Telling Migrant Stories: Latin American Diaspora in Documentary Film ed. by Esteban E. Loustaunau, Lauren E. Shaw (review)

Whether in Europe or in the United States, migration and migrants are often portrayed in still photography, film, indeed in all forms of media. In the current historical moment, images have become important elements of the immigration debates and are not to be underestimated. Consider the photography depicting Alan Kurdi, the Syrian three-year-old who drowned in 2015, or the 2018 picture of a young boy crying “inside a cage” in US detention. Both pictures show the power of images depicting migrants, while also raising important ethical questions about ownership, representation, and circulation. The essays in this collection address similar questions as they analyze a vast array of documentary films on the Latin American diaspora.

In addition to the introduction, this edited volume consists of 15 chapters, organized into four parts: Enacting Politics of Place in the Diaspora, (Re)membering Past and Present Lives, Migrant Identities and Displaced Subjectivities, and Conversations on Documentary Film and Migration. The chapters discuss such diverse topics as Cubans in Manchester (Chapter 9), Ecuadorian Virgins Mary in Spain (Chapter 7), Central American children crossing Mexico (Chapter 8), and the children of Chilean exiles (Chapter 6). The authors all address similar theoretical questions: What is the transformative potential of documentaries? And how should we think about migrants’ narratives, documentarians, and new technologies in relation to ownership and representation?

Loustaunau and Shaw’s introduction positions the book as centered on both migrants and visual culture in general. Documentaries, they state, should seek to “uncover truths” and “fill in” the gaps created by mainstream media, and attempt to turn viewers into active participants. Most chapters explore the transformative potential of documentaries. In Chapter 2, Jared List analyzes two documentaries: abUSed: The Postville Raid and Sin país. Relying on Arendt and Agamben, List argues that both documentaries attempt to make “deportable life” visible and humanize migrants in dire situations. Such visibility should not be interpreted as individualizing. Rather it shows the potential of documentaries to blur the lines between private and public spheres by demonstrating that “bare life” can be written into history.

Along similar lines, in Chapter 9, Zaira Zarza analyzes three short autobiographical documentaries by young Cuban female cineastes living in Europe. These three films deal with gender and race, showing the potential of film to create a “public intimacy” that can have an effect on both the documentarian and the migrants. The potential of this “public intimacy” is particularly clear when thinking about migrant mothers (Chapter 4) and women migrants in general (Chapter 3).

The question of ownership and representation also appears throughout the book as authors analyze who controls migrants’ narratives, particularly in relation to child migrants—reminding us that the separation of children from their families is a recurrent and all too common historical event. In Chapter 8, Ramón J. Guerra analyzes the documentary Which Way Home by looking at how the narrative is constructed throughout the film. Two young boys appear as the protagonists, often answering questions about their lives, but does this mean that the young boys own the narrative?

In a different way, Ada Ortúzar-Young asks us to consider the epistemic validity of who is being represented in documentaries. In Chapter 5, she analyzes films addressing the Pedro Pan Project, which bought Cuban children to the United States, and shows that documentaries are not objective and that any argument can be made if you find the right interviewees. In relation to ownership, Juan G. Ramos (Chapter 10) talks about the Migrar es Cultura initiative in the Museo de Ameŕica (Madrid, Spain). More specifically, Ramos analyzes how new technologies are not only changing issues of ownership—as the figure of the “director documentarian” becomes less relevant—but may also be transforming aesthetic notions as well.

The book is a valuable text, given the variety of approaches and documentaries analyzed and its...