Migrant Rights and Migrant Melodrama, or Elvira Arellano as Suffering Mother and Evil Mother, Criminal and Saint

Date: Thursday, Feb. 24th from 5:00-6:00 p.m.Location: 2nd Floor conference room, #2135, Social Sciences and
Media Studies building

Abstract of Talk:

Ana Elena Puga trains a theater/performance studies lens on the
struggle to control public perception of undocumented migrant rights
activist Elvira Arellano, who was deported in 2007. Puga coins the
term “migrant melodrama” to describe how key media coverage,
cultural production, and social performance in Arellano’s case
recycled and deployed tropes from nineteenth-century melodrama.
Migrant melodrama was used by Arellano herself, as well as by both
supporters and detractors of the single mother, who sought
sanctuary in a Chicago church together with her US-born son. Can
melodramatic spectacles of suffering insist on a common humanity
and make ethical claims for inclusion into an imagined community?
Yet can they also backfire by setting the price of inclusion at an
impossibly high level of virtue?

Bio of Speaker:
Ana Puga’s current book project, Desperate Acts: Melodrama and
Spectacles of Suffering in the Performance of Migration,
interrogates the reliance on melodrama in late twentieth and
twenty-first century artistic and social performances featuring
undocumented migrants from Latin America, especially women and
children. Desperate Acts shows how performances that involve
suffering migrant bodies often re-circulate nineteenth-century
melodramatic tropes from race, domestic, and sensation melodramas,
asking how those tropes circumscribe contemporary political agency.
Puga is the author of Memory, Allegory, and Testimony in South
American Theatre: Upstaging Dictatorship (Routledge 2008) and
translator, with Mónica Núñez-Parra, of Finished from the Start and
other Plays, an anthology of six works by Chilean playwright Juan
Radrigán (Northwestern University Press 2008). Puga has published
articles in Latin American Theatre Review and Theatre Journal,
among other journals. She co-founded LaMicro Theatre, dedicated to
the staging of contemporary Spanish, Latin American and US Latino
plays in English and bilingual productions.

hm 2/21/11; jwil 22.ii.2011