Abstract
When the residents of Fuente Ovejuna collectively claimed responsibility for the 1476 murder of Knight Commander Fernán Gómez de Guzmán, they successfully thwarted the process aimed at pinpointing and punishing the culprit. The account of these events inspired Lope de Vega to write Fuente Ovejuna, whose characters withstand great torture but steadfastly protect Frondoso’s identity. After all, in killing the commander, Frondoso saves the town from a cruel tyrant. One by one, they audaciously tell the inquiring judge, who will later report to the Spanish monarchs, that “Fuente Ovejuna” is responsible for Fernán Gómez’s death. In so doing, the oppressed villagers—a unified collective—defy the logic of the legal procedures. The “innocent” insist on their guilt to ensure that the “guilty” retains his innocence. By blurring these distinctions, Fuente Ovejuna’s residents achieve a type of justice unforeseen by the legal system. Their solidarity leads to the crowd-pleasing denouement characteristic of Lope’s comedias (King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella pardon all). But more critically for the purposes of my project, the villagers’ feat attests to their ability to manipulate a legal system and alter its categorical definitions.
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Notes
Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, Biro (Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2010). Citations to Biro are noted parenthetically and abbreviated BI. I refer to Kindle location numbers and maintain Mwine’s line divisions and punctuation. I also base observations about Biro on the DVD recording of a performance at Uganda’s National Theatre (Canoga Park, CA: Cinema Libre, 2007).
Yussef El Guindi, Back of the Throat (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2006). References to this play are noted parenthetically and abbreviated BT (all italics in original script).
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;
Stephen H. Legomsky, “The New Path of Immigration Law: Asymmetric Incorporation of Criminal Justice Norms,” Washington and Lee Law Review 64, nos. 2–3 (2007): 469.
Mathews, 426 U.S. at 79–80; Judy Rabinovitz, Great Issues Forum, “Power & Law: Immigration Reform” (panel presentation, City University of New York, 6 April 2009); and Perez v. Brownell, 356 U.S. 44, 64 (1958) (Warren, C. J., dissenting). See also Margaret R. Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
The literature on this subject is extensive. For excellent, up-to-date summaries, see Jonathan Xavier Inda and Julie A. Dowling, “Governing Migrant Illegality,” introduction to Governing Immigration through Crime: A Reader, ed. Dowling and Inda (Stanford: Stanford Social Sciences, Stanford University Press, 2013), 1–36; and Ediberto Román, Those Damned Immigrants: America’s Hysteria over Undocumented Immigration (New York: New York University Press, 2013).
Susan Bibler Coutin, Nations of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 24;
Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond: The War on “Illegals” and the Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (New York: Routledge, 2010), 150, 180, 176, 116.
On the unreported crimes committed on immigrants, see Eithne Luibhéid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 104; see also various reports by Human Rights Watch, including Cultivating Fear: The Vulnerability of Immigrant Farmworkers in the US to Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment, 16 May 2012; Crossing the Line: Human Rights Abuses along the U.S. Border with Mexico Persist amid Climate of Impunity, 1 April 1995; and Brutality Unchecked: Human Rights Abuses along the U.S. Border with Mexico, 1 June 1992, all available at www.hrw.org/en/publications (accessed 15 September 2013).
David M. Engel and Frank W. Munger, Rights of Inclusion: Law and Identity in the Life Stories of Americans with Disabilities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 11.
Biro’s narrative contrasts reports of serious lapses in treatment for immigrant detainees with HIV/AIDS (see Human Rights Watch’s Chronic Indifference: HIV/AIDS Services for Immigrants Detained by the United States, 5 December 2007, available at www.hrw.org/en/publications [accessed 15 September 2013]).
Linda S. Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 71;
Valerie Neal, “Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune: The Deportation of ‘Aggravated Felons,’” Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 36 (November 2003): 1621–22.
Shahram Khosravi, “Illegal” Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 67.
Tram Nguyen, We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities after 9/11 (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), xv.
Michael Garcés, interviewed by author at Cornerstone’s offices in Los Angeles, 7 June 2010. For more on the Justice Cycle, see Anne García-Romero, “Cornerstone Theater Company’s Justice Cycle,” TheatreForum 38 (Winter/Spring 2011): 47–59; and Cornerstone’s website, cornerstonetheater.org/work/2007–2010-justice-cycle/ (accessed 21 August 2013).
Sally Engle Merry, Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working-Class Americans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 5; Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper, 114, 8.
See Shonna L. Trinch, Latinas’ Narratives of Domestic Abuse: Discrepant Versions of Violence (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003), 2.
Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 9.
Robert Hariman, “Performing the Laws: Popular Trials and Social Knowledge,” in Popular Trials: Rhetoric, Mass Media, and the Law, ed. Hariman (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 17 (italics in original).
I am indebted here to Diana Taylor’s work on Argentina’s desaparecidos. I do not wish to compare and contrast one system of violence to another but merely draw on the theoretical possibility that the “disappeared” are, “by definition, always already the object of representation” (Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” [Durham: Duke University Press, 1997], 140).
Peter H. Schuck, Citizens, Strangers, and In-Betweens: Essays on Immigration and Citizenship (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 35.
Dora Schriro, Immigration Detention Overview and Recommendations, report to DHS, 6 October 2009, available at www.iaumc.org/console/files/oFiles_Library_XZXLCZ/2010HomelandSecurityImmigrationDetention Overview_MJERXUXV.pdf (accessed 21 September 2013), 4, 6.
