuban performance artist and scholar Coco Fusco argues that technology repeats the colonization of the subaltern body: “The digital divide is not just about access to computers and phone lines—it is about how subaltern bodies are positioned vis-à-vis technology. Colonialism abjected the subaltern body through militarism, forced labor, and scientific objectification—new technologies elaborate and diversify these strategies of domination” (Fusco xvi).[19]

These concerns manifest themselves in the film Sleep Dealer through the images of the cyber-braceros where the portrayal of multiple characters suggest not the post-hierarchy vision espoused by Haraway, but rather a subjugated cyborg that repeats hierarchies of class and gender. The work performed by these cyborgs mirrors that of their bodied selves in contemporary U.S.: José is working at a slaughterhouse in Iowa, María as a nanny in Washington, Memo works construction. We do not see examples of women working construction or men taking care of children—the labor follows traditional “gendered” expectations. Nor do we see doctors, lawyers, professors, or other “white-collar” professions, but rather a repetition of socio-economic division of labor. These cyborgs are not post-hierarchy and, in fact, due to the risks to the body through the cyborg existence, they are not post-body, but rather they highlight the vulnerability of the human migrant body that continues to exist in this world of virtual border crossing.

Visibilizing vulnerable bodies: children crossing borders

In Sleep Dealer, the danger to the migrant body comes through crossing the border virtually through the use of nodes. Long-time node workers go blind, not to mention the risk presented by computer viruses and short circuits that Luz, an aspiring writer with a “coyotec” ex-boyfriend, describes before she installs Memo’s nodes. However, the migrants who are drawn from around Mexico to Tijuana express no desire to physically cross the border to the U.S. Other films, such as the feature films La misma luna / Under the Same Moon (Patricia Riggen Mexico/USA, 2007) and Sin nombre (Cary Fukunaga Mexico/USA, 2009), and short films Victoria para Chino (Cary Fukunaga, Mex/USA 2005) and El otro sueño americano (Enrique Arroyo, Mexico 2004) take up the physical dangers to the body in the physical crossing itself through scenes that depict the vulnerability of migrant children’s bodies.

Patricia Riggen’s first feature film, La misma luna / Under the Same Moon (Mexico/USA, 2007), tells the story of nine-year-old Carlitos’s journey across the border to try to find his mother Rosario (Kate del Castillo) who has been working as an undocumented domestic in Los Angeles and sending $300 dollars a month to Carlitos and his grandmother for the past four years. [20] The film quickly sets up the human bond between mother and son who talk on the phone every Sunday morning at 10am. As director Patricia Riggen explains in the director’s commentary, this is a love story, and like all love stories, the “lovers” long to be together. Both director Patricia Riggen and screenwriter Ligiah Villalobos emphasize that the story is about love and the separation of families. In fact, Villalobos explains that her goal with the screenplay was to “explore the theme of abandoned children” and “only years later did she realize that setting the story against the background of illegal immigration would allow her to ‘introduce the public to all of these people that are working in this country and see them as human beings instead of an issue’” (Johnson). By framing the story in this way, the film establishes empathetic connections between the audience and the characters—especially Carlitos. Through his story, the film puts a human face, a child’s face, on immigration and its effects on families.

When Carlitos’s grandmother dies, he decides to find his mother using money he’s been saving and contacts he’s met through his part time job helping shop owner and coyota, Doña Carmen. When Doña Carmen refuses to cross Carlitos to respect a promise she had made to his mother and grandmother, he seeks out two Chicanos who, with their broken Spanish, had come to the office to offer to smuggle babies. These inexperienced nervous smugglers are not part of any organized crime operation, but rather two students looking for a way to pay their college tuition. Martha (America Ferrera) asks for Carlitos’s money and gives it to her brother as she opens up the back seat of the van, revealing a small compartment in which Carlos will hide—contorting his body to become part of the car. Through the positioning of the camera with extreme close-ups of Carlos’s sweating face, juxtaposed with a close-up of his disembodied eye peeking through a small hole in the leather, the audience gets a sense the claustrophobic conditions. The use of close-ups helps remove the distance between the spectator and the “Other” (in this case, a child migrant) while at the same time, this cinematographic technique also fragments the body. Ironically, it seems that the only way to embody fully is to disembody. These images, combined with the audio of Carlitos complaining that is it “too hot,” and the strong beat of menacing music, contribute to escalating our concern for his well-being when the car is impounded for unpaid parking violations and we imagine the danger of this child’s entrapment inside a closed vehicle in the desert sun in El Paso. Fortunately (and somewhat unrealistically), Carlitos is fine and easily works his way out of the car later that evening, only to find himself in the hands of a junkie who tries unsuccessfully to sell him into sex work. [21] Through these two narrow escapes, the film introduces the theme of the child migrant body as commodity that can be bought and sold (a theme that we will see again in El otro sueño americano).

Through the portrayal of Carlitos, the film successfully captured audience (and some critical) support, achieving the rank of highest grossing Spanish-language film in the U.S. in its premier weekend (Hernández), but it met with mixed reviews in both Mexico and the U.S., especially due to its “blunt[ing of] the hard edges of immigration with a thick coating of preciousness” to cater to “middlebrow movie audiences [who] prefer their thorny social issues served lite and with a side order of ham, an opportunity to shed happy tears and enjoy a guilt-free drive home to the (let us hope, legal) baby sitter” (Catsoulis). Several critics point to the narrow escapes described above as unconvincing. In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan writes:

Unfortunately, once ‘Under the Same Moon’ gets past the central mother-son relationship, it relies too heavily on coincidence and obvious plot devices. Obstacles suddenly appear and then magically disappear, crises come and go, and nothing feels as real as we’d like it to. This problem is especially acute when it comes to the film’s few but pivotal English-speaking characters, who come across as evil or feeble or both. Not only do the Anglos tend toward caricature, none of them have the slightest idea of how to have fun. The Mexicans, hard-working as well as fun-loving, come off much better.

Both Turan and New York Times film critic Jeannette Catsoulis draw attention to the film’s portrayals of Anglos. The latter sums up the film’s portrayal of race as depicting “bad white people, hard-working brown people and morally ambivalent people of mixed race.” Catsoulis astutely observes that, “the movie lines up a succession of nasty gringos to block [Carlos’s] path. As he evades the clutches of a drug addict, child traffickers and the United States Border Patrol, nonwhites rally to protect him in the form of kindly migrant workers and traveling musicians.” At the same time that the film humanizes migrants, it dehumanizes Anglos—a characterization that repeats in other films with similar concerns (for example, the truck driver in “Victoria para Chino” and Tim in El otro sueño americano).

While some films, like Patricia Riggen’s La misma luna / Under the Same Moon (Mexico/USA, 2007), hint at physical dangers to migrant bodies,[22] others, such as short film Victoria para Chino (Cary Fukunaga, Mex/USA 2005), are more explicit. The film also follows a minor on his journey across the border, though his experience is far more harrowing than Carlitos’s border crossing. Like La misma luna, the film’s use of child protagonists helps to humanize the migrant experience, though as a 13-minute short film it has less time to create an empathetic connection between spectators and characters.

The film attempts to establish this connection quickly, first identifying us with the teenage protagonist, Chino, who walks into the frame brushing his teeth, followed by a pan of the group as the film opens. It offers us glimpses of people doing everyday activities with which viewers can identify (Chino’s friend uses an inhaler, a father plays with his son, a man talks on his cell phone, a woman eats while another man seems to be trying to pick her up, etc.) and that are key to set up the humanity of the group in contrast with the inhumane treatment they receive from the coyotes (both Mexican and Anglo). The smuggler’s call that it is time to go interrupts these activities and the frame opens to a wide shot as we see some seventy people stand in response. As they all climb into the back of a tractor-trailer, a young man expresses concern that there are too many of them, only to be reminded by the coyote that he paid to cross—it seems the smuggler is merely providing a service.

The doors close and the screen goes black.[23] For the next several minutes, the film imagines what happened inside that trailer and we are witnesses to their journey through fragmented glimpses that visually create a sense of a chaotic and even dizzying experience for the viewer. A close up pan of sweating faces contrasts with the opening pan of the group. Instead of laughing and playing, we see a close up of the young boy’s worried face; instead of talking on cell phones and brushing teeth, we see close ups of hands clawing through the insulation around the tail lights to try to reach air and raise to boy to the open hole. As they near a checkpoint, the boy cries and one man threatens to kill him. The child appears to be convulsing and though Chino wants to call for help, the others won’t let him, telling Chino that “many of us aren’t going back to your Mexico. If we die, we die.” The father continually tries to convince himself, his son, and the group that they will all be fine, but the boy’s condition continues to deteriorate and as a woman begins to cry out “el niño,” we know that he will not be as lucky as Carlitos. Perhaps more than the character of Chino himself, this boy (who is named in the credits if not within the film) is key to the humanizing project of the film. The relationship that the film establishes between this child and others in the trailer (his father and Chino who try to protect him, the migrant who threatens to silence the child to protect himself and the group from discovery, reactions to his condition and death) are integral to establishing a human connection that ranges from empathy, fear, and sadness (even mourning), to outrage. Like La misma luna, the film counts on the parent/child connection to elicit a primal, visceral reaction in the audience, though unlike the former, Victoria para Chino takes the potential vulnerability of child migrant bodies to its extreme consequence: death. Through this child’s death, the film visibilizes risks to migrant bodies by showing us a human face that we can connect with on an emotional level that circumvents political leanings regarding immigration policies.

Unlike La misma luna that seems to want to humanize the smugglers as well through Martha and her brother, Victoria para Chino is an indictment of the cruelty of the smuggling system. The migrants are transported like goods—human merchandise—in the back of a tractor trailer with no ventilation and no consideration for their basic needs (such as water). For the coyotes, these are not human beings, but a product, something emphasized by their mode of transport. The film visually represents the commodification of migrant bodies that has been occurring along the border, at least in part, according to Raymod Michalowski, due to government policies that have increased border militarization, which in turn has fed the human smuggling business:

This system has transformed unauthorized migrants from human beings into commodities. Groups of migrants are now a valuable load, a cargo, to smugglers. All of the practices connected with transporting and protecting shipments of illegal drugs now apply to human cargos of irregular migrants: loading as much ‘product’ into transport vehicles as possible, jettisoning anything that might increase risk of capture (i.e. migrants unable to keep up the pace of marching across the desert), and in some cases, raiding rival syndicates to steal their loads. (Michalowski 67)

The film emphasizes that coyotes on both sides of the border treat migrants as Michalowski describes. When the American driver finally pulls over, he is more concerned about his truck, an object that represents his economic livelihood, than for the human life it carries. An image of the driver inspecting the truck is followed by a cut to the inside where bodies are piled on the floor. Before opening the doors to check on the passengers, the driver calls his contact to complain that “your people are destroying my trailer!” and ignores the calls from inside that announce what the audience has suspected “el niño, el niño está muerto” (the boy, the boy is dead), responding with “I don’t speak Spanish!” He opens the door and bodies of migrants (some alive, some dead) fall out on him. The driver, instead of trying to help them, first tries to convince them to get back inside to continue the journey in the back of the truck. Later, he closes the door and abandons them. Though the film also includes Mexican smugglers, its treatment of the Anglo smuggler seems to suggest not only US complicity in the commodification of migrant bodies, but also a complete lack of consideration for their humanity.

The last image of Victoria para Chino is one of the abandoned trailer accompanied by the text that confronts the spectator of the reality of what we have just witnessed: “In May 2003, a Truck carrying 90 illegal immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America departed Southern Texas for Houston. The trailer never reached its destination. When the Highway Patrol discovered the abandoned trailer in Victoria, Texas, they found 19 people dead. Among them, a five year old boy and his father.” By ending in this way, the text emphasizes the death of the child, as well as the connection between father and son that was present throughout the film, visibilizing the reality of the dangers posed to migrant bodies that were only hinted at in La misma luna. In the context of pure fiction (like La misma luna), a viewer might dismiss the driver’s actions as lacking verisimilitude, but the text forces us to confront the reality that a driver, who had it in his power to help save (at least some) of the immigrants suffering in his truck, instead abandoned them to die. The focus, at least to an extent, shifts from the illegal act of undocumented entrants crossing the border without documents, to the heartlessness of the Anglo driver.[24]

Like several of the other examples in this essay, the issues raised related to immigration in Fukunaga’s short film serve as the nucleus for a later feature length film, Sin nombre (Mexico/USA, 2009), a film that from its title, addresses questions of invisibility.[25] Director Cary Fukunaga explains, “Sin nombre” means “without a name,” or “nameless.” And that in all honesty came because there was a scene with one of those crosses on the border that said “Sin Nombre,” and it has to do with people who died on the border and they don’t know who they are, like a John Doe. […] But I also thought that thematically it had a lot to do with immigrants and the gang members not really having an identity besides what their group is” (Fukunaga, cited in Smith).

Like “Victoria para Chino,” Sin nombre follows a teenage migrant, in this case Honduran-born Sayra, on her journey north and exposes dangers to migrant bodies as they strive to reach the U.S. border. This time, rather than transported like cargo in a truck, they travel like cargo by freight train across Mexico. While riding atop the train with her father and uncle, Sayra meets Casper, a gang member who joins the migrants to escape certain death at the hands of his gang after he kills fellow-member Lil’Mago and throws him from the train. Although most of the violence we see in the film is directed at bodies of gang members (gang bodies are foregrounded in the film via tattoos, beating, sex, etc), the brief scene that starts with Casper, Smiley, and Lil’Mago robbing migrants and ends with Smiley’s discovery of Lil’ Mago’s mutilated body beside the tracks also reveals the vulnerability of migrant bodies.

Mara Salvatrucha gang members, the teenage Casper, the newly initiated pre-adolescent Smiley, and adult leader Lil’ Mago board the train with the explicit purpose of robbing migrants, threatening bodily harm with guns and machetes. When they come upon Sayra and her family, after taking their valuables, Lil’ Mago knocks out her father and grabs Sayra, throws her down to the roof of the train, pins her with his legs and holds a gun to her head, yelling, “Shut up or you die bitch!” Close ups of Sayra screaming are juxtaposed with close ups of Casper standing back and watching, presumably imagining Lil’ Mago’s attack on Martha, Casper’s girlfriend, that ended in her accidental death. Casper steps in and interrupts this display of sexual violence, cutting Lil’ Mago’s throat with a machete, then kicking the body off the train as it lurches forward to continue North. Shortly after, the gang banger’s mutilated body serves as a visual example of the dangers facing migrants who fall (or are thrown) from the train. Smiley, having followed Casper’s advice to leave the train, walks along the railroad tracks, and with a line of sight shot we see a close up of a boot on the ground between the rails. We realize that the boot contains a severed leg as the camera pans left to Lil Mago’s body next to the tracks. Through this sequence, the film ties the threat of gang violence to dangers to migrant bodies: death or sexual assault at the hands of gang members, or mutilation and possible death under the wheels of the train.

Vulnerability of female migrant bodies takes the forefront in the short film,

El otro sueño americano (The Other American Dream, Enrique Arroyo, Mexico, 2004).

This short, which frames itself within the discourse of the Ciudad Juarez feminicides, presents the female migrant as merchandise and places the spectator in the role of witness to the last 10 minutes of a young girl’s life as she thinks she has found a ride to “the other side,” but instead falls victim to the darker side of human trafficking.

Sandra, a fourteen or fifteen year old Oaxacan, has migrated to the border town of Ciudad Juárez where she has evidently been barely surviving as a sex worker and seems willing (though reluctant) to trade her body for passage to “el otro lado.” In the first few seconds of the film, the invisible driver-narrator who, due to the positioning of the camera remains out of the frame for most of the film, very quickly sets the scene and provides the spectator insights into both characters with the line, “a poco creías que cruzando al otro lado te quitabas lo puta” (You really thought that crossing to the other side would take the whore out of you). This short line sets the scene for the film: a young female sex-worker is trying to cross the border with the help of the driver/narrator. The narrator reveals his disdain for her, suggesting that being a “whore” is something intrinsic, rather than the result of circumstance or place. According to the director, portraying the main character as a sex worker caused IMCINE (Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía) to reject this script because “everything happened to a prostitute and how the right wing thought that the dead women in Juárez had it coming to them because they were prostitutes. That bothered me a lot because before prostitutes, they are women” (Arroyo in Segoviano). Although Arroyo’s comments suggest that he wants to humanize prostitutes by seeing them as women first, I would argue that IMCINE had a point. The choice of portraying Sandra as a prostitute feeds into the myth that the disappeared women were sex workers as it has been framed by reporting and even the Mexican government. Rosa Linda Fregoso criticizes the way the state has repeatedly discredited the victims by saying they were leading double lives: factory worker by day, prostitute by night, “as though nontraditional sexual behavior justified their killings” (Towards 37). How would the film and its message change if Sandra were a student or a house wife instead of a prostitute? How would it be different if Sandra were an adult woman sex-worker rather than a minor?

These first few seconds also establish the power relationship between Sandra and the driver. She asks, “¿Adónde vamos?” (Where are we going?). After insulting her, the driver, who clearly has control of the situation, responds with, “no quieres ver la procu, verdad? Como nos vamos a arreglar?’” (You don’t want to go to the station, do you? How are we going to fix this?). This is no run-of-the-mill coyote, but a police officer who has detained Sandra for possession of cocaine. The choice, then, to cast Sandra as a minor serves to underline the power differential, as this is not just a question of police with authority over a criminal, but also an adult male pedophile who uses this power over an underage girl for his own sexual gratification.

They “fix” the situation with a corporal transaction—she “pays” the coyote-cop by showing him her breasts—although with a speed that reveals certain modesty and immaturity rather than the confidence of a woman with agency over her body and sexuality. The payment is not complete, however, and she fellates him,[26] an act that to some degree shifts the focus to the male body—though a body absent from the frame of the film due to the angle of the camera that remains fixed on the dashboard and aimed at the passenger’s seat.[27] During this oral sex act, which frustrates the potential erotic gaze by taking place mostly out of the frame, we only see the movements of the top of the girl’s head. The film juxtaposes this image with several pink crosses, such as those found around Juárez to denote graves of anonymous women, which we can see out the passenger window when the car crosses the railroad tracks at the same time as the driver climaxes. This detail links this girl with the missing women, las desaparecidas, while simultaneously visually associating this police officer, this sexual predator, with the perpetrators of the Juárez murders, who continue to evade justice. At the same time, intentionally or not, it eroticizes feminicide as male sexual gratification is connected with the dead women.

Following the driver’s ejaculation, Sandra spits out his semen, and for such a rejection of his fluids, of his manhood, he beats her. Sexual pleasure rapidly turns to violence enacted on this woman-child’s body. Moments later she tries to escape, only to be caught and handcuffed to the inside of the vehicle. This child, who was “fixing” a possible arrest for cocaine possession, becomes a victim of human trafficking. To avenge her rejection of him, the cop calls “Tim” and tells him he has a “sorpresita” (little surprise) for him, then goes on to describe to Sandra all the horrible things that these “vatos locos” (crazy dudes) have done to women (and says he has witnessed their screams).

The fixed camera shows us Tim, with his María Sabina T-shirt and his marked “gringo” accent in Spanish while he takes a “probadita” (little taste) of the merchandise by touching Sandra’s breasts without looking her in the face—he separates her body from her face, her identity; she is invisible to him. He buys her from the cop, passing him a roll of dollars. For both men this woman is a disposable product. The policeman warns Tim not to throw her body near the train tracks (where we saw the pink crosses) because he’ll have to come back for him, presumably to arrest him. With this line, the spectator knows what we have already suspected: the policeman knows that this gringo has killed other women and will kill Sandra, but he doesn’t care. He does nothing, but rather takes his money and leaves. The film overtly criticizes the role of Mexican law enforcement in the Juárez murders—they are paid to turn a blind eye and even actively participate in finding victims. They profit from allowing the feminicides to continue.

