Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law

A Theatre of Undocumentedness

G. Guterman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137412485
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137411006
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How has contemporary American theatre presented so-called undocumented immigrants? Placing theatre artists and their work within a context of on-going debate, Guterman shows how theatre fills an essential role in a critical conversation by exploring the powerful ways in which legal labels affect and change us.

1

Act § 237(a)(1)(B)—Present in Violation of Law

An Impossible Subject

Near the end of his autobiographical one-man show, Intríngulis, Carlo Albán erases markings that he has written in chalk on the set. What at first sight appears to be a simple black background has become, throughout the show, a blackboard, a projection screen, and shelves. The set is deceptively complex. Various oddly shaped geometrical panels transform the seemingly flat backdrop into a sort of monochromatic jigsaw puzzle. Once Albán erases words and figures that he has scribbled throughout the performance, the set gains additional intricacy. Traces of the story that he has shared both remain and no longer remain. A few chalk letters, or pieces of letters, linger legibly against the dark wall. Others are completely gone. In this way, Raul Abrego’s set for the 2011 production of Intríngulis at INTAR Theatre in New York City aptly captures the meaning of the title word. “Intríngulis” translates from Spanish to “complex web” or “tricky situation.”

We are often reminded by our politicians that immigration issues are difficult. They are personal and inspire much passion. But current immigration debates regularly reduce individuals and their positions to dangerous binaries. Labels such as “criminal” and “racist” fuel the flames of intense ongoing discussions. They also ignore messy realities that make divisions between citizen and noncitizen, between “alien” and “American,” between legal and illegal imprecise and often indeterminate. Historian Mae Ngai deems those living in the United States without proper authorization “impossible subjects.” They are distinguishable in concrete ways from citizens and legal immigrants but also indistinguishable. They are rendered powerless but are not altogether unprotected by the law. They are needed here and in ostensible need of removal. Ngai ultimately demonstrates how the “illegal alien,” an invention of US immigration law, surfaces as “a person who cannot be and a problem that cannot be solved.”¹ Theatre pieces such as Albán’s—a play about growing up as an undocumented immigrant in the United States—illuminate these kinds of complexities, which are often ignored in the broader debates.

The acts of writing, rewriting, and erasing performed by Albán evocatively capture realities of what I call “undocumentedness.” The term helps to approach the tricky nature of immigration law and highlights connections between identity and law. Much has been made of the dehumanizing and contentious use of “illegal alien” to describe migrants who reside in a country without legal authorization. Other adjectives—undocumented, unauthorized, irregular—deemphasize the criminalization of these immigrants. Nonetheless, as adjectives, such terms retain the power of “illegal” to turn issues of immigration law into individual qualities. I prefer a noun—undocumentedness—to stress how the labels that immigration law creates engender particular conditions. Undocumentedness moves us away from an adjective that dangerously describes people to a noun that describes circumstances under which people must live. These circumstances often create specific stresses and contradictions that inevitably shape an individual’s sense of self and of community. Undocumentedness leads to a long list of adjectives that easily attach themselves to individuals forced to live within its constraints: vulnerable, afraid, exploited, persevering, cautious, determined, displaced, and disenfranchised, to name a few. Although inevitably tied to questions of ethnic and national identification, undocumentedness also demands distinct attention. Albán’s play fits not only within a long tradition of Latina/o performance but also within a growing repertory of stories that focus specifically on living in the United States without proper immigration papers. Such a repertory has not yet received much dedicated attention. I hope that this study can open up new paths for discussing law, identity, and performance.

Still, it is important to remember that terms such as “illegal” and “alien” link issues of identity to issues of law. “Illegal alien” is firmly established legal language that speaks to a real legal entity. US statutes have used “alien” since the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, some of the federal government’s first attempts to delineate processes of citizenship and naturalization. Defined as “any person not a citizen or national of the United States” by the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), “alien” retains its currency in statutes, executive orders, and court cases.² Although the compounds “illegal alien” and “undocumented alien” are far rarer in the immigration statutory and regulatory framework, they do commonly appear in judicial opinions. Even as the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times are leading the way in dropping the use of “illegal” as a descriptor for individuals, both “undocumented immigrant” and “illegal immigrant” remain widely used in political and journalistic arenas. For some prominent politicians, retaining the term “illegal” becomes a matter of principle.³ With “undocumentedness,” I endeavor to move us away from charged and contentious terminology. At the same time, I rely strategically on “illegal” and “alien” to remind us that law constructs categories that contribute to the building of identities, as Albán’s work emphasizes.

