Filmmaker Alex Rivera has been telling stories about the border and the lives of immigrant communities for nearly 30 years. For him, questioning certain narratives and telling these stories with more depth and thought, is critical. “It’s such an incredible time right now because we see, ju st in the national political conversation, that there are so many stories to be told. This is a moment when it’s very, very clear that, for this country, questions of who belongs, who’s an insider, who’s an outsider—which are questions of borders and migration—are so central to this moment,” he says. “It’s what’s being talked about by political leaders, perhaps more than anything, is who gets to come and go, who gets to live here, who can make a claim to being an American, who cannot. So, these are not questions about the perimeter, they’re not questions about the outer edges; these are questions at the center of this moment.” There are seemingly endless headlines about deportations, right now, in the United States—from the Boston college student deported to Honduras during the Thanksgiving holiday, to self-deportations, to a 6-year-old boy in Queens, New York who was separated from his father and placed in federal custody during deportation efforts. Within these questions about deportation is another: “Where Do Deportations Come From?,” the title of an upcoming conversation between Rivera, a MacArthur Fellow based in Los Angeles and associate professor in the Sidney Poitier New American Film School at Arizona State University, and Kelly Lytle Hernandez, MacArthur Fellow, historian, and The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA. The discussion, a reading, and a screening of a new film from Rivera, based on the work of Lytle-Hernandez, will begin at 6 p.m. Saturday at Bread Salt. Rivera took some time to talk about his own work researching and telling stories about deportation. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. ) Q: The last time we spoke, we talked about your filmmaking and your focus on globalization, migration, and politics in the Latino community in the United States. On Saturday, you’ll be in conversation with historian and MacArthur Fellow Kelly Lytle Hernandez for “Where Does Deportation Come From?” First, can you talk a bit about how your own film work has explored the issue of deportation? The kinds of stories you’ve told in your work about this topic? A: I’ve been making films that have depicted the lives of immigrants, some with papers and some without papers, since the 1990s and the specter of deportation always loomed over those projects. When I made a film in 2019, however, it came right into the project when one of the film subjects was deported under the first Trump administration, right after we released the film. His deportation appeared to be punishment for speaking out in our film. We went through this extraordinary campaign to try to bring this man, his name was Claudio Rojas, back from deportation, and we were able to under the Biden administration. So, questions of immigration control and deportation have been central to my work for decades. This event is really exciting to me because it’s a chance to engage with Kelly, who’s a brilliant historian, about the idea of where does deportation come from. I love this idea because it’s asking the questions that get asked of immigrants: Where are you from? Show us your papers, prove that you belong here. That’s the approach to immigrants. We’re sort of taking that approach to the idea of deportation itself—which does have a history, which does come from somewhere and which has not always been happening here in the land we now call California—and this event is a chance to look at this invader in our society called deportation. Q: In the American Historical Association’s chronology on the history of deportation in the U.S., they note laws in colonial Massachusetts and New York authorizing the deportation of the poor in the 17th century; laws allowing for the deportation of immigrants from China and other foreign nationals in the 1700s and 1800s; and the mass expulsion in the 20th century of Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans born in the U.S. In your research to create these narratives in your films, what have you learned about where this concept of removal and displacement comes from? A: That’s such a deep question. The deportation regime that we know today, in terms of the laws that are used to arrest people, detain them, remove them, those go back to the 1890s and the time of Chinese exclusion when the laws were written that are still in use today. This is one of the big insights to understand that today, people who are being arrested, detained, deported, the legal foundation of that goes back to a very dark chapter in American history, which is in the 1890s when there were demands to get rid of Chinese people. The impulse behind the creation of these laws was not to “control immigration,” or to have secure borders. The impulse was to get rid of one ethnic and racial group, which was Chinese people; that was the founding of the laws that we have today. One key thing to understand is that the system that we live with was born with racial animus. That was its purpose. I think Kelly’s work will speak to this. Q: We see that early in this country’s history, the poor were targeted for deportation, but that shifted to a focus on race and nationality, and we now see current policies restricting or pausing immigration from 19 countries. Who becomes a target for deportation and why? What purpose does it serve? A: It’s complicated. I think one thing I would draw inspiration from is all the teaching that happened in the past decades about prisons. Nobody in this country is put in prison for being Black or for being Latino, that’s not how it works. People are put in prison for petty drug crimes, for theft, for any number of things; but if you pull back and look, you see the racial character of the prison system. The immigration system is similar in that it doesn’t say, ‘We arrest people for having brown skin,’ yet, Kelly’s research recently revealed that (more than 90%) of people removed by this country’s immigration system are people of color, so the system is a system that was born to target a racial group and has, for, let’s call it 135 years of existence, targeted over 90% of its efforts on people of color. So, it’s very hard to say that this is not a system that is a kind of racial system that was designed to limit the number of people of color in this country, explicitly, and it has happened ever since it was created. Q: Have you come across ways that people successfully resist deportation? Ways that people have been able to subvert the historical narrative around it into something new that has resulted instead in processes of naturalization, inclusion, acceptance? (i.e. would legislation like the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 or the Refugee Act of 1980 count?) A: My film from 2019, called “The Infiltrators,” is a story of undocumented youth, people sometimes called Dreamers, who were resisting deportations and detentions. In the film, they decide to infiltrate a detention center, meaning they get arrested by Border Patrol on purpose. They go into detention centers to help get other people out. It was a really bold civil rights action led by people who were, in this case, undocumented youth. It was making a moral claim, which was that they and their families deserve freedom, deserve dignity, and in a context where corporations can move around the world, where rich people can move around the world, they were asserting their right to move and to live in a dignified way. Q: Can you tell us about the film screening on Saturday? A: It’s an excerpt of a work in progress; I’m working on a film based on some of Kelly’s writing. She wrote a chapter on the first man who was deported. The story was extraordinary, and I’m in the process of turning it into a film, so I’ll show a few clips of the film and we’ll talk about that story of the first the first man deported in the United States. It starts with the story of Fong Yue Ting, who was a Chinese immigrant and worked as a laundry man in New York City in 1893. He was a member of a civil rights group at the time called the Chinese Equal Rights League. When the Geary Act passed, which invented the federal power of deportation in this country, he decided to test that power by walking into a U.S. Marshal’s office and declaring that he was not going to comply with the law, so he should be deported. His test case went to the Supreme Court. The whole thing was stunning to me when I read it, but the most amazing part was that in the Supreme Court, he and his attorney made the argument that deportation was unconstitutional, that it doesn’t appear in the Constitution at all. That (Thomas) Jefferson and (James) Madison actually had written correspondence about banishment, and they decided that they did not want to put the power to banish in the Constitution, so there’s a historic record that it was intentionally left out of the Constitution. Incredibly, they almost won. There were three justices at the time, incredibly conservative justices, and all three of them agreed that deportation should not exist in law at all. So, I’m doing a telling of that story as part of this film, which is called “Banishment.” ...read more read less