The policeman, however, has limits framed by his own particular morality. Although he doesn’t hesitate to sell this woman to the gringo, when Tim asks him for “riñones chiquitos: (very small kidneys), the cop replies, “esto es pecado” (that is a sin). Although he can dehumanize the sex worker and see her as merchandise with economic but not human value, he draws the line at selling children for their organs. While the film clearly suggests collaboration between Mexican authorities and rich Americans in these disappearances and murders, it seems to suggest, through Tim, that the U.S. is responsible for driving the actions of the Mexicans involved. Like several of the other films mentioned here, even if a Mexican character is cast in a negative light, the “gringo” is worse and often an over-the-top caricature of evil. The film paints an image of the American man as someone who sees Mexican bodies (be they women or children) in terms of their economic value and disposability.

Where several of the films discussed in this article frame themselves within the context of U.S. policies and events, this short film overtly enters into discourses surrounding Mexican policies and the handling of the feminicides in Ciudad Juárez by authorities by including a corrupt police officer who remains invisible for most of the film, echoing the invisibility of the perpetrators of these crimes since to date most remain unsolved. Additionally, the film ends with the following text before the credits roll:

It would be a pleasure to say that any resemblance to actual events is a mere coincidence. Certainly, our characters are fictitious, but it is not fiction that 11 year old girls, students, house wives, prostitutes, workers, all women, have been victims of impunity for over 10 years. The PGR [Procuraduría General de la República or Federal Attorney General's Office] has reported 258 dead women as of August 2003. Amnesty International reports 370-500 disappeared women…[28]

This concluding text clearly situates the film in the discourse surrounding “las desaparecidas,” the disappeared women of Ciudad Juárez, and interrupts the spectator’s potential voyeuristic positioning by confronting us with the reality of the violence (often sexual) enacted on the bodies of women[29]—many of them migrants from other parts of Mexico and Central America who travel to the US/Mexico border with hopes of crossing into the U.S. (like Sandra) or with the promise of economic opportunities represented by the global companies, often referred to as “maquiladoras” or “maquilas,” that operate (or operated) on the border and exploit the cheap labor that comes from economic necessity. [30]

“El otro sueño,” like all of the films analyzed here, strives to bring light to current issues related to immigration. Like the others, it struggles with the tensions between advocacy, storytelling, and exploitation. These films raise questions about responsible representations of human bodies as well as responsible looking. How to represent violence and suffering in a responsible way? How to visibilize and humanize without falling into the same trap of either inadvertently contributing to the same rhetoric one proposes to contest, or to humanize one group at the expense of dehumanizing another? In spite of their shortcomings, all of these films endeavor to participate in speaking against dehumanization of migrants through making them visible by depicting migrant experiences on the big screen.

As has been recognized in many contexts, film can have a powerful impact on perceptions of the “other” (which, as we know, can have positive and negative effects). I personally had never considered why immigrants came to the U.S. illegally until, as a college student, I saw the film El norte (Gregory Nava, USA/UK, 1983). In class we had touched on debates regarding California’s Proposition 187 (though from across the country in a liberal arts college on the East Coast), and I wasn’t really sure how I stood on the issues. Over sixteen years later, I still remember how that film brought tears to my eyes as it opened them to realities I had never imagined. Witnessing the celluloid journey of the Mayan brother and sister from Guatemala to Los Angeles made me think less in terms of political rhetoric and more in terms of human rights. Now that I am a professor, I can see similar reactions in my students after viewing and reflecting on many of the films in this essay.

Without wanting to suggest that film representations of migrants (be they fiction or documentary) are unproblematic, offer a perfect solution to the complex issues surrounding immigration, or are a magic bullet to change the way spectators stand on these issues, I do maintain that they impact conversation on a variety of levels. I have witnessed these conversations following screenings of the films mentioned in this essay (both in Mexico and in the US), in classrooms, in film festivals, and even among policy-makers. Perhaps if the public and politicians alike come to see the human impact of current policies (in the U.S. and in sending countries) they might also realize that “Los cuerpos, no las fronteras, son puntos vulnerables” (Bodies, not borders, are vulnerable points), [31] and perhaps, just perhaps, we might see humane immigration reform.
[1] I presented an earlier version of this essay, “(In)visibilidades, (des)corporalizaciones y globalizaciones: El cuerpo migrante en el cine mexicano de la frontera de los 2000,” at SEPANCINE’s “5o Congreso Internacional de Teoría y Análisis Cinematográfico” in Morelia, Mexico on October 2, 2009. I would like to thank the organizers of and participants in the conference for their feedback, as well as my colleagues Amy Schneidhorst, Kate Blanchard, Amy Sarah Carroll, and Joanne Gilbert. I especially thank the editors of FIAR, Wilfried Raussert and Yolanda Campos García for the opportunity to expand the original piece and present my work in this forum.

[2] I begin with this personal anecdote because my experience working with the documentary truly inspired this line of questioning. However, documentary is not the focus of this essay, in part because I want to resist analyzing my own film (I know I am too close to it to be objective), even if I do use it as a starting point and find some commonalities between Which Way Home and some of the fiction films I analyze here. I ask the reader to indulge this choice and to understand that I realize that documentary and fiction, even if they share common goals, use very different methodologies and theoretical frames to reach those goals. There are many noteworthy Mexican documentaries (and co-productions) from the 2000s that deal with immigration including, among others, Los que se quedan (Carlos Hagerman and Juan Carlos Rulfo 2008, Mexico), Little immigrants (Frances Lausell and Miguel Picker 2007, Puerto Rico/MX/USA), De Nadie (Tin Dirdamal 2005, Mexico), Al otro lado (Natalia Almada 2005, Mexico/USA), Cheranasticotown (Dante Cerrano 2005, Mexico), Sueños binacionales (Yolanda Cruz, 2005 Mexico/USA), La sexta sección (Alex Rivera 2003, Mexico)—not to mention U.S. productions such as Farmingville (Carlos Sandoval and Catherine Tambini 2003). For theoretical approaches to the concept of visibilization through documentary, see, for example, Collecting Visible Evidence, edited by Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov, and Patricia Zimmerman’s States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies.

And indeed, there are noteworthy Mexican fiction films (and co-productions) not included here such as Los Bastardos (Amat Escalante 2008, Mexico/France/USA), Norteado (Rigoberto Perezcano 2009, Mex/Spain), El viaje de Teo (Walter Doehner 2008, Mexico), 7 soles (Pedro Ultreras 2009, Mexico), among others. The films included in this essay were chosen for the ways they engage with (in)visibilization and (de)humanization of migrant bodies, particularly in terms of the two foci here: visibility through erasure: invisible labor forces; and visibilizing vulnerable bodies: children crossing borders. Practical factors also contributed to defining the corpus as films were chosen in part based on their availability at the time of this investigation. Additionally, I chose to include films that I have used in my college classroom. I have taught all of the films analyzed here with particular success and, at least with my classes, have found that they were instrumental in opening discussions regarding broader immigration issues. My pedagogical analysis is fruit for another essay; nevertheless, I hope that this article might provide some background for those interested in teaching film or teaching through film. The shorts analyzed here can be particularly attractive in a classroom as they can be shown in their entirety without the need to break the narrative flow even in classes with time constraints where showing complete feature films is not practical.

I also chose to restrict my corpus to recent films. However, there is a long history of films that take up immigration and the representation of Mexican migrants that remains outside the scope of this essay. For a history of the representation of Mexican migrants in border film, see for example, Rosa Linda Fregoso’s The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture (1993); David Maciel’s “Visions of the Other Mexico: Chicanos and Undocumented Workers in Mexican Cinema, 1954-1982” in Gary Keller’s edited volume, Chicano Cinema: Research, Reviews and Resources (1985); David Maciel’s “Pochos and Other Extremes in Mexican Cinema; or, El Cine Mexicano se va de Bracero, 1922-1963” and Alex Saragoza’s “Cinematic Orphans: Mexican Immigrants in the United States since the 1950s” in Chon Noriega’s Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance (1992); Norma Iglesias’s Entre yerba, polvo y plomo: Lo fronterizo visto por el cine mexicano, Vol 1 (1991).

[3] I recognize that Butler has been accused of neglecting issues related to race and ethnicity in her writing and nods to these criticisms, though somewhat superficially, in Undoing Gender.

[4] These posters were seen most recently May 1^st of this year when groups met across the country to protest Arizona’s SB 1070 (a law that gives police officers powers to demand proof of citizenship—something previously reserved to immigration officers) and more famously on May 1^st 2006 to protest the “Sensenbrenner law” HR 4437 (that included, among other aspects, construction of additional border walls, a redefinition of undocumented migrants as criminals, and criminalization of any kind of aid given to undocumented migrants). Both laws were interpreted by migrant groups as anti-migrant and by more conservative groups as part of increased border security measures. At the time of this writing, HR 4437 has been defeated and did not become law, and SB 1070, a law “which proponents and critics alike said was the broadest and strictest immigration measure in generations” (Archibold), is being contested from some groups and at the same time applauded by others. While U.N. experts question the “law’s compatibility with relevant international human rights treaties to which the United States is a party” (Nebehay), others, such as Michigan State Representative Kim Meltzer, are proposing similar legislation (Hornbeck). For more information on HR 4437, see the Library of Congress website at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:h.r.04437; for more on AZ SB 1070, see the Arizona State Legislature website http://www.azleg.gov/ .

[5] Joseph Moriarty, writing an opinion piece responding to AZ SB 1070 for the Minneapolis Star Tribune entitled “Immigration problem? Blame NAFTA,” would agree. He writes, “It’s time to face the truth. We, the United States, brought this calamitous situation on Mexicans and on ourselves when Congress passed the NAFTA treaty in 1993. NAFTA was sold as a magic formula that would improve the American economy while at the same time reducing poverty in Mexico. At the NAFTA signing, then President Bill Clinton said this: ‘Pass NAFTA and we will have jobs for Mexicans in Mexico. Defeat NAFTA, and there will be a tremendous flow of Mexicans in the United States.’ In practice, NAFTA accomplished exactly the opposite.” (http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/92546759.html). Ted Lewis, writing for The San Diego Union Tribune explains in his article, “Linking NAFTA and Immigration,” “Even the most conservative estimates make it clear that during the first decade of NAFTA the annual number of undocumented immigrants arriving in the United States from Mexico nearly doubled.” (http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20080229/news_lz1e29lewis.html). See also Louis Uchitelle’s New York Times article, “Nafta Should Have Stopped Illegal Immigration, Right?” (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/weekinreview/18uchitelle.html)

[6] The agreement does have provisions for business visas (where visa holders are not permitted to enter the US labor force but are paid by their home country) and for a non-immigrant TN (or Trade Nafta) Visa. According to the U.S. Department of State Website, TN Visas are available for “Professional” Canadians and Mexicans, requiring “evidence of professional employment” and “educational qualifications or appropriate credentials demonstrating professional status” (“Visas”). The agreement has no provisions for the vast numbers of non-professional immigrants that represent the majority of undocumented workers who take manual labor jobs in fields such as agribusiness, construction, domestic services, etc.

[7] For an idea of the stance of Mexican president Felipe Calderón and George W. Bush regarding NAFTA reform, see for example, Myers’s 2008 New York Times article, “Next-Door Neighbors Back Bush on Trade.” For an idea of President Barack Obama and President Calderón’s recent meetings in which NAFTA reform was discussed, see for example, MacGillis’s Washington Post article “Mexico not worried about Obama campaign pledge to renegotiate NAFTA” from May 2010, in comparison with articles that report on the Jan. 2009 meeting of the two leaders: Gillman’s Dallas Morning News article “Obama talks of ‘upgrade’ to NAFTA with Mexico’s Calderón”; and Marshall’s Guadalajara Reporter article “Obama-Calderon Talk Overshadowed by Nafta Discord.”

[8] Passed by California voters in 1994, Proposition 187 (also known as “Save Our State” or “SOS”) included the denial of public benefits to illegal aliens in California and measures for public officials (including police, healthcare workers, and teachers) to verify legal migratory status before providing service. A federal court found it unconstitutional and in 1999 Governor Gray Davis helped end appeals to that finding.

[9] All translations from Spanish are by the author unless otherwise indicated.

[10] http://www.adaywithoutamexican.com/

[11] The film addresses the common assumption that all Latinos are Mexican when Senator Abercrombie erroneously refers to the men his wife hired to paint the house as “illegal Mexicans […] from Guatemala and Honduras.” The film uses text on the screen to correct the error, informing us that “Guatemalans and Hondurans are not Mexicans.”

[12] For an in-depth study of fake or “mock-documentaries” as a subgenre of documentary film, see F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, edited by Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner.

[13] We later find out that she is not, in fact, Latina, but rather that she was an Armenian adopted by a Mexican family, a somewhat disappointing resolution that explains why she does not disappear with the other Latinos. She finally does disappear, live on “Lila Cam,” after finding out she was adopted and claiming that blood doesn’t matter: “I was raised Mexican and I was treated like a Mexican […] Love is thicker than blood. You belong to the people that taught you the world, and my heart, my heart is Mexican. Please don’t take that away from me.” This seeming attempt to question identity politics divorces cultural association from the body.

[14] The marketing in México actually excluded Anglos through its tagline “Nadie sabe lo que tiene un día sin mexicanos ¡los gringos van a llorar!” (No one knows what a day without Mexicans has in store, The gringos are going to cry!) which many “gringos” would feel as offensive if not outright aggressive as it suggests that the film (and Mexicans) will inflict suffering on them, making them cry.

[15] Marambio and Tew make the relationship between the film and the march names explicit when they explain that the Milwaukee march “was organized as ‘A Day Without a Latino,’ borrowing its name from the title of the movie” (477).

[16] This scene also works to humanize “terrorists” and casualties of war. What is at stake by showing (or not showing) the toll of war on bodies? I am focusing on the humanization of migrants here, but am also intrigued by Rivera’s inter-weaving of multiple dehumanizing discourses into his film. Through the character of Rudy, a node-worker and drone pilot, the film suggests the impact of visibilizing the “enemy.” When he sees his human “target,” something that the T.V. narrator tells us is uncommon in his line of work, Rudy hesitates to follow orders. After he complies, he, like Memo, begins a physical and psychological journey that leads him to question his role as node-soldier and to attempt to make amends to Memo’s family. The film seems to question discourses that dehumanize more than one side of the “War on Terror” with its treatment of both soldiers (Rudy) and suspected terrorists (Memo and his father).

[17] The most important fiction film from either side of the border to deal with the Bracero program is undoubtedly Alejandro Galindo’s Espaldas mojadas (México 1955). An analysis of this classic film is, unfortunately, outside the scope of this article.

[18] I first consider the implications of a Chicano-cyborg body in my article, “Entre las palabras y el cuerpo: estrategias performáticas fronterizas en las obras de Guillermo Gómez- Peña.” Mexican-born performance artist Guillermo Gómez –Peña has played with notions of the cyborg in various performances and videos over his career. Although in my article I consider the commodification of the Chicano-male body in Gómez-Peña’s Binational Boxer video (in Ethno-techno: Los Video Graffitis, USA, 2004) in terms of sexuality and gender roles, I do not expand upon implications of the racialized cyborg and hope to begin to address that here, though in a different context.

[19] The subaltern does, of course, talk back through technology in unexpected ways. I am considering, for example, the strategic use of technology by the Zapatistas in Mexico, “hactivism” performance interventions by artist and scholar Ricardo Dominguez, and Alex Rivera’s own use of technology to make, market and distribute his independent film through his webpages http://www.cybracero.com/ and www.sleepdealer.com, but also the use of technology to reach a broader audience by releasing the film on cable “On Demand” networks the same day it opened in select theaters in the U.S.

[20] One more than one occasion our film, Which Way Home, has been compared to La misma luna since both look at the separation of families and the journey of undocumented migrants through the experiences of children. When I first saw La misma luna, I was immediately reminded of three Salvadoran children, brothers and sisters aged 9, 10, and 11, whom I had met while working on the documentary. Their mother had been working legally in Los Angeles for seven years and, like Carlitos, they had been living with their grandmother. When the grandmother passed away, the mother, not knowing that she could have applied to bring her kids legally, sent for them using a coyote. The kids had crossed El Salvador, Guatemala, and part of Mexico when they were picked up by Mexican immigration agents, having been abandoned by their smuggler.

[21] In the haste of his escape, he leaves his money behind, which places him in another situation where we fear that bodily harm will come to him. When he is unable to pay a junkie the 100 dollars he had promised so that the man would help him buy a bus ticket, the junkie sells the boy to a pimp. Fortunately he is saved yet again as a concerned bystander, Reyna (María Rojo), steps in.

[22] In fact, the film has been criticized by Mexican audiences for making light of these dangers since we see no actual harm come to any migrants at any point in the film. I believe that the film wants to humanize the migrant experience for U.S. spectators and to that end has made choices to avoid alienating potential viewers through graphic images.

[23] This film brings to mind similar scenes that open and close the film, Raíces de sangre (Jesús Salvador Treviño, Mexico/USA 1979). Both are based on actual events—this kind of transportation did not begin with NAFTA, though a principal difference is that “Victoria” takes us inside the truck and Raices does not. Film Scholars Rosa Linda Fregoso and David Maciel have signaled Raices de sangre (with Espaldas mojadas) as one of the most important Mexican films to deal with immigration and the Chicano experience in the U.S.

[24] The actual driver was a Jamaican immigrant from New York that in this film was cast as a light-haired “gringo” with no indication that he might be a non-citizen.

[25] This film has also often been compared with Which Way Home as a fictional representation of the perils of the freight train journey across Mexico. Erik Davis, in the context of the Tribeca Film Festival, writes, “Which Way Home and the recently-released Sin Nombre would make for an excellent double feature, as the former — currently screening in the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival — is a riveting documentary that taps into the same concept and themes of Sin Nombre, except it’s all real and it’s all heartbreaking to watch. Like Sin Nombre, Which Way Home follows the stories of several children attempting to illegally cross the Mexican border into the United States by way of riding on the tops of trains. But while Sin Nombre works in a fictional plot involving love, friendship and gang violence, Which Way Home covers the topic from several different (and fascinating) points of view. From the boys and girls riding the trains to the kids who’ve already been caught and are on their way back home, the film brings us everything we’d expect from a solid, well-made documentary — injecting passion, honesty and heart into a topic that certainly needs more attention drawn to it.”

[26] These two moments shocked the students in my film course. They were concerned that the age of the actress (though as it turned out, she was not a minor when she made the film) might make this film akin to child pornography and brought up questions of the tension between exposing violence to women’s bodies and the risk of repeating the violence to the woman’s body through the act of filming. This kind of tension is present to different degrees in many of the films discussed here.

[27] The film has a flavor of a home video due to the quality of the image and the fixed camera—it remains positioned towards the passenger seat throughout the film. Some explanation of the quality and positioning of the camera comes at the end when the policeman yanks it out of place and turns it off—he knew the camera was there and recording, but why? Since we know he is a cop, we might suspect that it is a surveillance camera in his squad car, but the positioning doesn’t support this (it is focused on the front passenger seat, not the back where a suspect might be held). At the risk of projecting today’s technology into the past, it feels like a web-cam (although at the time of the making of the film, it would have been difficult to imagine broadcasting over the internet live from the dashboard of a truck), and I question my position as a spectator—am I a cybernetic voyeur? Or is this a personal video that the policeman will view later, but why? For pleasure? Is this a sort of a snuff film? After all, pornography and snuff films have been suggested as possible explanations for the missing women.

[28] The statistics are often disputed and vary widely from source to source. Guadalupe Loaeza, writing in Mexico’s Reforma newspaper in March of 2009, sets the number at 1060 deaths considered feminicides in the last 15 years with 544 in 2008 alone. She does not include the number of missing women in her statistics (nor does she cite a source).

[29] Rosa Linda Fregoso notes that “many of the murdered women had been gagged, raped, strangled, and mutilated, with nipples and breasts cut off and buttocks lacerated like cattle, or they had been penetrated with objects. The number of murders tabulated as sexual killings is disputed because city authorities don’t count penetration as rape when an object is used; for example, a woman found with a blanket in her anus was not recorded in police investigations as having been raped” (Toward 62).

