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Portions of chapter 1 were previously published in “The Labors of Looking: Unseenamerica and the Visual Economy of Work,” American Quarterly 56, no. 4 (December 2004): 1035–50; copyright 2004 by The American Studies Association; reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. Portions of chapter 5 were previously published in “Confronting Regimes of Legality in ‘Sanctuary City/Ciudad Santuario, 1989–2009,’” Radical History Review, special issue, “Calling the Law into Question: Confronting the Illegal and Illicit in Public Arenas” 113 (Spring 2012). Portions of chapter 6 were previously published in “Reconfiguring Documentation: Immigration, Activism, and Practices of Visibility,” in The Latina/o Midwest Reader, edited by Claire F. Fox, Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, and Omar Valerio-Jiménez (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017).
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Schreiber, Rebecca Mina, author.
Title: The undocumented everyday : migrant lives and the politics of visibility / Rebecca M. Schreiber.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2017042813 | isbn 978-1-5179-0023-6 (pb) | isbn 978-1-5179-0022-9 (hc)
Subjects: lcsh: Illegal aliens–Political activity–United States. | Mexican Americans–Political activity. | Central America Americans–Political activity. | United States–Emigration and immigration–Government policy. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / Hispanic American Studies. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Emigration and Immigration. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Poverty and Homelessness.
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017042813
Acronyms vii
ix Introduction Migrant Lives and the Promise of Documentation 1
Part I. Ordinary Identifications and Unseen America
1 “We See What We Know”: Migrant Labor and the Place of Pictures 41
2 The Border’s Frame: Between Poughkeepsie and La Ciénega 79
Part II. documentary, Self-Representation, and “Collaborations” in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands
3 Visible Frictions: The Border Film Project and the “Spectacle of Surveillance” 119
4 Refusing Disposability: Representational Strategies in Maquilápolis: City of Factories 159
Part III. Counter-Optics: disruptions in the Field of the Visible
5 Disappearance and Counter-Spectacle in Sanctuary City/Ciudad Santuario, 1989–2009 195
Acronyms
CAFTA-DR Central America–Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement
COMO Centro de Orientación de la Mujer Obrera
DACA Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
DAPA Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents
DHS Department of Homeland Security
DOJ Department of Justice
DOL Department of Labor
DREAM Act Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act
FAIR Federation for American Immigration Reform
HRHCare Hudson River HealthCare
ICE Immigration and Customs Enforcement
IIRIRA Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act
INS Immigration and Naturalization Service
IRCA Immigration Reform and Control Act
IYJL Immigrant Youth Justice League
MALDEF Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund
NAFTA North American Free Trade Agreement
NDLON National Day Labor Organizing Network
NFOP National Fugitive Operations Program
NIYA National Immigrant Youth Alliance
1199SEIU Local 1199 Service Employees International Union
PEP Priority Enforcement Program
PRWORA Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act
SB 1070 Arizona Senate Bill 1070 (Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act)
S-COMM Secure Communities Program
USA PATRIOT Act Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act
USCCR U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
Preface
I began work on this project in 2003, as labor–community coalitions were starting to organize the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride (IWFR) to protest the U.S. federal government’s inaction on comprehensive immigration reform. As part of the IWFR, close to one thousand migrant workers and their allies rode buses originating from nine U.S. cities, meeting up in Washington, D.C., and then traveling to join one of the largest immigrant rights rallies in history held in New York City on October 2, 2003.1 This event was organized following the passing of laws after 9/11, including the USA PATRIOT Act, which criminalized undocumented migrants.2 It was in this context that the Freedom Ride participants “manifested their political message and defiantly asserted their subjectivity,” by what Nicholas De Genova contends was “their physical and bodily presence.”3 De Genova argues that the “migrant Freedom Riders not only moved ‘the question of the speaking subject front and centre,’ but also provoked a kind of dialogue that was above all about the question of the moving subject—migrant subjectivities manifested through the insubordinate mobility of their bodies.”4 In his analysis of the IWFR, De Genova emphasizes migrant subjectivity, presence, and mobility, which relate to the organizers’ interest in involving migrant activists in documentary projects of self-representation, including “Unseen America.” In early 2003, the sta¤ of Bread and Roses Cultural Project, then the cultural arm of Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union
x Preface
(1199SEIU), suggested that the organizers of the Freedom Ride could help host cities coordinate “Unseen America” photography workshops on the buses to Washington, D.C. The Bread and Roses sta¤ provided the photography teachers and cameras for a fee, enabling the activists to document their experiences on the buses, in Washington, D.C., and at the closing ceremony in Flushing, New York. While this type of strategy was not new, it was especially meaningful in view of the historic conjuncture of the post-9/11 moment. In other words, the strategy of selfrepresentation in documentary photography took on specific meanings for undocumented migrants during this time due to intensifying regimes of state-mandated documentation.5
Although the organizers of the Freedom Ride were interested in Unseen America—with its focus on self-representation and its capacity to generate images and leadership opportunities for the participants—only a small number of the host cities were able to fund the project. In Minneapolis, photographer Quito Ziegler led the Unseen America photo workshop for the nine-day bus ride, handing out 35mm point-and-shoot film cameras and documentary photography books to ninety riders on two buses. When the bus returned to Minneapolis after the Freedom Ride, Ziegler set up a curatorial committee of individuals who took the photographs and who selected some for an exhibition. Also, in preparation for a planned demonstration in Minneapolis in late 2003, these activists taped their photographs inside the windows of a school bus, producing a mobile photography exhibit.6 In creating and exhibiting these images, these activists centered their subjectivity, while also visualizing their presence and mobility within the United States.
