Buried in the Graves of Social Consciousness
Prominent among all the omitted stories and silenced voices of our current history, we find the masses of contemporary immigrants: the exiled, the refugees and the displaced that by the millions are forced to leave their home behind by the policies of power. Some of them may be romanticized years later as “nation builders,” restless pilgrims with an unbreakable work ethic and a propensity for sacrificing everything for the dream of a new start. Most of them will remain a footnote to someone else’s history at best. As for the most vulnerable among migrants, and in the Americas, the vast statistical majority, this omission extends to the physical realm of our lives. Their bodies are hidden from view inside clandestine sweatshops from Los Angeles to Buenos Aires, in restaurant kitchens everywhere, or working the graveyard shifts while the rest of us sleep. The products of hard labor are disconnected from the laborers who make them and are disappeared from our social awareness. The circle of denial is closed shut.
Erasing working immigrants from consciousness acts as a lubricant for the machinery of their exploitation. To ensure their cooperation, immigration policies based on detention, deportation, and even criminalization are put into place (in the United States they are enforced by an agency named “ICE,” [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] a masterpiece of naming by the people who brought us their “infinite justice” and their “manifest destiny”). To reach the minds of millions, however, these strategies depend on a formidable apparatus of propaganda. From corporate newscasts to Hollywood movies, image factories churn out stereotypes and distorted representations of the migrant as the “greaser,” the spicy lover, the funny-little-brown sidekick, or our Maids in Manhattan. It is either these reductions, or a complete erasure from sight. An example of the latter in the U.S. can be seen in Ken Burns’ upcoming PBS series on World War II. Mr. Burns, a filmmaker regarded by the U.S. mainstream as the most popular living documentary director, found no need to interview even one of the estimated 500,000 Latinos, including thousands of Latin American immigrants, who fought in “The War.” It took thousands of outraged people to rally behind the “defend the honor” campaign to force him to make some very small changes. He fiercely resisted making them, arguing that this would harm his film’s “artistic integrity.” Finally, it seems that he added about 23 minutes to the almost 15 hour epic, interviewing two Latinos and one Native American. These will run at the end of an episode, and graciously, before the end credits roll, as a footnote. It should be noted that he had originally scheduled to premiere his film on September 16, which happens to be Mexican Independence Day (PBS just moved the release a week later).
This zeitgeist has moved many of us to question how the art that we produce addresses the need to represent immigrants in our own terms, to imagine a map where we are not the ones falling off the cliff of history. How do we engage in creating a body of work that would conjure into sight and into consciousness the migrant’s experience, and also reveal some of the hidden mechanics of her disappearance? In developing Buried in the Body of Remembrance we decided to move formally into a layered narrative, and to focus our content particularly on the moment of parting.
Discussing ideas for the piece, I wrote from Argentina to Violeta Luna: As immigrants, we are as condemned as we are freed by the in-between. Our present is always a “somewhere along the road,” and a sort of construction site. With shovel in hand we dig our foundation. We dig and we dig until our body itself is built in the shape of the shovel, and of the hole itself. We dig up to reveal, and we dig to bury. Our collective work, our collective graves, our collective memory.
Violeta wrote back to me from Mexico: Actions: I am in a hole, my body half buried. I am digging, but just as I dig up, I also bury: a handful of photos, scissors, my shoes... I stitch the photos to my body, like we used to do as children, just sewing the skin, as if I were tattooing my memories. Memories that are also wounds… and it is all as if done by Sisyphus…
We emailed Víctor into the conversation. From Greece, where he was with Antigone, he started to share his ideas of mixing videos and media, and, by the time David joined us from San Francisco, the messages were journeying half-way round the globe among three continents. The seeds for this piece about the act of parting, migrating, exiling were planted in the in-between of cyberspace.
Our working plan mirrored the ways in which immigrants support each other when we venture into unknown places. We all took on specific roles, but we also got our hands on everything. We had no hierarchies, worked with much respect for each other, and, simultaneously, nothing was sacred. I proposed a “conceptual container” and suggested scenarios. These were discussed. The images that emerged were our own very personal responses, which when juxtaposed evoked new readings and possibilities. The work of Violeta, a dramaturgy of actions reminiscent of work, play, and violence, was often grounded by the voice of David’s mother, narrating her story of crossing from El Salvador. Víctor’s Memory Boxes, as he called his videos, recalled childhood games, digs, and grids for our personal archaeologies. These digs were also the graves of the disappeared, intervened by a performative forensic anthropology. The sound of electric ghosts, the static of Victor’s videos inside a head projected on the wall of a cemetery. Our violent past, the hands of our Antigone, digging up the talking head of la migrante. Our violent present: from farm labor to the women of Juárez. Deserts and river crossings: Lo seco y lo mojado.
All of us in S&M live in San Francisco, a city with a reputation for openness, and for being a sanctuary for difference. According to the last census, 4 out of 10 people who live here are foreign-born, but many Latinos, including myself, were not counted (like Ken Burns, the government wasn’t interviewing me. Censors had turned the census into censorship.) For many of us it is self evident that our city’s inclusive and compassionate reputation is the direct result of the immigrant’s ethos of solidarity. Most immigrants come here from struggle, into more struggle, and their plan for survival is not based on ruthless self-interest, but rather on a strategy rooted in collective support. Crime rates in immigrant neighborhoods are 45% lower than in places populated by third generation Americans, for example. We are aware that, in silencing the voice of the immigrant, power censors from public discourse the very values that could undermine their economic model of self-centered, consumerist canibalismo. As immigrant artists, we are answering the call to resist stereotyping, vilification, or the outright disappearance of our story from history. Instead, we contribute to a construction of identity that is representative of an immigrant consciousness that is generous and compassionate and that aligns personal advancement with the well-being of the community.
--Roberto Gutiérrez Varea
Resources
On Ken Burns’ Controversy:
“Latinos' Battle With Burns Taken to 'War' Sponsors,” The Washington Post, May 3, 2007.
Gonzalez, Juan. “Hey Ken Burns, Why Shun Latinos?” Democracy Now.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/11/1719227
(accessed May 11, 2007)
Jenson, Elizabeth. “PBS Supports Ken Burns Against Latinos' Complaints.” New York Times, August 26, 2007.
Defend the Honor Campaign: http://www.defendthehonor.org/
National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ): http://www.nahj.org
National Hispanic Media Coalition: http://www.nhmc.org
On the 2000 Census:
Hendricks, Tyche. “All roads lead to the Bay Area: Number of foreign-born residents climbs to 27.5%.” San Francisco Chronicle. August 27, 2002.
Migration Policy Institute:
http://www.migrationinformation.org/
On crime rates in immigrant neighborhoods:
Sampson, Robert J. “Open Doors Don't Invite Criminals.” New York Times, March 11, 2006.
The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, and thePew Hispanic Center. 2006. America’s Immigration Quandary. Pew Research Center.
http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/63.pdf