[30] The recent award winning fiction thriller—five Ariels, including best direction and best actress for Asur Zágada (Juana), and Mexico’s submission for the Oscar for best foreign film of 2009)— Backyard / El traspatio (Dir. Carlos Carrera; screenplay Sabina Berman, Mexico 2009), also addresses the Juárez feminicides (reminding us that they continue to this day) and the topic of the disposability of women through the stories of co-protagonists police detective Blanca Bravo (Ana de la Regera) who arrives in Juárez to investigate the murders and indigenous migrant Juana (Asur Zágada) who travels to Ciudad Juárez from Chiapas to work in a maquila. I am very interested in the tensions I see in this film between humanizing and dehumanizing, between advocacy/subversion, and exploitation/reinforcing the status quo; however, a detailed analysis is outside the scope of this essay. Much has been written on the Juárez murders and feminicide the past few years. For a recent example that considers media representation (including several films), see Hector Domínguez-Ruvulcaba and Ignacio Corona’s 2010 anthology, Gender Violence at the U.S.-Mexico Border: Media Representation and Public Response.

[31] These words are spoken by the narrative voice from the short documentary that focuses on female migrant experiences along Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala, Bajo el Tacana (Isabel Vericat, Mexico, 2007)

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Introducción:

El 11 de Abril del 2011 Walter Prudencio Magne Veliz, Embajador del Estado Plurinacional de Boliva en Alemania, pronunció un discurso en el Coloquio de los Estudios Interamericanos de la Universidad de Bielefeld sobre los nuevos procesos en Boliva con una especial atención a la controversia de la cultivación de la coca. Nosotros, el Grupo de Estudios InterAmericanos, tuvimos la oportunidad de charlar con él sobre su trabajo como Embajador en Alemania y también sobre los cambios en la política y la sociedad boliviana y sobre conceptos indígenas y su papel en el gobierno de Evo Morales.

Walter Prudencio Magne Veliz nació en 1960 en la ciudad andina de Oruro, Bolivia, a tres horas de La Paz. Estudió Comunicación en Oruro, Antropologia en La Paz y estuvo tres semestres en la Academia de Cine y Televisión en Munich, Alemania. A parte de su puesto oficial de Embajador, Magne Veliz lucha por los derechos de los pueblos indígenas y la cultivación de la coca en los Andes.

El Grupo de Estudios Interamericanos es un grupo autorganizado de estudiantes de grado, postgrado y doctorado de la Universidad de Bielefeld que están interesados en temas relacionados con la historia, la política y la cultura de las Americas. Cuando comprobamos y editamos la entrevista en el verano del 2011 el grupo estaba compuesto por Martin Breuer, Kiara Fiorella Abad Bruzzo, Laura Mendez, Marc Hesling, Felipe van der Huck, Lukas Schenk, Pedro Velasquez, Jan Dirk Wiewelhove y Serena Wördenweber.

Introductory Text

On the 11^th of April 2011, Walter Prudencio Magne Veliz, Ambassador of the Plurinational State of Bolivia in Germany, held a talk at the InterAmerican Studies Colloquium of the Bielefeld University about new developments in Bolivia, with a special focus on indigenous rights and the controversy of the cultivation of coca. We, the InterAmerican Study Group, had the chance to talk to him about his work as Ambassador in Germany, about changes in the Bolivian society and politics and indigenous concepts and their role in the government of Evo Morales.

Walter Prudencio Magne Veliz was born in 1960 in the Andean city of Oruro, Bolivia, about three hours south of La Paz. He studied Communications in Oruro, Anthropology in the city of La Paz and spent three semesters at the Academy of Film and Television in Munich, Germany. In 2006, he became the first indigenous Ambassador of Bolivia in Germany. In addition to his official post as Ambassador, Magne Veliz fights for the rights of indigenous people and the cultivation of coca in the Andean region.

The InterAmerican Study Group is a self organized group of BA, MA and PhD students from the Bielefeld University, interested in issues concerning history, politics, and culture in the Americas. At the time we recorded and edited the interview, in the summer of 2011, the following students participated in the Study Group: Martin Breuer, Kiara Fiorella Abad Bruzzo, Laura Mendez, Marc Hesling, Felipe van der Huck, Lukas Schenk, Pedro Velasques, Jan Dirk Wiewelhove and Serena Wördenweber.

Interview Botschaft Boliviens

Translated Interview transcript (English):

Pedro:
Good evening, dear Mr. Ambassador. First of all, welcome to Bielefeld.
Ambassador:
Thanks for the invitation.
Pedro:
Thank you for coming. Since 2006 you have been the Ambassador of Bolivia here in Germany. Could you tell us something about how you became Ambassador and since when you have been working with Evo Morales?
Ambassador:
Well, in fact my work is part of the historical process; you have to see the current circumstances in my country. My relationship with the President (Evo Morales) is based on the issue of the coca leaf. My thesis deals with the coca leaf and therefore we met at different events about/related to coca, and I learned many important things during those meetings.
I have been Ambassador since September 2006, which has to do with the historical circumstances in Bolivia. Actually I didn´t study to become an Ambassador, I studied Communication, Anthropology and some Politics and I graduated specializing on “Innovation and Competitiveness.” Actually, I was invited to take that position. I think that this depended on, how to say, the historical situation, we wanted to change things, like we called it, a “diplomacy of the peoples” as a different form of diplomacy with other countries. Our vision has changed; right now we are not only in a dialogue on the level of state functionaries but a dialogue with the society itself. We are participating in dialogues with the civil society, with the academia and students in order to communicate the process in Bolivia in the dimension that we want it to be understood.
Jan:
Five years ago Evo Morales won the elections with the promise to found a new Bolivia. What are, in your opinion, the most important changes that took place in your country?
Ambassador:
We said that we had to regain our dignity, our sovereignty and that we have to be part of the process of constructing a new horizon. You have to keep in mind that we had lived for more than 20 years within the neoliberal logic, that we have been an experiment of the Washington Consensus. This impoverished society on all levels. In other words, we could say that the neoliberal model made illegal and legal salesmen out of academics. Because academics were transformed into a commodity inside the neoliberal model, in which they work in order to sell their studies.
The neoliberal model is something very permissive, in Bolivia it led to a self-impoverishment of society and it left a huge sector of unemployment, for examples the miners where dispelled from their jobs.
This actually created the mentality that the state has to be used for personal profit. “You don’t have to serve the state; you have to serve yourself from the state” was the logic of the public functionaries.
Today, we have changed this concept. We say that we are no more functionaries but servants of the state. To say, there is a first change that has to be noted, too, because this process has to be seen inside an ethical scale. Because if we don’t consider this ethical scale, we will remain on implications that say: Right now there is a government of Indios versus whites, what is unreal and besides is not the matter here. The matter is that the Bolivian society was tired of the neoliberal government and had to formulate a new alternative. And the President formulated sovereignty and, well, dignity. In reality Bolivia did not decide about its development on its own, it was defined by foreign aid, by the constructors of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund or the Embassies which had influence in Bolivia.
And, well, that is a real thing, today we have dignity, we have sovereignty, and we define our appropriate laws on the basis of our social and economic demands, which are of short and long range. Because they left us a debt which dates far back and we have to keep paying those social debts, even if it is not our debt from the last five years. Well, it is from the republican years, from the neoliberal years and there is an historical debt, too, right? Here we have to talk about how colonialism left us with this debt.
Pedro:
Well, if we touch this issue now: We have read that one of the central goals of the new constitution of Bolivia is to improve the lives of the indigenous people. What are the most important changes that took place in this context? Did a lot change? What is your opinion in this respect?
Ambassador:
It’s a process. What we are experiencing in Bolivia is a process, and part of that process is the reoccupation of dignity. During the last years we had exhaustion on the indigenous side. No professional could declare himself indigenous, because it was considered, well, as something unacceptable. If one observes anthropologically the rites of passage, how a human lives his live, we can recognize here how colonialism is structured, why we have coloniality, right? The schools empty your indigenous soul, they tell you plainly that you belong to a universal culture, whereas this universal culture in reality is only a construction. Well, (here: in Bolivia?) there are different forms of inhabiting the world, different forms of relating human beings with nature, and the humans in the Andean World relate themselves in terms of complementarities, whereas in the occident the relation is one of domination. Culture is the domination of nature, right? If so, in that respect there is a change. This relation, this cosmovision is recognized in the constitution and here begins the empowerment of, let us say, the Andean-Amazonian cultures in Bolivia.
Pedro:
Here in Germany you hear a lot about the new concept called “buen vivir”. What is that exactly?
Ambassador:
The Suma Qamaña comes from the Aymara, right? Suma Qamaña, Sumak Kawsay, there are a variety of words. If you want to understand the Suma Qamaña you have to see it in the broader context, it is a way how to live your life, it is a Taki, like we say in Aymara, right? You have to walk the life, but how do you walk your life? Practicing domination or practicing complementarity? And, if you are practicing the complementarity concept you construct a different form of making your social network, right? There is a concept, also an Aymaran one, the Ayni. In this regard we would have to talk about the culture of complementarity to achieve a constant reciprocity in the Andes.
Jan:
Referred to the concept of “buen vivir”, what has to change in Germany, in the German way of life?
Ambassador:
Well, each culture has its history. Basically a society receives its input out of its history and constructs itself in that way. I am not an expert in German history or German culture, I am not a sociologist of German culture. Then I cannot give advice about German culture, right? But I can give you an analysis of the Andean world. That is to say how we perceive ourselves and how we want to construct our horizon. And that horizon, how can I explain it to you, derives out of relation of comlementarity. We have to state that a society of complementarity exists in which the principle is not luxury, because “buen vivir” also means not to seek a luxury life. If society means consumerism it makes you a consumer of ideas, too, a consumer of illusions. If you start to think about how marketing techniques are selling all this unnecessary stuff. People do not need many things to live. But out of fear of accidents you have to contract insurances in order to feel secure. But secureness also derives out of our inner harmony and that is something that nobody can sell. This has to do with the secureness of your own, with your cosmovision that you are practicing and fulfilling.
Pedro:
The concepts you have are very interesting, but now let us talk about economy. Which perspectives for the economic and ecological sphere of Bolivia do you see after the discovery of great deposits of lithium?
Ambassador:
It is similar to the situation of gas. The neoliberals always said to us that gas was a big deal for Bolivia. They said that they have done a good bit of business with Brazil and Argentina. They paid $1,02 per million BTU, the British unit of measure for gas. At that moment, the price on the international market was US$5. The same people said to us, we have studied at Harvard, we have studied at the best universities The reality was that this model impoverished us. They said that the deal was good, but it was a bad one. When we nationalized strategic companies, like the gas company, our international currency reserves reached almost 1,000 million dollars, nowadays there are more than 10,000 million dollars.
We have to see the difference. We cannot allow them to treat us the same way they treated us before. They imposed the treaties on us. We had to sign the treaties in other countries, today it is different. We negotiate the treaties, we negotiate them in Bolivia in accordance to our constitution. We are willing to discuss the lithium matter with those countries and companies that accept our constitution. That implies that there are environmental laws, too. It will be a process. It might take 5 or 10 years of negotiation. This cannot be done by tomorrow, it is a process of negotiation about the lithium case and of course you have to consider everything important for the environment.
But we have to make something clear. Many people of the political sphere tell us that we, the indigenous communities and the cultures of the Andes and the Amazonas, have to protect the environment. But in the sense of us being conservationists. Do we have to continue, in this sense, to say that we are not able to industrialize our country? And do we have to continue with our economic role of exporting raw materials? No! We are also able to industrialize our country. Until recently, the West only tried to penalize us, and besides the environmental and other related politics, they try to discredit our process of change. We say, with lots of dignity, that we will negotiate about the topic of lithium properly and we will work hard to support the industrialization to extract not only lithium but also other raw materials in Bolivia.
Jan:
How would you describe the standing in the international community, and especially in Latin America? Was there a huge change during the last years?
Ambassador:
Yes, it changed quite a lot. Now Bolivia has the chance to speak within the United Nations. We supported that water is a human right. We also supported the introduction of the Day for Mother Earth and we have a strong position on the topic of climate change.
You all know what happened in Copenhagener and in Cancun. Bolivia defended its position in Cancun and we stood there alone along with our dignity defending our position. For us, the earth is our mother, she is sick and we stand for a position to respect our mother. We do not enter the emissions trading and we do not accept it. Because the bankers will continue their way of trading like they did with the toxic funds. They can contaminate the industrialized countries but the developing countries are forced to sell only raw materials. No, that is not right. We will not enter in such a gloomy world, without transparency according to the emissions of these gloomy certificates. We are not willing to accept this way.
Jan:
For you, as an educated person, which things changed in respect to the Bolivian universities during the last years?
Ambassador:
You have to ask the directors of the universities and you have to analyze the results of the scientific community in Bolivia. The universities are in a process of restructuration. We created three indigenous universities because we want to guarantee the access to universities for people coming out of the Amazonian cultures (Chaquenhas, the valley and the high lands). Their cultures have the right to systematize their knowledge. The traditional universities only copied the developed systems of other countries and transferred it to Bolivia. This is a construct of inner colonization. Please, recognize this. It is a form of colonizing a country by implying the models of development, models of analysis and models of presenting the things. The agricultural students were sellers of chemical fertilizers. We cannot present us in a modern world with producing gene-modified products. That’s it and we cannot continue on this path. For that reason, we are challenging the universities in Bolivia to change.
Pedro:
Well, Mr. Ambassador, thank you very much for sharing some of your time with us. We learned a lot about your country. It´s an honor to have you here in Bielefeld as an orator! Thank you!
Jan:
Thank you!
Ambassador:
It´s me, who should be thanking you.

Elspeth kydd

08 January 2009 at Bielefeld University, Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF)

Elspeth kydd

Shannon Dudley (University of Washington: School of Music)

20 May 2009 at Bielefeld University

Shannon Dudley

Keynote Address by John Carlos Rowe (University of Southern California)

20 May 2009 at Bielefeld University

John Carlos Rowe

Keynote Address by Maryemma Graham

13 June 2008: Remembering and Forgetting: Memory in Images and Texts
(International Conference, Bielefeld University)

Maryemma Graham

Keynote Address by Sophia McClennen (Pennsylvania State University)

17 July 2009 at Bielefeld University

Sophia McClennen

Humboldt University, Berlin

This article investigates the consequences of the rupture of 1989 for the self-image of radical intellectuals and for their production of critical and emancipative theory. It focuses on North American and British perspectives. Hence it is not strictly speaking ‘Inter-American’ but it illuminates similarities, differences and interactions of American and European discourses and suggests a comparative approach to the history of political ideas. To this purpose, it analyses the relevant contributions in four periodicals which combine ‘old-left’ and ‘new-left’ elements. Two of these periodicals, New Left Review and Socialist Register, have their organisational bases – and, arguably, their implied readerships – in Britain and two, Dissent and Monthly Review, in the United States. Rather than looking into the reflections of individual theorists, this emphasis on journals aims at illuminating collective discussion processes with the aim of reformulating a radical intellectual perspective and politics. In particular, the focus is on the consequences for Marxism as a theory of social change and as a strategic project, on discussions about remaining systemic alternatives (whether called socialist or otherwise), and on how to organise and work for their realisation. The paper discusses two questions: did 1989 have different meanings for the intellectual left in Britain and the USA? In how far did these differences reflect distinct ideas of history, as well as specific interpretations of the character of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc and of their role in international politics?

In 1991, Robin Blackburn, then editor of New Left Review, argued in a long article with the title “Fin de Siècle: Socialism after the Crash”, that “today’s moribund ‘Great Power Communism’ is not a spectre stalking the globe but an unhappy spirit, begging to be laid to rest.” (1991 p. 5) And although he conceded that “for Marxists, to disclaim any responsibility whatever for the October Revolution and the state which issued from it would be wrong” (ibid. p. 9), he believed in the possibility of a new beginning for radical and Marxist social theory – especially if theorists did not only consider the Eastern Bloc’s lack of democratic structures but analysed its economic problems and failures as well. About one year later, the American political philosopher and editor of the left-wing journal Dissent, Michael Walzer, seemed more sceptical:

We are in a period of uncertainty and confusion. The collapse of communism ought to open new opportunities for the democratic left, but its immediate effect has been to raise questions about many leftist (not only communist) orthodoxies: about the ‘direction’ of history, the role of state planning in the economy, the value and effectiveness of the market, the future of nationalism, and so on. (1992 p. 466)

Again three years later, American cultural sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander observed in the pages of New Left Review that the events of 1989 had to be understood as a “new transition”: “It is the transition from communism to capitalism, a phrase that seems oxymoronic even to our chastened ears. The sense of world-historical transformation remains, but the straight line of history seems to be running in reverse.” (1995 p. 65) Calling his article “Modern, Anti, Post and Neo”, Alexander described a return of North Atlantic intellectuals to a world of ideas quite similar to what he defined as the modernism of the 1950s[1]. Finally, the Swedish sociologist Göran Therborn diagnosed in an article “After Dialectics. Radical Social Theory in a Post-Communist World”, published in New Left Review in early 2007, that a post-1945, and especially post-1968, Western Marxist triangle had been disentangled: social theory as the combination of historical social science, philosophy of dialectics and a working-class politics aiming at the overthrow of the existing order (cf. 2007 p. 69). Especially the third, the political, dimension had disappeared as a result of the historical defeats of Western European social democracy in the 1970s and 1980s, the intellectual challenge of postmodernism, and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. According to Therborn, the European Marxist and socialist left was more seriously affected than the traditionally weaker, more sober, and geographically farther removed American one (cf. ibid pp. 99-100).

About two decades after the events of 1989, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and slightly later of the Soviet Union is often characterised as a last stumbling block for a tired and disillusioned Western Marxist left (old as well as new). Especially in Britain, over the last ten years a number of studies have been published which diagnose, deplore, and criticise the end of intellectual Marxism as a project. They come up with a variety of explanations for this improper ending. Even more surprising than the diversity of the reasons suggested – some of which seem contradictory – is the empirical base on which they are founded. With the exception of Paul Newman’s study on Ralph Miliband[2] (2002), they concentrate either on the journal New Left Review or on the individual often seen as its mastermind – Perry Anderson[3] (Achcar 2000; Blackledge 2000; Blackledge 2002; Blackledge 2004; Elliott 1998; Thompson 2001; Thompson 2007). They elaborate his “Olympianism” (Elliott 1998), “Deutscherism” (Blackledge 2004), or his and New Left Review’s “historical pessimism” (Blackledge 2002, Thompson 2007), the journal’s over-reliance on short-lived social movements, its distrust of the British working class, and its too rosy picture of Third Worldism. Important as Anderson indubitably is for the history of the Anglophone intellectual left in the second half of the 20^th century, the question remains in how far such studies suffice as analyses of the problems 1989 caused for certain strands of Marxist thinking. Reducing – at least implicitly – the history of a non-aligned, heterogeneous intellectual left (which can, if at all, be best characterised as neo-Gramscian) to a journal that admittedly calls itself the “flagship of the intellectual left” and further narrowing down this journal to the ideas of Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn[4], and – for its earlier phase – Tom Nairn[5], entails the danger of accusing individuals of ‘selling out’ their former political convictions. Many more Marxist and leftwing intellectuals than those writing in the pages of New Left Review had deeply ambivalent feelings about the changes of 1989 though they had declared again and again – at least since 1956 – that the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc did not represent their idea of socialism.

A major methodological problem for an approach focusing less on individuals and their political biographies lies in the question of who belongs to the ‘intellectual left’ and points to a difficulty that always arises once one sets out to investigate the ideas of collectives that are more amorphous than, say, political parties or interest groups. I try to come to grips with this problem through a comparative approach. The article embarks on a close reading of relevant articles in New Left Review and three further journals, each of which shares certain, but not all, characteristics with it. One was, like New Left Review, originally British while two were American, and all tried to produce social theory with political surplus value. These are Dissent, Monthly Review, and Socialist Register; and the analysis covers those articles in which authors tried to make sense of recent developments within the five years from January 1990 to December 1994. Although these publications did not represent the intellectual left as a whole, they played important roles within its debates.[6] And although discussions did not end in 1994, the time frame is deliberately chosen: five years are short enough to allow a detailed reading and long enough to explore longer-term trends.[7] With this methodological design, the article tries to take more seriously the immediate effects of the conjuncture of 1989 than do historical-biographical long-term accounts.