This book is informed by the context of 9/11, the e¤ects of U.S. immigration policy on Mexican and Central American migrants in the United States, and increased immigration enforcement in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. Specifically, it examines the particular salience of self-representation as a common trope in documentary projects that primarily involve undocumented Mexican and Central American migrants during the post-9/11 period through 2012.7 Although Presidents Vincente Fox and George W. Bush were in negotiations about a binational agreement on the status of undocumented Mexicans in the United States
in the summer of 2001, following 9/11, agencies of the U.S. state viewed these migrants in particular as representative of the threat that immigration presented. In this context, the U.S. government created laws and policies that criminalized undocumented migrants without allowing them the space or place to contest them. The Undocumented Everyday examines how these individuals have used documentary forms to respond to a political context in which they have been both racialized and criminalized. One way that they have contested their circumstances has been through the production and circulation of documentary media, including photography, film, video, and audio projects. These projects have taken place in locations across the United States and in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands during the 2000s and 2010s.
Despite the high-profile and contentious debates over immigration during the early twenty-first century, the terms of visibility and the prevalence of self-representation as a form of visibility have yet to be adequately addressed and analyzed. Although some of these projects are based on the premise that visibility will provide recognition and inclusion of Latina/o migrants by the U.S. state, visibility can also produce heightened conditions of vulnerability and exposure, especially within the context of the intensification of the U.S. state’s regimes of surveillance, detention, and deportation following 9/11. While this book examines the ways in which some documentary projects of self-representation emphasized migrants making themselves “visible,” I argue that they represent themselves in ways that are directed toward other goals and political projects, too.
In this book, I focus on representation as a practice, not only as an image or idea.8 I bring a critical approach to the study of documentary forms, and I am also interested in how Mexican and Central American migrants have used documentary media to challenge how they are represented in the mainstream media in the United States and Mexico. Some create images that contrast with these representations, while others use documentary media to engage other migrants. Although the projects that I write about are quite distinct from one another—in their use of specific forms of media, in how they are mediated or curated, and to what purposes they are put—all of them involve some form of self-representation in documentary form.
In addressing an audience largely (although not entirely) outside of those who created these artworks, I challenge liberal humanist approaches to documentary as well as what Wendy Hesford refers to as the “seeingis-believing” paradigm. She contends that this “model presumes the power of the image to persuade . . . instead of emphasizing the rhetorical and material power and the confluence of the discourses and apparatuses . . . that deploy the image and that guarantee or hinder its circulation.”9 Hesford argues for a “seeing-is-power” model, which understands the visual as a “structuring agent for a specific set of historical, social, and economic interests.”10 The mediation, curation, exhibition, and distribution of documentary work involving self-representation shape its production, as well as how it is viewed. These aspects address issues of who has the power to represent whom and what events are made visible or invisible. I focus on how these documentary projects are shaped by exhibitionary practices, as well as by audience engagement. Similar to some of the organizers of these projects, I am not a member of the communities that produced these works. This book is mediated by my own perspective, and thus the arguments that I make about these projects are not a matter of “giving voice” or speaking on behalf of those whom I am writing about. One of the ways that I have attempted to be accountable to those whose work is represented in the book is by the decisions that I have made about which projects to write about. The documentary works that I have included were made public through exhibitions, books, film screenings, and websites, as well as livestreams on the Internet.
It is my intention that this book speak to the significance of these documentary photography, film, and video projects and their relation to migrant organizing in the early twenty-first century. My stake in bringing together these projects in this book is related to my understanding of the role of culture in the terrain of struggle. Stuart Hall argued that “culture is always being negotiated and inflected, to resonate with new situations,” and is “often contested, and sometimes bitterly fought over.”11 He also contended that “counter-strategies in the ‘politics of representation’” relate to “the way meaning can be struggled over,” as well as “whether a particular regime of representation can be challenged, contested, and
transformed.”12 In this book I examine the context of undocumented Mexican and Central American migrants’ exclusion from citizenship in the United States in relation to their use of aesthetic and political strategies. As such, I understand the aesthetic strategies deployed by Mexican and Central American migrants in their documentary projects not as secondary to politics but as primary—as their decisions relate to the address of the work as well as to the purposes that they want it to serve. Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar argue that “cultural contestations are not mere ‘by-products’ of political struggles but are instead constitutive of the e¤orts of social movements to redefine the meaning and the limits of the political system itself. . . . When movements deploy alternative concepts of woman, nature, race, economy, democracy, or citizenship that unsettle dominant cultural meanings, they enact cultural politics.”13 While many of these projects were not produced within the context of organized social movements, I argue that between 2000 and 2012 Mexican and Central American migrants employed documentary media to visualize “ways of belonging” in the United States and U.S.–Mexico borderlands that did not rely on notions of citizenship.14 Further, in centering their subjectivity, presence, and mobility they created alternative representations of themselves that challenged the framing of some of these projects as attempts to “humanize” them for a broader audience or as part of e¤orts to gain the “gift” of citizenship or some other form of immigration status.15 These projects convey the significance of migrant organizing in the early twenty-first century, but they also engage with the documentary form itself.
