COLLABORATION AND DISOBEDIENCE

Alex Rivera's music videos for the #Not1More campaign draw upon approaches to filmmaking that he has developed during his (close to twenty-year) career, as well as from his collaborative work with activist organizations, including NDLON and NIYA. Widely recognized for his use of digital media to explore contemporary issues of Latina/o immigration in the United States, Rivera has produced numerous films and videos, including Papapapá (1995), Why Cybraceros? (1997), The Sixth Section (2003), and Sleep Dealer (2008). According to Rivera, these films “illuminate two massive and parallel realities: the globalization of information through the Internet, and the globalization of families and communities through mass migration.”Footnote ⁷ Rivera utilizes a range of filmic conventions in his work, frequently mixing elements of different genres, including documentary and fictional film. For example, while Papapapá is a kind of documentary film, some scholars have argued that it better approximates a docudrama, in the sense that it employs both documentary and dramatic techniques.Footnote ⁸Why Cybraceros? is a mockumentary, a political satire that includes clips from an industrial film for the Bracero Program, and The Sixth Section, while classified as a documentary, also includes fictional filmmaking aesthetics. Amy Sara Carroll has argued that Rivera's filmmaking has “an overarching drive towards undocumentation,” which she relates to the way in which he “critiques the documentary genre's clichéd investments in fact-finding and political action.”Footnote ⁹ However, what distinguishes these videos from his earlier work is that they were, in his words, “baked in an oven and that oven is a movement.”Footnote ¹⁰ As such, these music videos were produced within an activist context, in order to solicit action on the part of the viewer in support of the #Not1More campaign.

The music videos for NDLON's #Not1More campaign need to be situated in relation to Rivera's prior collaborative work with undocumented Latina/o migrant and youth activists, in representing their challenge to state and federal immigration policies and programs, including Arizona Senate Bill 1070 (SB1070) and the “Secure Communities” (S-COMM) program of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), both of which involve the racial profiling and criminalization of Latina/o migrants.Footnote ¹¹ The music videos that Rivera produced for the #Not1More campaign developed out of his role as an artist in residence with NDLON during the ¡Alto Arizona! campaign to oppose SB 1070, and in developing a film about undocumented youth activists in NIYA who organized actions against federal immigration policies and programs, such as S-COMM. NDLON staff members had seen The Sixth Section and Sleep Dealer, and were interested in collaborating with Rivera on cultural projects related to ¡Alto Arizona!. NDLON staff coordinated the campaign with NIYA, an organization of undocumented youth activists, and the Puente Movement, a grassroots organization based in Arizona. NDLON staff viewed cultural production as central to the ¡Alto Arizona! campaign and as such musicians and artists donated their time and their work in support of the cause.Footnote ¹² At this time NDLON approached Chilean MC Ana Tijoux and Spanish French singer Manu Chao to create music videos supporting ¡Alto Arizona!, and asked Rivera to direct them, which he agreed to since he felt that he could, in his words, add a “level of craft and obsessive attention” to their production.Footnote ¹³

The videos that Rivera directed for the ¡Alto Arizona! campaign – “Shock” with Ana Tijoux, and “Clandestino” with Manu Chao – are forms of cultural production that emerge from within an activist context. These music videos employ the aesthetics of activist film and video, as well as documentary and performance film and video. As opposed to traditional music videos, these were “on-site interventions” as the musicians wanted to film them in Arizona, in solidarity with the movement.Footnote ¹⁴ In the music video for “Shock,” Tijoux performs the song alongside undocumented youth activists who also participated in a civil disobedience action during protests against SB 1070, footage of which is also intermixed in the video, along with interviews with the activists. The video for “Clandestino” was shot with Manu Chao singing outside Sheriff Arpaio's “Tent City,” and includes documentary footage of individuals imprisoned there.Footnote ¹⁵ These videos thus make visible both effects of SB 1070 and the way activists were organizing against the laws.