There are strong arguments for choosing these publications as cases for a comparative study. Some are formal: the journals stand out, with birth years between 1949 and 1964, and uninterrupted activity since, through longevity and a high degree of personal continuity among editors and contributors. With Irving Howe[8], Paul Sweezy[9], Perry Anderson and Ralph Miliband, each has had a particularly influential, long-serving editor, though the journals can certainly not be reduced to being their brainchildren.[10] All stand for a genre of writing that integrates essayistic elements into academic articles. Further reasons for this selection of journals lie in their content and political outlook. They were children of the early Cold War. Most of those setting them up belonged to a generation of leftwing intellectuals born in the 1910s and 1920s and politically socialised in the interwar years and the Second World War. During this time it was tremendously difficult to define one’s position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union – which stood for Stalinist violence but also for a decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazism. Whereas it seemed often impossible then to square the circle of expressing solidarity with both the USSR and with workers’ interests on a global scale, after the war it became increasingly difficult to react adequately to the developing block confrontation. With different approaches, all the journals tried to find a democratic-socialist position that was neither uncritically pro-communist nor dogmatically anti-communist. Having started their political activities in the orbit of radical-left organisations, the U.S. intellectuals around Dissent and Monthly Review had broken with Moscow already in the 1930s or 1940s or had always been “vague Marxists of the heart” rather than ‘party soldiers’ (Diggins 1992 p. 152). In Britain, they finally broke free from the Communist Party in 1956. From then on, the four journals saw themselves as allied primarily to the labour, peace, and civil rights movements in the respective countries (as well as internationally), and in a critical dialogue with the major political parties of the centre-left. However, the contributors represented a specific intellectual type: they were neither closely associated with parties nor, although sympathetic, intimately allied with radical movements. They became the first generation of an academic left which – to a large degree – substituted ‘theoretical practice’ for involvement in political struggles.[11] Having preceded the student new left of the late 1960s, all the journals sympathised with their protests on many issues but on certain points also disagreed. Later, they expressed scepticism of a (post-) Marxist revisionism and of neo-Trotskyite approaches. They became severe critics of the rising neo-liberalism of the 1980s and did not follow many progressives’ turn towards post-structuralism and deconstruction. Instead, they kept their faith in historical-materialist and political economic explanations. Finally, from their early days, the journals acknowledged each other, followed each others’ debates, and criticised each other – at times rather heavily.[12]

In the case of New Left Review the pessimism resulting from the experience of 1989 is explained with what Gregory Elliott called a ‘Deutscherite’ perspective (1998 passim). Its core was the perception, ascribed to Isaac Deutscher, of the USSR and its allies as non-capitalist or post-capitalist societies, despite their shortcomings (to be explained with the Soviet Union’s backward economy and hostile environment) (cf. van der Linden 2007 pp. 139-146).[13] Deutscher was convinced that eventually these would be corrected:

Stalinism has exhausted its historical function. Like every other great revolution, the Russian revolution has made ruthless use of force and violence to bring into being a new social order and to ensure its survival. An old-established regime relies for its continuance on the force of social custom. A revolutionary order creates new custom by force. Only when its material framework has been firmly set and consolidated can it rely on its own inherent vitality; then it frees itself from the terror that formerly safeguarded it. (1953 p. 164)

As Thompson pointed out, according to Deutscher’s perspective, the principal achievement of the October Revolution, namely the abolition of private property, had never been reversed and thus the Soviet Union stood in the revolutionary tradition of 1917 (cf. 2007 p. 33). It was at least one step further than the capitalist West. Hence, change towards socialism could be implemented from above (cf. Elliott 1998 p. 30). There was no guarantee that it would, and the Cold-War climate diminished the likelihood of this to happen (cf. Thompson 2007 p. 33). Still, it remained more probable than a socialist transformation in the West, realised through working-class struggle – especially in a time in which the working class had declined in absolute numbers and had also become ever more fragmented (cf. Anderson 1992 pp. 279-375). According to Paul Blackledge, “this transposition of the extrinsic history of the class struggle from the point of production to the global arena of the Cold War effectively tied his [Perry Anderson’s; S.B.] vision of socialism to the fate of the Soviet Union” (2004 p. 99). For those who thought like Anderson, socialist agency, or at least the possibility of moves towards socialism, rested with the Soviet Union, and some of them saw the Gorbachev era as a delayed vindication of Deutscher’s thesis. But can this explanation help us to understand the intellectual left after 1989 beyond the specific cases of Anderson and New Left Review?

In the following, I will show that 1989 was experienced by leftwing intellectuals writing for the journals mentioned as traumatic not only because of the restoration or implementation of capitalism in the Eastern Bloc but because, with this process, Marxism was robbed of its teleological dimension. More than ever, history seemed to have lost direction. This moment of major disorientation confused those observers who identified the Soviet Union as post-capitalist but it irritated also those who claimed they had seen it more critically and yet as qualitatively different from the capitalist West. This teleological dimension had made Marxism a hybrid of theory and belief system. Its loss meant much more than correcting and revising a (partly) defective theory. It compelled one to rethink one’s own values, morals, political ethics and even one’s very personality on the most fundamental level.

Evidence from the Journals

In all the four journals, the sheer number of reactions to the moment of 1989 is impressive. The focus here is exclusively on comments dealing directly with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc.[14] Often personal in tone, they revealed a feeling of urgency to grasp what was going on and to find adequate responses. These reflections peaked in the years 1990 and 1991; and their numbers decreased from 1992 on. They asked what the altered conditions meant for radical intellectuals individually, for their generation, and for sketching out an emancipatory project relevant to the new political context. In different ways, the contributions focused on four questions:

• What exactly did happen in 1989 – in the states and societies of the Eastern Bloc and elsewhere?
• What were the consequences of these events?
• What were ‘wrong’ reactions to them?
• What would be the ‘right’ responses?

The following sections investigate how these questions were discussed in each of the journals.

Dissent

One would expect Dissent, post-Trotskyist and anti-Communist, to have been least affected by the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, or even to have regarded it as a positive and liberating development. In fact, it moved from awe to scepticism. Norberto Bobbio described the events in 1990 as “total overturn of a utopia, of the greatest political utopia in history (…), an overturn into its exact opposite” (1990 p. 340). Most of the early comments emphasized, like Irving Howe’s, the positive effects for the Western left: “Intellectually, Stalinism evoked keener discomforts than did Nazism, since here the enemy seemed to have come out of ‘our own’ milieu, that of the left. Stalinism used words and symbols representing our hopes.” (1991 p. 63) But with the directions developments in Eastern Europe took, Howe realised in 1992 that the era of revolutions had come to an end (1992 p. 144). There were further problems. Ann Snitow was concerned about consequences for her generation of thinkers: “As a cultural group, we U.S. leftists (Old and New now shovelled together by recent events) may not recover spiritually from 1989. Our utopianism took root in other soil. Children of the cold war, we are not likely to be elected to the future.” (1994 p. 14)

In politics, social democracy could profit because the collapse of Communism had not put an end to the ‘social question’ within capitalism. Norberto Bobbio was firmly convinced that future social struggles lay ahead and, differing from Howe, he did not even preclude the possibility of revolutionary change:

In a world of frightful injustices to which the poor are condemned, crushed by unreachable and apparently unchangeable great economic powers, including those that are formally democratic – to think at this juncture that the hope for revolution has been extinguished only because the communist utopia has failed is tantamount to closing one’s eyes in order not to see. (1990 p. 341)

However, a deep insecurity about how to proceed in a “moment of political and intellectual confusion” remained (Howe 1992 p. 143). The central question for Dissenters was whether there still was a place for their radicalism – could a democratic socialism beyond social democracy be envisaged? Obviously, most of them hoped it could. The following words are from the opening paragraph of a Dissent symposium in 1994: “Are we now advocates only of an American version of social democratic reformism, reduced to piecemeal opponents of the liberal status quo, urging only that things be made a little more democratic? Can we still project some radical hope?” (Editors of Dissent 1994) Most contributions tried just that. But the symposium also contained voices such as Paul Berman’s which were more afraid of failing to make a radical break with the past than of giving up on radical change: “[I]f we keep trying to project radical hope by sticking more or less to our main arguments from the past, will our efforts be credible?” (1994 p. 9)

Confusion and difference of opinion notwithstanding, there were clear ideas what was needed: the intellectual left should develop a concrete utopianism. Several writers diagnosed Marxism’s reluctance to sketch out the details of a socialist society as its most serious deficiency (cf. Howe 1990 p. 301). And they clarified that the socialist imagination should be concerned with devising a better rather than a perfect society (cf. Howe 1992 p. 145). This has to be understood as demanding a ‘policy utopianism’ to replace a ‘theory utopianism’. Others added that new utopias ought to get rid of old ones – as well as of old myths and assumptions such as those of a revolutionary proletariat or a vanguard party (cf. Ryan 1990 p. 437). For Dissenters, the right place for the left was slightly to the left of what counted as progressive in the institutional political spectrum, and in conversation with social democracy (cf. Gitlin 1994 pp. 12-13). However, radical or socialist voices should avoid becoming identical with these centre-left forces: “Socialism is no longer a design but a disposition: a spirit with which we wish to animate political life, and from whose absence political life suffers.” (ibid. p. 13) The task was to keep the radicalism of a concrete and realistic utopianism as a ‘candle in the window’ and not to forget the old materialist assumption that the internal contradictions and social polarisations of capitalism would always create oppositional political forces.

Monthly Review

For contributors to the second American journal, Monthly Review, the future of socialism was insecure and depended to a large extent on the Soviet Union:

Socialists all over the world have not only an interest but a personal and political stake in what happens in the Soviet Union in this coming and decisive phase of the process that began with Gorbachev’s accession to office in 1985. We can only hope that the outcome will be positive and that it will set the stage for a following phase of economic recovery. (Editors of Monthly Review 1990 p. 17)

Hence also in Monthly Review, a change of mood from hope to scepticism could be observed, though later than in Dissent. Additionally, writers in Monthly Review regarded the problems of the Western left after 1989 not just as the result of the ‘collapse of neo-Stalinism’ but also of the political ‘bankruptcy’ of social democracy and of epistemological doubts, associated with postmodern positions, about the left’s basic philosophical assumptions (cf. Singer 1994 p. 87; Buhle 1990).

Initially, there was a split in Monthly Review between more optimistic and more pessimistic voices. For optimists, like Howard J. Sherman, the Eastern European revolutions provided a “wonderful opportunity to begin the construction of a democratic socialist society”. He enthused that “[w]e are thus witnessing an end to statism and the possible – still fragile – beginnings of the worldwide triumph of socialism” (1990 p. 22). Sherman argued strongly for the grassroots activism and socialism Monthly Review had always stood for. Most were less optimistic, precisely because they had seen advances towards socialism in the West as being dependent on the maintenance of non-capitalist modernisation in the Soviet Union (cf. Sweezy 1990 pp. 20-21). With its demise, there seemed to be no alternative to global capitalism anymore, even though, due to its internationalist perspective, the magazine did not focus exclusively on the changes in the Eastern Bloc. But developments elsewhere were equally discouraging: by 1993, apart from the end of the Soviet Union, the left had to digest the recent defeat of the Sandinistas, new problems for an isolated Cuba, and the marginalisation of Marxism in Africa (cf. Meisenhelder 1993 p. 40). Nevertheless, activists and intellectuals writing for Monthly Review kept their faith in the possibility of an eventual renewal of socialism though they admitted that a very different form of socialist struggle, still difficult to discern, might develop:

This renewal will take time. The institutional forms of the old opposition – mass organizations, political parties, sovereign states – will mostly disappear and be replaced by new ones. The same will hold for ideas and ideologies, particularly the falsified and distorted versions of Marxism that acquired status of orthodoxies in the Social democratic and Communist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Sweezy 1994 p. 7)

This renewal needed self-confident intellectual work. Writers criticised what they regarded as lack of nerve among many on the intellectual left in terms of sticking to socialist and Marxist principles and deplored that this became part of a vicious circle: “The cycle is then complete: capital proclaims Marxism’s death; ordinary people take it for granted; left activists are loath to challenge them; Marxism atrophies even among the activists; and finally, Marxism is dead.” (Wallis 1991 p. 7)

Concretely the task of radical intellectuals was to reformulate a democratic socialist project as a Marxist one – as an alternative to political liberalism and intellectual postmodernism. This implied a discussion of strategies and values. The editors tried to initiate discussion about an ethical Marxism, compatible with environmentalist demands, in dialogue with liberation theology and new social movements. They did so, for example, through retrieving and discussing Cornel West’s study on The Ethical Dimension of Marxist Thought, which he had written in the early 1970s. In the introduction to a symposium on West’s book, John Bellamy Foster quoted the author’s argument for Marxism’s importance in the post-socialist and postmodernist 1990s:

My point is not that Marx’s social theory fully accounts for all social phenomena; rather, it is that social theory wedded in a nuanced manner to concrete historical analysis must be defended in our present moment of epistemic scepticism, explanatory agnosticism, political impotence (among progressives), and historical cynicism. (West quoted in Foster 1993 p. 14)

Also in the case of Monthly Review the immediate reaction to the events of the late 1980s consisted of the insistence on ‘keeping the candle in the window’ – though in this case a more narrowly defined Marxist candle – because capitalism would inevitably continue to produce injustice and, thus, opposition. Intellectuals still had an important function – through theorising a democratic and ethical Marxist socialism that could be used as a framework of orientation in grassroots struggles for political change.

New Left Review

Similar to Monthly Review, the majority of writers in New Left Review assumed the events of 1989 to have enormous consequences. There was unanimity that the demise of this particular version of state socialism was definite, no matter how it was explained and judged. Due to New Left Review’s ambivalent relationship with the USSR and the Eastern European states (criticising their authoritarianism but nevertheless regarding them as post-capitalist), considerable space was dedicated to finding the causes for the breakdown – and in how far these affected the future of socialist ideas in general. The majority of contributors named the West’s victory in the Cold War as major reason for the collapse. Fred Halliday expressed this position most succinctly in an argument with E. P. Thompson and Mary Kaldor (the latter two wrote as guests rather than as regulars) over Eastern and Western peace movements’ contributions to the end of the system of deterrence.[15] As the second reason for the Eastern European states’ collapse writers identified the systems’ internal contradictions which unfortunately brought them down just at the time when they had – perhaps simply too late – developed potential for internal reform. Consequently, according to Halliday, the populations took political change into their own hands:

They [the events in Eastern Europe; SB] have restated in a dramatic form, the most neglected facet of political life, one spurned in east as much as in west, namely the capacity of the mass of the population to take sudden, rapid and novel political action after long periods of what appears to be indifference. (Halliday 1990 p. 5)

Despite its sympathy for democratic struggles, this might adversely affect the Western left. According to Mary Kaldor, leftists had failed to distance themselves clearly enough from the states of the Eastern Bloc, let alone actively opposed their oppressive practices (cf. 1990 p. 37).[16] She was convinced that this failure played its part in discrediting socialist ideas. Whereas socialism had lost credibility only in its Eastern European guise, i.e. as nationalisation, central planning, bureaucracy, paternalism, belief in experts, these (distorted) elements were now generally taken for the whole. Hence “[t]he 1990s may well go down in history as the moment when Europe (and the world) took the wrong direction because of a commitment to capitalist orthodoxy. The dreaded word ‘socialism’ is no longer printable.” (ibid. p. 36)

The Western intellectual left was in a bad shape – this feeling was expressed more frequently and in more personal tones in New Left Review than in any of the other magazines. Lynne Segal’s bleak description is just one among many:

Today, depression, cynicism or political turnabouts are hard to avoid, even knowing we are not the first – and will not be the last – to face the defeat and disorderly retreat of the ideals, activities and lifestyles that transformed and gave meaning to our lives. Depression hits hardest when the withering of former struggles and aspirations begins to feel like personal defeat; often ending the friendships, the shared activities, and the opening up of public spaces, so necessary for the survival of any sense of optimism in the future. (1991 p. 81)

This quote clearly shows the personal dimension of the losses experienced and the psychological consequences they have – and Segal becomes even more drastic when explaining that “[t]en years of defeat for almost all egalitarian and collectivist endeavours has caused many of us on the Left to fall into chronic mutual abuse, to fall upon our own swords or to fall – some never to raise again – onto the analytic couch” (ibid. p. 82). Like Segal, also G. A. Cohen’s diagnosis is characterised by an emotional attitude – he compares the experience of recent events to the end of a tragic but important love affair: “What is more, depression about the failure of the Soviet Union, as it supervenes in those of us who reluctantly rejected its claims decades ago, perforce has a complex structure, one element in which is self-reproach, since what is lost is a long since denied (yet also fiercely clung to) love.” (1991 p. 13) This feeling intensified in the early 1990s, as Lucio Magri, a leading member of the Italian Rifondazione Comunista suggested:

When the Berlin Wall came down the judgement of many people was one of euphoria. They saw the coming of a new historical period marked by world cooperation, disarmament, and democratic advance which would provide a clear opportunity for democratic socialism with a human face. Now we can see that the reality is different and much harsher. (1991 p. 5)

This had consequences, however, far beyond the destabilisation of intellectuals’ identities and needed reactions other than navel-gazing. Also real political gains were in danger when the baby was thrown out with the bathwater, as again Halliday explained:

[M]uch that was positive and necessary is being abandoned: a commitment to social justice, insistence on the exclusion of religion from public life, the promotion by the state of equality of men and women, internationalism and solidarity, to name but four. The assertion of a need to intervene to plan and direct economic activity is now almost universally rejected, at a time when the cosmic destructiveness of production had never been more evident. What is occurring on these fronts in the ‘communist’ countries is not an advance, but a recidivism of epochal proportions. (1990 p. 22)

Soon it seemed beyond any doubt that the abolition of state socialism meant indeed the triumph of a more radical, liberated capitalism – especially since it was paralleled by the collapse of the Western labour movements and by the fizzling out of third world radicalism (cf. Ahmad 1994 p. 96). Nevertheless, trust remained in dialectical turns which might usher in eras of new social struggles in the future. Miliband pointed out:

As long as capitalism, with all its inherent faults, endures, so will the socialist alternative remain alive; indeed, it will again gain more and more ground as capitalism shows itself to be incapable of solving the major problems confronting humankind. For this reason, the collapse of Communism, far from delivering a fatal blow to the socialist alternative, will increasingly be seen as wholly irrelevant to its prospects. (1992 p. 113)

But dialectics should not be confused with pre-determined movements of history. And one should not underestimate the length of time which a reconfiguration of anti-capitalist forces might require. According to Immanuel Wallerstein, the horizon would stay open for a time of up to fifty years – a bleak period during which a new world system would emerge in a slow and complicated process (cf. 1994).

Contributors agreed that the intellectual left should involve themselves in developing the design of this new world system. Reflections on how this should not be done were comparatively rare. Some criticised tendencies to adopt the perspectives of a moderate social democracy or of transforming Marxism into an evanescent post-Marxist spirit of critique. The Indian literary scholar Aijaz Ahmad took issue with Derrida’s Spectres of Marx and criticised that the philosopher dissolved the anti-capitalist kernel of Marxism into a vague anti-neoliberalism. He added: “He [Derrida; SB] is in mourning (…) not so much because of the death of the Father per se, but because of the kind of death it has been, and for the fact that the kingdom has been inherited not by the Prince of Deconstruction but by the right-wing usurpers.” (1994 p. 93) But which would be the adequate status of Marxism after all? Contributors disagreed but the majority would have subscribed to an intermediate position between Ahmad and Derrida: it remained important as one of the strongest intellectual traditions within social theory but – as suggested by Norman Geras – it would have to play a much more modest role in future struggles (1994 p. 106).