I started researching this project in 2003, and I completed it during the final months of President Barack Obama’s second term and the first months of the Trump administration. The aftershocks of Donald J. Trump’s November 2016 victory rippled across many communities throughout the United States, raising concerns about how his administration would approach immigration policies, especially those a¤ecting undocumented Mexican and Central American migrants. These reactions were in response to hostile statements made during Trump’s campaign that were specifically directed toward Mexicans and Trump’s
near-constant refrain about the need to build a wall between the United States and Mexico. Trump also threatened to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), deport two to three million undocumented “criminals,” and defund “sanctuary cities.”
Trump’s win unleashed preemptive organizing against his proposed policies through e¤orts to establish “sanctuary campuses” and to reaªrm the commitments of sanctuary cities and counties. The strategies developed by undocumented youth and migrant activists during President Obama’s two terms have proven to be useful in the Trump era, evident in campaigns such as Alto Trump.16 In recent years, this organizing has taken place on the local and grassroots levels—such as in Arizona, where undocumented migrant activists filed lawsuits against Sheri¤ Joseph Arpaio, and in campaigns they coordinated, such as ¡Bazta Arpaio!, which worked to vote Arpaio out of oªce. On the national level, groups like the National Day Labor Organizing Network initiated antideportation campaigns, including #Not1More.
On January 14, 2017, days before President Obama left oªce, “We Are Here to Stay,” a nationwide immigrant rights rally, was held in Washington, D.C., and in fifty other cities throughout the United States. Organizing for the rally included a diverse group of undocumented migrants, most of whom were people of color; recent migrants from Haiti; and LGBTQ activists from Make the Road New York (MRNY).17 The rally was held when Obama was still in oªce, since some organizers hoped that he would take executive action to allow these Haitian migrants into the United States. Similar to the IWFR, migrant activists from across the country participated in this national rally to protect migrants and refugees.
Migrant rights activists associated with Somos un Pueblo Unido in Santa Fe—an organization that has been successfully organizing against anti-immigrant laws on the local level—sent community leaders representing counties in New Mexico to Washington, D.C., to attend the rally. Before leaving New Mexico, Sergio, who represented Familias Unidas por Justicia, an aªliate of Somos un Pueblo Unido in Farmington, stated, “We are already living what the incoming Trump administration is threatening to do,” and furthermore, “that is why I am going to Washington,
D.C., to share how we are fighting back locally and despite all the uncertainty and everything going against our community, we will continue to fight and win.”18 While the activists were in D.C., they met with New Mexico’s congressional delegation to discuss how sanctuary policies have helped their communities. They also participated in the national rally at an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.
After Trump took oªce on January 20, 2017, his administration acted quickly on his campaign promises, mostly through executive orders. On January 25, 2017, Trump announced two executive orders: “Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements” and “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States.” As part of his order on Border Security, Trump directed the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to construct a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico (section 4), as well as to “allocate resources to . . . detain aliens at or near the land border with Mexico.”19 This executive order emphasized border security, while also reaªrming that federal immigration authorities would enter into 287(g) agreements with local and state authorities to detain and deport undocumented migrants.20
The executive order on “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States” included enforcement priorities, such as deporting undocumented migrants who had committed criminal o¤enses. However, this executive order expanded who could be categorized as a criminal and identified acts such as presenting a false social security number to a government agency as crimes.21 While this executive order ended Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Priority Enforcement Program (PEP), it reactivated Secure Communities (S-COMM), a program that led to mass deportations during the Obama administration.22 The executive order also specified that sanctuary jurisdictions “are not eligible to receive Federal grants, except as deemed necessary for law enforcement purposes.”23 In response, numerous migrant rights organizations held rallies and press conferences at which speakers challenged these executive orders. At El Centro de Igualdad y Derechos in Albuquerque, executive director Rachel LaZar stated, “We will organize locally to pass and strengthen local immigrant-friendly policies,” asserting that “we’ll use strategic litigation to fight back and we will ramp up some of our organizing e¤orts
