¹ In this essay I am using the term “migrant” as opposed to “immigrant” in order not to privilege permanent settlement over other kinds of migration.

² For DACA statistics see www.uscis.gov. DACA builds on existing policies developed during the Obama administration, including the use of prosecutorial discretion, which was supposed to eliminate “low-priority” cases in order for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to focus on deporting undocumented migrants who had been convicted of crimes.

³ There is more information about the #Not1More campaign on the website, at www.notonemoredeportation.com.

⁴ These videos can be viewed on YouTube: “El Hielo (ICE)” at www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lNJviuYUEQ, and Wake Me Up at www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_o6axAseak.

⁵ John Tagg, “A Means of Surveillance: The Photograph as Evidence in Law,” in Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 66–102, 102. Certain documentary forms fall within Nicholas Mirzoeff's definition of visuality, including photography that “develop[s] new means of disciplining, normalizing, and ordering vision.” Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 23.

⁶ Author's interview with Alex Rivera, 10 April 2014, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

⁷ See Alex Rivera's biography on his website at http://alexrivera.com.

⁸ Carroll, Amy Sara, “From Papapapá to Sleep Dealer: Alex Rivera's Undocumentary Poetics,” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 19, 3–4, (Summer 2013), 485–500CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 487.

⁹ Ibid., 498, 486.

¹⁰ Interview with Alex Rivera.

¹¹ Secure Communities enables the DHS/ICE to access fingerprints taken by local police, to question detained individuals regarding their immigration status, and to request that local enforcement agencies hold individuals who are undocumented.

¹² At this time NDLON also created a website, AltoArizona.com, to circulate this cultural work, including photographs and videos of protests, and other forms of “creative resistance” such as posters, videos, music, and poetry.

¹³ Interview with Alex Rivera.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Filmmakers from Pan Left Productions donated this footage to Alex Rivera for inclusion in the music video. Ibid.

¹⁶ Jonathan Perez and Isaac Barrera, interview with Irene Vasquez, Dec. 2011, Albuquerque, New Mexico, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9yXC_Q68gU.

¹⁷ The film was sponsored by the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, which had been expelled from the CIO in 1950.

¹⁸ For more information see chapter 6, “Reconfiguring Documentation: Migrant Mobility, Counter-Visibility and (Un)Documented Activism,” of my forthcoming book Migrant Lives and the Promise of Documentation.

¹⁹ Interview with Alex Rivera.

²⁰ Author's phone interview with Chris Newman, 3 Sept. 2014.

²¹ A “DREAM” activist refers to someone who is working to get the DREAM (the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act passed. The DREAM Act proposed that migrant youth of “good moral character” who had lived in the US for at least five years and graduated from US high schools or the equivalent would become eligible to apply for a six-year conditional resident status. “Bill Text – 112th Congress (2011–2012) – THOMAS (Library of Congress) – S.952.IS” Library of Congress, at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c112:1:./temp/~c112ENd6sQ:e1408.

²² Hareth Andrade-Ayala became well known after she presented a poem, “America,” about her father's deportation at the annual meeting of the AFL-CIO Convention in 2013. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZztYukJlwQ.

²³ Interview with Alex Rivera.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Interview with Chris Newman. Funding for the videos was provided by the abc* Foundation. For more information on the abc* Foundation see their website at www.abcfound.org.

²⁶ Jordan Levin, “Band's ‘El Hielo (ICE)’ Becomes Anthem of Immigration Reform Movement,” Miami Herald, 17 April 2013. Also see David Montgomery, “L. A. Band La Santa Cecilia Speaking Out for Undocumented Immigrants.” Washington Post, 9 April 2013.

²⁷ For the full lyrics to the song in English and Spanish see NDLON's website for the #Not1More campaign at www.notonemoredeportation.com/la-santa-cecilia-el-hielo.

²⁸ Interview with Alex Rivera.