On changing nature of immigration detention in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, see also Mark Dow, American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
Inda and Dowling, “Governing Migrant Illegality,” 16; Charlie Savage, “Dept. of Justice Seeks to Curtail Stiff Drug Terms,” New York Times, 12 August 2013, A1. On immigration industrial complex, see also Deepa Fernandes, Targeted: Homeland Security and the Business of Immigration (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007);
and Alissa R. Ackerman and Rich Furman, “The Criminalization of Immigration and the Privatization of the Immigration Detention: Implications for Justice,” Contemporary Justice Review 16, no. 2 (2013): 251–63.
Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 23–24, 28.
On the length and condition of detention for immigrants, see Amnesty International, Jailed without Justice: Immigration Detention in the USA, 25 March 2009, available at www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?id=ENGUSA20090325002&lang=e (accessed 15 September 2013);
David Cole, Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism (New York: New Press, 2003); and various Human Rights Watch reports, including Detained and at Risk: Sexual Abuse and Harassment in United States Immigration Detention, 25 August 2010; Costly and Unfair: Flaws in US Immigration Detention Policy, 6 May 2010; Locked Up Far Away: The Transfer of Immigrants to Remote Detention Centers in the United States, 2 December 2009; Detained and Dismissed: Women’s Struggles to Obtain Health Care in United States Immigration Detention, 17 March 2009; and Detained and Deprived of Rights: Children in the Custody of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1 December 1998, all available at www.hrw.org/en/publications (accessed 15 September 2013).
Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, “Criminal Obsessions, after Foucault: Postcoloniality, Policing, and the Metaphysics of Disorder,” in Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, ed. Comaroff and Comaroff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 276;
Diana Taylor, “Afterword: War Play,” PMLA 124, no. 5 (October 2009): 1892.
Pierre Bourdieu, Language & Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 140.
David Bacon, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008), 184.
Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper, 183 (my emphasis); Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012), esp. her chapter, “Immigrant Rights versus Civil Rights,” 115–45.
Sonja Kuftinec, Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 9–10.
For a most recent analysis on this much-studied phenomenon, see Natalie Masuoka and Jane Junn, The Politics of Belonging: Race, Public Opinion, and Immigration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Kim Fellner, Wrestling with Starbucks: Conscience, Capital, Cappuccino (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 2.
Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, and Power” (1982), interview by Paul Rabinow, trans. Christian Hubert, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 245.
Leisy Abrego, “Legitimacy, Social Identity, and the Mobilization of Law: The Effects of Assembly Bill 540 on Undocumented Students in California,” Law & Social Inquiry 33, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 709–34.
Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (London: Seagull Books, 2007), 58–69;
Noa BenAsher, “Who Says ‘I Do’?: Reviewing Judith Butler & Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 21 (2009): 250.
Peter Brooks, “The Law as Narrative and Rhetoric,” in Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law, ed. Brooks and Paul Gewirtz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 16; Engel and Munger, Rights of Inclusion, 40.
Michel Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze” (1972), in Language, Counter-Memory, and Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 209; and Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 200.
Coutin, Nations of Emigrants, 178, 112, 16. For stories referenced below, see, for example, Jose Antonio Vargas, “Outlaw,” New York Times, 26 June 2011, MM22; Julia Preston, “Out of the Shadows: A Speech Makes History,” New York Times, 7 September 2012, A14; Eva Longoria, “Dulce Matuz: Citizen-in-Waiting,” Time, 30 April 2012, 68; and Manny Fernandez, “Vying for Campus President, Illegal Immigrant Gets a Gamut of Responses,” New York Times, 10 March 2012, A11. On the success of the DREAMers as a viable political bloc, see Walter Nicholls, The DREAMers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).
Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 220.
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 3, 39, 2. I do not engage here in philosophical arguments over “bare life,” Agamben’s conception for the kind of exposure to state violence that results from the state of exception. Rather, I am interested in the ways in which “exceptionality” seeps into discussions and analyses of cultural products.
Amnesty International, U.S. of America—Amnesty International’s Concerns Regarding Post September 11 Detentions in the USA (London: International Secretariat, 2002), 1; Philip Shenon, “Report on U.S. Antiterrorism Law Alleges Violations of Civil Rights,” New York Times, 21 July 2003, A1.
On immigration and terrorism, see Bill Ong Hing, Deporting Our Souls: Values, Morality, and Immigration Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 140–63.
On immigration and violent crime, see, for example, Scott Akins, Rubén G. Rumbaut, and Richard Stansfield, “Immigration, Economic Disadvantage, and Homicide: A Community-Level Analysis of Austin, Texas,” Homicide Studies 13, no. 3 (August 2009): 307–14.
Lisa Magaña and Erik Lee, eds., preface to Latino Politics and Arizona’s Immigration Law SB 1070 (New York: Springer, 2013), v.
Yussef El Guindi, quoted by Tirdad Derakhshani, “A Funny, Ferocious Drama Post-9/11: An Egyptian-born Writer Mingles the Immigrant Experience, the War on Terror, and Office Politics,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 9 March 2010, Daily Magazine D1. On English-Only legislation, see Carlos R. Soltero, Latinos and American Law: Landmark Supreme Court Cases (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), esp. chap. 14. For an example of language policing, see Miriam Jordan, “Arizona Grades Teachers on Fluency,” Wall Street Journal, 30 April 2010, A3.
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© 2014 Gad Guterman
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Guterman, G. (2014). Act § 331—Alien Enemies. In: Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137411006_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137411006_5
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