The task of the intellectual left was twofold. It should re-identify and re-examine the “(often implicit) fundamentals” of Marxist and socialist theory (Halliday 1990 p. 5) and intervene in political struggles in the post-Cold War world. Writers suggested that Marxism should return to its core task: the criticism of capitalism and of political economy, including the reinstallation of capitalist relations of production in the former Eastern bloc and perhaps also in states, like China, that remained nominally socialist (cf. ibid. p. 21). Numerous proposals were discussed to whom of the many Marxist thinkers it would make sense to return in order to revive Marxism as theory. Favourites became those within the Marxist tradition who had expressed – occasionally or permanently – their concern about revolutionaries’ neglect of democratic procedures. Geras recommended to reread Rosa Luxemburg, claiming: “To ask what foothold may have been provided for this development [the socialist apologies for Stalinism; SB] by Marxist doctrine itself, its democratic commitments notwithstanding, is also to the point for those who care about the prospects of socialism.” (1994 p. 94) Peter Wollen, arguing for a revaluation of the writings of Karl Kautsky, suggested abandoning vanguardism and all attempts at accelerating history (cf. 1993).[17]

Despite all those questions contributors felt so obviously unsure about, they did not doubt their persistent duty to produce a politically relevant critique of capitalism and capitalist democracy. Reflection and self-criticism notwithstanding, they simply had, as Wallerstein explained, to go on:

You may think that the programme I have outlined for judicious social and political action over the next twenty-five to fifty years is far too vague. But it is as concrete as one can be in the midst of a whirlpool. First, make sure to which shore you wish to swim. And second, make sure that your immediate efforts seem to be moving in that direction. If you want greater precision than that, you will not find it, and you will drown while you are looking for it. (1994 p. 17)

Socialist Register

In Socialist Register, immediate reactions to the collapse of the Eastern Bloc resembled those in New Left Review. As an annual publication, its perspective was more detached and thus the personal dimensions were less visible though soul-searching and self-analysis occurred in its pages too. Like in the Review, contributors had no doubt about the definite nature of Eastern Europe’s breakdown and debated its meaning and consequences: for Wallerstein, who was more closely associated with Socialist Register than with New Left Review, East and West were compatible – components of the same liberal nation-state development model that had produced Wilsonian sovereign capitalist states as well as the idea of socialism-in-one-country (cf. 1992 p. 104). The years 1989-91 thus became a turning point not just for the countries of Eastern Europe. This to a certain extent positive reading of events was not shared by others such as Richard Levins who were convinced that socialists had to acknowledge a defeat of immense proportions as final result of several decades of decline: “Half a century ago, my grandmother could assure me that my grandchildren would live in a socialist republic. It now seems unlikely.” (1990 p. 328) Interestingly, Avishai Ehrlich, an Israeli intellectual, argued against assuming the end of an era and criticised this supposition as heavily Eurocentrist (cf. 1992 p. 227). While accepting this criticism, most agreed that, at least for European and North American socialists, the changes and consequences were serious and chances for building a socialist society had declined. Joel Kovel, shocked by eye-witnessing what he had considered as hardly thinkable – the victory of anti-Communism (cf. 1992 p. 254), was convinced that the collapse of the Eastern Bloc would reinforce a neoliberal onslaught on Western labour movements and make their lives extremely difficult – particularly in the USA:

The dream of the [US; SB] bourgeoisie had come true: the proletariat had withered away; anti-communism had helped secure class struggle on the most favourable possible terms to business, leaving in its wake a largely oppositionless society characterised by the accommodation of labour to capital, the functional identity of the Democratic and Republican Parties, and the most threadbare left-wing politics of any nation in modern history. (ibid. p. 263)

Ralph Miliband repeated the dialectic perspective he had developed in New Left Review: the collapse of the Eastern states would strengthen the conservative forces in what he called the “international civil war”, but, together with the moral bankruptcy of social democracy, this might eventually contribute to the opening up of new spaces for socialism (cf. 1990 pp. 358-360).

Radical social criticism, for a long time the core of intellectual left activity, was at stake. Joel Kovel feared that transformative criticism would for the foreseeable future be regarded as quixotic and attempts at understanding history through the concept of class struggle suppressed:

A profound weariness and cynicism occupies the place where critical/dialectical thinking used to occur. Since the underlying structure which makes society intelligible is erased, society becomes a mystery, its various phenomena merely strung together like the words of a game of Scrabble, and as easily forgotten. Thus even factual understanding of the world is lost. (1992 p. 264)

Similarly, Daniel Singer stated that the term ‘utopianism’ was widely understood as being synonymous with unrealistic thinking or, worse, the gulag (cf. 1993 p. 249). Like Kovel, he anticipated the detrimental effects of this amnesia – not just for intellectuals but for society as a whole. Like many others, he identified the root of political apathy not only in the collapse of Communism (on which he claimed to have given up hope as early as 1968) but in the simultaneous surrender of social democracy to capitalism (cf. ibid. p. 251).

News of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc reached Socialist Register when its editors were preparing the 1990 issue on The Retreat of the Intellectuals. Thus the volume’s critical assessment of the post-Marxist and post-structuralist Anglo-American intellectual (former) left of the 1980s became overdetermined by political changes, as explained by the editors, Ralph Miliband and Leo Panitch, in the preface to the 1990 issue:

There are of course many Left intellectuals who would say that there has been no move away at all, but an essential reappraisal of socialist positions in the light of the extraordinary transformations which have occurred in recent times, and which have created an entirely new context, so it is claimed, in which to conceive socialist change. We too believe that constant reappraisal is essential for socialism to advance. But we also believe that much of the reappraisal undertaken by Left intellectuals in recent years has marked a retreat from socialist perspectives; and that such a retreat is unwarranted. (1990 not paginated)

Contributors pointed to two different responses to the changes of 1989, both of which they regarded as inadequate. The first, argued Arthur MacEwan, simply denied that the Soviet experience had any significance for socialist experiments. Even if, as he agreed, the USSR had never succeeded in setting up a socialist society, a burning question remained: “[W]hy is it that our efforts will lead to something better?” (1990 p. 312) The second was to give up socialism altogether, surprisingly widespread, as Norman Geras explained, even among those who had been critical of the USSR’s claim to Marxism. He complained about

a tendency, amongst people who have thought, insisted, for years that the Soviet and Eastern European regimes were not a genuine embodiment or product of Marxist belief, to wonder if the entire tradition is not now bankrupted by their wreckage – as though the ideas and values of Marxism were then, after all, wrapped up in these regimes, as before they were said not to be (1990 p. 32).

Contributors to Socialist Register were convinced that three essential tasks remained for socialists in the changed historical context of the early 1990s: firstly, they ought to explain why they still were Marxists and socialists – although history did not march with them anymore and the theory had lost, in other words, its teleological authority. Secondly, as Richard Levins said, they should act not as a vanguard anymore but as a rearguard, “defending the gains of 150 years of struggle, acknowledging the reality of the defeat and evaluating the reasons for it, regrouping and preparing for the second wave of revolutionary upsurge. It is an agenda of years and decades.” (1990 p. 329) Thirdly, producing social theory remained important. One aspect was to assess where exactly the former state socialist regimes had failed in creating socialist societies. Views of former dissidents needed to be taken seriously but left intellectuals should not adopt them uncritically. Although they were undoubtedly correct in condemning (post-) revolutionary atrocities, Levins maintained that “this validity held only in the small and immediate while their abandonment of the revolution in favour of the old regime was reactionary in the larger scale of things. We need this dual vision to understand these critics, from Dickens to Solshenitsyn.” (ibid. p. 333) To summarise: what was needed was intellectual honesty, stamina in sticking to Marxist views on social change and methods of analysis, the courage not to shy away from unpleasant conclusions, but also efforts not to lose touch with working-class struggles.

Coming to Terms with 1989 – the End of Teleology and the Last Socialists

Despite political differences, there was a large degree of unanimity among the magazines. They agreed (though Monthly Review took longer to come to this conclusion) on the definite demise of the Eastern European variant of ‘socialism’. Their feelings swayed between hope and despair with hope getting dimmer and despair deeper, despite a common emphasis that the crumbling regimes, even in the case that the progressive content of the October Revolution was accepted, did not represent – and hence did not devalue – Western Marxists’ and democratic socialists’ models and visions of socialism. They had no doubt that left intellectuals would be negatively affected by the changes, even if they hoped that dialectical movements of history would eventually create new political and theoretical opportunities. Whenever they discussed the reasons for the collapse, they hinted at the combination of military pressure from the West (especially during the final phase of the Cold War) and the regimes’ internal contradictions which produced popular protests. They had failed to ‘de-link’ from the capitalist world economy, and to transform the post-revolutionary socio-economic modernisations they had initiated (successfully, as most agreed) into dynamic strategies for a socialist mode of production and an egalitarian organisation of societal life. They had failed, in other words, to proceed from ‘state capitalism’ to (state) socialism.

Further, left intellectuals had no doubt that popular forces for progressive social change still existed in East and West, in the labour movements and in the new social movements, and were most likely to exist in the future. It was the intellectuals’ job to think about possibilities of aggregation – by formulating common values and an ethics relevant to all. Developing models for democratic, non-authoritarian routes to socialism was more urgent a task than ever – socialist and Marxist principles and theories had to be re-discussed. These discussions revealed uncertainty: within the journals, perhaps even more than between them, a difference of voices and an ambiguity of opinion is hard to overhear – some argued for emphasising, others for watering down socialist principles, some for immediately restating, others for radically rethinking them. A lot was at stake since the reflections would have consequences for assessing one’s own political biography and for designing one’s future tasks. This dimension might explain why silent co-existence of contradictory opinions was more widespread than open discussion.

Apart from these parallels and similarities, there were differences. As already mentioned, well into 1990 Monthly Review maintained hope that despite the collapse of the Eastern European regimes, the Soviet Union might survive. For Dissent, democratic socialism seemed to resemble social democracy (albeit of an ambitious type), while the others accepted social democracy, if at all, only as a vehicle for first moves into the right direction – though ideas on further steps remained vague. To a certain extent we can identify differences in personal reactions to the events of 1989: emotional expressions of loss were more widespread in the pages of Dissent and New Left Review than in the other two journals. This is surprising, given Dissent’s post-Trotskyist origin and New Left Review’s comparatively open theoretical horizon. One may explain this with the generational difference between the writers of the journals – Monthly Review and Socialist Register were still more dominated by an older generation of leftists who had had to survive ruptures before (for example, in 1956), while in the other two magazines the ‘1968’ generation was stronger. This generation had distanced itself from the Eastern European states as had the older, but originally was more optimistic about chances of social change – an optimism shattered by developments in the 1980s and further destabilised in 1989 (cf. Meiksins Wood 1995 pp. 39-43).

Other variations emerge in a more ‘quantitative’ comparison. Firstly, it is obvious that the two British magazines published more contributions discussing the change of 1989 as a whole. Geographical factors might be responsible – for the West European intellectual left Europe, including Eastern Europe, acted as frame of reference in a way it did not for American intellectuals who were, at the same time, more parochial and more internationalist. This supports Therborn’s thesis on Euro-American differences mentioned in the introductory part of this article. The difference Therborn diagnosed, however, does not apply to all the four questions raised. Concerning the meaning of 1989, one finds more reflections in Monthly Review and in Socialist Register than in the other two – this has to be related to their ‘stricter’ Marxist orientation, focusing on historical and economic approaches. On the other hand, concerning attempts at discussing the adequate answers to the collapse of state socialism, one counts more statements in the politically and methodically more open magazines Dissent and New Left Review. That the debate of wrong answers seemed to be more extensive in the US publications can be explained by the more marked turn to poststructuralist and identity issues within the American intellectual left in the 1980s to which contributors to both, Dissent and Monthly Review, had objected.

‘Deutscherism’, the perception of the Soviet Union as post-capitalist, is of some value in explaining pessimistic reactions. Especially in New Left Review one finds voices which defined what happened in Eastern Europe as restorative developments – Halliday’s diagnosis of ‘recidivism’ with regard to social achievements can serve as an example (cf. 1990 p. 22). These assets had, as several writers mentioned, not been limited to the Eastern Bloc but had positively affected the states of the West and the Third World. A similar perspective informed the pages of Socialist Register, for example, when Richard Levins’s criticised some dissidents’ perspective as “reactionary in the larger scale of things” (1990 p. 333). Additionally, Miliband’s high hopes on the potential of the Gorbachev reforms must also be seen as a manifestation of the ‘Deutscherite’ belief in change from above (cf. Newman 2002 pp. 308-309). Did the American journals share it? With Dissent’s Trotskyist origins, its self-declared anti-Deutscherite position, and its insistence that the acceptance of democratic norms and rules were a sine-qua-non for socialism, its contributors’ initial reactions to the collapse were more positive. But, as can be detected from their mood change outlined above, even they had to acknowledge the domesticating influence of the ‘state-socialist’ on the capitalist world. They also realised that agency for socialist change ‘from below’ developed neither in the Eastern European countries nor elsewhere in this period of capitalist restoration. They hoped for a social democratisation of the West which would have to start from above too. Hence, although they disagreed with Deutscher’s characterisation of the Soviet Union, they agreed with his idea of top-down political change. Similarly, Monthly Review was aware of the dilemma of a collapsing Eastern Bloc which on the one hand had falsified and distorted Marxism but on the other was an indispensable precondition for socialist advance in the West (cf. Sweezy 1994 p. 7, Editors of Monthly Review 1990 p. 17). Such differences, discernible in a close reading of the journals, might indeed be explicable with varying answers to the question whether the Soviet Union was in a teleological sense post-capitalist or just beneficial to emancipatory causes beyond its own sphere of influence. Even if the second position was taken, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc could not be unconditionally welcomed.

The ‘Deutscherite’ explanation needs to be complemented by a biographical one: the feeling of personal loss has become very evident. The Eastern Bloc was not socialist, but – following a teleological logic of historical progress – it was the part of the world that either could and should have been or had been at least more likely to become socialist than the historically retarded West. Disappointment was even more severe since for a short historical moment the Soviet Union seemed to move towards socialism. Paul Blackledge, Gregory Elliott and others criticised the intellectual left’s pessimism as the result of a specific view of the Soviet Union. However, intellectual perspectives are chosen, adopted and developed within specific historical and biographical contexts. In this case, they mirror an epoch of bipolar global conflict and its end, welfare-statist and corporatist politics on a national scale (with their ‘domesticating’ effects on the working classes) and later the long turn towards neo-liberalism, punctuated by small and medium-scale activities of social movements, infrequent incidents of working-class militancy, and the fizzling-out of internationalism. Hence, trust in grassroots self-emancipation in the Western World could only rest on shaky ground. This era of disillusionment culminated with the rupture of 1989 and produced a severe identity crisis among Marxists since history was running backwards or at least coming to a temporary halt. Obviously, it is hard to avoid linear teleological perspectives, even for those best trained in dialectical thinking. Later in the 1990s, the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement was welcomed as an attempt at confronting the realities of the new, transnational capitalism of the post-communist world and thus to put history back on track. It seems that radical theory needs radical practice at least as much as the other way round.

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Endnotes

[1] Alexander’s version of modernism is synonymous with modernisation theory. This theory held a hegemonic position within the social sciences from the 1940s to the 1960s. Modernisation theorists worked on the assumption that societies were coherently organized systems, traditional or modern, developing through evolutionary processes towards individualism, secularism, capitalism, democracy (cf. 1995: 67-68).

[2] Ralph Miliband, 1924-1994, Marxist political scientist, taught at LSE and the University of Leeds, and co-founded Socialist Register with John Saville in 1964.

[3] Perry Anderson, b. 1938, from 1962 editor of New Left Review for almost 20 years. Anderson became editor again in 2000 and stayed on until the end of 2003. He left Britain in the 1980s to take up a post as professor of history and sociology at UCLA. He is seen by many observers as the leading figure in New Left Review.

[4] Robin Blackburn, b. 1940, member of New Left Review’s editorial board since 1962 and editor from 1981 to 1999. Played an active role in British student protests in 1968. Close long-term cooperation with Anderson, professor of sociology at the University of Essex.

[5] Tom Nairn, b. 1932, member of New Left Review’s editorial board from the early 1960s until the late 1980s. Co-formulated the Anderson-Nairn thesis, claiming that Britain’s archaic political culture had to be explained with its proto-bourgeois revolution and a later alliance of aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Fell out with the editorial board due to different perceptions of nationalism. Professor of nationalism and cultural diversity at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

[6] This selection of journals allows for a consideration of many of those thinkers (and their intellectual environment) whose work is discussed by Alexander and Therborn.

[7] My analysis is limited to the British and the American intellectual left while Göran Therborn discussed the European intellectual left as a whole, not just the British. However, taking the British as an exemplary case seems legitimate since he regarded it as clearly forming a part of the European ‘family’.

[8] Irving Howe, 1920-1993, literary scholar and political activists, belonged to the ‘New York Intellectuals’, moved from Trotskyism to a loosely defined ‘democratic socialism’, co-founder, with Lewis Coser, of Dissent in 1954.

[9] Paul Sweezy, Marxist economist, academic and New Deal administrator, co-founder, with Leo Huberman, of Monthly Review in 1949. Sweezy is well-known for his work on ‘monopoly capitalism’.

[10] There are numerous discussions on editorial politics and mechanisms of decision making in New Left Review. The tenor is that Perry Anderson has played (and still plays) an extremely important role in its life, even at times, as in the early 1990s, when he was not the official editor. Anderson’s role was discussed by Paul Blackledge (2004), Lin Chun (1993); Dennis Dworkin (1997), Gregory Elliott (1998) and Michael Kenny (1995). None of the other journals’ internal lives have attracted comparable interest. Perhaps they were run more smoothly (Socialist Register, for example, did not work with an editorial committee before Ralph Miliband’s death in 1994) but apparently New Left Review is an exceptional case. The other publications are less frequently used as reference points for making statements about one’s own political position – a role that, to me as a foreign observer, seems quite evident in the case of New Left Review.

[11] This distinguished the journals from others, such as Marxism Today and International Socialism in Britain or The Nation and New Politics in the USA, which either moved, as a consequence of Marxist revisionism, closer to centre-left parties, or, because of a different understanding of the relation of structure and agency, claimed to have a more intimate link to the radical left sections of labour and social movements.

[12] It should be noted that several contributors published in more than one journal – for example, Daniel Singer in Socialist Register and Monthly Review, Norman Geras in New Left Review and Socialist Register, Cornel West in Monthly Review and Dissent, Ralph Miliband in New Left Review, Socialist Register and Monthly Review. Not surprisingly, there were and are differences between the four magazines – for example, different levels of theoretical abstraction, fields of empirical focus, varying prestige in the academic world, wider popular versus narrower academic recruitment areas of contributors, the degree of leftwing ecumenism, but also conceptual specificities like New Left Review’s short-lived sympathies for Mao and Althusser in the 1970s, a leftwing, critical Zionism among post-Trotskyist Dissenters, Miliband’s theory of the capitalist state shining through the pages of Socialist Register, or Sweezy’s theory of capitalist development visible in those of Monthly Review.

[13] For a short summary of Deutscher’s perspective see Marcel van der Linden, Western Marxism and the Soviet Union. A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates Since 1917 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 139-146.

[14] This explains why I do not consider comments on, for example, developments in China, which received a new interest as the remaining example of a state-guided economic system. It also explains a certain blurring of boundaries between central and marginal articles. While some contributions more closely represented the ‘spirit’ of a particular journal, the conjuncture of 1989 obviously generated a moment of increased ecumenism in order to facilitate the process of rethinking that was required.

[15] These became the final exchanges in a long debate between E. P. Thompson and Fred Halliday over the characterisation of the (second) Cold War. Whereas Thompson considered the logic of ‘exterminism’ – the possibility of destroying the whole planet – as producing its own drive and momentum and making Nato and Warsaw Pact to collaborators in the same process of irresponsibility, Halliday interpreted the Cold War as fuelled by the conflict between capitalism and post-capitalism in which the former side, consequently, carried a higher amount of responsibility than the latter (cf. New Left Review 1982).

[16] Kaldor’s argument was obviously directed against, among others, many writers in, and editorial committee members of, New Left Review.

[17] Rehabilitating Kautsky was a surprising project because he had been widely criticized by the New Left and Neo-Marxists for his economic determinism.