²⁹ Some day laborers who are members of NDLON are also involved in a theater group, Teatro Jornalero Sin Frontera (Day Laborer Theater without Borders), in Los Angeles. See http://cornerstonetheater.org/teatro-jornalero/about-us. In filming the video Rivera also noted that the activists were “comfortable with the camera and the idea of performing.” Interview with Alex Rivera.

³⁰ The importance of self-determination for undocumented migrant workers within NDLON is apparent in a recent campaign slogan for the Seventh National Assembly: “Nuestra Lucha, Nuestra Voz” (Our Struggle, Our Voice) “Nothing about Us without Us.”

³¹ Author's email correspondence with Alex Rivera, 20 Jan. 2015.

³² Interview with Chris Newman.

³³ The remainder of the song is sung in Spanish, and focusses on the lives of three undocumented Latina/o migrants. The individuals mentioned in the song are based on the lives of those close to the band. One of the characters is modeled on singer Marisol Hernández's mother. The song also draws from the experiences of the accordion player, José Carlos (Pepe), who is undocumented.

³⁴ As mentioned earlier, Rivera was aware of Figueroa's story from being an artist in residence at NDLON, because the organization helped with the campaign to stop the deportation of her parents. However, it is important to note that in some cases Rivera chose actors to represent characters that they never would have in real life, including NIYA activist Isaac Barrera's portrayal of an ICE agent, which was ironic considering that at the time that the music video was being produced he was in deportation proceedings.

³⁵ Soon after this occurred, Erika Andiola launched a campaign to prevent the deportation of her family members. See Aura Bogado, “ICE Arrests, Releases Prominent Immigration Activist's Family Members,” The Nation, 11 Jan. 2013, avalable at www.thenation.com/blog/172178/ice-arrests-releases-prominent-immigration-activists-family-members.

³⁶ Aura Bogado, “A Music Video without Papers,” The Nation, 8 April 2013, available at www.thenation.com/blog/173676/music-video-without-papers.

³⁷ In her book Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), ix, feminist film scholar Teresa de Lauretis writes about “the power of discourses to ‘do violence’ to people, a violence which is material and physical, although produced by abstract and scientific discourses as well as the discourses of the mass media.”

³⁸ This approach relates to Leigh Raiford's analysis of antilynching photography in which she argues that African Americans were able to “return the gaze” of the “dominant other.” Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 40.

³⁹ Interview with Alex Rivera.

⁴⁰ Similar to “El Hielo,” in developing the music video of the acoustic version of Aloe Blacc's “Wake Me Up” Rivera worked with NDLON to locate the cast. The collaboration between Rivera, NDLON, and Aloe Blacc in the video for “Wake Me Up” emerged from personal connections, as NDLON's communications director Marco Loera is a family friend of the musician, who was interested in partnering with a nonprofit organization involved in social-justice organizing. The video was used as part of a campaign against the deportation of undocumented youth activist Hareth Andrade's father. Interview with Chris Newman.

⁴¹ Interview with Alex Rivera.

⁴² For the text of the California TRUST Act see www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/13-14/bill/asm/ab_0001-0050/ab_4_bill_20131005_chaptered.pdf .undocumented.

⁴³ See the NDLON website at http://ndlon.org/en/pressroom/press-releases/item/971-california-trust-act-signed.

⁴⁴ Interview with Alex Rivera. Alex Rivera deals with these themes in The Borders Trilogy (2003), including his video “A Visible Border.”

⁴⁵ Interview with Chris Newman. In the video, Hareth and her mother were further connected by their participation in a rally for migrant rights.

⁴⁶ Here hooks draws on the work of Michel Foucault, specifically examining “the ways power domination reproduces itself in different locations employing similar apparatuses, strategies, and mechanisms of control” in order to relate the effects of how enslaved African Americans were punished for looking to issues regarding black spectatorship. bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 115–31, 115.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 116.

⁴⁸ Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), 127.