Starting in the fall of 2011 Rivera also began to film undocumented youth activists who were protesting the effects of ICE's programs, including S-COMM, in detaining and deporting undocumented migrants from the United States. In doing so they were attempting to make visible the activities of government agencies that were largely unseen by the broader public. In a short film that Rivera started at this time he focussed on the planning and implementation of a civil disobedience action that took place at an ICE office in Los Angeles in October 2011. The office was located next to an immigrant detention center where other activists blocked vans full of undocumented migrants who had been detained and were about to get transferred to another detention center and/or deported.Footnote ¹⁶ By holding a civil disobedience action in the middle of an ICE office and in front of a van of undocumented migrants who were about to be deported, these activists attempted to disrupt the “processing” of what they referred to as the ICE “machine.”

In the work-in-progress version of the film, Rivera and the NIYA activists attempted to make visible what the state wants to keep invisible. The film focusses on a group of five undocumented youth who were being trained by other NIYA activists in preparation for the civil disobedience action inside the ICE office in Los Angeles and who thus risked being deported from the United States. On the day of the action, Rivera recorded organizers Mohammad Abdollahi and Isaac Barrera, who filmed the activists as they entered the ICE building in order to take part in civil disobedience. In this film Rivera included video footage by the undocumented youth activists who were involved in the civil disobedience action inside the ICE office and who recorded their action on their cell phone cameras. Rivera thus represented how NIYA activists used cameras to make visible the criminalization of undocumented migrants, as well as state agents’ performances of the state's power over undocumented migrants. The action and Rivera's film highlight the state's investment in acts of social violence against undocumented migrants.

However, Rivera's film also reveals the limitations of representing, in documentary form, these acts of social violence from the perspective of undocumented migrants. After a few minutes of filming the activists’ involvement in civil disobedience, ICE agents pushed Mohammad Abdollahi, Isaac Barrera, and Rivera out of the room where the action was taking place, thereby limiting their ability to document it. Further, the cell phone camera recording of the action by one of the activists was cut short, presumably by the arrest of this individual. One of the main strategies of undocumented youth activists in recent years has been to publicize their actions, to bring attention to the effects of the Obama administration's immigration policies on undocumented migrants, which has also served as a form of protection against detention and deportation. Perhaps in efforts to contain the effect of their activism, state agencies, including ICE, have ordered the release of undocumented youth activists following their involvement in civil disobedience. This response is related to the interest of the Obama administration in concealing or minimizing publicity around its policing and detention of undocumented youth migrants.

Rivera's music videos for the #Not1More campaign draw on some of the elements of those he produced for ¡Alto Arizona!, as well as his film about NIYA activists, but they are also quite distinct from these works. In the music videos for the #Not1More campaign, Rivera uses a hybrid “docufiction” form due to the challenges of representing migrant apprehension from the point of view of undocumented migrants. In order to represent “something that cannot be seen,” such as ICE raids and migrant apprehension near the Mexico–United States boundary from the point of view of undocumented migrants, Rivera integrates into the music videos both documentary and cinematic narrative conventions. By employing fictional elements, Rivera is able to center the narrative within the videos from the point of view of undocumented migrants, while also making visible the social violence committed by the state agencies against them.

