In an age when politicians and the mainstream media continue to divide immigrants into deserving and undeserving subjects, making them both hypervisible and yet invisible, the essays by Lauret, Krause and Schreiber are timely and compelling. Together, they map the historical and contemporary processes of state violence, legal erasure and cultural coercion that have shaped immigrant lives and subjectivities. Models of cultural conformity and whiteness, hyphenation, and either/or binaries that enforce the strict separation of old and new, legal and illegal, have affected the immigrant psyche and induced forms of individual and collective trauma, including ethnic shame, madness, family fragmentation and the physical exploitation of human bodies. In their essays on Americanization and Dominican American fiction, Lauret and Krause reveal the less than celebratory narratives that get lost in stories of emancipatory assimilation, ethnic persistence and hyphenated and multiple subjectivities. Likewise, in her essay on contemporary Latino/a music video and undocumented immigration, Schreiber asks us to see what is obscured from view, but also to find room in these new narratives for patterns of immigrant visibility, agency and activism. These essays suggest that immigrant testimony, literature and visual and aural media can be powerfully combined with historical analyses of immigration policy to unravel the complex realities behind the walls of national nostalgia and racial stereotyping. They also suggest alternative ways of seeing that demand we recognize every immigrant's right to humanity and a sense of belonging.

In her wide-ranging and sophisticated essay, Maria Lauret unravels the dominant “rhetoric” about the United States as a nation of immigrants by looking back to the Americanization campaigns of the early twentieth century. The paradigm of the “nation of immigrants” has imbued the oratory of conservatives and liberals alike, and the speeches of Presidents from JFK to George W. Bush and Obama. Yet, according to Lauret, its origins lie not in declarations of ethnic pride stemming from diversity, but in patterns of ethnic shame that came about as a result of the success of Americanization across the span of the twentieth century. While Americanization was riven with conflict and the need to harness the minds and hearts of natives and newcomers alike, it was not the consummate failure that some historians have made it out to be, argues Lauret. Rather, it was an expansive and successful programme that became “the hegemonic discourse” across the twentieth century. If Americanization marginalized African Americans, Native Americans and communities of Asian and Latin American descent, it also generated a regulatory movement for the eventual incorporation of racialized southern and eastern European immigrants, whose compatriots were restricted from coming to the United States under the national quotas of the 1924 Immigration Act.

Lauret's analysis engages with the work of Gary Gerstle, Russell Kazal, Matthew Frye Jacobson and David Roediger on assimilation and whiteness, and with Herbert Gans's notion of “symbolic ethnicity” as an explanation for the white ethnic revival during the 1970s. The success of Americanization fostered celebratory stories among conservatives and liberals alike, about the benevolence and ability of the United States to fashion incorporation from diversity, hence the “nation of immigrants.” Yet this whitewashed version of history – and the success of Americanization – were tied to two powerful and damaging psychological debts, argues Lauret: first, the notion that immigrants should be grateful for the nation's benevolence (since restrictionist federal immigration policy denied others the opportunity for Americanness), which Lauret calls the “gratitude paradigm,” and, second, the immigrant's “shame” about her or his ethnic origins. By unravelling these connections, Lauret shows very deftly how the paradigm of the “nation of immigrants” works across conservative and liberal lines to express concerns about undocumented immigration alongside calls for immigration reform: whereas Bush used this paradigm to juxtapose the “sacrifices” of an earlier immigrant generation and “ungrateful” and “unlawful” undocumented immigrants of the present, Obama has employed it to rally the nation's “traditional” acceptance of diversity as a platform for granting rights to undocumented immigrants who abide by the law.

