Abstract
In Culture Clash’s interview-inspired Bordertown, the character Julia tells us, “ To cross the border is a big decision, it’s like being reborn.”1 Legal borders indeed suggest lines of consequence: cross them and something will, or at least should, happen. That something involves performances of various sorts, as I explore in this chapter. After all, the national border cannot establish its power without requiring some material interaction between those entering a country and those charged with guarding the literal and metaphoric gates. Borders thus become sites that demand concrete performances from its crossers and custodians. When we imagine the national border as a phenomenon that operates through performance, we begin to understand the power, as well as the fragility, of such a legally constructed boundary. And perhaps in the legal act of crossing a border, and through the performances it requires, one is reborn.
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Notes
Culture Clash, Bordertown, in Culture Clash in Americca (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997), 20. Subsequent references to Bordertown will be noted parenthetically and abbreviated B (all italics are in the original).
Sophie Nield, “On the Border as Theatrical Space: Appearance, Dis-Location and the Production of the Refugee,” in Contemporary Theatres in Europe: A Critical Companion, ed. Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout (London: Routledge, 2006), 64–65.
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), esp. 28–33.
Janet A. Gilboy, “Deciding Who Gets In: Decisionmaking by Immigration Inspectors,” Law & Society Review 25, no. 3 (1991): 571–600 and “Penetrability of Administrative Systems: Political ‘Casework’ and Immigration Inspections,” Law & Society Review 26, no. 2 (1992): 273–314. Although her publications predate 9/11, Gilboy remains an authority and an often-cited voice in discussions about screening practices.
Gad Guterman, “Reviewing the Rosenbergs: Donald Freed’s Inquest and Its Jurors,” Theatre Survey 48, no. 2 (November 2007): 265–87.
I refer to Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese’s A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), esp. 6–20.
Konstantin Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work: A Student’s Diary, trans. Jean Benedetti (New York: Routledge, 2008), 306–21.
Harold Fernandez, Undocumented (Mustang, OK: Tate Publishing, 2012), 61;
Rubén Martínez, Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001), 202;
Debbie Nathan, Women and Other Aliens: Essays from the U.S.-Mexico Border (El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 1991), 17–34;
Shahram Khosravi, “Illegal” Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 63;
and Susan Bibler Coutin, Nations of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 103 (italics in original).
Cecilia Olivares, “Seeking Divine Intervention: Votive Iconography and Processes of U.S.-Mexican Migration,” in Mediating Chicana/o Culture: Multicultural American Vernacular, ed. Scott L. Baugh (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006), 100, 102;
Linda S. Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 4. I expand on the increased dangers of crossing the border in chapter 5.
Christine Koyama, “A Novice Playwright Finds Inspiration in Her Heritage,” New York Times, 16 June 1985, 29. Lai, Lim, and Young’s Island was first published in 1981 through the San Francisco Study Center (H. Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Young, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island 1910–1940 [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991]). Genny Lim, Paper Angels, in Unbroken Thread: An Anthology of Plays by Asian American Women, ed. Roberta Uno (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 11–52. References to this play will be noted parenthetically and abbreviated PA (all italics are in the original script).
See Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond: The War on “Illegals” and the Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (New York: Routledge, 2010);
and Peter Yoxall, “The Minuteman Project, Gone in a Minute or Here to Stay? The Origin, History and Future of Citizen Activism on the United States-Mexico Border,” University of Miami Inter-American Law Review 37, no. 3 (Spring–Summer 2006): 517–66.
For more on paper sons, see Tung Pok Chin, with Winifred C. Chin, Paper Son: One Man’s Story (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000);
Peter S. Li, “Fictive Kinship, Conjugal Tie and Kinship Chain among Chinese Immigrants in the United States,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 47–63;
Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), esp. ch. 6;
Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995);
and Betty Lee Sung, The Story of Chinese in America (New York: Collier Books, 1967).
