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Need for a New Narrative on both Immigration and democracy

part 2

Alfredo Bravo de Rueda

    Before making my own proposal on immigration and democracy narrative, I would like to mention Fintan O’Toole’s ‘The Politics of Pain,’ in which O’Toole tries to portray English character by using its culture as a starting point, something Piketty also does in some extent in ‘Capital and Ideology.’ Here I would like to start with some manifestations of popular culture that gives us an idea of the perception of immigration (as I have done in the previous paragraph with democracy) through the lens of the most salient narratives.
    First of all, let’s mention what a good narrative can do. On gay rights, movies like Philadelphia and sitcoms like Will and Grace or Modern Family did in a few years what decades of gay pride parades could not. And what they did do? They presented gay people not as different and proud but as people, like you and me. And this is essential to achieve what in psychology is known as empathy. Yet, immigration-related cultural products don’t seem to have incorporated that lesson. Either movies like ‘A Day Without a Mexican’ trivialize the issue by presenting undocumented status as something funny or movies like ‘El Norte’ (and I like that movie as art) present the protagonist as an ethnic stereotype, glad of merely surviving in the limbo of his precarious legal status and of escaping from immigration officers (The Migra). In other words, they present immigrants as different, and, the more different, the better in the eyes of the advocates of this new multiculturalism even if it makes empathy more difficult. Consider that it’s always easier to rationalize the pain of somebody seen as different. Empathy makes rationalization of the other’s pain more difficult. And that’s why the dominant immigration narrative should prioritize empathy in its portrayal of regular immigrants. But, does this mean we should negate diversity? Not at all. This just means that in the dominant narrative, in the ‘Melting Pot’ narrative, multiculturalism should take a back seat even when in more limited segments, multiculturalism could play a more fruitful role (For instance, if we remember the findings of the ANES surveys mentioned before, when it comes to cultural products directed to that part of Hispanics for whom the Hispanic identity is fundamental, a more ethnic perspective could strengthen that identity and as long as it keeps a friendly door open to those for whom the Hispanic identity doesn’t have the same importance, it could play a constructive role.) Let’s reiterate that considering the Hispanic identity fundamental and seeking to be accepted as part of the mainstream don’t have to be contradictory goals and only appear to be so because some activists feel the need of pandering to a particular version of multiculturalism.
    And what’s the role of humor in this narrative? Let’s start with a counterproductive example. In one episode of ‘Superstore,’ Mateo invites his coworkers to assault him in order to get a visa reserved for crime victims, so making the unjust immigration law look like a laughing matter. This point would not be that delicate were it not for the many misconceptions about this issue that have taken root in American culture. And trivialization on an issue where misinformation is rampant could lead to tragic consequences if the mainstream ends up seeing the desperation of immigrants as mere acts of mischief. Should we consider harmless the trivialization of the phenomenon of high suicide rates among gay people when presenting a gay character? And yet, Sacha Baron Cohen’s ‘Who is America’ gave us a perfect example of how humor could play a constructive role in an effective immigration narrative in episode 103, where the laughs come when the xenophobes’ prejudices collide with reality. The laughs don’t come at the expense of immigrants as such. Does this mean I am proposing a dishonest portrayal of reality where the defects of immigrants are not subject to ridicule? No, as long as the laughs don’t come at the expense of immigrants as immigrants, as long as they don’t trivialize their suffering as immigrants, we should not have to regret counterproductive outcomes. In the end, there are people worthy of ridicule among both immigrants and the native-born.
    On the other hand, we should not be afraid of showing tragedy where it is justified because it’s in tragedy where the hero is tested. And no, tragedy doesn’t have to collide with presenting three-dimensional characters. Otherwise, should we refrain from presenting Joaquin Luna’s story or stories about the Children in Cages just because they are tragic?