By focussing on the legacy of Americanization for those of European origin who were eventually granted Americanness, Lauret's “gratitude paradigm” says less about the trajectories of Asian Americans, who have been subject to similar discourses in the shape of the “model-minority” label, and Latino/as. But Lauret does point up the use of the deserving/undeserving binary in current debates about amnesty for undocumented immigrants, a debate that has often become equated with Latin American immigration. Lauret's demonstration of how the “gratitude paradigm” infiltrates debates about immigration reform in presidential speeches, and popular US television programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are?, also directs us towards the reinterpretation of this model by contemporary Latino/a artists and activists. In the work of Mexican-born photographer Dulce Pinzón, for example, we find equally powerful images of immigrant sacrifice and “good citizenship.” Pinzón's “The Real Story of the Superheroes” series (2005) presents undocumented Mexican immigrants in New York as US superheroes and Mexican wrestlers in everyday, urban work contexts. Inspired by the photographer's response to the elevation of New York firefighters after 9/11, Pinzón's photographs embody the tensions between visibility and invisibility and heroism and degradation that define many undocumented lives. For Pinzón, “the Mexican immigrant worker in New York is a perfect example of the hero who has gone unnoticed,” who “works extraordinary hours in extreme conditions for very low wages,” which are then sent “at great cost and sacrifice to families and communities in Mexico who rely on them to survive.” Mexican and US economies have become “dependent” on immigrant remittances and labour respectively. In emphasizing immigrant “sacrifice” and “the quietness of this dependence,” Pinzón's photographs underscore the significant and fundamental economic contributions that undocumented immigrants make to the United States, a contribution highlighted by the nationwide May Day rallies in 2006, when immigrant workers, many from Mexico and across Latin America, walked out of their jobs for the day and onto the streets in a protest dubbed “A Day Without an Immigrant” and the “Great American Boycott.”Footnote ¹ Pinzón's images also underline the tension between undocumented status and the “deserving” immigrant: her captions emphasize hard work, money and family support, all hallmarks of “good citizenship,” yet they also reference the remittances and transnational ties that critics use to position undocumented immigrants as “ungrateful” and “unworthy” of amnesty and citizenship.Footnote ²

Lauret's concept of the “good immigrant” is critiqued more pointedly in the work of undocumented “artivist” Julio Salgado. Salgado came to the United States from Mexico aged eleven in 1995, achieved a college education, and cofounded Dreamers Adrift, a creative art and video collective in which undocumented youth tell their own stories and “take back the narrative” told about them through the media.Footnote ³ For example, in Salgado's “I Exist!” digital portrait series, undocumented college students in graduation gowns and caps proclaim their right to be. Likewise, in his “Undocuqueer” series, Salgado, who is gay and undocumented, focusses on undocumented LGBT immigrants for whom “coming out” is a political statement twice over. Salgado's art is tied directly to the DREAM Act movement, the drive to pass the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act first introduced into the House of Representatives in 2001, an Act that would provide a pathway for conditional, then permanent, residency for immigrants who entered the US before age sixteen with at least five years in the country, through either military service or higher education. Salgado's portraits show undocumented students not as criminals, but as potential citizens. Yet he rejects outright the “gratitude paradigm,” which according to Lauret lies at the heart of the rhetoric about immigration and Americanness. In one powerful image from “I Exist!”, a college student raises his middle finger and proclaims, “I'd rather be undocumented than die for your acceptance.”Footnote ⁴ As Salgado explains,

Salgado's work, then, resists “show[ing] … the perfect immigrant,” an image that he claims “the politicians want to sell,” a fact borne out by Lauret's analysis of presidential speeches.Footnote ⁵

Lauret's essay is particularly salient in asking us to evaluate “the price exacted … for American-ness.” Importantly, she claims that Americanization “had real effects on real people … Reaching into their workplaces, their schools, their homes and kitchens, and ultimately their individual psyches” (my emphasis). Lauret's framing of Americanization as inducing shame and psychological damage is partly reflected in the words of white ethnic Michael Novak, who claimed that “[g]rowing up in America ha[d] been an assault upon [his] sense of worthiness.”Footnote ⁶ But it is also embodied in Cuban-born performance artist Carmelita Tropicana's Milk of Amnesia/Leche de Amnesia (1994), in which the performer's amnesia is induced in the United States after being forced to “chew on [a] peanut butter and jelly sandwich … gulped down with milk,” and later resolved by jettisoning nostalgia for Cuba.Footnote ⁷ These pressures also appear in the work of Dominican-born performer, writer and educator Josefina Báez, whose poem “A 1 2 3 Portrait of a Legend” describes assimilation in the United States as “a concept not to be understood but experienced,” and whose Dominicanish: A Performance Text refers to the painful process of “chewing English and spitting Spanish.”Footnote ⁸ Indeed, Jennifer Krause's essay on the novel Geographies of Home (1999) by Dominican-born author Loida Maritza Pérez suggests that we should perhaps turn to testimony and fiction, and sensory experiences in particular, to understand fully the impact of immigration on “individual psyches.”

While Lauret ties ethnic shame to the coercive nature of the “new” nation, Krause connects the madness of Pérez's Dominican-born protagonist, Marina, to the violence of the “old” homeland. Like Lauret, Krause questions singular narratives about the immigrant experience: Dominican immigrants are “faced not only with the onslaught of a new culture, but also with the legacy of the old,” a complex reality illustrated by Perez's full cast of women characters belonging to the same family (Aurelia, Iliana, Rebecca and Marina), who represent, according to Krause, the varied strands of the “Dominican immigrant psyche.” In Marina's case, “the birthplace of [her] madness” is not first and foremost the United States and its coercive state practices, but the poverty, violence and racism of the Dominican Republic's Trujillo dictatorship. Prevented from speaking about the trauma of the island's past, Marina becomes a complex and contradictory “victim” and “victimizer” in the New York present, who repeats the past by turning the violence of the Trujillo regime towards herself and members of her own family. “Madness is her identity” (original emphasis), claims Krause, and it is embedded as much in the personal and collective traumas of the past as in the “newness” of the present.

