“My Nine-Digit American-Dream”: Undocumentedness and Unwelcomeness in Do You Know Who I Am?

Abstract

Abstract The community-based performance Do You Know Who I Am? (2013; Motus Theater, Boulder; dir. Kirsten Wilson) relates the lived experience in the U.S. under the DACA (Deferred Action for Child Arrivals) programme, told by an undocumented Mexican cast. By reclaiming the label ‘undocumented migrants’ whose residency on American land without legal authorisation implies a dehumanising dimension of the ‘illegal alien,’ the cast defines the state of undocumentedness as the lived conditions of vulnerability, exploitation, displacement and perpetual fear determined by living under ‘illegality’ and non-citizenship. My purpose is to analyse the stylistic and thematic oratorical components of the dramatic performance in line with the ontological construction of its performers as undocumented – undocumentedness itself becomes a “space of legal nonexistence” in Susan Coutin’s understanding –, unwelcome (by virtue of Derrida’s theorisation of the standards of hostipitality), as well as subjects/objects of racial hatred. Immigrants become collective projections of criminality, a threat to the nation within a “we” against “them” horizontal conflict (Ahmed 51). Within this framework, the performance consolidates an ontology of the Mexican migrant rooted in social stigma and the constructedness of labels, and undocumentedness becomes the locus of a collective imaginarium with repercussions on the immigrant’s survival in society.