to fight back against Trump’s deportation machine and agenda of hate.”24 At the press conference, some activists held signs that read “We’re Not Going Anywhere” and “Mayor Berry Reject Trump’s Immigration Machine #heretostay.” Less than two weeks later, speaking at an Immigrant Day of Action rally organized by Somos un Pueblo Unido and held at the New Mexico State Capitol in Santa Fe, state representative Javier Martínez declared, “Estamos aquí para quedarnos. We are here to stay.” Further, he proclaimed, “We’re going to fight for our rights. We’re going to fight against that wall. We’re going to fight against that ban and we’re going to tell President Trump this is our country too.”25 At the end of the rally, members of Somos un Pueblo Unido started a round of chants shouting, “Aquí estamos y no nos vamos” (Here we are and we’re not going), their voices echoing in the rotunda of the state capitol. Activists have chanted these words during many immigrant rights rallies and marches over the last decade, and yet as one activist noted in recent months, they have “never been so much of a declaration of defiance.”26
This book explores a set of strategies regarding visibility and documentation that Mexican and Central American migrants have used in response to the political context of the early twenty-first century. It is dedicated to undocumented migrants who engage in “impossible activism” on behalf of all migrants in the United States.27
Migrant Lives and the Promise of Documentation
This photograph (Figure 1) was taken by Jonathan Alvira during a “Shut Down ICE” protest, organized by the National Day Labor Organizing Network (NDLON), the Puente Movement of Arizona, and other groups in Phoenix, Arizona, on October 14, 2013, as part of the
Figure 1. A “Shut Down ICE” protest in Phoenix, Arizona, on October 14, 2013. Photograph by Jonathan Alvira.
#Not1More campaign.1 During this day of protests activists chained themselves together on a road leading to the Eloy Detention Center in Eloy, Arizona—run by the Corrections Corporation of America—in order to disrupt its daily operations of deporting undocumented migrants. This photograph was taken at a concurrent protest held that day outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) building in Phoenix, Arizona.2 As described by an activist involved in the #Not1More campaign, “The protest transformed the building with papel picado and decorations” and “became a dance party in the driveway of ICE with no buses or vans moving in or out.”3 The fence around the ICE building is featured prominently in this photograph, along with signs, posters, and images that are displayed on it, some of which were screen-printed (“Alto a la Migra,” “Not One More Deportation,” “Deferred Action for All Now,” and “Vamos a Quebrar el ICE”), while others were handwritten (“Leave my dad here we need him”).4 There are also paper flowers on the fence, as well as a photograph of a man flanked by two boys, all of whom are posing for the photograph.
If you are unfamiliar with contemporary migrant activism, you may wonder why a photograph, presumably of a father with his two sons, was enlarged to the size of a poster and hung on a fence along with political signs and posters. As indicated by the handwritten text below the photograph, this poster-sized image was probably held up during the protest by members of this man’s family, who were fighting his deportation. Family and personal photographs have been used in recent years as part of antideportation campaigns.5 These images circulate within a range of di¤erent locations, including political actions and as part of online petitions on activist websites. Although some scholars and activists have noted the limitations to emphasizing the family ties of undocumented migrants (within either mixed-status families or not), Amalia Pallares contends that within the context of antideportation activism, highlighting the family “challenge[s] the divisions and categorizations of the state” and specifically the way in which the state views undocumented adults as less “deserving” of citizenship or some other oªcial “legal” status than undocumented children and young adults.6 The strategic use of this photograph among signs and posters is indicative of this book’s
primary concern with struggles over the idea of documentation, documentary forms, and self-representation by Mexican and Central American migrants in the early twenty-first century.
My interest in starting o¤ the book with an analysis of this image from the “Shut Down ICE” protest is related to the significance of “subjective” aesthetic forms within projects that primarily involve the self-representation of undocumented Mexican and Central American migrants.7 In the early 2000s, these projects began to proliferate in the United States and U.S.–Mexico borderlands, resembling those developed by nonprofits, social service organizations, filmmakers, and photographers in the 1960s and 1970s, which attempted to put the “mode of production” into the hands of members of “marginalized” groups. Still, I wondered why there was a resurgence of this approach in the post-9/11 era in projects that specifically included Mexican and Central American migrants. This book aims to respond to this question. I contend that although nonprofits, social service organizations, filmmakers, and artists initiated projects for these migrants to “document” elements of their lives through photography, film, and video, those who participated did not only use the documentary form, but also revised the aesthetics of documentary. They did this by combining documentary with “subjective” aesthetic forms, including family and personal photography and performative elements within film and video.