    The other, much more important role of a new immigration narrative, should be to question misconceptions on this issue. On September 24, the New York Times presented a survey showing that 3/5 of respondents found convincing a message condemning illegal immigration from countries with gang-and-drug problems: Trump’s message on asylum. This rationalization (blaming the victims for the evil from which they are trying to escape) is made easier by the same cultural elements that made easier the rationalization of Trump’s 2016 message (that he was going only after the ‘bad hombres’ and then got no reaction when he went after all immigrants) because the concepts, thus contextualized, distort reality (distortion made even easier by the unnecessary complexity of the immigration law, whose complexity has been considered to surpass the tax law’s according to the American Bar Association) and make injustices related to this issue more acceptable for the average American.
    Now, when it comes to popular culture, consider the episodes of The Simpsons and Family Guy dealing with undocumented immigrants: both episodes present their illegal status as a result of their failing a test (misrepresenting the citizenship test, which actually exists but which you can’t take unless you are first a legal resident), what brings to mind another widespread misrepresentation: the line. In ‘Strangers in their own land’, Hochschild precisely discusses the importance of the concept of the line as a referent for order and fairness. Yet, even though a frequent charge against undocumented immigrants is that of being ‘line-jumpers,’ the fact is that in the immigration law, there is not a ‘line’ (even though even President Obama himself validated that falsehood in 2013 with his call for an immigration reform that would send the undocumented to ‘the back of the line’).
    If I said that undocumented immigrants are those who ‘jumped’ the line, don’t pay taxes, and don’t speak English, too many would agree even though none of these assertions is true. Worse, the way this assertion is framed implies that their illegal status is the result of moral or intellectual flaws when, in reality, the determinant factors of legal status are the country of origin/family of the applicant and, above all, the sponsor’s legal status and economic solvency. Definitely, it’ll be more difficult for me to rationalize xenophobia if I know that their legal status is the result of having been born in the wrong country or family rather than the result of personal faults.
    Now, let’s see what we can use in the current culture to build a much better narrative. On one hand, we can start by portraying immigrants, and undocumented immigrants in special, as people who happen to be immigrants, not as people whose thoughts and feelings are defined by that quality (The infamous ethnic stereotype). Let’s portray them as people, as we see ourselves and as we ourselves would like to be. For instance, in ‘Superstore,’ the writers could present Mateo (undocumented, gay character) making excuses to decline going on vacation with his coworkers to a location that requires taking a plane because he can’t take a plane with his ID and then we can present Mateo and his coworkers enjoying vacations together in a closer location when, after realizing why Mateo is making those excuses, they change plans to vacation at some closer destination that doesn’t require taking a plane. On the other hand, it can present episodes showing immigrants as we aspire to see ourselves. For instance, in some episode the employees may be watching the news during their break and see a clip (real) about the African immigrant who saved a toddler who was about to fall from a balcony in France and who was awarded citizenship by Macron as a reward, or they could be watching a news report about Lance Corporal Gutierrez, the undocumented immigrant who died in Iraq. These episodes could trigger a discussion about what an undocumented immigrant could become if given a chance.
    All this brings us to the hero. In Hamilton we have a hero who was also a quasi undocumented immigrant, a hero who shows what an undocumented immigrant can be if given a fair chance. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton makes a case for the hard-working, talented low-born immigrant who is willing to prove his worth. Ron Chernow, whose Hamilton biography was the basis for the musical, describes how, born poor in the Caribbean, Hamilton came to America to study law thanks to gifts from his former employer although with the intention of staying here (What could have turned him into inadmissible under the current law). Yes, had the current law been applied, Hamilton, our most important immigrant, would have been unable to come legally. That’s precisely why twelve years ago, long before the musical, I proposed Hamilton as a symbol of both Deserved Residency and Immigration Reform. Hamilton was definitely a symbol with whom Americans could identify themselves and whom they could have easily remembered (Hamilton is in the $10 bill!) And yet, pro-immigrant organizations, always eager to pander to the Abolish ICE Left’s multiculturalism, pretty much ignored Hamilton in the immigration narrative and, since then, we haven’t counted with more Hamiltons to counter the ethnic stereotypes that make empathy more difficult. Now, this is not the result of anti-immigrant sentiments among writers or producers but of a regrettable hostility in the organizations that have crafted a clearly ineffective pro-immigrant narrative (and that have become the gatekeepers of cultural content) toward new approaches based on the concept of empathy while the anti-immigrant narrative, as detailed before, has been able to ingrain effectively in the culture as we have seen in the surveys mentioned in the Atlantic article and in the You.Gov polls quoted by Kaufmann.