University of Aarhus, Denmark

In the spring 2006 many immigrants and their supporters took to the streets in larger cities throughout United States to protest against the draconian HR 4437 bill, which among many other punitive provisions would make felons of immigrants staying in the country without documents (Chávez 2008). Many people saw this bill as an unjust and exaggerated criminalization of undocumented immigrants, and they argued that it was part of a general pattern of exclusion and segregation of immigrants, especially of those of a Latin American background. The aim of the marches was thus to symbolize the important contributions immigrants make to U.S. economy and society, and to make general claims for recognition, inclusion and citizenship (Chávez 2008:152).

However, in this study I argue that the present struggles for citizenship of the Latino[i] Immigrants take place in a political and cultural environment, which in many ways is unlike the context of earlier manifestations. Even though only the Secure Fence act was signed into law, the HR 4437 bill is a clear indication of this unprecedented political environment (Henriksen 2007). This bill, titled ‘the Border Protection, Anti-terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Act’, symbolizes the ideological marriage of two issues, which have traditionally been treated as separate: immigration and terrorism (Henriksen 2007). This does not necessarily mean that people of Latin American background are confused with potential terrorists, but the integration[ii] of Latino immigrants is today marked by a new spirit of national alertness and cultural pessimism. A sign of this are the apprehensive fears of loss of national security and identity that are often expressed in media and public discourse in the United States

The aim of this article is to examine local expressions of this trend. The article analyzes the public debate that emerged in the northern part of San Diego County, California, in the wake of the formation of a local human rights organization. This organization, named El Grupo (The Group), was formed in August 2006[iii] to tackle immigrant rights issues in North County.[iv] As a coalition of representatives from various civil and Latino rights organizations, El Grupo was formed after a series of setbacks for the Latino and immigrant community in North County, including a municipal proposal to ban landlords from renting to “illegal immigrants” in the city of Escondido (Sifuentes 2008). Taking the point of departure in the study of the local debate that emerged on online discussion forums of the local newspaper North County Times, the article sets out to explore how Latino citizenship and local belonging have been affected. Has ‘the war on terror’ given rise to new discourses of disrespect and discrimination, and ultimately to new forms of exclusion and segregation of Latino immigrants? And do such practices eventually leave the Latino population in a new state of disempowerment and incomplete citizenship?

It is a basic contention of this article that the Latino population’s feelings of belonging to the local community is marked by such major issues, and that the constitution of Latino subjects results, in part, from such a debate. One of the goals of El Grupo, for example, is to increase political participation, citizenship and voter registration of Latinos living in North County. But the coalition does not work in a vacuum. The mobilization for belonging and integration of the Latino population is constrained by discourses and categorizations sustained by Others.

The external construction of Latino cultural citizenship

In this paper I understand the notion of cultural citizenship broadly as membership in a community. The notion of cultural citizenship was initially developed in the 1980s and 1990s to study rights-claiming agency of Latinos and other subaltern groups in the United States (Flores & Benmayor 1997). The concept was used to examine Latino civic participation in the claiming and negotiation of cultural space and rights (Flores 2003). William Flores defines cultural citizenship as a concept which refers to:

[T]he various processes by which groups define themselves, form a community, and claim space and social rights. Cultural citizenship encompasses a broad range of everyday activities as well as the more visible political and social movements. A key aspect of the concept is the struggle for a distinct social space in which members of the marginalized group are free to express themselves and feel at home. (Flores 2003, p. 297)

Acknowledging the importance of Latino agency in the struggle for recognition and feeling of belonging to a distinct social space, I argue that the formation of such a social space is not merely a matter of internal agency. Recent research on social representation and categorization has demonstrated that identity and belonging cannot be separated from the processes of being constructed as Others (Moloney & Walker 2007). This article therefore views cultural citizenship as a process of being-made by power relations that produce subjects through schemes of surveillance, discipline, control, and administration (Foucault 1977). Members of the Latino community must daily negotiate the lines and principles of difference established by the state and by dominant groups in society. Membership in a community is, therefore, also contingent upon how existing members look upon, represent, and categorize the group (Chávez 2008).

Using this definition the problems arise over defining who is entitled to membership and who is not, and, thus, over drawing the line between citizens and non-citizens when it comes to the allocation of rights and privileges. For many immigrants in the United States, especially those who are in the country without documents, the lack of formal status becomes a key factor in this framing of citizenship. However, much writing on citizenship has focused on the legal aspects of citizenship, pointing to the formal procedures through which people are either allocated or denied rights and entitlements. Such approaches deny the subjective and often contradictory processes whereby people are made into subjects, and whereby their membership of this community is negotiated.

Taking a dynamic approach, this paper therefore addresses some of the processes of external categorization by which people are made into citizens and non-citizens (Ong 1996: 737-38; Jenkins 1997). This means that citizenship is viewed as an ongoing political and cultural process whereby feelings of belonging to a community are, in part, made “from without” by members of the larger society. Becoming a citizen, thus, depends not only on formal relationship to the state or on the right to make claims, but also on views, values, and ideas held by dominant groups in society. It follows that discourses of inclusion and exclusion play a critical role in the constitution of citizens and non-citizens.

For this reason the emphasis will be on the role of dominant discourses in the construction of Latino identities. By dominant discourses I refer to the external Anglo-representations of Latinos as they are expressed in local media. Their domination stems from existing power relations in United States, but also from the intensity of the representation. Here I agree on Leo Chávez point that through repetition, ideas become taken for granted set of assumptions, for example about the inability and unwillingness of Latino immigrants to become part of US society (Chávez, 2008:26). The notion of hegemony, the centrepiece of Gramsci’s analysis of capitalism, provides a way of understanding how domination is achieved through the cumulative mutual reinforcement of the same assumptions. Although always an ‘unstable equilibrium’ hegemony refers to “domination across the economic, political, cultural and ideological domains of society” (Fairclough, 1992:92). According to this definition, domination is most effective when ideas and ideologies become naturalized and achieve the status of common sense. The control of resources and the monopolization of discourses play an important role in this achievement of hegemony. Monopolization of discourses means that Anglo representations acquire the position to make their categorizations count disproportionately in the social constitution of Latino identities. To put it shortly, what it means to be Latino is in part a consequence of what the Anglo population has made it mean.

This has ramifications for understanding the role of individual texts in the construction of Latino cultural citizenship, and also for how to interpret postings on the online platform of an English language newspaper in the United States. Each utterance is consequential, and it is necessarily an intervention in the social world of the Latino population, even if the Latinos themselves do not read or hear the text itself. Each text responds to and reaccentuates past texts, and, in so doing, contributes to wider processes of social and cultural change, as well as anticipating and trying to shape subsequent texts. Online platforms, therefore, play a role in the in the construction of systems of knowledge and belief, and in the strengthening or restructuring of existing conventions in society. Such conventions, I argue, impact the identities of individual Latinos although the position that an individual Latino takes to the conventions is off course mediated by his or her personal experience.

The Setting

For various reasons the case of San Diego North County provides an interesting point of departure for studying Anglo-American representations of Latinos. First, the cities in North County have experienced a dramatic growth since 1970, with most of the city areas developed into middle-class single family home tracks.[v] However, the area is ethnically diversified, and in some of the cities whites are today under half the population (Griswold del Castillo 2007). Especially the Latino population has undergone a boom, and makes up about 35 – 40 % of the population in many cities (Kiy and Woodruff 2005).[vi] The economy is based on tourism, high tech and agriculture, and agriculture is an important source of income for many Latino families, especially for those who stay in the country without documents. The area is known to be the home of many undocumented immigrants from Oaxaca and other poor states in the southern part of Mexico (Runsten 2005). Perhaps for this reason, local members of the Minutemen project and other anti-immigration people have begun to stake out day-labor sites and to harass farmers and employers into never hiring again. North County, thus, provides a case for the study of Anglo-Latino relations in a context with high levels of immigration, and with emerging conflicts between inhabitants of Latin American descent and immigrant unfriendly groups.

Second, for a combination of different but overlapping reasons immigration policies are today being decentralized from federal to sub-national levels of the political hierarchy. One reason is the neo-liberal trend of devolution and deconcentration, which implies a general transfer of responsibility for implementing programs to private actors, NGOs, or to local governments. A related reason is the failure of Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reforms. Consequently, despite the fact that the federal government has exclusive authority over immigration in the United States, many local governments across the country, including the city councils of many of the cities in North County, have adopted ‘own’ immigration policies. In these cities there has thus in recent years been a general increase in local immigration bills and city ordinances, which restrict driver licenses, health care, housing, and other services to immigrants (Versanyi 2008). Although the constitution pre-empts many local anti-immigration initiatives, local citizenship for immigrants of Latin American origin is seriously affected by this combination of anti-immigration policies and the devolution of responsibility. With the series of law enforcement initiatives and a general spirit of alertness among many local residents, North County provides an interesting case for the study of how Latino cultural citizenship is negotiated in modern United States. There are of course huge differences across the country, and many cities have proclaimed themselves as sanctuary cities with immigrant friendly policies (Vázquez-Castillo 2008). However, there are today a large number of indications in the United States that immigration laws are being more aggressively implemented. The Bush administration, for instance, directed its efforts with respect to unauthorized immigration into more vigorous enforcement along the border and in the workplace. In part for this reason, it has been argued that immigrants have become scapegoats in a time of heightened security (Little & Klarreich 2005).

Taking inspiration from critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1992) I will now analyze the ways in which Latino cultural citizenship is constructed in the online discussion platform of North County Times. The point of departure is the discussion that emerged in the wake of the resurrection of El Grupo.

Debating the Resurface of El Grupo

As alluded briefly to above the El Grupo coalition was reborn as a response to signs of growing anti-immigrant sentiments in North County, among those a number of events and initiatives affecting mainly immigrant communities of Latino origin. El Grupo can thus be viewed as a civil rights organization whose primary focus is to create local citizenship and belonging for the groups that are excluded by anti-immigrant practices. The organization defends the victims of the punitive and xenophobic actions. In 2008, for example, El Grupo protested against a parking restriction ordinance and against frequent driver’s license checkpoints in the city of Escondido. Both initiatives were criticized for targeting undocumented immigrants and for encouraging them to move to another city (personal interview with spokesperson Bill Flores May 9, 2008). El Grupo is thus just one among many Latino organizations based in San Diego, which in the last decades have engaged in direct and indirect forms of political action (Griswold del Castillo 2007). According to Isidro Ortiz much of the Latino political activism in San Diego has been a response to oppression, and it has produced accomplishments and achieved influence beyond the boundaries of San Diego (Ortiz 2007:130). Yet, the capacity of El Grupo to forge Latino membership and participation depends in large part on dominant discourses and other practices in society.

I therefore take the public debate that emerged after the resurface of El Grupo as a starting point for the examination of Latino cultural citizenship in San Diego North County. In August 2007, about a year after the leaders had announced the return of the coalition, North County Times printed a number of articles focusing on El Grupo. Many of these articles were also posted on the webpage of the newspaper, where readers have access to commenting on the articles. This study scrutinizes the comments posted as a response to one article titled “El Grupo making a name for itself”. The article was posted on the webpage late evening on August 26, 2007 (Sifuentes 2007), and because this date is the coalition’s first anniversary, the article makes an appraisal of its accomplishments. The author reports the viewpoints of members of the coalition, and of one Escondido Council member known to be critical of El Grupo. The reported voices talk mainly about two issues: First, whether the organization is needed or not, and, secondly, to what extent El Grupo is a legitimate representative of all the Latino community in North County. Not surprisingly, there is disagreement. Whereas the council member argues that El Grupo does not deserve much credit, another reported voice states that El Grupo has “provided a needed voice for those without a voice”. In a final section, key members of El Grupo are asked to reflect upon the role of the coalition as a local advocacy organization and upon communication and structure of the activities.

Importantly, whereas the reported voices reflect the viewpoints of members of the coalition as well as members of the political establishment, positions of ordinary residents are not reflected in the article. Perhaps for this reason, 145 short comments were posted on the newspapers website in the 6 days following the publication of the article. 114 of these comments express explicit anti-El Grupo and/or anti-immigration sentiments. Only a small minority (10) of the texts articulates sympathy with the organization, or voiced concern for the human or civil rights of the Latino population.[vii] In conclusion, the large majority of the messages posted convey antipathy with the Latino population in North County, and because of the disproportionate number of unfriendly postings, it can be argued that the messages constitute an online discussion community, which is constructed on overt anti-immigrant and anti-Latino sentiments.

But, how are these anti-Latino sentiments transmitted? What identities and subject positions are constructed in this unfriendly online community? What relationships between discourse participants are enacted and negotiated? How is Latino (non)-membership and (non)-agency constructed? Is Latino agency and responsibility made explicit or left vague?

Representing Latino Immigrants on Online Community Platforms

In what follows, I will address these questions by concentrating on online postings as a particular type of human activity and communication. Although it is a relatively new type of communication compared to ordinary “letters to the editor”, for example, there are reasons to argue that it is today an expression of a particular literary genre. Here I draw on Norman Fairclough’s definition of a genre as language use associated with a particular social activity (Fairclough 1992: 125-26). But how should we define the thematic, compositional, and stylistic characteristics of this type of activity? And what is the impact of these characteristics on the constitution of Latino subjects?

As part of the development and dissemination of modern information technology, newspapers have become interactive media, and the usual distinction between writers and readers has become increasingly blurred. Modern webpages of newspapers, where readers today have access to commenting on the articles, are themselves a clear indication of this. Some would argue that readers’ commentaries have always been a feature of American newspapers, and that “letters to the editor” have been a key fixture of most papers’ opinion pages. There are, nevertheless, a number of important generic differences between such letters and the activities associated with online community discussion platforms.

Most of the letters submitted to the editor by conventional mail (or e-mail) are mostly about issues of general concern to the readers of the newspaper. Only in some occasions letters actually comment on individual articles printed in earlier issues of the same newspaper. This means that the “readers’ comments” genre on the newspapers web-pages to a larger extent facilitates communication and debate about the particular issues dealt with in the individual articles. In addition, access has become much easier, and messages are therefore posted on a frequent and repeated basis, and the same reader may often post multiple messages commenting on the same article. Also, only a small percentage of conventional letters to the editor is actually printed, but the majority of the comments posted on the web-page will actually be screened, even if they are submitted anonymously. In the case of North County Times posters may not include contact information or last names as the paper cannot guarantee the identity of the author.

The establishment of online community discussion platforms has thus facilitated dialogue between readers, and these platforms have given voice to more people in local and national debate. Moreover, since a large number of people actually get their daily news – not from reading printed versions of the newspapers – but from visiting their webpage, there are reasons to argue that the readership of online comments is becoming larger.[viii] This also suggests that readers commenting on the online platforms reach a larger public and that online discussion platforms support the distribution of common knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers. In a recent publication Anne Gentle has emphasized the positive features of online communities:

By joining a community, being a community member, and looking for places where you can either contribute or motivate others to contribute, you are empowering collaborative efforts unlike any seen in the past (Gentle 2009: 104-5).

In a similar commendatory fashion, Yochai Benkler states that online platforms contribute to the democratization of society:

This new freedom holds great practical promise: as a dimension of individual freedom; as a platform for better democratic participation; as a medium to foster a more critical and self-reflective culture; and, in an increasingly information dependent global economy, as a mechanism to achieve improvements in human development everywhere (Benkler 2006: 3)

In addition to the points quoted here, it can be argued that the online discussion platforms on the webpages of local newspapers become a medium for advising or pressuring local politicians, especially at a time when (immigrant) policy is increasingly devolving to the subnational levels. Consequently, online communities are rapidly becoming a popular way to organize people, exchange opinions, and build shared meanings and advocacy.

However, in the same way as civil society is not always home of the good and enlightened (Henriksen 2008), online members are necessarily not writing morally righteous postings. Online platforms and other social media may in fact facilitate the availability of potentially damaging messages (Kaplan & Haenlein 2010). In a study of restrictionist discourses and their impact on immigrant communities in Los Angeles, Hinda Seif argues that grassroots anti-immigration mobilization is transforming and expanding via new media and information technologies:

The revolution in information technologies and accelerated consolidation of capital is transforming media and grassroots networking, communications, and organizing. These changes, along with Latino reactive formation against political restrictionism, have altered the forms and scope of waves of immigrant and anti-immigrant activism (Seif 2008:8)

She goes on asserting that sensationalist weblogs multiply and that subtle forms of hate speech against Latinos have become commonplace. Despite their unique potentialities, the online discussion platforms also constitute an expanding source of anti-immigrant mobilization. One of the reasons is undoubtedly that easy access to the discussion communities facilitates the participation of angry and furious voices. Readers with more moderate views on the issue, however, are not likely to take part in a heated debate, which does not invite lengthy articles with more nuanced types of argumentation. Instead, the genre encourages readers to post brief, vigorous, and often emphatic comments, and because the comments are posted anonymously, one could argue that the genre facilitates the dissemination of irresponsible and disapproving utterances. [ix] It is for example unlikely that the following condemnatory note would be printed in a traditional letter to the editor: “I want to rob banks! Support me ok, El Grupo??” (Aug 27, 2007, 8:48 AM). The obvious message to the reader is that El Grupo defends and supports criminals, and since El Grupo is a coalition that works for the integration of the Latino community in North County, this utterance claims that Latinos in general are unlawful.

In addition, posting online messages seems be an activity in which many distinct varieties of language use co-exist. The statements and posters quoted above suggest that informative messages intermingle with more deliberative speech genres. The deliberative statements aim at persuading the readers about what the author perceives to be the true story about Latino presence in the community, and in most posters it is that they are a threat to national and/or local security and identity. However, perhaps because of the “vague” and permissive control of incoming posters, many comments, which make use of language styles known from everyday parlance, and which have a “written-as-if-spoken” style, slip through. In a heated debate on (illegal) immigration with many infuriated voices, this results in a vivid usage of “vulgar” and offensive language. The result is an epideictic speech genre[x], which is loaded with accusations and indictments, and which blame the Latino population for all types of social evils:

Foreign Nationals do not have the right to invade the US and reside here without consequence because they claim some civil right violation. That is a perversion of civil rights, and if allowed to continue, may result in tyranny imposed by foreign invaders (Aug 27, 2007, 7:10 AM).

Another illegal alien with TB discovered in Florida. He wanted to cut and run back to Mexico, but thankfully was stopped and isolated before it could spread it around. It is problems like this that El Grupo does not help with their open borders mentality (Aug 27, 2007, 11:26 AM).

Apparently, the two postings quoted appear to transmit very different conceptions of incoming immigrants. Whereas the former produces a metaphorical construction of immigration as an invasion, the latter pays attention to immigrants bringing contagious and dangerous diseases. Both statements, however, bring about a sense of insecurity, and construct immigration as a phenomenon beyond human control. But this defensive concern with loss of control of the boundaries is taken out on the Latino population. Drawing on Norman Fairclough’s notion of force as the “actional component” of language use and, thus, as speech acts that are performed in language use (Fairclough 1992:82), it can be argued that the posted comments posted threaten, intimidate, and scapegoat Latinos. In this way Latinos are constituted as blamable objects responsible of social disintegration.

The construction of Latino scapegoats is accentuated by the vivid usage of categorical modality[xi] and rhetorical questions in many of the statements. Whereas rhetorical or closed questions impose tight limits on the readers answer, categorical modality is a powerful way of limiting openness to struggle and more nuanced positions. Both techniques, thus, tend to project own perspective as a universal truth. Read for example the following two posters:

Maybe El Grupo can help Americans secure the border so we don’t have the terrorist who doesn’t care if you are Mexican or American, they just want to kill all of us! Or is El Grupo part of the terrorist plot? (Aug 27, 2007 6:19 AM, bolds are mine)

Until you guys stop labeling yourselves as Mexican Americans or some other foreign nationality/Americans you will always be looked upon by legal American citizens as outsiders. Learn English, come here legally, work legally, pay into the system & enjoy the American dream. Is that a hard concept to understand? (Aug 27, 2007 11:19 AM, bolds are mine).

In both messages, the categorical modality accentuates the propositional meaning of the text, which is that El Grupo is a threat to national security (first example), and that Mexican Americans are illegal beings, and, by this vice, a source of social degeneration (second quote). In the case of the two questions posed, the writers have taken control of the readers answer. Despite the dialogical nature of many of the messages posted (see also below), there is no indication that the writer expects a reply. Instead the questions encourage the reader to reflect upon what the implied answers would be, and whereas the first quote functions as a rhetorical affirmation where the writer actually asserts the propositional meaning, the second question appears to be a persuasive denial. In both cases, the protagonists of the narratives told, El Grupo and Mexican Americans, are constructed as unlawful, criminal Others threatening US society.