The Undocumented Everyday specifically focuses on projects created in the United States and U.S.–Mexico borderlands between 2000 and 2012 during the administration of George W. Bush and the first term of Barack Obama’s administration. Starting in the early 2000s and continuing after 9/11, labor unions, nonprofit social service organizations, advocacy groups, filmmakers, artists, and activists developed documentary projects that included Mexican and Central American migrants, which were presented to a range of di¤erent audiences. As compared with conventional approaches to documentary media, the organizers of these projects envisioned self-representation as a way for members of these groups to portray themselves on their own terms, and thus di¤erently from how they were presented in the mainstream media or by documentary photographers and filmmakers. This approach can also be
distinguished from other autobiographical forms within nonfiction media, as these projects involved groups of people, rather than individuals.8
The Undocumented Everyday also examines the choice of documentary modes and corresponding realist aesthetics in the self-representation of Mexican and Central American migrants. I analyze what is assumed in the imperative for “documentation” in this context, and I consider the presumptions and formal conventions that valorize self-representation as a visual and political strategy. This book explores the conventions and constraints of documentation, understood both as an aesthetic practice and as an administrative procedure for policing boundaries of inclusion within the nation-state. I use the phrase “documentary realist forms” to emphasize the ways in which documentary is an aesthetic based on the visual conventions of social realism, with genealogical connections to state (juridical-administrative) record keeping and scientific modes of visual documentation.9 The use of visual technologies as part of state documentation can be traced back to the late nineteenth century, when, as Anna Pegler-Gordon argues, “the United States’s di¤erential politics regarding immigration and photo documentation were part of statebased practices of racial formation.”10 The majority of the documentary projects that I write about were produced following 9/11, a time when the U.S. state gathered biometric data, including photographs, ostensibly as a form of defense against terrorism. The government also utilizes “biometric imaging technologies that digitally recognize racial ‘types’” at entry points to the country, including the U.S.–Mexico boundary.11 Consequently, I understand “documentary” as a form of knowledge and a technique of power, and I explore the possibilities and limitations of the production and circulation of works of self-representation in documentary form in the context of U.S. neoliberal governance.
In this book, I argue that in their use of documentary media, Mexican and Central American migrants have created alternatives to liberal tropes of “visibility.” Within a liberal model, “giving” visibility is individualized, focusing on the ways individuals are depicted, rather than highlighting the predicament of undocumented migrants as a result of state policies and legislation and their collective circumstances more generally. However, as Dimitris Papadopulos and Vassilis Tsianos suggest, “Visibility, in the context of illegal migration, belongs to the inventory of the
technologies for policing migrational flows.”12 In contemporary U.S. society, visibility is associated with empowerment and invisibility with powerlessness, including an absence from political and cultural life. While some scholars see visibility as a means for marginalized groups to claim rights, Lisa Marie Cacho suggests that “because the state renders criminalized populations of color [including undocumented migrants] ineligible for personhood, and consequently, ineligible for the right to ask for rights, they cannot be incorporated in rights-based politics.”13 It is “the exclusionary aspects of citizenship that shape the experiences of undocumented residents as the ‘present absents’ in the U.S. polity,” as Amalia Pallares argues.14 However, Pallares also notes that scholars must study the subjectivity of undocumented migrants and “focus on the specific agency of the undocumented—that is, on the relationship between the exclusion from citizenship and the forms of political representation, strategies, and identities that undocumented people can potentially deploy.”15 The Undocumented Everyday examines how Mexican and Central American migrants use documentary media as part of their “counter-representational practices” and “to generate uncertainty about ‘commonsense’ understandings of belonging.”16
Rather than presuming the value of visibility, I analyze how Mexican and Central American migrants deploy strategies of visibility and invisibility within specifically situated contexts that expose the relations of power at work in the terms of visibility itself. Although the general liberal claim about “visibility” is frequently touted as necessary in order for certain marginalized groups to have a “voice” and be fully included in U.S. society, what is significant about these migrants’ approach to visibility in the examples that follow is their attention to the specific context of their enunciation. As such, I contend that in these projects migrants do not make general claims about the importance of being “visible” as an abstract form of empowerment, identitarian aªrmation, and inclusion, but instead employ documentary forms to draw attention to as well as challenge the e¤ects of neoliberal policies and U.S. immigration laws on undocumented migrants.
Mexican and Central American migrants have used and revised the aesthetics of documentary realism to represent themselves in ways that push back against liberal concepts of “political incorporation into national
belonging.”17 This approach relates to arguments scholars have made that in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries undocumented Mexican and Central American migrants have asserted their political presence in the United States in opposition to liberal citizenship rights.18 I argue that in some of these documentary projects migrants narrate forms of social belonging that do not involve state forms of recognition, while in others they refuse recognition from the state.19 This study contributes to scholarship on contemporary U.S. im/migration through its examination of how Mexican and Central American migrants use documentary media to provide alternative representations of themselves, which center their subjectivity and visualize their presence within the United States and in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands.
These documentary works created by Mexican and Central American migrants are a response to U.S. immigration policies and neoliberal economic policies in the U.S.–Mexico border region. In the case of Mexican migrants, Alicia Schmidt Camacho contends that as they “narrate a condition of alterity to, or exclusion from, the nation, they also enunciate a collective desire for a di¤erent order of space and belonging across the boundary.”20 Drawing on Charles Taylor’s work on social imaginaries, Schmidt Camacho suggests that we should understand these migrants’ cultural forms not as “a reflection of the social, or merely a detached ‘set of ideas,’ but rather the means by which subjects work through their connections to a larger totality and communicate a sense of relatedness to a particular time, place, and condition.”21 In analyzing these projects of self-representation, I situate them within the historical moment in which they were developed in the post-9/11 era, as well as their locations, their modes of address, and their contexts of production.