#NOT1MORE

Although mixing elements of documentary and fictional film is an approach that Rivera has used in many of his films, the hybrid “docufiction” form that he employs in the music videos for NDLON's #Not1More campaign – “El Hielo (ICE)” with La Santa Cecilia and “Wake Me Up” with Aloe Blacc – emerged out of his involvement as an artist in residence with NDLON and as part of a social movement focussed on migrant rights. In these music videos, Rivera represents the experiences of undocumented Latina/o migrants in the United States through fictional narratives. Although the videos are fictional, the stories that they narrate are based on the lives of undocumented Latina/o migrants, including those who perform as actors in the videos. For example, the opening credits to “Wake Me Up” indicate that it is “Inspired by 11 Million True Stories,” while the end credits state that “Most of the Actors in This Video Have Lived This Story,” including two actors in the video – Augustin, a day laborer who works in Los Angeles, and Margarita, an actress who was deported to Mexico with her mother as a child (Figure 1). The end credits to “El Hielo (ICE),” a song that directly references the raids conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), attest to the undocumented status of the actors, including Isaac, Maria, Erika, and Juan, as well as José Carlos (Pepe), the accordion player in La Santa Cecilia (Figure 2), noting as well that ICE had already placed two (Isaac and Maria) in deportation proceedings (Figure 3), and was attempting to deport both of Katherine Figueroa's parents (Figure 4). Not only were the music videos produced as part of NDLON's #Not1More campaign, they also publicize specific deportation cases, such as that of activist Hareth Andrade's father in “Wake Me Up” (Figure 5), and Katherine Figueroa's parents in “El Hielo (ICE)” (Figure 4). Both of these videos circulate on NDLON's website, and on those of other migrant rights’ organizations, as well as on YouTube.

Figure 1.

Augustin and Margarita in Alex Rivera’s music video for “Wake Me Up” by Aloe Blacc.

Figure 2.

Isaac, Maria, Erika, Juan, and Pepe in Alex Rivera’s music video for La Santa Cecilia’s “El Hielo (ICE).”

Figure 3.

Isaac and Maria in Alex Rivera’s music video for La Santa Cecilia’s “El Hielo (ICE).”

Figure 4.

Katherine Figueroa in Alex Rivera’s music video for La Santa Cecilia’s “El Hielo (ICE).”

Figure 5.

Hareth Andrade in Alex Rivera’s music video for “Wake Me Up” by Aloe Blacc.

Rivera's decision to use the “docufiction” form was inspired by traditions of political filmmaking in the United States. Staff at NDLON viewed these videos as a homage to Salt of the Earth, in which Mexican American workers involved in a strike against the Empire Zinc Company in Grant County, New Mexico played roles based in part on their own lives.Footnote ¹⁷ These music videos thus reference a tradition of politically radical cinema that aims to move viewers to political action. In addition, the decision of undocumented Latina/o migrants to perform in these videos relates to the broader strategies of undocumented youth and migrant activists at a time when they viewed their visibility as a form of protection.Footnote ¹⁸ In an interview, Rivera noted that in the music videos the “undocumented cast relive [and] portray their own stories,” which “bring[s] veracity,” and is “part of the strategy, part of their defense.”Footnote ¹⁹ NDLON staff also viewed the stories of undocumented migrants in the videos as tools for defense against the deportations of their members.Footnote ²⁰

In these music videos the actors are performing roles that are situated somewhere between fiction and nonfiction. However, while the stories narrated in “El Hielo (ICE)” and “Wake Me Up” include those of activists and actors featured in the videos, they also portray experiences that are not just about the individuals represented, but also about the conditions that many undocumented Latina/o migrants have confronted in recent years. These experiences include the difficulties of migrating from Mexico to the United States, being deported by the Border Patrol, the separation of family members across national boundaries, and living as an undocumented Latina/o migrant during a time in which there was an increase in ICE raids leading to their arrest, detention, and deportation. Some elements of the music videos reference undocumented youth and migrant activists’ challenges to immigration policies in the United States, such as the character of the DREAM activist played by Hareth Andrade in “Wake Me Up,”Footnote ²¹ or the presence of well-known undocumented youth activists, including Hareth Andrade, as well as Los Angeles Immigrant Youth Coalition (IYC) organizer Isaac Barrera and Erika Andiola, cofounder of the DREAM Action Coalition in Arizona, as actors in “El Hielo (ICE).”Footnote ²²

