Abstract
This chapter introduces Bishop Giovanni Batista Scalabrini and the order he founded, known as the Scalabrinians, as an early example of melodrama in migrant advocacy. We argue that Scalabrini’s prolific writing and public speaking were infused by a melodramatic imagination that still structures many aspects of migrant representation today. In the second half of this chapter we analyze the staging-of-self and writings of one of the seven hundred Scalabrinian clerics now working on behalf of migrants around the world: Father Flor María Rigoni, who opened shelters in Tijuana (1987) and in Tapachula (1998) Mexico. We argue that while Rigoni demonstrates a twenty-first-century ironic disdain for media exploitation of spectacles of suffering, he nevertheless creates such spectacles and embeds them in melodramatic scenes involving pitiful migrant-victims and their compassionate companion-rescuers.
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Puga, A.E., Espinosa, V.M. (2020). Heroic and Empathic Rescuers in Foundational Migrant Melodrama. In: Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37409-9_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37409-9_2
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-37408-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-37409-9
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