If Marina complicates the trajectory whereby immigrant women are transformed and emancipated from patriarchy and “machismo” in the “new” world, she also destabilizes the narratives of hyphenation attached to the 1·5 generation – those who are born in the homeland yet raised predominantly in the United States. Marina's madness, argues Krause, underscores the “nefarious multiplicity inherent in a life on the hyphen,” for although she is defined by multiplicity – the negation and confirmation of past and present, whiteness and blackness, the United States and the Dominican Republic – Marina remains confined within an “isolated system (hyphenation)” that precludes alternatives. Thus Krause critiques the equally celebratory and “flattened” narratives of Latino/a identity that position multiplicity as somehow liberating and capable of generating “wholeness” in the cultural self and psyche. In this reading of multiplicity, Krause's analysis complements studies of transnational Latina motherhood, in which transnationalism is forged from systems of class- and race-based exploitation that confine women's bodies to domestic labour in US households and women's familial networks to one nation or the other.Footnote ⁹ Krause's analysis also reflects a broader project among Dominican American writers and artists to articulate the complexity of Dominican American identity in the face of either/or binaries, a complexity partly summed up in the title of Báez's Dominicanish (2000) and embodied in the drive to recuperate histories of blackness so violently erased from the national discourse of island identity by the Trujillo regime in opposition to Haiti.Footnote ¹⁰

Krause's essay illustrates the power of art and fiction to address – if not to completely heal – the unspeakable traumas that have shaped immigrant lives in both the past and the present. For example, in his bloodstained and bullet-holed collages from the 1980s and 1990s, Dominican-born artist Freddy Rodríguez maps the excavation of a “lost” blackness onto images of a paraíso (paradise) desecrated by the violence of the Trujillo regime as part of a broader legacy of slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean.Footnote ¹¹ Likewise, Junot Díaz addresses the “shadows of history [that] don't go away” in his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), in which the scarred bodies of the protagonists reveal the living trauma of the Trujillo dictatorship, itself a “shadow” of US intervention in the Caribbean. Indeed, Díaz might have been speaking of Marina's madness when he claims that “the weight of that history is on you forever … it's there, it works its way into things.”Footnote ¹² Krause's essay might not necessarily interrogate other, alternative strategies to deal with the complexity beyond the hyphen (embodied, for example, in terms such as “DominicanYork,” and Báez's versions of “Dominicanish” and “yolayorkdominicanyork”).Footnote ¹³ But in addressing the traumas that persist around either/or binaries in both host and home countries, she makes the important point that Latino/a identities built on varied hyphens or multiplicity are not always to be celebrated.

Both Lauret and Krause explore the sacrifices and traumas associated with immigration and subject formation, whether in the shape of ethnic shame or madness. Their analyses suggest that the past informs immigrant subjectivity in the present, but in different ways: whether ethnic, political and racialized pasts are unspeakable and suppressed (towards madness) or coercively denied (towards shame), Lauret and Krause expose the layers of oppression that function in both host country and homeland. If Krause's “isolated system” of hyphenation is a counterpart to Lauret's coercive model of Americanization, then ethnic shame and madness underscore the pressures to conform, fit in and, to quote Obama in Lauret's essay, “get with the law,” in ways that deny the complex realities of hyphenation, multiplicity and racialization. In particular, the pressure to “get with the law” is currently generating intense public debate, political protest and cultural activism about undocumented immigrants and their emotional welfare.

Undocumented activist Julio Salgado claims that it is not simply a case of changing immigration policy, but of addressing the less obvious and talked about processes that involve “the healing of ourselves.” “That's what we need to tackle more,” he insists.Footnote ¹⁴ This is especially important when the law denies undocumented immigrants the right to exist and declare their humanity, and when the United States' draconian deportation and detention programmes fragment immigrant families and individual psyches. In 2012, Salgado collaborated with Mexican-born poet Yosimar Reyes on the Dreamers Adrift video The Legalities of Being. In the video, Reyes declares, “I am beginning a conversation with myself about my being by laws that really can never summarize my existence.”Footnote ¹⁵ Salgado describes this process as revealing the “layers of humanity that we have,” and it suggests that we often neglect the emotional and psychological costs in debates about legal citizenship and cultural adjustment.Footnote ¹⁶ As Reyes claimed,

This focus on “emotional well-being,” which is emphasized by Lauret and Krause, suggests that we might expand the scope of immigration studies by looking to the field of health humanities and the connections being made between well-being and creativity.

