Dis-integration: Miko Revereza’s Video Letters and the Aesthetics of Counter-Assimilation

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay focuses on the Filipino American filmmaker Miko Revereza, who is “out” about his undocumented status, in order to document the possibilities of counter-assimilationist expression by migrants who are undocumented. In his awardwinning autobiographical film Disintegration 93-96, Revereza uses footage from the glitchy VHS “video letters” that his family recorded and sent from California to relatives in the Philippines in the 1990s. In contrast with the model of the ideal DREAMer, who integrates into the state, Revereza creates an aesthetic of imperfection and a space of “dis-integration,” widening the possibility for counter-assimilationist expression by migrants who are undocumented.