The Undocumented Everyday begins during a period marked by a shift from a collaboration between the U.S. and Mexican governments on a 2001 binational agreement regarding the status of undocumented Mexicans in the United States to the immediate post-9/11 era, wherein these migrants were viewed as part of the threat that immigration presented to the country.22 As I outline in the next section, laws established after 9/11 limited the ability of Mexican and Central American migrants to leave and then return to the United States. Consequently, there were major
changes in migration patterns, increasing the number of undocumented people living for extended periods in the United States. Almost all of the projects that I analyze were produced after 9/11, when the federal government subjected undocumented migrants to more punitive and carceral practices, leading to dramatic increases in the numbers of those arrested, detained, and deported. This period was also characterized by neoliberal austerity programs in Mexico, escalating violence in Central America, heightened security in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, and the installation of surveillance technologies in public spaces—including worksites— throughout the United States. The Undocumented Everyday concludes at the end of Obama’s first term in oªce, by which time close to two million undocumented migrants, primarily from Mexico and Central America, had been deported.23
The development of localized strategies of immigration enforcement distinguishes the post-9/11 era from earlier periods.24 While these strategies were partly the result of federal immigration policies, state governments also implemented stricter immigration enforcement, such as Arizona Senate Bill 1070: “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” (SB 1070). Jonathan X. Inda and Julie A. Dowling note that policies like SB 1070, which are based on “attrition through enforcement,” focus on “depriving [undocumented migrants] of the ability to participate meaningfully in quotidian life” and are thus “designed to isolate this population from society and render them ultimately powerless.”25 Further, federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) developed programs, such as Secure Communities (S-COMM), that had local law enforcement policing and reporting on migrants’ immigration status, leading to huge increases in the detentions and deportations of undocumented migrants.26
In the post-9/11 era, federal immigration policies and state laws like SB 1070 have increased the racial profiling and surveillance of Latina/o migrants.27 The documentary projects of self-representation that I examine developed within a political context in which, as Wendy Hesford notes, these “specular and panoptic logics are mobilized by governments to harden ideological support for the curtailment of rights.”28 Jodie M. Lawston and Ruben R. Murillo have related the spectacle of enforcement
by state agents—including Sheri¤ Joe Arpaio of Arizona—and the escalation of ICE raids—leading to the detention and deportation of undocumented migrants—to the actions performed by civilian anti-immigrant organizations, such as the Minuteman Project in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands.29
This book is informed by theoretical insights from visual culture studies, as it seeks to place questions of visuality at the center of U.S. immigration politics. The theoretical perspectives that I draw upon emphasize how the visual is invested in relations of power. As Susan Je¤ords has argued, “It is how citizens see themselves and how they see those against whom they define themselves that determines national selfperception. . . . The very idea of a nation is itself dependent on the visual realm.”30 Various scholars have written about how state and nonstate actors use visual surveillance technologies to produce spectacles of enforcement, drawing on the work of Guy Debord, who described the spectacle not as “a collection of images,” but as “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”31 According to Diana Taylor, the spectacle “ties individuals into an economy of looks and looking.”32 Further, Nicholas Mirzoe¤ has argued that laws such as SB 1070 are intended to “intensify the racialized divide between the citizen and undocumented migrant worker, creating a normative border that can be instantiated whenever a ‘citizen’ looks at a person suspected of being a migrant.”33
The projects that I discuss emerged out of distinct sites, political contexts, and historical moments. Some involved photography workshops arranged by labor groups or social service organizations in places where migrants were either temporary residents or where they were part of a well-established community. Other projects involved migrants taking photographs as they traveled through the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. Still others had filmmakers and artists collaborating with migrant activists on film and video projects that became part of their political organizing. The migrants who contributed to these documentary works include male day laborers from Central America and Mexico living in Long Island, New York; a multigenerational group of men, women, and teenagers who were primarily from Oaxaca living in Poughkeepsie, New York; Mexican and Central American migrants journeying through the
U.S.–Mexico borderlands; promotoras (community activists) in Tijuana, most of whom migrated there to work in the maquiladoras;34 Latina/o migrants who were part of mixed-status families in the Bay Area in California; and “undocumented 1.5 generation activists,” some of whom are Latina/o, but not Mexican or Central American, or are undocumented, but not Latina/o, who collaborated with migrant activists on campaigns against anti-immigrant laws.35 I further investigate their di¤erent circumstances, as well as the distinct discourses that informed perceptions of these groups, in the next section of the introduction.
