Free trade refugees: from Chiapas to the prairie
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation, comprising an experimental hybrid of a video documentary and this accompanying text, explores the central phenomenon of the experience of immigrant Mexicans to the Midwest and aims to inspire action rather than only to prompt reflection. Situated as part of the broader historical trends of Mexican immigrant migration to the United States in the post-NAFTA era, the video documentary in particular aims—in a way that text documentation cannot—to show the “autobiographical face” of Mexican immigration in this recent era; an autobiographical face that stands not as a “truth” that refutes prevailing untruths or stereotypes about Mexican immigrants but that stands, rather, in contrast to the “truth of the period.” Leps (1992), building on the work of Foucault, asserts that the truth of a period “corresponds not to the closest perception of a primary reality, but rather to the sets of information which, having been legitimized by institutions, organize the mode of being, the social arrangement, [and] the historic reality of people and product” (3). The truth of a period, then, exists not simply in terms of the prevailing framework(s) constructing what is taken for the truth during any given period, but also in the forces that manage, surveil, police, contend, and defend it. As such, the truth of a period constitutes a discourse, but one that is never simply neutrally or equally accessed and debated by all, but one rather that has markers of control and delimitation that determine not only what is accessed and discussed about a topic—what is permitted, what is not permitted, and what remains under contestation as permissible or not—but also how these topics are and may not be discussed, subject also to various contestations. For Mexican immigration in the post-NAFTA era, the truth of the period manifests in what and how the figure of the Mexican immigrant is and is not represented and discussed, along with sites of relative contestation around the propriet…
abstract: This dissertation, comprising an experimental hybrid of a video documentary and this accompanying text, explores the central phenomenon of the experience of immigrant Mexicans to the Midwest and aims to inspire action rather than only to prompt reflection. Situated as part of the broader historical trends of Mexican immigrant migration to the United States in the post-NAFTA era, the video documentary in particular aims—in a way that text documentation cannot—to show the “autobiographical face” of Mexican immigration in this recent era; an autobiographical face that stands not as a “truth” that refutes prevailing untruths or stereotypes about Mexican immigrants but that stands, rather, in contrast to the “truth of the period.” Leps (1992), building on the work of Foucault, asserts that the truth of a period “corresponds not to the closest perception of a primary reality, but rather to the sets of information which, having been legitimized by institutions, organize the mode of being, the social arrangement, [and] the historic reality of people and product” (3). The truth of a period, then, exists not simply in terms of the prevailing framework(s) constructing what is taken for the truth during any given period, but also in the forces that manage, surveil, police, contend, and defend it. As such, the truth of a period constitutes a discourse, but one that is never simply neutrally or equally accessed and debated by all, but one rather that has markers of control and delimitation that determine not only what is accessed and discussed about a topic—what is permitted, what is not permitted, and what remains under contestation as permissible or not—but also how these topics are and may not be discussed, subject also to various contestations. For Mexican immigration in the post-NAFTA era, the truth of the period manifests in what and how the figure of the Mexican immigrant is and is not represented and discussed, along with sites of relative contestation around the propriet…
author: Silva, Maria Isabel
language: en
keywords: Immigrants, Stereotypes, Representation, Mexican, Ethnographic documentation, Film
date published: 2017-03-01T16:37:05Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:26:37Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/95506