Abstract
A shackled man twists his torso in a physiologically challenging effort to raise his hand and commit to telling the truth. A detained woman is prohibited from saying farewell to her spouse. Individuals are referred to as “the body” and expressly proscribed from eating. Others are forced to line up against a wall after parting ways with their loved ones. To many Americans, these scenes likely exemplify the terrorizing actions of drug cartels across Latin America's barrios and favelas where a legitimate rule of law is absent. Conversely, however, these are portraits of lived experiences within courts and administrative offices that adjudicate immigration cases throughout United States territories. In a liberal democracy that prides itself on endorsing fundamental rights, “aliens”—a derogatory term, employed to identify foreigners, that further emphasizes their condition of otherness—do not possess nearly as many constitutional safeguards in America as citizens do.
In this book, Castañeda employs a valiant narrative, placed at the intersection of performance, historical, and carceral studies, to elucidate how the administration of justice resolves the indeterminate status of undocumented immigrants in the American jurisdiction. By conducting a critical scenographic analysis of the spaces where these decisions are made, the author dissects how theatrical elements known as mise-en-scène—architectural designs, gestures, symbols, and writings that are arranged in a certain fashion as to evoke a certain reaction from the audience—serve to unearth the contradictions within immigration law mechanisms that, disguised as protecting national security, aim to secure racialized political interests.
The ambivalence indicated within the title—hidden theaters—presages countless paradoxes that Castañeda identifies as inherent to a legal system that “threatens to kill and promises to save” (4). Congruent with colonizing practices, the United States has historically enacted policies aimed at attracting low-cost labor from abroad. Although not explicitly employing this framework, the author's rationale communicates with the minority threat perspective (Blalock, 1967) to the extent that, it is only when these groups begin to be perceived as cultural, economic, political, and/or public security risks (Caraballo, 2020; Wang, 2012) that that same legal apparatus is directed at ostracizing them.
Chapter 1 focuses on the dynamics of a removal room, where undocumented individuals may be deported during their mandated periodical check-ins with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, in Manhattan in 2017. Immigration law proceedings, Castañeda argues, while seemingly settling individual-level violations of the law, are deliberately directed at specific nationalities at certain historical moments. Such is the case, in present times, of undocumented individuals of Central American descent. In Chapter 2, Castañeda probes into the experiences of asylum seekers at a family detention center in Texas in 2016. She details how legal reforms passed to advance humanitarian efforts to protect persecuted persons developed alongside the expansion of the criminal law instruments designed to further marginalize them. Chapter 3 recounts, from a different set of lenses, the perspectives of asylum officers in the decision-making process of requests for asylum. Castañeda claims that the immigration justice system operates on a dangerous dyad that separates “good” immigrants, who are rewarded with residency and citizenship prerogatives, from those deemed “bad,” thereby subjected to criminalization and deportation procedures. In a provocative statement, the author contends that both conditions are equally detrimental to undocumented immigrants because they confer a state of an equal restrictive one-dimensionality that does not comport the convoluted human experience. People may disappear—as the title itself indicates—in myriad ways; from being banned from land to where they have become emotionally bonded to being unable to tell their stories in their own terms.
Due to its qualitative methodological approach, Castañeda's findings are limited to the individuals in her sample and the jurisdictions under her analysis, possibly not reflecting the realities in other contexts. Moreover, the author examines the dynamics surrounding immigration procedures from the position of a participant-observer, and not a party in those judicial disputes. Despite including direct quotations from undocumented immigrants and criminal justice officials, the book reflects Castañeda's interpretations of what the participants had verbalized or what their mannerisms had betrayed in the reported circumstances. To her credit, nevertheless, the author openly addresses her involvement with immigration justice organizations, thereby making her philosophical standpoint explicit.
To the well-known contention that the United States is the “land of the free,” this book offers a provocative contemplation that, without a profound system change accounting for the liberty of movement to all persons, any notions of freedom must remain attached to the questioning of “…to whom?” This book is fundamental for scholars in the socially conscious performing arts, law, post-colonialism, and race and ethnicity fields. For activists and practitioners involved with the justice system, Castañeda's writings provide a powerful tool for self-reflection as she highlights her position of privilege while occupying those spaces, challenging readers to consider in what ways even those combating degrading immigration practices may end up contributing to the establishment of such policies.
Given all the valuable insights that the author provides in this manuscript, one cannot help but wonder: How do people explicitly support or implicitly remain apathetic toward criminal justice policies that so heavily burden persons who already occupy a situation of extreme vulnerability? Perhaps consciously to the former group and unconsciously to the latter, our ability to recognize, and somewhat not rejoice with, human suffering as such depends, in the words of Butler (2016), on “whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable” (38). While any prospects of change look certainly bleak for those who openly oppose abolitionist efforts, Castañeda paves the way to enlighten those who justify their state of impassivity through ignorance. As she, herself, phrases: “If people understood what goes on in these rooms, they would never see immigration law the same way again” (2). Herein lies the greatest merit of Disappearing Rooms: opening the curtains of these spaces—physical and philosophical alike—which are greatly protected from public scrutiny and where the fates of (im)migrants’ lives are decided in a tragically dehumanizing fashion.