Julian Samora, with the assistance of Jorge A. Bustamante F., and Gilbert Cardenas, Los Mojados: The Wetback Story (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971), 11. Strategies to curb undocumented immigration spiked and ebbed throughout the twentieth century following economic and political tides. Especially during the Cold War, there were some isolated, intensified attempts to sweep “illegals” out from the country. Operation Wetback, for example, apprehended hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers in the Southwest in just one year. The Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) similarly conducted investigations in San Francisco’s and New York City’s Chinatowns to uncover and charge paper sons for fraud, perjury, and conspiracy (Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 155–56, 212–24).
Hiroshi Motomura, Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 9.
For more on the entwining of consumption and the obligations of citizenship, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003).
Dorinne Kondo, “(Re)Visions of Race: Contemporary Race Theory and the Cultural Politics of Racial Crossover in Documentary Theatre,” Theatre Journal 52, no. 1 (2000): 82, 106. I problematize cross-document performance further in chapter 3.
Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation: Common Sense about America’s Immigration Disaster (New York: HarperPerennial, 1995), 235.
The semiautobiographical The Mission calls attention to the three artists’ struggles as “frustrated Latino actors,” contending with a business that sees them as “either too Hispanic or not Hispanic enough” (Ricardo Salinas, introduction to The Mission, in Culture Clash: Life, Death and Revolutionary Comedy [New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997], 5).
Ellen MacKay, “Auditioning for the Role of a Lifetime: Performing Self-Translation at the American Immigration and Naturalization Service,” Canadian Theatre Review 102 (Spring 2000): 23; subsequent quote also from p. 23. In their American Night: The Ballad of Juan José (Ashland: Oregon Shakespeare Festival Scripts, 2010), Culture Clash focuses on the title character’s studies for a citizenship test, a framing device for a theatrical journey through US history.
Josefina López, Real Women Have Curves (Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 1996). References to this play will be noted parenthetically and abbreviated RW (all bold text, used for words in Spanish, and all italics are found in the original).
Jorge Huerta, “Looking for the Magic: Chicanos in the Mainstream,” in Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latin/o America, ed. Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 42–43. Notable productions include the Teatro de la Esperanza premiere (1990), a long-running Spanish-language staging at Repertorio Español in New York City (1993–1996), one directed by López at her theatre in East Los Angeles (2006), and a version adapted and directed by Garbi Losada in Spain that transposed the action to the European country and depicted the characters as Cuban immigrants (2003).
For more on the complications of this switch, see Tiffany Ana López, “Suturing Las Ramblas to East LA: Transnational Performances of Josefina López’ Real Women Have Curves,” in Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands, ed. Arturo J. Aldama, Chela Sandoval, and Peter J. García (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 296–308.
María P. Figueroa, “Resisting ‘Beauty’ and Real Women Have Curves,” in Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture & Chicana/o Sexualities, ed. Alicia Gaspar de Alba (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 273 (my emphasis).
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), 201, 213.
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed” and “The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods,” trans. Richard Nice, in The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 29–73 and 74–111.
“Genny Lim, Poet and Beyond,” interview with Jaime Wright, www.jaimewright.ws/intergenny.html (accessed 2 September 2013); Miseong Woo, “Diaspora and Geographies of Identity: Genny Lim’s Paper Angels and Bitter Cane,” Journal of Modern British and American Drama 17, no. 1 (April 2004): 193.
Huerta, interviewing López, Necessary Theatre, UCtelevision; Alicia Arrizón, Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 11.
Stephen H. Sumida, “The More Things Change: Paradigm Shifts in Asian American Studies,” American Studies International 38, no. 2 (June 2000): 103 (italics in original).
Richard Montoya, Ricardo Salinas, and Herbert Siguenza, Bordertown, sound recording (Venice, CA: L.A. Theatre Works, 2006), end track 3 into track 4.
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© 2014 Gad Guterman
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Guterman, G. (2014). Act § 275(a)—Improper Entry by Alien. In: Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137411006_2
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