Undocumented Narratives: Migrant Testimonio in La Migra me hizo los mandados

La migra a mí me agarró300 veces digamospero jamás me domóA mí me hizo los mandados,los golpes que a mí me dio,se los cobré a sus paisanosThe border patrol has caught me,say three hundred times,but they haven't tamed me,they can't get the best of me,the beatings I tookwere later paid for by their countrymen

Jorge Lerma¹

In 2002, in the midst of a surge in nativist anti-immigrant politics, Los Angeles journalist Alicia Alarcón published La Migra me hizo los mandados, a collection of testimonios recounting the border-crossing experiences of twenty-nine California residents who immigrated to the United States from Mexico, Central America, and South America in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.² Alarcón's text, as well as its 2004 English translation, emerged in the wake of 9/11, as national security concerns heightened anti-immigrant sentiments and became rhetorical fodder for nativist activists concerned by the influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants.³ The book is one of several works published in the first decade of the new millennium intended to serve as a humanizing antidote to nativist rhetoric, including Rubén Martínez's Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (2001) and Luis Alberto Urrea's The Devil's Highway: A True Story (2004).⁴ Alarcón's text is different from these journalistic accounts, however, for both the diversity of stories it contains as well as the way it foregrounds the voices of undocumented immigrants themselves. The stories contained in La Migra come from tales that were submitted by callers to Alarcón's radio talk show, which she read aloud on the air. Alarcón eventually collected the stories her callers submitted, performed an initial round of edits for clarity and readability, and after receiving permission from the narrators, submitted them to Arte Público Press to be compiled into a book.⁵ In both their radio and print form, these stories are representative of the increasing interest in migrant testimonio in recent years and signal the growing presence of testimonio in various mediums as part of the US political and literary landscape.⁶ Alarcón stages these testimonios as a form of political protest, employing the dual media of radio and print as technologies of resistance in response to the ever-increasing technologies of surveillance that have militarized the border and framed undocumented border-crossers as enemy combatants. While these testimonios speak collectively to migrants' persistent evasion of such surveillance technologies, they also underscore the high human costs of their efforts.⁷ In the process, I argue, the testimonios in La Migra offer a humanizing narrative that combats nativist panic, underscores the importance of lived experience to explanatory narratives of immigration, and models an intersubjective relationality that disrupts the nationalist mythology of the American Dream by uncovering the arbitrariness and ethical limitations of citizenship status as the prerequisite for inclusion in political community.

I begin by outlining how, in the context of nativist backlash against immigration in the late twentieth century, the dissemination of migrant testimonio via Alarcón's radio show and book creates a public space within which the undocumented community can speak back to anti-immigrant discourse. In the process, the testimonios Alarcón compiles function both as community building and as a mode of activism. Next, I argue that the stories the narrators recount humanize not only the "illegal" immigrant but also the history of immigration itself. As an alternative mode of historical narrative, the testimonios in La Migra decenter the role of the detached, anonymous observer as the voice of history and offer instead a form of embodied history that cannot be divorced from the individuals whose stories it tells. Following this analysis, I examine how representations of the visceral experience of migration in the testimonios emphasize the perilous and dehumanizing conditions of the journey north, while also bearing witness to the ways that bodies form intimate connections in extreme conditions to sustain one another. Here, I draw from Kelly Oliver...