Domestic Disturbances: Re-Imagining Narratives of Gender, Labor, and Immigration by Irene Mata (review)

The current moment has seen a resurgence of anti-Latina/o and anti-immigrant xenophobia. Into these hostile waters comes Irene Mata’s sharp-edged book Domestic Disturbances: Re-Imagining Narratives of Gender, Labor, and Immigration. Mata’s book is elegantly constructed to cut through the flotsam of our society’s patent disregard for the humanity of Latina/o migrants while simultaneously serving as a rhetorical life raft for those beset by the constant barrage of anti-immigrant discourse.

The aim of Mata’s book is, in her own words, twofold: “[T]o read the conventional immigrant narrative as a type of ideological system of containment whose organizing logic can be challenged and ultimately dismantled; and to identify the creation of a Latina genealogy of immigrant literatures that provide oppositional narratives that offer decentralized accounts of power and exploitation” (6). She accomplishes both tasks by offering a careful examination of far-reaching instantiations of cultural production. The introduction uses Michel Foucault’s work on subjugated knowledge to articulate how genealogies contribute to the marginalization of groups and how the articulation of alternate genealogies proffers a productive contestatory move, one that helps us to envision a different reality.

The book covers ample territory. Chapter One establishes the longevity of the traditional immigrant narrative by juxtaposing two seemingly contradictory texts: José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho (1959), the Chicano novel long held as one of the sacred texts of the Chicano literary canon, and the movie Spanglish (2004), a largely vacuous contemporary Hollywood romance. This chapter clearly lays out the long history of the immigrant narrative and its connection to the continued stamina of the American Dream. Chapters Two and Three expand the discussion to cultural products that center on the stories of Latina housekeepers and hotel domestic staff, including Hollywood films, literature, documentary film-making, theater, and spoken word poetry. Finally, Chapter Four uses the all-American image of the superhero to examine the art of Laura Alvarez alongside the photography of Dulce Pinzón in order to recast the labor of migrants, both women and men, as heroic in their humanity.

Mata is at her rhetorical best when she is carefully picking apart the ideologies of our Hollywood films. This disarming of cherished national narratives is, quite simply, fun to read. As her book progresses, one increasingly begins to understand the larger import of her efforts to craft a coherent Latina genealogy. These examples of Latina cultural producers waging an incessant campaign against the debilitating effects of racism and patriarchy have always been there, but they have rarely been acknowledged as a movement, as a collective project focused on claiming a space of equal footing for the most denigrated of Latina workers. While Latina/o studies scholars will welcome the opportunity to learn about the important work being done by Latina “genealogists” (Mata’s term), the book also has the potential to be a valuable pedagogical tool. Undergraduate students will be disoriented in profound ways by Mata’s efforts to reconceptualize the seemingly benign Hollywood programming they have grown accustomed to dismissing as mere entertainment.

Mata is an engaged and engaging writer. Her writing is perceptive, sophisticated, and rigorous. In the initial chapters, which offer a sustained analysis of the central tropes of American exceptionalism, her commitment to bringing humanity and recognition to a group of women who have historically been denied basic dignity pushes forcefully against the typically detached stance of the academic monograph. Mata’s writing is strongest, however, when she leaves behind the discussions of earlier generations’ efforts to catalog the narrative typology of the immigrant narrative and instead bends to the task of examining how articulations of both xenophobia and resistance are tucked away in unexpected corners of our society.