Documenting Migrant Deaths in the Borderlands: Who is Dayani Cristal? and Torn Apart

This paper examines the visualization of migrant deaths in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in Marc Silver’s (2013) documentary film, Who is Dayani Cristal? And the Human Rights Watch short Torn Apart (2014), and interrogates how... [ view full abstract ]

This paper examines the visualization of migrant deaths in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in Marc Silver’s (2013) documentary film, Who is Dayani Cristal? And the Human Rights Watch short Torn Apart (2014), and interrogates how the films and the agencies involved rely on acts of critical witnessing and testimony to resist the disappearance of migrant bodies and their histories. Both documentaries feature the recovery of migrant bodies in the Arizona desert and the joint efforts of the Pima County Medical Examiner and The Missing Migrant Project at the Colibrí Center for Human Rights to identify migrants and repatriate their remains.

Drawing on critical visual culture and film theory, as well as border and transnational studies, I view these documentaries within the emerging filmography of migrant suffering and death throughout Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands that has grown as migrant deaths and suffering persist. In particular, I examine how these documentaries visualize migrant deaths as “systemic violence”, or what Slavoj Zizek describes as the results of the “catastrophic consequences” of our sociopolitical system. I also interrogate how each makes visible that which has otherwise been disappeared, both physically, and in political and popular imagination, by the neoliberal militarization of borders and migration. Along these lines, this paper examines the critical potentialities of these films to generate change by analyzing how the documentaries, and the work of the Colibrí Center, advocate for, and constitute sites of, what Diana Taylor refers to as “critical witnessing,” calling on spectators to become witnesses to the trauma and violence they have observed, and to resist the invisibility of this violence through acts of recording and reporting that which has been observed. Ultimately, I contemplate how these visual documents and their calls to action resist contributing to what Nicholas Mirzoeff describes as the “banality of images”, where contestatory visual discourses are relegated to the realm of visual culture that is representative of problems that spectators view, but ultimately determine are beyond their power to change.