Although the context of production of the music videos for the #Not1More campaign was different than for ¡Alto Arizona!, Rivera describes his creative process in directing La Santa Cecelia's music video for “El Hielo (ICE)” and Aloe Blacc's “Wake Me Up” as emerging from his experience of “being inside the narrative space of a movement and telling the story” from within the movement.Footnote ²³ Unlike the videos for Ana Tijoux and Manu Chao, both “Wake Me Up” and “El Hielo (ICE)” were official music videos as well as projects that, as Rivera stated, “involved an artist, a song, and focussed on a moment and a message.”Footnote ²⁴ As such Rivera worked with the recording track, orchestrating a narrative. His idea for “El Hielo (ICE)” developed during a breakfast gathering at the home of NDLON legal director Chris Newman and his partner Marjorie Garcia, who signed La Santa Cecilia to Universal Music's Latin American Division. It was the song “El Hielo (ICE),” a bilingual pun on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that sparked the collaboration between the band and NDLON in the form of a music video. NDLON staff viewed the video as a tool for mobilizing against the deportation of Katherine Figueroa's parents and as a means to publicize the #Not1More campaign.Footnote ²⁵

The song “El Hielo (ICE)” by La Santa Cecilia, which is sung in Spanish, is pointedly critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and, due to the appearance of the band at immigration rallies, some journalists have argued that it has become an “anthem for immigration reform.”Footnote ²⁶ In creating the music video for “El Hielo (ICE),” Rivera noted that the song itself is a kind of corrido, as it has a narrative, and in collaboration with the band he worked to build an “image system” around the song, drawing on the lyrics. Rivera was captivated by the lyrics of the chorus in particular:

In creating a narrative based in part on the lyrics, Rivera thought about how ICE raids are never portrayed from the point of view of the people who are targeted by them because they do not know when state agents will appear. Instead, all representations of these raids are filmed from the position of a cameraperson who accompanies the ICE agents. With this video Rivera depicts an ICE raid from the perspective of undocumented Latina/o migrants who were being targeted. He situates the raid at the end of the video, so that most of the action would instead focus on a day in the life of three people whose lives converge during an ICE raid.Footnote ²⁸

Rivera's decision to cast members of NDLON, and NIYA as well as their family members, and to have some undocumented Latina/o migrants play themselves in the music video is related to its production within a social movement. Rivera's role as artist in residence for NDLON and his involvement with NIYA is visible in the casting process. After building a storyboard and conferring with La Santa Cecilia, Rivera used NDLON as his casting agency. NDLON staff put out a call to members of the organization or to people who lost family to the “ICE machine,” as well as to undocumented youth activists, including some who were in deportation proceedings. When I interviewed him, Rivera stated that he saw a connection between the activists’ experiences and acting, explaining, “That's what happens when they are successful at organizing – they are used to performing.”Footnote ²⁹ Almost every role in the video is performed by an undocumented Latina/o migrant, which reflects the emphasis on self-determination within NDLON, as well as the importance of representing undocumented migrants on their own terms.Footnote ³⁰ Further, some actors also contributed to their representations in the videos. For example, in “Wake Me Up” some of the actors who had crossed the Mexico–United States boundary shared their own perspectives on that experience with Rivera, which influenced how he envisioned a scene in the video.Footnote ³¹ Also in “Wake Me Up,” Hareth Andrade created the tagline (“Wake Up and Dream”) for the poster that she and her mother (played by Margarita) are holding during the immigration rally at the end of the video.Footnote ³²

