Some prefixes are false.
The “un” in “undocumented,” for one, implies lacking, but such a characterization of migrants without State authorization for movement is a narrow one, if not inaccurate. Undocumented people do not lack documents or paperwork, they are just denied eligibility to specific kinds, often arbitrarily. Even more than that, most are swimming in paperwork—applications, petitions, passports, proofs, consulate cards, letters, receipts. This “hyperdocumentation” is something I’ve been thinking a lot about as I share two major projects.
The first is an exhibition I co-curated with Francisco Donoso at PS122 called Eligible/Illegible. Part of the gallery’s open call, the show emerged from being in conversation with Francisco about our overlapping experiences and frustration within queer/migrant/undocumented communities and how they (we) have interfaced with the “art world” and with institutions more broadly.
We had both seen and experienced the barriers faced by undocumented creatives in particular, and how the art world echoed much of the structural violences that mark their realities and limit visibility, mobility, and livelihoods. As an intentional counter, we sought out to curate a focused exhibition of four queer, undocumented, formerly undocumented artists working across the country with work that rejected demands for legibility and representation.
Here are some installation images by Argenis Apolinario, Courtesy of PS122.
Here is our digital catalog, with an essay by Francisco and I, along with a poem by Jan-Henry Gray.
I have been so moved collaborating with Francisco and getting to know the work of Jonathan Molina-Garcia, Fidencio Fifield-Perez, Nancy Rivera, and Rodrigo Moreira. These artists draw from the aesthetics of the immigration process and its counter the violent flattening through strategies of queering and abstraction. The long-term relationship that these artists have with these images—and, in turn, with the embodied limbo of being an “illegalized” migrant—is deeply familiar. It carries a physical and emotional weight which these artists contemplate, and which comes back to this idea of “hyperdocumentation.” Fidencio’s dacaments are a series of tender plant paintings on the many envelopes required for the artist’s immigration processes. I recognized many of the kinds of envelopes and related so much both to the keeping and to the impulse to do something with this omnipresent evidence. Together on a wall, they become a kind of monument, a kind of portrait, and a kind of protest.
What does it mean when an arduous process like naturalization requires keeping a literal paper trail, and often one that forces intimate disclosures and traumas? Many are made to experience the impact of needing to keep, to record, to track, to document. I know for me it has affected the way that I navigate the world even beyond the context of my immigration. Just this weekend was going through boxes of paper ephemera in my parents basement—decades of drafts, schoolwork, drawings in large plastic containers I’ve been trying to sort and downsize.
I’ve also always kept too many papers in my wallet (in case), including slips from MetroNorth, which titled my upcoming collection of poems, This is your receipt and is not a ticket for travel. I’ve been thinking a lot about how the underlying theme in the book is this migrant longing and the ways that these demanding systems make it so our anxious impulses are to keep the receipts. Layered in this is also the inherent limitations to receipts—in the train slip, it tells you very clearly that it cannot get you where you need to go. These limitations extend to documents beyond receipts, of course, and emphasize the need to deflate the authorities that embed power in
I think one of the individual and collective turning points in the immigrant rights movement was in the realization that documentation wasn’t actually the goal. It was (and remains) critical to demystify that the supposed lack implied in “un”documented may not actually be address by anything approved by the state. Documentation often means surveillance, panic, and control—not liberation. The challenge remains to upturn the usual terms of documentation and embrace ones that we create to align with the everyday resistances and desires in our lives—perhaps in the a book of queer little train poems, or in the delicate plants of Fidencio’s dacaments. Indeed, whether documentation is a goal or not, what happens after?
I hope you can join me on Friday 4/14 at Polly’s Cafe in Brooklyn or on Monday 4/17 on Zoom to celebrate the book, and on Saturday, April 15th 1-6 pm on the closing weekend of Eligible/Illegible.
With care,
d