In development since 2005, Intríngulis officially premiered in 2010 as a coproduction between LAByrinth Theatre Company in New York City and Elephant Theatre Company in Los Angeles (subsequent productions have included the one at INTAR as well as at Southern Rep in New Orleans, at the Atlantic Fringe Festival in Halifax, and in Spanish at Two River Theater Company in New Jersey).⁴ The one-man show places Albán in direct interaction with his audience. He shares his passage through and out of undocumentedness with candor, focusing on key moments and ideas interspersed with nueva canción protest anthems popular in Latin America, which he accompanies on guitar. He depicts his family’s journey from Ecuador to the suburbs of New Jersey, their years of residing in the United States with lapsed tourist visas, and their nearly 20-year struggle with the US immigration bureaucracy. He chronicles the shift from living in perpetual fear to finding peace. The tension in Albán’s intimate theatre piece does not come from dramatizing opposing viewpoints of the immigration debate. Rather, Intríngulis stages Albán’s struggles of having to exist day-to-day within those oppositions. It is the boundary between illegal and legal that truly animates the play, as Albán contends with the severe material consequences that illegality can prompt.

In her compelling studies of Salvadoran immigrants, legal anthropologist Susan Coutin describes living in the United States today without proper immigration papers as occupying a “space of legal nonexistence.” She proposes that such a space requires its occupants to negotiate between being present and erasing presence, between existing physically and not existing legally. Disallowed or unrecognized by the law, so-called illegal immigrants participate fully in a community and simultaneously exist “underground,” in an “otherworld” where their presence must be falsified or altogether denied. Individuals without papers can thus exist as family members, neighbors, consumers, and workers but also strive tirelessly to erase themselves to avoid notice. The incongruities inherent to this process are many, and our current immigration system therefore leads to “incompatible realities [being] true simultaneously.”⁵ As I describe below, Intríngulis ably illuminates some of these contradictions and demonstrates why nonexistence is unsustainable, as Coutin adamantly warns.

I introduce Coutin’s work here because legal nonexistence offers students of performance a productive approach to analyze undocumentedness. Performance—construed in this study broadly as an embodied, deliberate practice—surfaces as a way to manage contradictions caused by nonexistence. Moreover, because performance demands presence, it offers a tool with which to combat nonexistence. I am interested in considering how enactment and representation create spaces of existence, even if only fleeting ones. What power does performance hold to interrupt and perhaps modify gradations of existence created by law? What role can performance play in shaping not only an individual but also a collective identity vis-à-vis the law? How might performances make present for audiences a condition predicated on non-presence? More to the point, how does theatre participate in making undocumentedness visible? Coutin briefly discusses how the 2003 Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, which convened immigrants and their advocates to Washington, DC, after a cross-country journey, helped to combat images of the undocumented as “shadows.”⁶ But she does not meaningfully engage with cultural products that depict undocumentedness (she does frame Nations of Emigrants with a poem and the lyrics to a song). I find in her work an invitation to examine how cultural products generally, and theatre pieces specifically, can bring those forced into spaces of nonexistence out of the shadows and, in so doing, mitigate the violence characteristic to those spaces.

Intríngulis makes clear that spaces of nonexistence are dangerous as well as transformative. Albán submits plainly that without legal status, “there are people who sell themselves into slavery [ . . . ,] people dying of thirst in the desert [ . . . ,] thousands of men, women and children, held for months, even years at a time in detention centers, caught up in a system that benefits financially from keeping them there” (I 18). As a personal narrative, Intríngulis becomes less about these distinct circumstances and more about the pressures of undocumentedness. Albán tells us: “We started learning English upon arrival in the U.S. [ . . . ] In time, we learned [words like] Visa, Immigration, Green Card, Bureaucracy, Deportation, Naturalization, though I don’t remember learning them. [ . . . ] You simply absorb and absorb until one day you find that you understand, speak and even dream a different language. It’s part of you” (I 8–9). How the law and legal categorizations seep into everyday lives, into dreams, is at the core of Intríngulis. Albán describes the perpetual “state of unease” in which his family lived, how “fear became the status quo” (I 2–3). He equates the fear of immigration authorities with having a bomb set off in his heart, a bomb that can “destroy a person in one big boom” (I 8).

Fear fuels the need to erase oneself. Some acts of erasure operate through imitation. Coutin explains that the US immigration system generally encourages migrants to “imitate citizens.” They live daily lives “act[ing] on the rights” that citizenship ultimately promises.⁷ The angst produced by undocumentedness intensifies the need to imitate. Undocumentedness strengthens the power of a disciplinary apparatus, to tap into Foucauldian language, that compels immigrants to erase marks of foreignness. But in undocumentedness, imitating citizens can never fully cease to be an imitation. So other acts of erasure come into play, and these highlight immigrants’ agency. Coutin writes of the “art of not existing.”⁸ This combination of practices—inventing biographies, manipulating documents, misleading authorities, avoiding exposure—proves necessary in order to withstand the perils of nonexistence. Growing up, Albán sees himself as “play[ing] the role of [an] American teenager to a T” (I 10). The theatrical language is noteworthy. It stresses both how legal nonexistence can cause existence to feel put-on and how performance becomes a tool to manage the pressures of undocumentedness.