The video “El Hielo (ICE)” begins with two definitions of the word in English, the first meaning frozen water, the second being the acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, followed by a translation of the word “ice” into Spanish (“El Hielo”).Footnote ³³ Following the credit sequence, the video opens with a point-of-view shot from the perspective of one of the characters played by Maria Arreola, activist Erika Andiola's mother in the video and in real life, who is looking out of the window of her apartment. This opening scene is followed by parallel sequences of three characters played by Erika Andiola, NDLON member Juan Romero, and Isaac Barrera, all of whom are getting ready for the day. They get washed and dressed, eat breakfast, and interact with family members, or, in the case of Juan, look at a photograph of a family member – presumably his wife – who is in Mexico. In a sequence that foreshadows the end of the video, Erika and Juan (but not Isaac) watch footage of an immigration raid on a Spanish-language television station. They then go to work – Juan goes by bicycle, Erika by bus, and Isaac by car, during which there is a moment where Erika and Isaac exchange looks while she waits at a bus stop, and he sits in his car at a stop light. The video then shifts to their workplaces – Erika and Juan are employed at a restaurant where she is a waitress and he is a cook. We see Isaac getting dressed in a uniform and discover that he is an ICE agent, preparing for a raid with other members of a SWAT team. The video returns to the restaurant where Erika is waiting tables. As she is cleaning up she sees an ICE agent through the front door about to enter the restaurant in order to conduct an immigration raid (Figure 6). She tries to run the other way but agents also enter the restaurant through the back, including one played by Isaac, trapping her and Juan. In this sequence there is an exchange of emotional looks between Erika, Juan, and Isaac (Figures 7 and 8). In the final scene Erika's family members, played by her mother Maria Arreola and Katherine Figueroa, hug as they watch the raid on television, while the photograph of Juan's wife appears and then fades from view.

Figure 6.

Erika Andiola in Alex Rivera’s music video for La Santa Cecilia’s “El Hielo (ICE).”

Figure 7.

Erika Andiola and Juan Romero in Alex Rivera’s music video for La Santa Cecilia’s “El Hielo (ICE).”

Figure 8.

Isaac Barrera in Alex Rivera’s music video for La Santa Cecilia’s “El Hielo (ICE).”

The involvement of undocumented Latina/o migrants in “El Hielo (ICE)” and the integration of some elements of their life stories is a means by which Rivera mobilizes a sense of the “real” within the video. While the music video portrays a fictionalized narrative, Rivera brings in story elements from the lives of the actors as he features individuals who are campaigning against their own or their family members’ deportation. For example, the scene at the end of the video in which Maria Arreola (Erika Andiola's mother) and Katherine Figueroa are watching the ICE raid on television references Katherine's experience of watching her own parents being arrested (at a car wash where they worked in Arizona) when she turned on the television after coming home from school.Footnote ³⁴ Further, during the year in which the video was made, Maria Arreola and her son were both placed in deportation proceedings.Footnote ³⁵ After the video was made, Erika Andiola spoke of the difficulties she had in playing the part of the waitress, stating, “It was really hard to do it, to reenact what I went through in real life,” noting as well that the experience of acting in this final scene also deeply affected her mother. Specifically, Andiola told a reporter, “There's that scene at the end where my mom is crying … Well, she was crying for real.”Footnote ³⁶

In making “El Hielo (ICE),” Rivera's political objectives include challenging how undocumented Latina/o migrants have been portrayed in the mainstream media, through the alignment of cameras with state agents, which is a form of social violence.Footnote ³⁷ One of Rivera's visual strategies in the music videos includes positioning the camera from the point of view of undocumented Latina/o migrants, while also showing them return the gaze of the state, rather than being surveilled from the point of view of state agents.Footnote ³⁸ Thus, while Rivera utilizes elements of documentary and nonfictional filmmaking to reference events that undocumented Latina/o migrants have experienced in the United States, he also employs conventions of narrative cinema, in order to create identification with the characters by deliberately aligning the point of view of the audience with that of undocumented Latina/o migrants. As such, in these videos he attempts to shift the allegiances of the audience to the point of view of undocumented people. As Rivera notes, “One of the liberating parts of fictional practice is to make someone identify with someone who is not them,” in order to “take them to a space where they wouldn't be – an intimate space.”Footnote ³⁹