In these locations, the dynamics of conflict took a variety of forms. In some places, local residents developed policies in e¤orts to drive out undocumented migrants, whereas in others residents and policies were less hostile and more inclusionary. In Hempstead, Long Island, anti-immigrant groups such as Sachem Quality of Life (SQL) actively attempted to push out Mexican and Central American migrants. Antiimmigrant organizations—such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)—worked with politicians and residents to create anti-immigrant ordinances, such as the Neighborhood Preservation Act, which limited day laborers’ ability to wait for work on street corners in parts of Long Island.36 FAIR also generated anti-immigrant legislation on the state level through its legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, which employed politicians such as Kris Kobach, coauthor of Arizona Senate Bill 1070.37 Migrant activists in Arizona and elsewhere challenged both SB 1070 and copycat laws in Alabama and Georgia. Other projects were organized in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, where vigilante groups such as the Minuteman Project (MMP) had set up “observation sites” to “guard” the U.S.–Mexico boundary, reporting migrants trying to cross “illegally,” or where cross-border organizing related to labor and environmental issues was taking place.
Other projects were produced in towns and cities that were more inclusionary of Latina/o migrants, including Poughkeepsie and San Francisco, the latter of which has a “sanctuary” ordinance for undocumented residents. Sanctuary ordinances o¤er what Jennifer Ridgley calls “an alternative vision of security and political membership” for undocumented migrants because these laws position migrants as residents
of a locality, rather than as criminals within the United States.38 However, the disjuncture between local sanctuary ordinances and federal immigration law and policies can create conditions of vulnerability for undocumented migrants.
The production of Mexican and Central American migrants’ documentary media has also been shaped by dominant ideological discourses, including neoliberalism. Neoliberal discourse on immigration began dominating the political landscape in the mid-1990s. The discussions about immigration resembled prevailing approaches to so-called welfare reform, which insisted that poor people—in this case noncitizens—were making illegitimate claims on the state. One major tenet of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA)— which emphasized “personal responsibility” over “public dependency” (shifting liability from the state to the individual)—was that migrants, whether “legal” or “illegal,” could not receive welfare benefits.39 According to Nicholas De Genova, the PRWORA and 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) “together represented the two-pronged material and practical culmination of a more generalized ideological onslaught against ‘immigration’ and ‘welfare’ that had raged in the United States during the early and mid-1990s.”40 In this context Jonathan X. Inda argues that “illegal” migrants have been “typically imagined as criminals, job takers, welfare dependents” and “have essentially been constructed as imprudent, unethical subjects incapable of exercising responsible self-government and thus as threats to the overall well-being of the social body.”41 Neoliberalism not only “represents a change in the way political subjects are perceived,” as Rebecca Hester suggests, but it also shifts “the way they perceive themselves.”42 Further, as Lisa Duggan argues, neoliberalism is a cultural project, and its political and economic objectives can be conveyed in forms of cultural production.43 Some of the documentary projects produced by Mexican and Central American migrants were responses to neoliberal policies and discourses that positioned them as “illegal” and as “takers” in relation to the welfare system.
Within the context of their exclusion from citizenship, Latina/o migrants deployed specific strategies and forms of cultural and political
representation. The documentary projects that I analyze in this book were shaped by a political context whereby migrants’ marginalization from national belonging is, as Amalia Pallares argues, “sustained ideologically through the use of repeated images and representations that help to create and reinforce exclusion.”44 Undocumented migrants have been constrained in their attempts to portray themselves in both legal and political contexts. Due in part to the limitations of immigration law and the predominance of neoliberal ideology, immigration advocates and lawyers have sometimes pressured migrants to represent themselves as exceptional, particularly in the ways “that appeal to dominant populations’ sympathies and sense of morality,” as part of antideportation cases.45 This strategy—to highlight the “worthiness” of their migrant clients—has been used by lawyers to defend undocumented migrants in deportation proceedings. Muneer Ahmad argues that there are many problems with this tactic, noting that while it “may expand the contours of the rights-bearing community,” it “do[es] so at the risk of reinforcing the subordinating regime that produces the substantive inequality in the first place.”46 It has also been used as part of antideportation cases involving undocumented youth, who have been encouraged to represent themselves in ways that emphasize their “worthiness” by focusing on their “productivity and competitiveness,” “their individuation,” and “their potential for self-care and self-responsibility.”47 This approach has been challenged in recent years by undocumented youth and migrant activists, whose strategies are aimed at disrupting the ways in which some migrants are represented as “exceptional” and thus “deserving,” and others are positioned as “undeserving” and thus deportable.48
Some of these migrants’ approaches to self-representation in documentary media developed out of their political strategies and activism. In these projects, migrants use documentary media to represent visual forms of “migrant counter-conducts,” which Jonathan X. Inda and Julie Dowling define as “acts or forms of comportment that contest the criminalization and exclusion of the undocumented.”49 Migrant counterconducts can occur as part of organized political actions or everyday forms of resistance, what Inda and Dowling refer to as “everyday counterconducts.”50 The di¤erent forms of migrant counter-conducts also relate
to how scholars have defined “migrant struggles.” For example, Nicholas De Genova and his coauthors provide one meaning that “indicates more or less organized struggles in which migrants openly challenge, defeat, escape or trouble the dominant politics of mobility (including border control, detention, and deportation) or the regime of labor, or the space of citizenship.”51 Some of the organized struggles that inform the migrants’ projects include the nationwide immigrant rights marches in the spring of 2006. They also include the activism of migrant-led organizations, such as NDLON, the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA), and the Puente Movement of Arizona.52 These activists have engaged in what I refer to as “unauthorized acts,” in which they disrupt or interrupt the business of the state in order to contest immigration laws and policies. The second meaning of “migrant struggles,” as defined by De Genova and his coauthors, “refers to the daily strategies, refusals, and resistances through which migrants enact their (contested) presence— even if they are not expressed or manifested as ‘political’ battles, demanding something in particular.”53 The documentary projects that developed out of these contexts narrate how Mexican and Central American migrants respond to being racialized and criminalized in the United States.
