Transnational Migrations and Political Mobilizations: The Case of A Day without a Mexican

Abstract

Transnational migrations from Mexico to the United States have significantly stimulated the creative imagination of Mexican and Chicano/a artists and have led to a robust cultural production in films, musical compositions (corridos or ballads and canciones or songs), visual art, cartoons, folk art, and literature (poetry, theater, novel, short story). In my book Northward Bound: Mexican Immigration in Ballad and Song (1993), I identified more than 150 corridos and canciones whose subject matter deals with transnational migrations. My book encompassed the period from 1850s to the early 1990s. In the last decade of the twentieth century and now the first decade of the twenty-first century, the cultural production focusing on Mexican transnational movements has continued unabated. Films with transnational migrant thematics have also been produced in large numbers. In their essay “The Celluloid Immigrant: The Narrative Films of Mexican Immigration,” David Maciel and María Rosa García-Acevedo state:

In Mexico alone, close to one hundred full-length “immigration movies” have been produced and distributed in the Americas. The films have included works by many of Mexico’s most distinguished filmmakers such as Miguel Contreras Torres, Alejandro Galindo, David Silva, Pedro Armendáriz, Julio Alemán, Héctor Suárez, Ernesto Gómez Cruz, María Novaro, Patricia Reyes Spíndola, Mario Almada, and Gonzalo Vega. (Maciel and García-Acevedo 1998, 151)

In order to make the invisible visible you make it disappear.

(Sergio Arau and Yareli Arizmendi)

One morning California wakes up to find that one third of its population has disappeared. A thick fog surrounds the State and communication outside its boundaries is completely cut off. As the day goes by we discover that the characteristic that links the 14 million disappeared is their Hispanic background.

(A Day without a Mexican)