“You Can Watch a Documentary”: Representation and Intersectionality of Immigrants to the United States in Documentary Film Genre

Abstract

Immigration and immigrants’ stories have been fictionalized, reported in the news without necessary contextualization, and reported in research, most often regarding media images ascribing to signs decodable for meanings and interpretations of the outside world. This study uses documentary reports as alternative angles of immigrants’ stories in the U.S., covering the period between 2016 and 2020. The study draws from B. Nichol’s claim that in documentaries, "facts become evidence when they are taken up in discourse; and that discourse gains the force to compel belief through its capacity to refer evidence to a domain outside itself” (p. 33); and on Dyer’s typography of representation. Theoretically, it utilizes intersectionality to analyze immigrants’ representations in the documentaries Immigration Nation and Living Undocumented. Findings show that the documentaries represent undocumented immigrants as a burden. The documentaries over-represent Latinos as "illegal" and "undocumented." Paradoxes riddle the U.S. immigration outlook. Despite undocumented immigrants’ contributions to American society, they remain in the shadow.