Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration: Heroes, Martyrs and Saints by Ana Elena Puga and Víctor M. Espinosa (review)

This collaboration between a sociologist and a theatre scholar begins with a classic social science move: a melodramatic anecdote drawn from fieldwork in a migrant shelter, one that takes a surprising turn into a deep questioning of ethical dilemmas, both in the researcher and in the two migrant women of the anecdote. For the latter, these dilemmas derive from the context of life-and-death decisions that they are forced to make about how to perform their identities when kidnapped, where the wrong choice could cost them very dearly indeed, and then how to reframe this performance for an audience of activists, journalists, or scholars like the authors of this book. This powerful story allows the authors to frame their book in a way that asks hard questions of performance studies scholars and activist readers alike, along with anyone else who has been involved in the discussion and circulation of cultural production about migrant sufferings. “Can there be such a thing as strategic, efficacious melodrama?” they ask, or do we inevitably fall back into “fantasies of egalitarian participation”? (1).

The book is divided into three parts: “Rescuers,” “Mothers and Fathers,” and “Children and Youth,” each with two chapters. These include analyses of a wide range of writings by migrant advocates, journalism about migrants, documentary and fiction film, television, live protests, and the discussion of a few scripted plays, all focusing on material created between the mid 1980s to 2018. The larger context of this study is an interdisciplinary interweaving of social science, history, and humanities and arts research. As Puga and Espinosa argue, convincingly, “a certain amount of ethnographic research was necessary to better understand how people ‘stage’ migrants in daily life and how migrants perform themselves” (28). Thus, the social science fieldwork opens up the question of performance, history provides the ballast, and the focus in the individual chapters is much broader than study of traditional theatrical melodramas about Latin American migration to the USA. This is a deeply researched book that wears its learning lightly. Reading it, I was reminded strongly of Hannah Arendt (whose Origins of Totalitarianism they cite) and the rigorous and scathing thinking in her article, “We Refugees”: “the less we are free to decide who we are or to live as we like, the more we try to put up a front, to hide the facts, and to play roles.”

The readers of this journal who are interested in theatrical productions and in new plays on the migrant experience will want to turn to the superb discussions of Javier Malpica’s 2005 play, Papá está en la Atlántida and the 2003 dance theater piece, Nine Digits. However, the more important question that Puga and Espinosa ask us to consider is that of how reading this historical moment through the theoretical and methodological lens of melodramatic performance can help us come to a deeper and more empathic understanding of the suffering of the very real migrants all around us right now in our communities.