Undocumented Everyday

Rebecca M. Schreiber is associate professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico. She is author of Cold War Exiles in Mexico: U.S. Dissidents and the Culture of Critical Resistance (Minnesota, 2008).

"The Undocumented Everyday is a powerful and compelling account of the creative and critical documentary media strategies deployed to intervene in the representational politics of Mexican and Central American migration to the United States. This book is a nuanced aesthetic and cultural analysis of an important understudied media archive and an urgent political debate."-RamÓn H. Rivera-Servera, Northwestern University"In a perilous political moment when nativists depict migrants as a problem, Rebecca M. Schreiber foregrounds migrant self-representations. Focusing on post-9/11 photo, film, and video projects by and about Mexican and Central American migrants, The Undocumented Everyday brilliantly examines the dialectic between visibility and invisibility. Schreiber analyzes an ‘aesthetics of disappearance’ in which the absence of visual representations of the migrants themselves shifts the focus to the tactics of state police power. At the same time migrants revise and combine documentary conventions with an aesthetics associated with ‘amateur’ media in order to center their views and criticize the state. After reading The Undocumented Everyday, scholars and students alike will see migration through critically different eyes."-Curtis Marez, author of Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance"A  significant  scholarly  achievement  amid  growing  anti-immigrant practices  and  populist,  xenophobic  politics . . . Schreiber provides the reader with ample material to consider the contingent, localized, and strategic ways in which the undocumented-as well as their allies-use visibility and invisibility in their struggles for self-representation and belonging in a climate of increased criminalization, detainment, and deportation. Arguably, this is the central contribution of this deeply researched and well-executed book."-Surveillance & Society"Schreiber makes an important contribution in arguing that undocumented Central American and Mexican migrants rely on and revise traditional documentary aesthetics of self-representation to establish alternative forms of belonging."-Latino Studies

• PrefaceIntroduction: Migrant Lives and the Promise of DocumentationPart I. Ordinary Identifications and Unseen America1. “We See What We Know”: Migrant Labor and the Place of Pictures2. The Border’s Frame: Between Poughkeepsie and La CiÉnega Part II. Documentary, Self-Representation, and “Collaborations” in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands3. Visible Frictions: The Border Film Project and the “Spectacle of Surveillance”4. Refusing Disposability: Representational Strategies in MaquilÁpolis: City of FactoriesPart III. Counter-Optics: Disruptions in the Field of the Visible5. Disappearance and Counter-Spectacle in Sanctuary City / Ciudad Santuario, 1989–20096. Reconfiguring Documentation: Mobility, Counter-Visibility, and (Un)Documented ActivismConclusion: Counter-Representational ActsAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex