Imagining migrants in cities

Abstract

Much of urban growth is driven by people migrating, both internally and transnationally. Starting from the assumption that almost all cities, both large and small, are affected by migration, this chapter asks how cinema makes migrants visible in cities, and what is at stake when rendering them visible and audible. While much of recent work taking up that question has focused on European metropolitan centers, this chapter uses two cities less frequently written about, Lebanon (Beirut) as visualized in Taste of Cement (Ziad Kalthoum, 2017) and Tijuana (Mexico) as imagined Sleep Dealer (Alex Rivera, 2008), to ask questions about how film genres – experimental documentaries and sci-fi fiction respectively – visualize labor migrants. While Taste of Cement mobilizes the genre of the city symphony to attest to the experience of labor migrants, Sleep Dealer uses science-fiction to address urbanization on a planetary scale. Together, they gesture toward a larger filmic archive about the labor migrant as a key figure in 21st-century cinematic urbanism, suggesting how films can not only produce audiovisual citizenship for labor migrants, but help produce forms of personhood, and critical visualizations of 21st-century forms of urbanization.