Further, in creating multiple subject positions in the music video Rivera challenges the way in which dominant modes of representation privilege one position. While shifting perspective is disallowed within conventional documentary film and television news, in “El Hielo (ICE)” Rivera disrupts the audience's identification with a single character through his inclusion of three interlocking characters and stories. From the first shot of the video, the audience is positioned from the point of view of Maria, who looks out of her window. Through the use of crosscutting and parallel action, Rivera relates the three main characters, played by Erika, Juan, and Isaac, to one another. By shifting the point of view from one character to another, such as in the exchange of gazes between Erika and Isaac at the bus stop and those among Juan, Erika, and Isaac during the ICE raid, both undocumented Latina/o migrants and Latina/os who are United States citizens are positioned as equals. Although these characters are represented as equal, the video narrates how the system around them positions them in unequal ways, as either “citizen” or “noncitizen” within the context of the United States.

The shifting terms of perspective thus have a political effectivity, and are a means by which the affective register of the music video is experienced by the viewer. In “El Hielo (ICE)” the three main characters are brought into collision through crosscutting and an exchange of gazes. In the first half of the video the crosscutting and parallel action are a means to relate the characters. This is achieved in part through the use of close-up and medium-range shots filmed in domestic spaces that convey a sense of intimacy. As such, the sequence in which Erika, Juan, and Isaac put on their work uniforms, revealing that Isaac is an ICE agent, is unexpected and unsettling as it positions them as antagonists. This sequence leads into the final scene during the ICE raid, in which the exchange of gazes between Erika, Juan, and Isaac register not only the perspectives of the characters who are the targets of the raid but also the ICE agent's conflicted feelings about the raid. This exchange of gazes, which hinges on a shift in perspective, leads to feelings of discomfort. Rather than demonizing individuals (such as the ICE agent), the video narrates a critique of the ICE “machine.”

While there are elements that relate the music video for “Wake Me Up” to “El Hielo (ICE),” the songs involved a different approach on the part of the filmmaker.Footnote ⁴⁰ In relating the video to the song “Wake Me Up,” which references the experience of someone being lost, Rivera decided not to represent the undocumented character this way, but instead to use this notion as a metaphor for the way in which the United States is “lost” around its immigration policy, and the need for the country to “wake up” and confront this reality. Rivera noted that he “put the lyrics of the song to work” in order to show a “crack in the armor” regarding immigration policy in the United States.Footnote ⁴¹ In the video for “Wake Me Up” Rivera focussed the narrative on an undocumented Mexican migrant, a young woman played by activist Hareth Andrade, who was deported with her mother as a baby and separated from her father in the United States, and who eventually grew up to become an activist. Another main character, a white police officer who has been assigned the role of guarding protesters during a political rally that she attends, is portrayed as her antagonist. In the music video it is the police officer who is represented as lost and defeated.

Figure 9.

Hareth Andrade in Alex Rivera’s music video for “Wake Me Up” by Aloe Blacc.

Figure 10.

Screenshot from Alex Rivera’s music video for “Wake Me Up” by Aloe Blacc.

“Wake Me Up” opens with a close up of Hareth Andrade's eye. As the camera zooms out, she narrows her eyes into a glare as she looks at a police officer who returns her gaze at a rally (Figures 9 and 10). She then closes her eyes and there is a flashback to moments in the lives of her parents – her father working as a day laborer, and her mother's attempt to cross the Mexico–United States boundary with her as a baby, during which they are caught by the Border Patrol and deported to Mexico. She and her mother continue to live apart from her father, communicating by Skype. When she is older they attempt the journey again, and this time they are able to reunite with her father in the United States. As she grows up she becomes an undocumented youth activist. In the concluding sequence the video returns to the rally featured at the start of the video where there is another series of gazes exchanged between Hareth and the police officer that suggests a standoff between them. In the final shot of the video, the police officer closes his eyes.

Figure 11.

Hareth Andrade in Alex Rivera’s music video for “Wake Me Up” by Aloe Blacc.

