Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Disembodied and Deportable Labor at the U.S. Mexico-Border: Representations of the Mexican Body in Film

2014; eScholarship Publishing, University of California; Volume: 3; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5070/t432022922

2154-1353

Christina L. Sisk,

Gender, Feminism, and Media

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, 2005) is the story of a Mexican undocumented immigrant who is killed by la migra.Melquiades Estradas's story is told by way of his death and, most importantly, by his burials.Sleep Dealer (Alex Rivera, 2008) portrays the use of Mexican and U.S. Latino cyborgs that are contracted to handle machinery or drones from a remote place.In this film, people are contracted for their labor via a computer connection to manipulate and control the equipment that is located in the United States.As I argue in this essay, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and Sleep Dealer portray the devaluation of the Mexican body as it feeds into the U.S. labor market.The Mexican body is perceived as foreign as its labor is welcome.As a result, it suffers the physical effects of this system.Both films can be said to have hybrid points of view.Tommy Lee Jones and Guillermo Arriaga collaborated to make The Three Burials, bringing together influences from both Hollywood and the Mexican film industries.Alex Rivera's mother is from New Jersey and his father from Peru.Neither film seeks to construct an alternative definition of Mexican identity, but what they do instead is to point out the ways that these constructions are used to separate Mexicans (or those perceived as Mexican) from the United States.While these two films are from different genres, they similarly use fictional elements to represent the current context of labor and migration on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and they present similar critiques of how migrant and maquiladora labor is welcomed in the United States even though the Mexican laborer's body is unwanted.Labor is defined as productivity, the group of people who contribute to that productivity, and the physical and mental work that goes into that.At the core of the problem is the desire to extract the work without the physical presence of the Mexican body.The Mexican body is understood to be an outsider and a foreigner to the United States.The need for labor without the presence of the body hinges on the existence of the nation-state and the differences that it creates within and outside of national borders, which affects people within the United States as migrant laborers, as well as those outside of the country who work in maquiladoras.Those born in the