If the “artivist” work of Salgado and Reyes illustrates how testimony and culture are vital in revealing “other layers of humanity,” then the music videos of filmmaker Alex Rivera highlight similar recent strategies that have enabled undocumented immigrants to come out of the shadows. Rebecca Schreiber's essay on Rivera's collaboration with the National Immigrant Youth Alliance and the National Day Labor Organizing Network (NDLON) illustrates how undocumented activists have organized, like Dreamers Adrift, in response to the DREAM Act movement and DACA, the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals plan, which deferred deportation for two years, although without necessarily guaranteeing citizenship, and the #Not1More campaign led by NDLON. The #Not1More campaign began in 2013 against forced deportations, and intensified in response to President Obama's 2014 executive order to grant temporary residency to undocumented immigrants with at least five years in the United States and children with citizenship or legal residency.

Alex Rivera's direction of two music videos in support of the #Not1More campaign was prefaced by his involvement in the protests against Arizona's Senate Bill 1070 and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement's detention and deportation programme, Secure Communities (S-COMM), and his work forms part of a wider body of multimedia cultural production that seeks justice for undocumented immigrants. Houston's Station Museum of Contemporary Art is currently showing an installation by artist collective Sin Huellas (Without Fingerprints). Entitled Detention Nation (2014), the installation draws on family experiences and letters sent from those held in detention centres. In one letter, a detainee describes the Joe Corley Detention Facility near Conroe, Texas, as “El Infierno” (Hell). For the artists, these letters provide a way to “get inside” places that are barred from public view, and “to peer into the things that we cannot see, to listen into the conversations that we cannot record, to draw the tableaus that would rip our souls if we were forced to experience them.” Participating artist Delilah Montoya claims that viewers “don't necessarily see a documentary representation” of detainees in the installation, but instead, “feel their presence.” Schreiber's essay shows how film work can also “trace the pictures that we cannot see” and generate participatory strategies built on affect.Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, her article suggests that visual strategies and multiple genres are often needed to document the invisible and unspeakable and, in particular, the state violence perpetuated by programmes such as S-COMM.

Rivera's collaborative work with the artists La Santa Cecilia and Aloe Blacc captures the struggles of undocumented activists and the day-to-day lives of undocumented families affected by immigration raids and deportation. Rivera's strategies, claims Schreiber, provide a rich example of “countervisuality,” a practice that generates ways of seeing that resist discriminatory, sensationalist media and police imagery. Rivera's film work employs what Schreiber calls “docufiction,” a blend of documentary and fiction in which real undocumented immigrants act out everyday scenarios. Schreiber ties Rivera's “docufiction” to the “undocumented everyday,” a way of seeing that questions the power of the documentary mode and discourses of criminality and illegality. The “undocumented everyday” is a version of the “layered humanity” that Julio Salgado champions in his Dreamers Adrift artwork; it is also a counterpart to the “real superheroes” who appear in Dulce Pinzón's photographs of undocumented workers in New York City. For Schreiber, the “undocumented everyday” is a vital way of “representing undocumented migrants on their own terms,” an argument that Salgado articulates beautifully when he declares, “WE tell the stories … [and] WE own the narratives.”Footnote ¹⁹ Indeed, in the Dreamers Adrift collective's YouTube video series, Undocumented and Awkward, undocumented youth also play themselves, this time in everyday, taken-for-granted situations – driving, shopping and dating – in which their lack of citizenship and legal identification generate “awkward silences at best, or deportation situations at worst.” Here is another type of “everyday shame,”Footnote ²⁰ one related not to the earlier generation of immigrants in Lauret's essay, but to an increasingly visible and activist 1·5 generation. The Undocumented and Awkward videos of everyday scenarios might be spoofs, but they are too often dangerously real, much like Rivera's “docufiction,” and they share the “affective register” that Schreiber identifies in Rivera's film work, playing this time with shame and humour, to generate forms of emotional connection and affiliation. Above all, Schreiber's essay documents a fundamental shift in the strategies employed by immigrant rights activists, whereby “visibility [has become] a form of protection” and a strategy of defiance embraced by those who once lived in the shadows.

Acts of invisibility, repression, erasure and coming out are evident in each of the essays by Lauret, Krause and Schreiber. If these scholars ask us to be mindful of the past and present lies that underpin the celebratory and discriminatory narratives that hide the complexity of immigrant lives, they also remind us to pay attention to the “layered humanity” and emotional lives of immigrants in the hope of an alternative and better future.