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

The figure of the migrant, undocumented immigrant, or refugee has become a political lightning rod in today’s world, demonized by those who seek to rally support for ultra-conservative agendas. When viewed through a more evenhanded lens, however, the global migrations that are occurring can be seen to be an historical phenomenon and the people(s) within them a constituency in need of justice. Answering the negative treatment of Latinx constituencies in political discourse and media representations, Esteban E. Loustaunau and Lauren E. Shaw’s collection Telling Migrant Stories: Latin American Diaspora in Documentary Film draws our attention to documentaries that challenge pejorative images of migrants while bringing to the screen more accurate and equitable understandings of the lives of those who migrate, the motivations behind migration, and how migration and life in the diaspora is experienced by those involved. Composed of fifteen chapters organized into four thematic sections, the collection explores documentaries that depict the history of Latinx migration to the United States, memory and remembrance in the lives of migrants or exiles, and diasporic subjectivity and experience. A fourth section features interviews with five of the filmmakers whose work is discussed elsewhere in the book. The documentaries discussed range from theatrically released media, such as Peter Getzels and Eduardo López’s Harvest of Empire (2012) and Rebecca Cammisa’s Oscar-nominated Which Way Home (2009), to small-scale productions that have been created by migrants themselves. Most contributors focus on films related to migration and the United States, but there are also chapters examining documentaries depicting the experience of Cuban women living overseas, Ecuadoreans residing in Spain, and the exile of one family to Ecuador following Chile’s 1973 right-wing coup, as well as a study of a video hosting site operated by Spain’s Museo de América where migrants can upload their own media content. In a brief appendix, the collection includes useful information about how the reader can view the documentaries discussed, many of which are available online for streaming or can be accessed by contacting the filmmaker directly.

A central tenet of the collection is that the documentary is an important means for the presentation of testimony by those who have been silenced or marginalized, and can lift up migrant voices and advance social justice and human rights agendas. In his contribution, “Who Documents the Migrant?,” Juan G. Ramos argues that a feature of this project is to understand “how individual stories fit within broader political, cultural, and economic categories such as globalization and transnationalism” (220). Or, as editors Loustaunau and Shaw propose, “if the voices of today’s migrants and refugees remain politically silent, documentary film in its many modes enable their voices to be heard” (1). Similarly, in his chapter “Resisting Arizona’s S.B. 1070 through Devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe,” contributor Thomas Piñeros Shields argues that documentary film can have the power to produce a “counternarrative to the dominant discourse” (80). This point is reiterated in “Documenting Deportable Life,” in which contributor Jared List proposes that documentary can play a role “in humanizing the lives” of immigrants and their families, thereby overcoming “exclusionary media practices” (39). Claims of this kind—regarding the documentary’s ability to foster social or political change through the presentation of testimony or other forms of evidence— have long been a feature of this type of filmmaking, and the collection brings to the reader’s attention a corpus of social documentaries that seem intended to operate along these lines. Focusing on two documentaries that depict the deportation of migrants—Luis Argueta’s abUSed: The Postville Raid (2010) and Theo Rigby’s Sin país (2010)—List demonstrates the urgency behind the making and circulation of documentaries of this ilk, declaring that in the present, “millions of undocumented individuals living in the United States remain in limbo, hoping for a fair and...