Immigrant Intimacies: Understanding Mediated Relationships Across Borders

Abstract:This essay considers Almudena Carracedo's Made in LA (2007) and Theo Rigby's Sin País/Without Country (2010) as two cinematic texts that render visible the sociocultural and affective role that visual and communication technologies play in the everyday life of transnational families, particularly those who reside outside the boundaries of legality. My overall analysis of these two cinematic texts focuses on the representation of practices of kin work, as they manifest through the performance or enactment of communication or mediated connection. I engage with theories of visuality, affect, and technology to show how the objects/media (homemade movies, audio cassettes, photographs) that transnational families keep and exchange to remain in touch with each other and their differential uses of new technologies (videophone calls, online instant messages, etc.) compose an archive from below, one activated by affections and loss that cannot be quantified, a record of emotions that often escapes official histories of migration, deportation, and transnational parenthood. I am specifically concerned with how through their visualization of technologically mediated familial relationships, these films produce potential counter visual narratives of hemispheric displacement, particularly in relation to war, US intervention, and the Central American migratory experience.