    And, finally, we get to my own proposal: a hero for both immigration and democracy, Gatito Inmeegrante, a project that could retake a hero narrative after the moment Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton was in the spotlight was wasted.
    The hero brings peace, justice, and order in times of uncertainty and chaos (like these times). The hero fares all-powerful enemies so we can have safety. And the hero teaches us the right way to do things (technically and morally). The hero, who in mythic times had to be a demigod, in our profane times, thanks to the culture, as noticed by Eliade, can be an ordinary man who rises to the occasion for the sake of our welfare even if that implies paying a heavy personal price. Even Prometheus, who suffers the punishment imposed by the gods for stealing their precious fire, is victorious, but Prometheus doesn’t steal the divine fire for himself but for us, so we can not just survive but thrive. And because, despite his own fate, he succeeds, his image as a hero is not tarnished. Thus, Gatito, as part of his ‘initiatory ordeal,’ must slay the dragons represented by all-powerful antagonists that threaten both immigrants’ and the native-born’s democratic institutions. As in many heroic mythologies where the hero descends to the realm of death and emerges victorious even when he personally doesn’t get to enjoy this triumph, Gatito doesn’t get to see the promised land, but his victory allows Nayak’s immigrants to reach it and Nayak’s native-born to recover their democracy and, with it, their dignity. And, because the hero also shows the way, because he teaches humans the right way to do things, Gatito teaches apathetic, cynical immigrants how to defend their neighborhoods from the gangs that prey on them and, even more important, he teaches both immigrants and the native-born how to use the vote as a tool to reach the goals about which they were once so skeptical.
    Gatito Inmeegrante is the most American of stories: an underdog fighting the system for what is right, an undocumented activist fighting against impossible odds to change the unjust law that has condemned him and his friends to live hopeless lives while an authoritarian leader, who rises to power by scapegoating immigrants, threatens to corrupt the democratic institutions of Nayak. Different from other immigration stories, Gatito doesn’t just live the problem. He tries to do something about it. More, Gatito seeks not just to merely survive but to live, love and dream, like everybody else, and that’s what, despite his extraordinary character, makes him one of us too. Gatito Inmeegrante is entertaining (otherwise nobody would see it and, therefore, would not be able to change anything), is non-partisan and honest (with heroes and foes among both conservatives and liberals, as in real life), breaks with the ethnic stereotypes that prevent empathy (what makes this story different from the current counterproductive pro-immigrant narrative), and presents immigration in a wider context, one with which the average American can correlate (as he is also a hero for democracy and prevents the antagonist from dismantling Nayak’s democracy). Aren’t all these good reasons to give it a fair chance?

    To begin with, art must be honest. Art approaches issues not by deduction or induction but by intuition as Plato understood it. And though art should not be required to present solutions, it should make you feel what is wrong even when your eyes can’t see the flaw yet. And, because of this, art should challenge your mind and heart. When survey after survey shows that the public’s attitudes toward two of the most pressing issues of our time reveal that people are seeking order-restoring heroes in the wrong place, isn’t it a sign that we have to try something different?