However, contrary to everyday face-to-face encounters the writers only have an abstract, indefinite sense of who is the interlocutor of their messages. Obviously, the use of deictic pronouns such as “we”, “they”, “us” and “them” reveals something about the intended or perceived readers (as in the two examples above). In a few posters, the intended addressee seems to be the (illegal) Latino reader or members of El Grupo. In these cases the actional dimension exhibits little ambivalence:

“Why would a legal U.S. citizen (Flores [the spokesperson of El Grupo]) want to help someone break the laws of the United States? Illegal people come in all races. We are trying to keep America from becoming a 3^rd world country. If it is the law, then it’s the law. If you can’t live by U.S. laws, then go home” (Jack Aug 27, 2007 11:05 AM, bolds are mine).

The message to the unlawful Latino reader is that he or she is a source of regress, and in an aggressive language style he or she is ordered to leave the country. The interpersonal meaning of such speech act is one of hierarchic division between a modern “we” and a degenerated “you”, and because of this degeneration illegal Latinos are constituted as dangerous and deportable aliens.

Yet, in many other messages, the direct addressee seems to be the non-Latino population. In these cases the ambivalence of force is more extensive. Now the Latinos are apparently perceived not to be participants in the act of communication, but reduced to represented objects of an exclusive Anglo conversation. Latinos are talked about as if they had no place in the ongoing debate about their position in the society:

“Let’s see… an illegal alien has the right to cross our border at will, even if previously deported, spread TB, give birth to children at government expense, have their children educated at government expense, receive welfare benefits for their children have government agencies deal with them in their native languages, and be left alone as if no crime has been committed and no harm done to this country (Patriot, Aug 27, 2007 12:51 PM, bolds are mine)

There are reasons to expect that the presumed absence of Latinos in the act of communication would reduce the frequency of the derisive utterances and weaken the inveterate contempt expressed. Why blame Latinos if they don’t read the messages? However, the indictments and the ingrained anger are also expressed in comments where Latinos are constituted as non-participating “Others”. This suggests the presumed indirect presence of a Latino audience, or, more precisely, the passive participation of local Latinos – not as primary addressees – but as hearers of the conversations between Anglo writers and Anglo addressees. Here I draw on Faircloughs definition of hearers as “those not addressed directly, but assumed to be part of the audience” (Fairclough 1992:78).[xii] The point I want to make here, thus, is that the Latino population face a double exclusion.

On the one hand the propositional and actional content of the messages constitute the Latinos as blamable Others and as unsocial evils.

On the other hand they are degraded to non-actors and (mis)treated like objects in a discussion to which they are not invited. Importantly, in this particular online discussion forum, with a potential participation of 35 % Latinos[xiii], only very few writers explicitly identified as such and no one as either illegal or (Latino) immigrant. There are many explanations for the absence of identifiable Latino participants. One is that they are uninvited. Other reasons are associated with the ethnic composition of the readership (although many writers accused the paper for catering too much for the Latino population), inaccessibility to computers, (perceived) lack of language skills, and, perhaps most importantly, security matters. In a situation where the cost of (visible) participation is possible deportation, a common strategy among mainly illegal Latino immigrants is to live a hidden life, to conceal their identity and their status, and to stay out of sight of the authorities (Kearney 1998; Flores 2003). For these reasons, Latinos in general are constituted as passive onlookers and undesired Others in an Anglo dominated debate on immigrants and their role in society.

Finally, the social identities and relationships between Latinos and Anglos set up in the online debate are accentuated by the dialogical nature of the comments. The individual utterances or comments posted on the homepage can be viewed as isolated statements with their own message and ideological content, but many comments are not merely comments posted as a response to the original newspaper article. The debate develops a life of its own, with many comments posted as rejoinders to previous comments. This means that many postings are linked to one another – often through an assertion and agreement structure (or on rare occasions through an assertion and objection logic). The comments posted, thus, form a dialogical and sequential structure, where some comments often have explicit intertextual references back to previous utterances. This was for example the case in this discussion between some readers about rights to citizens and to illegal immigrants:

“No they don’t have the right to be here and yes we have the right to deport them. What bothers me are posts like McD [commenter’s pseudonym] at 7:33AM and What Rights [commenter’s pseudonym] at 8:09 AM. Both say they have no rights. I disagree. They have many of the same rights as citizens. Not all, but many of them (What?. Aug 27, 2007 9:52 PM).

“To: What: If they are here legally, they have rights. As illegals, they don’t have the RIGHT to be here…. NO RIGHTS!! (To: What, Aug 27, 2007 10:12PM)

The intertextual links between the readers’ comments, as well as the explicit dialogic relations between many of the comments, contribute to the creation of a common semantic domain, by which the writers selectively assimilate the discourse of others, and develop a common discursive community. This discursive assimilation seems to function as a powerful way of setting and policing the agenda. Minority viewpoints or other messages, which do not fit easily into the dialogical relationships established, are thus unlikely to be posted, in part because the author does not have a sense of belonging to the community. The fact that more than 79 % of the comments posted (and accepted by the mediator) conveyed explicit anti-immigrant views underlines the power of the anti-immigration messages over more nuanced postings. There are thus two interconnected set of positions represented on the platform. One which is occupied by the writer of each comment posted, and another occupied by the common discursive communities formed through the intertextual chains. In the case of local immigration debate, these communities become the flip side of the new discussion platforms. Occupied mainly by writers with nativist sentiments, who are concerned with loss of control, wealth, security, and identity, the communities contribute to reinforcing existing boundaries in society: those excluded by the interpersonal messages in the posters are also denied membership in the online communities established.

Constructing Latino Others – continuity and change

In his recent book “The Latino Threat Narrative. Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation”, Leo Chávez is concerned with how the same myths about Latinos as people who cannot and will not become part of US society have become a powerful social imaginary (2008). Constructed as space invaders and out-of –the place identities they have for many years been seen as a threat to national identity, he argues. They therefore exist as illegal and deportable aliens in the eyes of the dominant society.

Chávez is particularly concerned with the historical depth of what he terms the Latino threat narrative. Through the comparison of older and newer anti-immigrant discourses, he finds that a pattern has been formed. This pattern, he argues, began to take shape in the 1920s, and because of endless repetitions, the image of the dangerous outsiders has now become common sense and taken for granted knowledge in the US society (Chávez 2008). The result is that exclusion has been progressively ingrained in the structure of the US society.

I do agree on Chávez general point that Latinos have been constituted as an undesired homogeneous mass. This is also the conclusion put forward in a large number of studies on the same subject (O’Connor & Nystrom 1985; Scmidt 1997; Berg 2002; Lytle 2003). Although more ‘positive’ – but not less stereotypic – images of, for example, the romantic and emotional Latin(a) lover are sometimes produced, existing research seems to agree that Latinos are mostly ignored or negatively stereotyped.

However, I find it useful to highlight some of the discursive transformations that have actually taken place, especially in the wake of larger contextual events such as the war on drugs, and, latest, the war on terror. Chávez does mention that an economic boom in the late 1990s caused an increase in demand for labor, and that, for this reason, the alarmist discourses were for a time superseded by more moderate views on immigration (2008:34). In an interesting section he does also highlight the post 9/11 images of the border with Mexico as a gateway for terrorist and as a homeland security issue (2008:36-40). Despite the reference to these important changes, Chávez’ interpretive framework is primarily concerned with demonstrating the discursive similarities that exist across time. This leads him to the conclusion that the pattern established has been successful in constituting the Latinos as a ‘threat’ and a ‘danger’ to the nation through “simple binaries of citizen/foreigner, real Americans/’Mexicans’ or real Americans/’Hispanics’” (2008:41).

These similarities do exist, and it is important to point them out. I do, however, argue that post-9/11 discourses have added new layers and tropes to the already established representations, and that this has produced a qualitatively different narrative. Because (Latino) immigration has been subsumed under larger issues of war, terrorism, and security the Latino threat narrative of today reveals a spirit of national alertness, cultural pessimism, and vulnerability, which is radically different from previous offensive images of the submissive and manageable Latino (Henriksen 2007).

The Image of the Docile and manageable Latino

There exist a number of studies done on data collected before the war on terror began. This research has focused on the categorization of Latinos in audio-visual media (Berg 2002), in popular culture (Johnson 1980), in history textbooks (O’Connor & Nystrom 1985), in jokes (Schmidt 1997), and in public and official discourses (Schmidt 1997; Lytle 2003). There are of course differences depending on the type of media and the genre. But it is interesting that that these studies do not highlight the image of the dangerous Latino who is a threat to North American society. Latinos are seen as peoples with little cultural and economic sophistication, and, thus, as inferior or pathological Others. But, even if the Latinos remain stigmatized at the negative end of the social pyramid, there are only few discourses whereby Latinos are explicitly represented as identities that might endanger North American society. In many of the postings presented and discussed above, there was an explicit concern with the border as a loophole for potential terrorists, and Latinos in general were seen as a source of social degeneration. This sense of fragility and vulnerability has not always been present.

Some labels, however, have identified the Latino with a criminal. In these cases the Latino is a dishonest, immoral figure with a proclivity towards violence (Berg 2002:39). But, although this figure might be a source of anxiety and fear, he is mostly dangerous to individual persons, and rarely to the North American society as such.

The criminal Latino is a well-known stereotype in many (Hollywood) films. In such films, this figure is mean and a source of fear, but because of his ignorance and lack of sophistication, he becomes eliminated in the end. The image of the Latino easy to defeat fits well into Kelly Lytle’s argument that the dominant discourse in the United States has traditionally depicted legal and illegal Mexicans as “obedient, docile, manageable, and temporary” (2003:4). The underlying rationality is that U.S. is mighty and Anglo Americans intellectually and technologically superior. The online community on the webpage of North County Times was not built on such rationality. Rather than perceiving the Anglo community in terms of an all-mighty superpower with an indefeasible capacity to obviate any difficulty, many of the comments exposed a deep sense of insecurity and vulnerability.

In California, Texas, and other states in the south-west, the business community and in particular the agribusiness employers, who hire Mexicans and other Latinos as cheap labor, have previously contributed to enforcing the notions of Latinos as docile and temporary. Rather than a source of fear, they have been seen as a needed resource. The explanation for this lies in the fact that the global competitiveness of the agro-industry depends on low cost labor force and, thus, on large numbers of legal and especially illegal Latinos willing to take the jobs offered – even if the wages are low and the work is hard. But, as Michael Kearney has argued, the Latino labor force is first and foremost seen as a commodity and their labor desired, “but the persons in whom it is embodied are not desired” (1998:125). Publishing this article in 1998, about 4 years before The White House declared the “war on terror”, Michael Kearney observes that the Immigration and Naturalization Service was one of the most underfunded and mismanaged agencies of the federal government. Despite the sophisticated high-tech surveillance program, thousands of undocumented Latinos were able to defy the control every day. He therefore argued that the basic rationality of the fence and other border protection technologies was not to make the border impermeable, but to discipline immigrants to work hard and accept low wages (Kearney 1998:128). The point here is that the border protection measures were part of a number of ways of creating an atmosphere of fear and insecurity (among the Latino population), which served to create a reliable and hardworking immigrant labor force willing to accept the often hard conditions offered at the workplaces.

In this light, the absence of any discussion about Latinos’ contribution to society on the online platform is conspicuous. Some postings did state the Latino immigrants are an economic burden, or that Latinos exploit the social welfare system, but in general economic discourses receded into the background. Instead, the dominant ideological work that constructs Latino immigration to the United States as a national security problem or as a threat to the local community was overrepresented.

Nationalism on the defensive

More than once it has been pointed out that the terrorist attack on September 11 of 2001 has split time into a “before” and an “after” (Mattingly et al 2002). For immigrants, in particular, things have changed. Life has been harder, law enforcement has been tightened, more undocumented have been arrested and deported, and anti-immigration sentiments are now more often expressed in public (Little & Klarreich 2005). Moreover, since terrorism has now been added to the debate many immigrants in post-9/11 United States feel more distressed than before.

In a previous study I have argued that the war on terror has given rise to a new alarmist discourse (Henriksen 2007). This discourse is in no way a breakdown of previous constructions, but it encapsulates and articulates a serious of self-protective dimensions unprecedented in previous more aggressive narratives. The most important indication of this shift is the disappearance of the image of the submissive Latino immigrant. Instead Latino immigrants are (un)-identified as a faceless tide that threaten to destroy the nation, not so much through tangible criminal activities as through mere presence. At the heart of this new defensive nationalism is an ideological marriage of two themes, which have traditionally been depicted as belonging to two different semantic fields: Latino immigration and national security (Henriksen 2007:330). Immigration and border crossings have thus been subsumed under larger issues of war, terrorism and national security.

The postings on the webpage of North County Times confirm this hypothesis. As argued above, the online community constructed Latino immigration in terms of an invasion that was beyond human (Anglo) control. Importantly, rather than identifying tangible dangerous activities, the comments represented Latino presence in North County (and in the US) as an anonymous collective threat. It is not so much their activities as their mere presence, which is seen as a source of social deprivation. On this online discussion platform, built on a combination of fear and anger, Latino marginalization is reinforced by their position as passive observers in a gathering to which they not invited.

The main point that I want to make here is that Latino cultural citizenship is today marked by a new spirit of national alertness and cultural pessimism, which is qualitatively different from the old triumphant images of the proactive and untouchable Anglo selves. I argue that this is a sign of new powerful ideology, which I term a nationalism on the defensive. This ideology is built on apprehensive fears, and on a sense of exposure to the loss of national security and identity. Not unlike the anti-immigration xenophobia that is now common in many West-European countries, this ideology is mainly driven by a belief in the inability to absorb and integrate peoples of ‘alien’ cultural backgrounds and by presumptive moral claims to a national and local territory.

The mobilization of people around ventures such as the Minutemen project and the English-only Campaign adds a social dimension to the defensive nationalism. Whereas the English-only campaign constructs bilingualism as a menace to American civilization (Schmid 2001), the Minutemen Project is an organization of ‘patriotic’ volunteers whose goal is to monitor the border with Mexico in the hope of locating and eventually ‘arresting’ undocumented border crossers (Chávez 2008). As mentioned, in 2006 volunteers in many local chapters throughout California and other south-west states began to target immigrants on day labor sites, and in businesses believed to hire illegal immigrants.[xiv] The majority of the day laborers are unauthorized immigrants (Versanyi 2008), but in their efforts to defend United States against what the members perceive as an invasion they might as well harass legal residents and U.S. citizens. I argue that this shift of focus away from the border to ordinary cities across the country contributes to a new type of segregation, where many people are denied a sense of belonging to society. Just like online community platforms constructed among mainly hostile natives of Anglo descent, parts of the population are denied access to social space, understood as both a geographical site and the social possibility of engaging in action. They redefine local citizenship, and they restrict rights and access to the city and to modern discussion platforms for immigrants of Latino origin.

Accordingly, the heightened sense of defensive-ness does not imply the evaporation of aggressive measures and attitudes. On the contrary, it pursues a hostile politics of identity that defines the Latinos as incomplete Others, and keeps them culturally and spatially segregated from the rest of the population. This ideology, which I term nationalism on the defensive, does not only result in the reinforcement of the international borders, it does also lead to the creation of social and cultural borders within national territory.

Final remarks

It has often been asserted that citizenship is not the passive acquisition of an arbitrary and limited set of rights. Rather than seeing citizenship rights as something bestowed by the simple act of birth, we must view citizenship as an active process of claiming rights, it has been argued (Flores 2003). I do agree on this point, and that active political and social movement is a key factor in generating a sense of belonging or building community.

However, in this article it has been argued that the struggle for rights and recognition does not take place in a vacuum. If cultural citizenship refers to processes whereby people claim rights and entitlements, it is also important to pay attention to the opposite processes by which social groups are denied rights, membership and recognition. Exclusion is itself a practice and, thus, a dynamic force which often take new forms.

In this article I have argued that the online discussion community established on the homepage of North County Times is a platform for new exclusionary practices. The exclusion of the Latino population is performed along two lines: first, Latinos are not part of the discussion group, and thus reduced to blamable objects in an immigrant unfriendly environment. Second, the offensive and xenophobic language use constitutes the Latino population as a group of unsocial beings and as dangerous Others.

I view this exclusion as part of a new ideology, which is taking shape in the United States, one that I call a nationalism on the defensive. This ideology constructs the Latino population in ways that differ from previous more offensive perceptions. Negative and aggressive representations have always dominated, but the image of the docile and manageable Latino has been replaced by sense of fear and anxiety. The Latino population is thus constructed as a sort of enemy who threaten to destroy the nation.

In this cultural and political environment the mobilization for rights and recognition is often countered by nativist and hostile voices, which makes any attempt to create citizenship and forge inclusion a thorny task.

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[i] In this article I use the ethnonym Latino to generally describe membership in a Pan-Latin American community. I do this acknowledging that the national, ethnic, and racial diversity of this population makes it extremely difficult – if not impossible – to adequately depict the group in one homogenizing term. Nevertheless, I prefer this term rather than alternative demonyms such as Chicano or Mexican American, which are mainly used to refer to people of Mexican heritage. Latino has been coined as an alternative to the official term Hispanic, which lacks legitimacy in part because it accentuates a connection to Europe. Most people of Latin American heritage I have talked with during my stays in San Diego self-identifies as Latinos. This observation tallies with Vélez-Ibáñez and Sampaios assertion that Latino is a ”term of cultural recognition and positive designation of social space” (2002:2). Also, I use the masculine form Latino rather than Latina or Latina/o, acknowledging that it renders invisible a large group of female Latinas as well as existing gender inequalities in society.

[ii] My usage of the terms inclusion and integration does not convey a one-way movement into mainstream Anglo-American society, neither does it imply absorption or assimilation into dominant national culture. Inclusion and integration are often contrasted with multiculturalism, which implies the extension of equitable status to distinct national, ethnic and religious groups. In this article the terms integration and inclusion are not opposed to the constitution of cultures of difference. They are used more broadly, referring to the achievement of membership, recognition and belonging.

[iii] El Grupo first appeared in 1998, but as a result of internal disputes the organization dissipated a few years later.. However, according to Bill Flores, the spokesperson of the coalition, some of the former members decided to announce its return in 2006.

[iv] North County is the local expression referring to a region in the northern portion of San Diego County.

[v] Although definitions of North County vary, most agree that the county includes the cities of Escondido, San Marcos, Vista, Fallbrook, and Encinitas.

[vi] In the more affluent coastal cities the Latino population is smaller

[vii] It has not been possible to make any reasonable assessment as to the position of the remaining 21 comments. Many of these messages deal with issues that are not related to the reappearance of El Grupo or the Latino population in North County. Moreover, many other postings were directed to the comments editor, who removes messages that violate the editorial policies of the paper. In fact, one of the remaining 21 messages was posted by the mediator himself, who wrote: “Please stop sending in comments that do not fit into the political bias of this publication, my delete button finger is getting carpal tunnel syndrome” (comments editor Aug 27, 2007). Although I am unable to provide with any documentation there are reasons to assume that the comments deleted had an anti-El Grupo or anti-Latino content, and that this was expressed in a very offensive and defamatory language.

[viii] However, traditional letters to the editor submitted by conventional mail or by e-mail probably continue to have a larger built-in audience, but I argue that the “readers comment” genre is gaining importance, also from a quantitative point of view.

[ix] However, a moderator will not only remove messages with contact information but also posters with “offensive language, defamatory statements, personal attacks, or with other questionable content” (www.nctimes.com/commentpolicy).

[x] An epideictic speech genre is a genre of rhetoric that seeks to praise or blame someone. Epideictic discourses are usually written or spoken on occasions to commemorate or revile. My usage, here, refers obviously to negative utterances venting anger and fury.

