In her essay “Undocumented, Unafraid, and Unapologetic”, Cristina Beltrán discusses the strategies of visibility deployed by DREAMers in their claims to political recognition. In particular, she considers the appropriation of “coming out” as a strategy originated during the gay rights movement to present the “opening up of new possibilities to imagine political membership and political claim making”, what she calls the “queering of the politics of immigrations” (88). Throughout the text, digital platforms are highlighted for their potential to produce new (and more democratic) spaces of appearance for undocumented people. Transcripts of cyber-testimonios, videos of undocumented youth declaring their legal status and claiming their right to be in the United States, clearly articulate the potential of these new of resistance to the dominant discourses which surround immigration today.
The two other readings for this week can provide valuable insight for the interpretation of the case of cyber-testimonios. In The Civil Contract of Photography, Azoulay develops a new account of citizenship based on the practices of looking associated with photography following the “conquest of the world as picture” (137). This form of citizenship is distinct as it is mapped onto models the deterritorialized spectatorship, where the witnesses of injustice might be located in distant places and yet remain accountable for this differential governance and responsible for restorative action towards the photographed subjects. In“The Intolerable Image”, Jacques Rancière seeks to collapse the distinction between the testimony and the image. In response to the critique of the circulation of photographs taken in gas chambers during the Holocaust, Rancière asks “What distinguishes the virtue of testimony from the indignity of proof?” He argues that the tensions between “having to” speak and being unable to is only possible to capture in photographs, in the expressions of those sharing their testimony.
The cyber-testimonio of Georgina Perez can be read through both Rancière and Azoulay’s accounts of citizenship and spectatorship. Georgina’s tearful expression of love, respect and gratitude for her mother directly confronts and dismisses the impulse within political discourse to criminalize the parents of DREAMers while emphasizing the innocence of their kids. The words in her testimony and the emotion we can perceive in her face during the video both clearly convey the personal depth and significance of the politics of immigration. In making herself visible, Georgina is also claiming the kind of citizenship of photography that Azoulay proposes. She is introducing herself as a political actor within an alternative space of appearance, and making us (as spectators) responsible for the differential ways in which we are governed based on formal “citizenship” status. She finally asks us “Are you going to be on our side?” (92). As witnesses to her testimony, we have to be.