Undocuments

John-Michael Rivera

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780816540037
• eBook ISBN: 9780816543007
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Literature

How do you document the undocumented? UNDOCUMENTS both poses and attempts to answer this complex question by remixing the forms and styles of the first encyclopedia of the New World, the Florentine Codex, in order to tell a modern story of Greater Mexico. Employing a broad range of writing genres and scholarly approaches, UNDOCUMENTS catalogs, recovers, and erases documents and images by and about peoples of Greater Mexico from roughly the first colonial moment. This brave and bracing volume organizes and documents ancient New World Mexican peoples from the Florentine Codex (1592) to our current technology-heavy age, wherein modern lawmakers and powerful global figures desire to classify, deport, and erase immigrants and their experiences.

While grappling with anxiety and the physical and mental health consequences of the way the United States treats immigrant bodies, John-Michael Rivera documents and scrutinizes what it means to seek opportunities in America. With a focus on the poetics of Latinx documentality itself, this book is concerned with the complicated and at times contradictory ways peoples of Greater Mexico have been documented and undocumented within systems of colonial knowledges, and how these peoples have been rendered as specters of the bureaucratic state. Rivera takes us through the painful, anxiety-ridden, and complex nature of what it means to be documented or undocumented, and the cruelty married to each of these states of being.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Info
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• To Acknowledge in the Age of Coronavirus
• Proem
• Genus Differentia
• Prelude — An Inquiry: How Do You Document the Undocumented?
• Book I — Gods
• Book II — Ceremonies
• Book III — Origins
• Book IV — Soothsayers
• Book V — Omens
• Interlude — An Inquiry into the “Mexican Question”
• Book VI — Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy
• Book VII — The Sun, Moon, and Stars, and the Binding of the Years
• Book VIII — Kings and Lords
• Book IX — Merchants
• Book X — The People
• Book XI — Earthly Things
• Book XII — Conquest
• Postlude — An Inquiry on the Edge of Tomorrow
• Notes
• Works Consulted, Erased, Read, Remixed, Sampled
• Images
• About the Author