Telling Migrant Stories: Latin American Diaspora in Documentary Film. Edited by Esteban E. Loustaunau and Lauren E. Shaw

Abstract

This book presents a useful reminder that while the media has seized on the Trump administration’s multiple hostile acts against migrants, immigrants and DACA recipients as something new, the precarious situations these groups find themselves have a longer history. People throughout Latin America have chosen or been forced to migrate due to a range of urgent reasons: poverty, limited employment opportunities, violence and high homicide rates, and ‘natural’ disasters such as hurricanes. On their migratory routes many are victims of transnational gangs, Mexican police, the US Border Patrol, unofficial vigilante groups on the US side of the border, and as a result have a high risk of suffering from thefts, rape, and murder. Other risks include falling from the cargo trains they ride upon to cross Mexico, and often fatal kidnappings by the Zetas, a paramilitary force initially formed by rogue members of the Mexican military. Others fall victim to hunger, thirst and exhaustion crossing the desert in Arizona while trying to avoid the border patrol. Once in the United States, undocumented people’s precarious situation is not resolved and immigrants are subject to exploitative working conditions, raids and subsequent deportation by immigration officials—ICE agents (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in the USA. Families are split and people forced to ‘return’ to Central America or Mexico, to countries that they may have no memory of.