[xi] Modality refers here to degrees of determination or commitment in an utterance. Categorical modality is realized when the producer of the text categorically asserts or denies a proposition, or when the producer indicates a high degree of ‘affinity’ with the propositional utterance (Fairclough 1992:158). The modal auxiliary verb ‘must’ is one important means of realizing categorical modality (e.g.’Latinos must leave the country’), but according to Halliday ‘tense’ is another way of categorically asserting something (e.g. Latinos are dangerous) (See Halliday 1985:85-9).

[xii] Latinos can be hearers either as readers of the posters or indirectly through the gradual dissemination of the messages and discourses expressed in the comments.

[xiii] As mentioned above, the Latino population makes up about 35 % of the population in North County

[xiv] http://www.minutemenunvarnished.com/minutesite/home.html

Pitzer College Claremont, USA

La drástica reducción en el costo de los medios digitales y su consecuente accesibilidad han hecho de la imagen en movimiento una herramienta poderosamente expresiva y de proporciones inesperadas en las comunidades rurales indígenas de México que, si bien han sido radicalmente alteradas por la migración y las imponentes fuerzas de la globalización, todavía están inmersas en su propia cultura local. Las videocámaras de bajo costo, ligeras y fáciles de usar, han promovido un proceso de transformación en cuanto a la producción mediática indígena en México. En este ensayo me gustaría delinear brevemente los principios generales de este cuerpo emergente de obras y, luego, revisar con mayor detalle Día dos, un documental reciente de Dante Cerano, uno de los artistas mediáticos indígenas más destacados de México.

A pesar del hecho de que la población indígena ha tenido una presencia significativa en el cine mexicano desde sus inicios, el desarrollo de los medios audiovisuales en las comunidades indígenas del país ha sido lento. Entre los primeros registros de las condiciones de vida que se grabaron en México en los últimos años del siglo XIX hay escenas que destacan la diversidad cultural nacional, espectáculos etnográficos si se quiere, tales como Desayuno de indios (1896). El cine mexicano de la época muda escenifica una serie de mitos, héroes y culturas indígenas en películas de ficción como Tiempos mayas (Carlos Martínez Arredondo, 1914), Tepeyac (José Manuel Ramos, Carlos E. González y Fernando Sáyago, 1917), Tabaré (Luis Lezama, 1917), Cuauhtémoc (Manuel de la Bandera, 1919) De raza azteca (Guillermo Calles y Miguel Contreras Torres, 1921), El indio yaqui (Guillermo Calles, 1926) y otras.[i] Por supuesto, estas primeras representaciones del México indígena, casi sin excepción, son obras hechas por gente de fuera de las comunidades indígenas. Las primeras voces indígenas en el cine mexicano fueron tardías, no llegaron sino hasta después de décadas de caricaturizaciones y representaciones equívocas en el cine comercial del país (como el Tizoc de Pedro Infante y la María Candelaria de Dolores del Río) y de la propaganda asimilacionista en los documentales (como Centro de educación indígena, Gregorio Castillo, 1938). Estas representaciones se convirtieron en estereotipos que resultaron bastante perdurables; Charles Ramírez Berg (1992) señala que a principios de la década de 1970, cuando el cine nacional estaba pasando por un periodo de revuelta y renovación ocasionado por la crisis, hubo serias revisiones tanto a las representaciones de las relaciones entre las clases sociales como a las de los roles de los géneros, pero la imagen de los indios en las películas comerciales permaneció como una imagen de

simplones rurales que dan un toque cómico o que fungen como sirvientes que cocinan, limpian y abren las puertas para los protagonistas de piel clara. (…) Se los reconoce por su actitud extremadamente sumisa, sus saltitos, su modo de andar a pasos cortos y su español con sonsonete y palabras mal pronunciadas. (Ramirez Berg 138)

Cuando las voces indígenas entraron por primera vez al cine, no lo hicieron como autores en control de sus representaciones, sino supeditados, en calidad de colaboradores, a la buena voluntad de documentalistas mexicanos trabajando en 16mm; realizadores como Nacho López (Todos somos mexicanos, 1958), Alfonso Muñoz (Él es Dios, 1965-66) y Paul Leduc (Etnocidio, notas sobre el mezquital, 1977).

Una generación después, la super-8 permitió lo que a veces se conoce como “transferencia de medios”, que abrió la posibilidad de que los amateurs, con un mínimo de capacitación técnica y ayuda (o interferencia) de los profesionales de los medios, antropólogos y burócratas pudieran representarse a sí mismos y a su cultura “desde dentro”. Estos profesionales introdujeron equipos pequeños de filmación a las comunidades indígenas, ofrecieron algo de información útil y luego permitieron, a quienes mostraban mayor interés en el medio, crear sus propias representaciones de sí mismos. Las experiencia previas que algunos de los participantes tuvieron en los proyectos de radio comunitaria sirvió como un precedente importante. Como resultado de la iniciativa de “transferencia de medios” surgieron algunos documentales notables, quizás el más conocido sea La vida de una familia Ikoods (Teófila Palafox, 1998) creado como parte del Taller de Cine Indígena de San Mateo del Mar en el Istmo de Tehuantepec, en Oaxaca; pero esta promesa no terminaría de cumplirse sino hasta la llegada de las videocámaras digitales de bajo costo y los sistemas de edición no lineal. Más o menos al mismo tiempo, algunas organizaciones de artes mediáticas, programas estatales ilustrados, grupos indígenas y activistas independientes de Australia, Canadá y los Estados Unidos emprendieron esfuerzos paralelos en sus respectivos países

En retrospectiva, ésta fue una etapa de transición que permitió, por fin, a los indígenas tener control sobre sus producciones, aunque todavía dependían de gente ajena a la comunidad para conseguir el equipo, el revelado y otros recursos indispensables. El enfoque anti-intervencionista prometido por la “transferencia de medios” ha podido realizarse a lo largo de la última década. Hace no tanto, los sistemas sofisticados de edición como AVID eran exclusivamente para quienes podían disponer de miles (si no es que de cientos de miles) de pesos para gastar en la renta semanal del mejor equipo de su línea. Actualmente, la edición no lineal, accesible por medio de software como iMovie, Adobe Premiere y Final Cut Pro, es el punto de partida para que comunidades indígenas de toda Latinoamérica, comunidades marginadas durante mucho tiempo por el idioma, la geografía, el prejuicio, la economía y un sinnúmero de otro tipo de barreras, puedan representarse a sí mismas con imágenes en movimiento. La emigración masiva de las comunidades a las ciudades de México y de los Estados Unidos ha permitido y acelerado este proceso, tanto por medio del equipo que se consigue y se lleva de regreso a la comunidad, como por la dependencia del video para mantener el contacto a lo largo de las enormes distancias de separación y de las fronteras internacionales. A pesar de que los historiadores de los medios vinculan las representaciones anteriores de lo indígena a un proyecto colonial de dominación y exterminio—quizás la postura más enérgica al respecto sea la de Fátima Tobing Rony en su estudio The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle (1998)—la dinámica que vemos aquí es totalmente distinta. Las comunidades indígenas mexicanas han demostrado que son rápidas para capitalizar esta nueva disponibilidad y han creado verdaderos legados para sus comunidades, tradiciones y luchas en formas en las que nunca antes lo habían hecho. El contraste con representaciones anteriores realizadas por gente externa a las comunidades con el propósito de documentar sus culturas, da una idea clara tanto de los términos que han cambiado con la transferencia del control de la imagen, como de los puntos en donde ha habido continuidad.

Muchos de los intereses expresados en esta nueva producción digital se traslapan con los intereses de otros activistas y artistas documentales que basan sus obras en las comunidades de México: la destrucción de los recursos naturales por parte de las empresas multinacionales, las luchas políticas en el contexto de naciones que persistentemente han ignorado y marginado a estas comunidades, las transformaciones de las tradiciones culturales ante la fuerza del avance de la globalización y los cambios generados por la migración masiva a los Estados Unidos. Sin embargo, me gustaría proponer que también hay mucho de nuevo. Quisiera ofrecer una lectura detallada del documental corto de Dante Cerano Día dos y considerar las formas en las que éste podría ser, si bien no representativo, por lo menos indicativo de las formas en que la producción audiovisual en las comunidades indígenas problematiza las normas de las representaciones etnográficas y de las categorías de los géneros. Beverly Singer escribió que los “términos que identifican a estas cintas como ‘vanguardistas’, ‘documentales’ o ‘etnográficas’ limitan la comprensión e información que contienen las películas o videos indígenas y, en nuestra experiencia, no son categorías naturales” (Singer 2001, 2-3). Si bien concuerdo en que Día dos de Cerano no encaja bien dentro de ninguno de los géneros existentes fuera de la ficción, también es cierto que participa en un juego altamente consciente con géneros reconocibles, en especial, los del cine etnográfico y los de videos de bodas, aunque sin ajustarse enteramente a las convenciones de estos géneros. El pastiche de géneros de Cerano se extiende más allá de estas dos referencias principales; una interjección, un montaje complejo con tomas cerradas de botellas de cerveza Corona siendo consumidas durante la celebración, acompañado por música de Vivaldi, es una parodia mordaz de un anuncio de cerveza. Esta secuencia, introducida por el intertítulo “la sonata de la cerveza” y un gráfico de una botella de cerveza, indica un tipo de intertextualidad más cercano al espíritu de Austin Powers que al de una antropología visual. Este jugar con los géneros es lo que ha contribuido al éxito internacional del documental.[ii] En este sentido, la película es distinta de otras cintas indígenas más conocidas que han “pasado del otro lado” y han alcanzado a las audiencias no indígenas (Atanarjuat: La leyenda del hombre veloz, Guerreros de antaño, Señales de humo, entre otros). En realidad, Día dos no introduce a la audiencia no p’urépecha a otro mundo, más bien, va y viene entre un mundo p’urépecha poco conocido y el mundo de las imágenes mediáticas masivas (y antropológicas) más conocidas.

Día dos adopta un tema antropológico clave: el parentesco y su articulación por medio del ritual del matrimonio. Dada la importancia del parentesco en la teoría antropológica, no es sorprendente que el tema del matrimonio esté profusamente representado en el corpus del cine antropológico, tanto en las primeras narrativas romantizadas como The Wedding of Palo (Knud Rasmussen, 1937) como en las que son parte integral de las clases de antropología, Bride Service (Tim Asch y Napoleon Chagnon, 1975) y Tobelo Marriage (Dirk Nijland y Jos Platekamp, 1982). El documental de Cerano narra la forma en que la comunidad colma de regalos a los recién casados: ollas, sábanas, baldes, sartenes, un molcajete y utensilios de cocina que ellos y sus familiares cargan mientras bailan por las calles yendo de banquete en banquete. En su obra, Cerano adopta una unidad de tiempo, lugar y acción que admiraría incluso a los teóricos más conservadores del cine etnográfico, pues enmarca su tema dentro de un sólo día, un sólo lugar y una sola secuencia de acontecimientos en un ritual de matrimonio. El video muestra un día en la vida del novio y la continuación del ritual de matrimonio que comenzó el día anterior, el día uno, cuyos momentos principales se sintetizan en una serie de imágenes fijas durante los créditos iniciales del documental. Como película etnográfica, el video está claramente dirigido a quienes no pertenecen a la comunidad; la voz en off del director explica, con una narración dispersa e irreverente, partes del ritual que de otra manera resultarían incomprensibles, y sintetiza los movimientos y las relaciones sobre un beat electrónico, en un resumen gráfico que estéticamente es hijo de la era del videojuego de la década de los 80.

Aunque la música electrónica sea ajena al contexto de una boda p’urépecha tradicional, el hecho de hacer un resumen esquemático, un diagrama simplificado y animado que explica las relaciones sociales complejas, los movimientos y el intercambio, es una estrategia que, sin duda, tiene ya antecedentes en el cine etnográfico . Por las mismas razones que Cerano, el realizador etnográfico Timothy Asch, en colaboración con el antropólogo Napoleon Chagnon, explica, por ejemplo, comportamientos sociales multifacéticos y caóticos en The Ax Fight (1975) por medio de gráficas de parentesco, ofreciendo un tipo de descripción densa que los propios participantes no pueden dar. Así como las impresiones ópticas y las flechas sobrepuestas señalan y decodifican los comportamientos de los participantes clave en el canónico corto de Asch, Cerano identifica a los participantes principales con títulos sobrepuestos, ayudando a los espectadores a comprender las relaciones sociales conforme ocurren en la pantalla. Y como para subrayar la convicción del etnógrafo de que los propios participantes no pueden articular todas las complejidades de la realidad social en la que interactúan, Cerano censura, durante el proceso de edición, a la “cabeza parlante” del video, que está intoxicado hasta el grado de la incoherencia.

La música dance electrónica es sólo uno de los fragmentos musicales extra-diegéticos incluidos en la banda sonora; se escuchan también fragmentos que van desde el hip-hop hasta el barroco, pasando por un neo-lounge frívolo y un repetitivo riff de guitarra de Heart, la banda de rock de los 1970s. Aquí es muy clara la distancia que toma Cerano de un proyecto de cine etnográfico concebido de forma más tradicional, con una sensibilidad de pura observación y con pretensiones positivistas. La condena que hace el antropólogo Karl Heider es típica de la desaprobación reservada a este tipo de decisiones editoriales en las películas etnográficas: “la música es inevitablemente una distracción salvo por los momentos en los que se trata del sonido real de los acontecimientos que estaban siendo registrados” (Heider 1976, 74). Vale la pena señalar que el ejemplo que usa Heider respecto a la elección inapropiada de música (música folklórica irlandesa sobre imágenes de campesinos irlandeses recolectando las cosechas) es considerablemente menos incongruente que muchas de las elecciones de Cerano.

En el contexto del video de boda, sin embargo, este tipo de inserción de citas musicales extra-diegéticas que parecen fuera de lugar, con frecuencia incluídas con intención de producir un efecto cómico, no está, para nada, fuera de la norma. También hay otras indicaciones de que Día dos puede situarse productivamente en relación a este otro género, el video de boda, que es incluso más marginal que la película etnográfica. Los videos de boda están únicamente dirigidos a los integrantes, es decir, a los participantes y, en especial, a los protagonistas del acontecimiento y a su parentela, así como las películas antropológicas están dirigidas sólo a los externos a la comunidad. Como lo explica James Moran, el video de boda es un género que colapsa las oposiciones binarias clásicas de amateur/profesional, privado/público y artesanal/industrial. El texto que aparece en la pantalla al inicio del video y que va de lo trascendental a lo banal sitúa la obra de Cerano dentro de los lugares comunes del género de video de boda:

Un día especial
Dios
Amor
Confeti
Banda
Padrino
Cerveza
Vals
Pastel
Regalos
Alegría
Costumbre
Responsabilidad

Esta lista, que mezcla los clichés del ritual con lo que podrían ser los puntos a seguir en la rutina de filmación del camarógrafo de bodas, nos ubica claramente dentro del ámbito de lo formulaico. Esta cualidad prescrita del video de boda es precisamente la razón por la que este género sólo es del interés de los participantes.

Más allá del pastiche genérico y del humor irreverente del video, Día dos de Cerano articula una posición que es, a la vez, la de un integrante de la comunidad y la de alguien externo a ella, una posición que, yo diría, es emblemática de los realizadores indígenas. . El camarógrafo/narrador/director no oculta el hecho de que él es uno de los participantes en la celebración. Tomas en primera persona que muestran grandes acercamientos de un chile, de salsa roja mientras se sirve con cucharón sobre un platillo del banquete de la boda, y de un vaso de unicel con una bebida destilada no identificada, colocan a Cerano entre los parrandistas. Un familiar de la novia se lleva al documentalista a la pista de baile y entonces se introduce una secuencia de encuadre fragmentado. Así pues, Cerano se coloca como un participante (en contraposición a un auto lleno de mirones, al que identifica con el título: “fueron curiosos”), pero a la vez permanece lo suficientemente distanciado del acontecimiento como para ser capaz de traducirlo para los externos a la comunidad.

El momento en el que la postura de Cerano como participante/externo es más clara y problemática ocurre durante la secuencia dedicada a Las bellas de la fiesta. La imagen de las jóvenes purépecha bailando en cámara lenta se yuxtapone a imágenes del ideal de belleza femenina de Hollywood: Marilyn Monroe y Madonna, entre otras, aparecen flotando sobre la imagen como un cuadro dentro del cuadro. Otra de las selecciones musicales sumamente extrañas de Cerano —Puff Daddy (alias P. Diddy alias Sean Combs) rapeando sobre un fragmento del éxito de 1983 “Every Move you Make, I’ll be Watching You” de la banda del movimiento New Wave, The Police— y el trabajo de la cámara colocan la mirada masculina, tanto la de Cerano como la nuestra, al frente y al centro. ¿Pero quién exactamente está viendo a quién? Aquí, Cerano fusiona varias miradas: la mirada masculina sobre el ideal femenino cosificado, ya sea caucásico o p’urépecha, la mirada etnográfica del externo ante el espectáculo de la otredad y la mirada p’urépecha ante la idea inalcanzable de un estándar de belleza importado y ajeno. Desde luego, no se trata de que tomemos todas estas miradas como equivalentes dadas las circunstancias tan distintas y las dinámicas de poder que las enmarcan. ¿Cómo se puede leer la inclusión de Jennifer López, quien una vez fuera la querida de P. Diddy, en la secuencia? Que Cerano es el autor de esta exposición de belleza femenina, aunque sea limitada, y del ritual p’urépecha para nosotros, no p’urépechas e hispanohablantes, sugiere que una lectura políticamente correcta más familiar es inadecuada. El hecho de que Cerano sea miembro de uno de los grupos mostrados (los p’urépechas) y no del otro (las mujeres), de que algunas de las representaciones sean estáticas (las de las estrellas de Hollywood) mientras que otras (las de los p’urépechas) estén en movimiento, y de que los hombres que bailan no están yuxtapuestos a ningún ideal de belleza masculina, sugiere una política de representación que frustra las expectativas antropológicas y las prohibiciones de lo políticamente correcto.

Aunque declaré que no argumentaría que Día dos de Cerano es necesariamente representativa o típica de las artes mediáticas indígenas recientes en México, la he considerado aquí como un claro indicador de la forma en que esta producción se desvía de modelos más puramente documentales y trastoca los paradigmas establecidos del cine etnográfico. . Me parece que Día dos es ejemplar en cuanto a la forma en que las nuevas tecnologías digitales y el software de edición no lineal han permitido no sólo un nuevo tipo de practicantes, sino también nuevas representaciones del México indígena. Estas representaciones, así como la selección musical de Cerano y como mucho de lo que los externos ven y experimentan cuando pasan tiempo en las comunidades indígenas de México, resultan muchas veces sorprendentes e incluso, quizás, insondables. Lo que queda claro es que la producción audiovisual indígena está creciendo y madurando. Aunque todavía están comprometidos con el documental social, el cual ha sido la constante en la producción indígena, Pedro Daniel López y el proyecto Mundos inéditos de Chiapas se han embarcado en un plan ambicioso para hacer una academia de cine indígena que también fomente producciones de ficción y que culmine en 2012 con un largometraje. Estas nuevas iniciativas y producciones forman vínculos a través de fronteras internacionales por medio de las artes mediáticas, alejando la representación de las comunidades indígenas de México de las personificaciones vergonzosas del Tizoc de Infante y llevándola a un nuevo y emocionante ámbito de auto-definiciones.

Endnotes

[i] En Crónica del cine mudo mexicano, Gabriel Ramírez hace una revisión de ésta y otras producciones del cine mudo mexicano. Por sorprendente que parezca, no hay ninguna investigación histórica de las representaciones de las culturas indígenas en el cine mexicano.

[ii] La obra de Cerano fue exhibida dentro de la serie First Nations/First Features en el Museum of Modern Art de Nueva York y durante el Robert Flaherty Seminar.

Obras Citadas

Heider, Karl G. 1976. Ethnographic Film. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Ramírez, Gabriel. 1989. Crónica del cine mudo mexicano. Ciudad de México: Cineteca Nacional.

Ramirez Berg, Charles. 1992. Cinema of Solitude: A Critical Study of Mexican Film, 1967-1983. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Singer, Beverly. 2001. Wiping the War Paint off the Lens. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Tobing Rony, Fatima. 1998. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham: Duke University Press.