Documenting the Undocumented: Life Narratives of Unauthorized Immigrants

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/biography/v035/35.3.caminero-santangelo.htmlAlthough Arizona's now-notorious anti-immigration bill SB 1070 and the plethora of copycat legislation bills in several other states,1 as well as the recent failures to pass any form of the DREAM Act at a national level,2 have kept a spotlight on issues of undocumented immigration in national debates, the voices of the undocumented themselves have onlyly begun to register in this scene.3 Indeed, it is arguable that there is no population more silenced in the face of debates that most directly affect them than the undocumented. As journalist David Bacon has observed in Illegal People, "Those who live with globalization's consequences are not at the table, and their voices are generally excluded" (viii). In his introduction to Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, editor Peter Orner echoes these concerns: "We hear a lot about these people in the media. We hear they are responsible for crime. We hear they take our jobs, our benefits. We hear they refuse to speak English. But how often do we hear from them?" (7). To speak and be heard, in ways that will not immediately invite the most serious of repercussions (e.g., detention and deportation), is a challenge that unauthorized immigrants face in ways that other populations with a direct stake in US legislative battles do not. Yet, personal stories—oral history, life writing, "witness" testimony— play an important, perhaps even a vital role in advocacy and human rights struggles, as a body of scholarship of the last decade suggests (e.g., Schaffer and Smith; Dawes; Nance; Beverley). Thus the question of how undocumented stories might participate in the public sphere where immigration policy and legislation are debated becomes increasingly urgent

Literary Journalism and "Illegal" Border Crossings

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/arizona_quarterly_a_journal_of_american_literature_culture_and_theory/v068/68.3.caminero-santangelo.html#b34The twenty-first century has been hailed as ushering in a new era of globalization and "post-nationalism," in which the nation-state is becoming an increasingly "obsolete" category (Appadurai 169). Such grand claims are belied, however, by the strong wave of resurgent nativism in the U.S. that has accompanied immigration reform debates of the last decade—most recently manifested in Arizona's notorious SB 1070 and similar legislative efforts in other states1 —as well as by the accompanying escalation in "boundary enforcement" at the U.S.-Mexican border (Nevins 158-59). As immigration spiked to ever higher numbers in the 1990s and early 2000s in the wake of NAFTA, policy enforcement "crack-downs" suggested a new level of border policing. Operation Hold-the-Line in 1993 and Operation Gatekeeper in 1994 implemented more rigorous enforcement at highly populated points such as San Diego and El Paso, driving border crossers through less populous areas and harsh desert conditions (Eschbach 4, 9). These developments resulted in large numbers of immigrant deaths due to dehydration, suffocation, hypothermia, and hyperthermia. The United States Government Accountability Office reports that border crossing deaths as a whole more than doubled between 1995 and 2005, although this increase was not accompanied by a corresponding rise in illegal entries

At the Intersection of Trauma and Testimonio: Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones

The terms “trauma” and testimonio (or “testimony”) have been linked so often in literary studies as to seem inextricably connected, suggesting that literature of “trauma” and testimonio narratives are one and the same. This essay examines some of the pressing and unreconciled tensions between literature of historical trauma and testimonio literature, at least as these have been critically construed, through an analysis of Edwidge Danticat's novel The Farming of Bones, which represents the massacre of ethnic Haitians within the Dominican Republic in 1937 at the orders of dictator Rafael Trujillo.University of Kansas Hall Center for the Humanitie

The Lost Ones: Post-Gatekeeper Border Fictions and the Construction of Cultural Trauma

This is a PRE-PRINT (original submission prior to peer-review process and revisions) of an article that has been accepted for publication, in substantially revised form, in the journal Latino Studies. The definitive publisher-authenticated version will be available online at: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/lst/index.html Citation of definitive, revised article: Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “The Lost Ones: Post-Gatekeeper Border Fictions and the Construction of Cultural Trauma.” Forthcoming in Latino Studies.University of Kansas Hall Center for the Humanities; University of Kansas General Research Fund allocation #2301341-003

Responding to the Human Costs of US Immigration Policy: No More Deaths and the New Sanctuary Movement.

This is a PRE-PRINT of an article published in the journal Latino Studies. The definitive publisher-authenticated version [Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. “Responding to the Human Costs of US Immigration Policy: No More Deaths and the New Sanctuary Movement.” Latino Studies 7.1 (Spring 2009): 112-22] is available online at: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/lst/index.htmlUniversity of Kansas Hall Center for the Humanitie

Moving Beyond "The Blank White Spaces": Atwood's Gilead, Postmodernism, and Strategic Resistance

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale represents a postmodern feminist sensibility in its conceptualizing of resistance to a dominant order and of the constraints upon such resistance. Postmodernism looks for ways to resist oppressive ideologies from within. Postmodern feminist studies argue for a notion of the subject as both constituted by the discourses into which it is inserted (including sexuality and gender) as well as "class, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, education, social role and so on" (Linda Hutcheon) and as constitutive of meaning by its location at the intersections of such discourses. A recognition of complicity with mass culture, along with an understanding that only within this area can effective resistance be waged, marks The Handmaid's Tale as what Andreas Hayssen might call a resistant postmodern novel. The novel suggests that the spaces for resistance are located within the discourses of the symbolic order (including technologically produced and disseminated discourse) rather than in opposition to them