UCLA

In this dissertation, I engage works of performance, video, and sculpture by five U.S.-based migrant artists from Central America and Mexico: Yosimar Reyes (Mexico), Julio Salgado (Mexico), Alan Pelaez Lopez (Oaxaca), Alma Leiva (Honduras), and Beatriz Cortez (El Salvador). Drawing on five years of qualitative fieldwork including interviews with the artists, participation in migrant justice actions and organizing spaces, and community-engaged performance collaborations, I employ discourse analysis and deep visual, sonic, and textual analysis to interpret these creative works against a backdrop of U.S. immigration politics and queer interventions into the migrant justice movement. Ample scholarship since the dawn of the War on Terror has centered on two sites of explicit state violence against racialized migrants: detention and deportation. I organize my analysis around a third and interrelated axis of state power: documentation. Building from scholarship in Latinx migration studies, queer of color performance and dance, governmentality, and Indigenous studies, I formulate here a theory of surveillance I term the documentation regime. I define the documentation regime as a system of administrative governance that surveils racialized migrants in past, present, and future temporalities, in order to restrict, predict, and produce migrant movements within and across U.S. territory. In addition to operationalizing state surveillance, the documentation regime also activates the watchful gazes of non-state entities: journalists, academics, non-profits, lawyers, artists, media producers, and citizens. I employ my documentation regime framework to analyze the distinct ways that racialized migrants are targeted for state- and non-state surveillance in the settler colonial United States — and the ways migrant artists perform queer subversions of the documentation regime. I chart four major technologies of the documentation regime, and each chapter examines one of the four: state-sponsored data collection through temporary immigration documents; state-issued IDs containing biometric data; transnational data sharing agreements; and state-sanctioned destruction of official databases. I identify three settler colonial logics that underwrite the documentation regime: visibility, choreography, and temporality. I argue that the artists in my study subvert the surveillance of the documentation regime in performances of queer mis/recognition, relationality, and futurity.