To Pursue Invisibility and Silence: Contemporary Fiction and the Ungovernable Latino

On May 1, 2006 more than one million immigrants, predominantly Latino, took to the streets of Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, and other major U.S. cities to protest the passing of H.R. 4437 in December of the previous year... [ view full abstract ]

On May 1, 2006 more than one million immigrants, predominantly Latino, took to the streets of Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, and other major U.S. cities to protest the passing of H.R. 4437 in December of the previous year that would have made it a felony to reside in the U.S. illegally, and which would have also made the acts of employing and harboring undocumented immigrants felonious offenses. Inspired by the 2004 film, A Day Without A Mexican, the so-called Great American Boycott protesters used the visual and economic impact of Latinos taking to the streets in the middle of a workday to underscore the political economic strength of Latinos in the U.S. For the protesters to make an impact, the boycott has to make “visible” the Latinos taken out of the shadows of their sites of employment and who take to the streets. This method of immigrant rights activism is not singular or exceptional, but part of the representational efforts made possible through visibility politics. Political representation, demanded through mass rallies, sit-ins, and hunger strikes are meant to be reparative and acts of redress by making visible the bodies subject to mass detention, deportation, and the unjust scrutiny of the law. Visibility, therefore, is the first step toward the demand for recognition, a term that has become critical to understanding rights. However, in this paper I argue against the politics of recognition by using Gayl Jones’s novel, Mosquito (1999). This novel reveals how recognition can very easily become an instrument for policing, surveilling, and repressing minority populations. The text’s namesake, Sojourner Nadine Jane Johnson, or “Mosquito,” is a Black female truck driver who transports ecological detergents across the U.S.-Mexico border used to clean up environmental disasters. In addition to transporting detergents, Mosquito finds herself (unwittingly at first) participating in a sanctuary movement in South Texas transporting and helping protect Latin American immigrants attempting to migrate to the Untied States.

In order to make a case for invisibility and silence as a critical political strategy, I argue that Mosquito first highlights the similarities between African American and Latino struggles for recognition, only to later disavow the efficacy of recognition for both populations through silence. By using the undocumented migrant as the subject needing to be hidden lest he/she face deportation, the novel counters a popular presumption that subjects must necessarily seek recognition to become liberal, and furthers a politics of critical invisibility that borrows from the Latin Americanist politics of silence in order to surface the need for secrecy for survival. I focus on the figure who animates Mosquito’s engagement with the sanctuary movement: Maria Barriga, a pregnant undocumented woman hiding in the cabin of Mosquito’s truck upon her return from Mexico to the U.S., and who seeks safe haven in the sanctuary movement. In so doing, I am the first critic of this novel to direct her attention away from Mosquito and Delgadina, Mosquito’s Chicana best friend, and towards the subject who remains most hidden throughout the novel.