The frequency with which theatrical language and ideas appear in descriptions of undocumentedness is striking. Josefina López introduces her play Real Women Have Curves with an anecdote about encountering immigration officers as a child: “On the way to the store we saw ‘la migra’ (INS/immigration/Border Patrol). I quickly turned to my friend and tried to ‘act white.’ I spoke in English and talked about Jordache jeans and Barbie dolls hoping no one would suspect us.” The character of Pepe, in John Leguizamo’s Mambo Mouth, attempts also to deflect la migra’s attention by “acting” Swedish, then black Irish, then Israeli, and then, like López, American.⁹ Although theatre-makers like Albán, López, and Leguizamo might be drawn to performance metaphors, the use of such comparisons extends beyond those of theatre folk. Chronicling his journey from life without papers to life as a surgeon in New York City, Harold Fernandez peppers his narrative with allusions to the theatre. His initial entry into the United States required planning “similar to rehearsing for a well-choreographed play.” Fernandez writes often of pretending, of disguising himself, of performing a role for others. “He should have been an actor in the theatre,” offers now-reporter Ramón “Tianguis” Pérez of a fellow border crosser trying to outsmart border patrol agents when the two have been caught. Well beyond the moment and the place of crossing a border, the performance must continue. In her journalistic narrative of four Mexican American teenagers living in Colorado, Helen Thorpe describes the “seamless job of acting,” the “escalating theatricality,” that often accompanies undocumentedness.¹⁰ As I will explore in subsequent chapters, both immigrants and immigration authorities must become keenly aware of how they present themselves to each other. To paraphrase geographer Joseph Nevins, the kind of boundary policing inherent to immigration law is necessarily about performance as much as it is about particular legal procedures.¹¹

Intríngulis further links issues of law and performance when Albán discusses his work as a young actor. A successful stint in a community theatre production of Oliver! eventually lands a 13-year-old Albán a regular role on PBS’s beloved Sesame Street. “What better place to hide than in the spotlight,” he tells us (I 13). That limelight readily illuminates some of the incompatible realities to which Coutin calls attention. As a denizen of the famous street, Albán becomes a paragon of Americanness. His heritage as a Latin American immigrant actually solidifies his place in the television neighborhood, as he embodies myths of the Melting Pot and the American Dream. But matters of law prevent Albán from belonging fully. He simultaneously represents an idealized, all-American kid and lives with the feeling that he is somehow trespassing. He shares with us another dream, this one a recurring nightmare:

It would start out with me sitting in my apartment at 123 Sesame Street practicing counting—“One, Two, Three”—when there’s a knock at the door. I walk to the door with a cheery disposition and answer with a smile. On the other side of my smile I see Oscar, looking especially green and smelling especially dirty, flanked by Big Bird and Snuffy, both looking especially gigantic and overbearing. Oscar asks me if there’s anything I’d like to share with them. I answer that as much as I am a big fan of sharing . . . and helping . . . and compromising, I don’t have anything for them at the moment, but they’re welcome to hang out and count with me if they feel so inclined. Then Oscar gives a signal and the giant yellow bird and the hairy elephant tackle me to the ground and drag me out of the building. And outside an angry mob of children and Muppets and “viewers like you” are throwing Styrofoam letters and numbers and chanting “Why is Carlo crying?!” Then out of Hooper’s store they bring a bucket of hot tar, dump it on my head and douse me with a raft of yellow feathers. And just before I’m dumped into Oscar’s trash can which leads straight to the Immigration Department’s Detention Center, the announcer says “This program has been brought to you by the number one and by the letters U.S.A.” (I 14)

On television screens across the nation, Albán gains spectacular presence. He is a palpable member of the national imaginary. But as per INA, Albán’s presence violates the law. Undocumentedness drives a relentless internal tug-of-war and prevents Albán from truly being himself, on or off-camera. Like the blackboard at the end of the performance, he surfaces as a product of partial writings and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1   Act § 237(a)(1)(B)—Present in Violation of Law
• 2   Act § 275(a)—Improper Entry by Alien
• 3   Act § 274A—Unlawful Employment of Aliens
• 4   Act § 212(a)(9)(B)(iii)(III)—Family Unity
• 5   Act § 331—Alien Enemies
• 6   Act § 505—Appeals
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index