 

    20       https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079638/
    21       Fintan O’Toole, ‘The politics of pain: postwar England and the rise of nationalism’ (https://humanities.princeton.edu/event/the-politics-of-pain-postwar-england-and-the-rise-of-nationalism/)
    22       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_(film)
    23       https://www.mediavillage.com/article/will-grace-the-tv-series-that-changed-gay-rights-in-america/
    24       Vargas correctly mentions that ‘Superstore’ character Mateo has a positive impact as viewers who saw Mateo in interaction with his co-workers, even those who had little or no real-life contact with immigrants, became more likely to support an increase in immigrants coming to the U.S. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/11/entertainment/immigration-tv-shows/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_topstories+%28RSS%3A+CNN+-+Top+Stories%29
    25       Something on which Glad commercials proved to be pioneers.
    26       Hidden Brain, The Empathy Gym, NPR, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/744195502
    27       https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085482/
    28       Episode 103, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Is_America%3F
    29       Jose Antonio Vargas, on presenting immigration tragedy: “The images we see in media are often immigrants crying, immigrants sad, immigrants tragic, as if we have this veil of tragedy all around us, when in reality, the study showed, when you actually present an immigrant in a three-dimensional way as a person, people are moved to action, to tell another friend, to post something on social media.” (https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/11/entertainment/immigration-tv-shows/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_topstories+%28RSS%3A+CNN+-+Top+Stories%29)
    30       https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/us/joaquin-luna-jrs-suicide-touches-off-immigration-debate.html
    31       https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/opinion/joe-biden-donald-trump-2020.html
    32       Haney Lopez, Ian ‘Trump exploited status anxiety among Latino voters’ Washington Post 11/08/2020 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trump-exploited-status-anxiety-within-the-latino-community/2020/11/06/3164e77c-1f9f-11eb-b532-05c751cd5dc2_story.html ).
    33       John Oliver on immigration (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXqnRMU1fTs&t=9s) and asylum (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtdU5RPDZqI). Also on this topic, see Aviva Chomsky’s book ‘Undocumented: How immigration became illegal,’ https://openyls.law.yale.edu/handle/20.500.13051/5789)
    34       The Simpsons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Much_Apu_About_Nothing#:~:text=%22Much%20Apu%20About%20Nothing%22%20is,in%20Springfield%20to%20be%20deported.
    35       Family Guy, episode 6, 6^th season: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Guy_(season_6)#Episodes
    36       Arlie Russell Hochschild. ‘Strangers in Their Own Land. Anger and Mourning on the American Right’ https://thenewpress.com/books/strangers-their-own-land
    37       Let’s not forget that Hamilton was a founding father, Washington’s right hand, and he designed both our executive power and our economic system in much more efficient and realistic terms than Jefferson proposed.
    38       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_(musical)
    39       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Hamilton_(book)
    40       “Obama vs. Firm, the Most Stupid Fight of Our Times” (https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2008/12/10/671565/-Obama-vs-FIRM-the-most-stupid-fight-of-our-times) and “Betraying Hector Perez Garcia” (https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2008/12/8/670801/-Betraying-Hector-Perez-Garcia-or-the-FIRM-rsquo-s-extraordinary-service-to-the-xenophobic-Right)
    41       “I wouldn’t want to tell a story where say, Mateo does find this funny way that totally works and makes him a citizen. And none of that is true. I don’t think it’s good for society that we’re spreading a wrong message” (Justin Spitzer, creator and executive producer of the Superstore). https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/11/entertainment/immigration-tv-shows/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_topstories+%28RSS%3A+CNN+-+Top+Stories%29
    41       https://gatitoinmeegrante.wordpress.com/gatito-inmeegrante-final-1st-draft/
    42       Now that I am here, I should present a difference though between Hamilton and Gatito. Because of the more limited conception of democracy in Hamilton’s times and because of his own personal views, and despite his undeniable stature as founding father and designer of our political system, Hamilton is not as clear a hero for democracy as Gatito is because Gatito’s main weapon is precisely the vote and his leadership is based less on rank than on his ability to win the hearts and minds of the people of Nayak.

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