The events and contexts of immigration policies and programs, as well as resistances to them, are represented by Rivera's inclusion of references to the organizing of undocumented youth and migrant activists. For example, Rivera's visualization of the standoff between the two antagonists, the police officer and the undocumented youth activist played by Hareth Andrade (Figure 11), was inspired by a documentary photograph of activist Sandra Solis-Castro and Phoenix police officer L. Hunt taken by photographer Eduardo Barraza on the day that the Supreme Court heard arguments related to Arizona v. United States, the federal government's legal challenge to SB 1070. Barraza took this photograph during a rally protesting SB 1070 when activists and police officers came face-to-face as police pushed protesters towards the sidewalk. In addition, part of the video was filmed at a rally for the California TRUST Act (AB 4), which limits the cooperation of the state with federal immigration authorities as part of programs such as S-COMM.Footnote ⁴² NDLON executive director Pablo Alvarado spoke about the significance of the TRUST Act after it was passed, noting,

The inclusion of references to activists’ organizing against SB 1070 and S-COMM within “Wake Me Up” relates to NDLON's broader political goals to challenge these state and federal immigration policies and programs.

Figure 12.

Screenshot from Alex Rivera’s music video for “Wake Me Up” by Aloe Blacc.

Much as in “El Hielo (ICE),” in “Wake Me Up” Rivera also draws on narrative film conventions in order to represent the perspective of undocumented Latina/o migrants, including the undocumented youth activist played by Hareth Andrade, as well as the character of her mother, played by Margarita, as an undocumented Mexican migrant who is attempting to migrate to the United States when she is apprehended by the Border Patrol. In this sequence we first see the Border Patrol from her mother's point of view, even though the agents have seen the migrants first (Figure 12). It is through representing the experience of migrant apprehension from her mother's perspective, rather than from the point of view of power (state agents), that Rivera challenges the way in which the Mexico–United States boundary has been constructed as a “theater of sight – of the state, of vigilantes – a place of visual explosion, an image machine” that “depends on visuality” and “is lined with cameras” as well as walls.Footnote ⁴⁴ “Wake Me Up” privileges the perspective of undocumented Latina/o migrants not only through the frequent use of point-of-view shots, but also through flashback, which serves a political purpose of relating the DREAM activist to her parents. While the flashback is a technique used for placing events in the present within the context of past memories, in the video Hareth's flashback does not represent her memories, but those of her parents. The use of this flashback here is thus a way of connecting the DREAM activist to her parents, which relates to a broader emphasis of the #Not1More campaign to challenge the false dichotomy between the ways in which politicians and the mainstream media have represented undocumented migrants as either “deserving” (young people/DREAMers) or “undeserving” (adults/undocumented workers) in order to expand who is granted administrative relief or discretion from undocumented youth to all undocumented migrants in the United States.Footnote ⁴⁵

In “El Hielo (ICE)” Rivera employs the exchange of gazes as a way of relating the antagonists to one another, whereas in “Wake Me Up” he represents Hareth as taking up an “oppositional gaze” in relation to the police officer. bell hooks has described the “oppositional gaze” as a site of resistance for African Americans, stating, “Subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that ‘looks’ to document, one that is oppositional.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Her conception of the “oppositional gaze” can be extended to include the experiences of people of color, as she contends that in resistance struggle “the power of the dominated to assert agency by claiming and in cultivating ‘awareness’ politicizes ‘looking’ relations – one learns to look a certain way in order to resist.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In “Wake Me Up” Hareth's “oppositional gaze” relates to how “the look of [white] surveillance returns as a displacing gaze of the disciplined,” in which, as Homi Bhabha describes it, “the observer becomes the observed.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In the music video Rivera transforms the objects of surveillance into the subject of the gaze, as undocumented Latina/o migrants are shown returning the gaze of state agents. In this video, undocumented Latina/o migrants take up an oppositional gaze against the state, and particularly its role in creating conditions of possibility for the surveillance of undocumented Latina/o migrants, leading to their arrest, detention, and deportation.