Abstract
This article trains a theater/performance studies lens on the struggle to control public perception of Elvira Arellano and coins the term “migrant melodrama” to describe how key media coverage, cultural production and social performance in Arellano's case recycled nineteenth-century melodramatic tropes. Elements of the nineteenth-century sub-genres known as domestic melodrama, sensation melodrama and race melodrama were recycled and deployed by both supporters and detractors of the single mother who sought sanctuary in a Chicago church together with her US-born son, and even by Arellano herself. The result was a kind of casting competition that sought to impose moral clarity and resolution on a complicated, fraught issue that in fact remains far from resolved. On the one hand, melodramatic spectacles of suffering insist on a common humanity and make ethical claims for inclusion into an imagined community that may extend across national borders. Yet on the other hand, they can also backfire by unintentionally setting the price of inclusion at an impossibly high level of virtue.
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Notes
For an extensive review of the literature on melodrama in theater, film and narrative, see Buckley (2009, 176, note 1).
Several recent documentary films on migration deploy conventions from sensation melodrama: De nadie (dir. Tin Dirdamal, 2005), Asalto al sueño (dir. Uli Stelzner, 2006); Which Way Home (dir. Rebecca Cammisa, 2009), La bestia (Pedro Ultreras, 2010). See also the fictional films La misma luna (dir. Patricia Riggen, 2007) and Sin Nombre (dir. Cary Fukunaga, 2009; see Puga, 2010).
For more on a broad discourse of human rights versus a narrow discourse of human rights, see Falk (2002). For a critique of supposedly universal human rights as a western construct, see Ignatieff (1999).
Even well-intentioned proposals designed to support migrants, such as Illinois Senator Dick Durbin's proposed Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, divide migrants into the categories of deserving and undeserving, as noted by Cristina Gómez (2009).
Molina-Guzmán touches on Arellano's case in the course of her analysis of media representation of Elisabet Brotons, the deceased mother of Elían González, the 6-year-old Cuban boy who was rescued at sea in 1999 (31–33). Molina-Guzmán maintains that in contrast to Brotons, who died at sea, Arellano maintained a level of political agency.
See the classic pro-abolition stage adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Aiken (1852), reprinted in Gerould (1983).
See also Molina-Guzmán's analysis of the film Maid in Manhattan (dir. Wayne Wang, 2002), in which Jennifer Lopez plays a Latina single mother of unspecified national origin who works as a maid but falls in love with a white US politician played by Ralph Fiennes (2010, 151–174).
According to Kaplan, Ellen Wood's 1861 novel was adapted for the stage in nine different versions between 1866 and 1899 and was reincarnated several more times until 1965. It was adapted for the screen six different times between 1913 and 1931.
For an analysis of the Latina mother figure as an absence in contemporary theater and film, see Paredez (2010). The literature on representations of self-sacrificing African-American mother figures in melodrama, especially the stereotypical “mammy” is far more extensive. See K.S.W. Jewell (1976), Bogle (2001), Johnson (2003), McElya (2007), Wallace-Sanders (2008).
The language of the decision implies that Saul needed to make a stronger case for his potential future suffering: it finds that family separation would not inflict hardship sufficient enough to constitute his de facto deportation, in violation of his constitutional rights: “This is not to say that Saul will not suffer a hardship; undoubtedly he will. But the question before the Court is whether that hardship is of constitutional magnitude – under any construction of the alleged facts, it is not” (St. Eve, 2006, 767). Along the same line of logic – the more you suffer the more you are entitled to exercise your rights – Saul Arellano, although a US citizen, was required to produce evidence of his suffering in the form of the medical condition Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, in order to win special permission from Congress for his mother to temporarily accompany him in his native country. See Bhabha (2004) for a persuasive argument that courts have relied on outmoded and discriminatory assumptions in refusing to recognize children's rights to family unity in their country of citizenship.
See for instance the photo posted on the “Elvira Arellano Friends” Facebook page (facebook.com, accessed 30 January 2010).
For a performance studies analysis of Lewis Hines's photographs arguing that some of them were staged, see Pace (2002). For an anthropological perspective on the commodification of images of suffering children, see Kleinman and Kleinman (1996).
See Decker (2007) and Jackson (1986) for analyses of the sentimental image of the child in American film melodrama.
The role of the villain in melodrama has a history far too extensive and varied to detail here. But for a few succinct descriptions of the character type, see Grimsted (1968, 177–180); Singer (2001, 256–257); and Brooks (1976, 17). For a post-9/11 study of the figure of the melodrama villain as a foreign invader who attacks a victim-United States, see Anker (2005).
For more on the New Sanctuary Movement, see Freeland (2010). In a fascinating, from the perspective of theater/performance studies, journalistic account of the New Sanctuary Movement, The Nation's Sasha Abramsky complains about “handlers” who stage a “scene” with a migrant sheltered in the Los Angeles area in a manner that does not seem sufficiently “authentic” (2008, 27).
The film also includes close-ups of children sobbing as they recount their fears of family separation during a bus trip to Washington DC to lobby for immigration reform.
The seven swords have been linked to seven sorrowful events in Christ's life. Carol M. Schuler (1992) traces the image of the sword in the cult of the sorrowing Madonna back to the 1490s in the Netherlands: “This motif was interpreted by medieval commentators variously as a symbol of Mary's pain at the Passion, as the counterpart of the lance used to pierce Christ's side, and as the embodiment of Christ's pain shared by his mother. All views have in common the understanding of the sword as an expression of compassion, conveying the belief that Mary suffered her son's tortures with him” (6).
Madre Dolorosa: Elvira Arellano was subsequently exhibited at the South Shore Arts Salon Show (13 September – 1 November 2009), where it won a US$250 merit award, and the Tall Grass Arts Association Gallery in Park Forest (4 December 2009 – 31 January 2010). It sells for $6000.
A growing body of scholarship has noted both the value and danger of the sentimental, or melodramatic, in the civil rights movement. See Lentz (1990), Osborn and Bakke (1998), Dudziak (2000), Fuller (2006) and Romano (2006).
See Schwartz (2009) for a compelling account of why Parks, and only Parks, is remembered as the “mother of the civil rights movement,” despite the fact that at least four other women were arrested and fined that same year, 1955, for the same offense of refusing to move to the back of segregated buses.
Colvin was belatedly acknowledged in a spate of newspaper and magazine articles following the publication of a biography for young readers, by Phillip Hoose (2009), that won a National Book Award.
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the anonymous readers for Latino Studies and my fellow external faculty fellows at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford, Dolores Inés Casillas and Sergio de la Mora, for their careful reading and invaluable comments. An early version of this work benefitted enormously from the suggestions of the participants in the Newberry Library's Seminar in Borderlands and Latino Studies: Frances Aparicio, Geraldo Cadava, John Alba Cutler, Micaela Diáz-Sánchez, Gabriela Nuñez and Ramón Rivera-Servera. Insightful responses from other friends and colleagues – María Eugenia De La Torre, Paola S. Hernández, Victor M. Espinosa, Javier Villa-Flores, Patricia Ybarra and Harvey Young – also helped me develop the notion of migrant melodrama.
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Puga, A. Migrant melodrama and Elvira Arellano. Lat Stud 10, 355–384 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2012.33
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2012.33