In their documentary projects, these migrants emphasize their points of view and everyday lives as forms of counter-knowledge and counterrepresentation. By centering their lives and their political projects, they also revise documentary realism by mixing documentary aesthetics with those of amateur photography (such as personal, family, or snapshot photography) and performative elements in the film, video, and audio projects. This mixed-genre aesthetic relates to Imogen Tyler’s contention that, in contemporary immigration politics, “the intellectual and the political challenge is precisely about the necessity of working at the borders of older and di¤erent genres and forms of practice as a means of reinventing,” what Lauren Berlant refers to as “new idioms of the political, and of belonging itself.”54 Although this book charts the various ways that undocumented migrants have organized, from working within the constraints of U.S. immigration policy to critiquing state power, I focus on how they have used documentary media as part of
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These quartets are much more broadly planned than earlier works by Mozart in the same form. Not only are the separate movements generally longer; the middle section of the first movements is intricate and extended, and the minuets are not less seriously treated than the other movements. The treatment of the separate instrumental parts is, of course, distinguished and fine.
It would be difficult to characterize each one distinctly. The first, in G major (K. 387), is marked by a certain decisive clearness throughout. The two themes of the first movement are especially clearly differentiated. The development section is long and rather severe. It will be noticed that the minuet takes the second place in the cycle, as in many of Haydn’s quartets. The final movement is in fugal style and not unrelated in spirit to the final movement of the great Jupiter symphony.
The second quartet, in D minor (K. 421), takes both from its tonality and from the nature of its themes a thin veil of melancholy. The opening theme is poignantly expressive, but the fire of it is often covered. The characteristic width of its intervals is used throughout the entire movement, with a strange effect of yearning, now resigned, now passionately outspoken. The andante, in F major, is tinged with the same melancholy. The trio of the minuet is one of the few places where Mozart made use of pizzicato effects. The last movement is a series of variations on a melancholy little theme cast in the rhythm of the Siciliana, one of the Italian rhythms already made use of by Handel and Gluck, among others.
The third quartet, in E-flat major (K. 428), is on the whole reserved and classical in spirit. The opening theme, given in unison, has a gentle dignity which marks the whole first movement. The measures following the second theme are especially smooth and lovely in their slowly falling harmonies. In the second movement, andante con moto, there is a constant shifting of harmonies, and a somewhat restless interchange of parts among the instruments. The trio of the minuet, in C minor, is subtly woven over a drone bass. The final movement is a lively rondo.
The fourth, in B-flat major (K. 458), is, in the first movement, very like Haydn, light-hearted and wholly gay. The following minuet, adagio, and rondo need hardly be specially mentioned. The A major quartet (K. 464), the next in the series, is in a similar vein. The slow movement, again the third in the cycle, is in the form of variations; and the last is full of imitations and other contrapuntal devices.
The last of these quartets, in C major (K. 465), is the most profound and the most impassioned. The boldness of Mozart’s imagination in harmonies is in most of his work likely to fail to impress the modern ear One hears but half-consciously the subtlety of his modulations. But here and there in his work the daring of the innovator still has power to claim our attention; as in the andante of the last pianoforte sonata in F major (K. 533), and still more in the introduction of this quartet. The sharp harmonies of the first few measures roused hostility; and the discussion as to their grammatical propriety was continued for more than half a century after Mozart’s death.
The whole quartet is full of an intensity of feeling. The andante has that quality of heart-melting tenderness which sprang only from Mozart’s genius. One cannot but place the four movements with the three great symphonies, as something not only immortal, but precious and inimitable in the world’s treasure of instrumental music.
This series of six quartets did not make a decidedly favorable impression upon the general public. The next quartet from his pen was in a much more conventional manner, as if Mozart had tried to suppress the genius in him which prompted him ever to new discoveries in his art. The quartet in D major (K. 499) was composed on the 19th of August, 1786. It is beautifully worked in detail, light in character. No special reason is known why he should have written and published a single quartet like this; and it has been thought that he hoped by it to rouse the public to enthusiasm for his instrumental works.
There remain three more quartets to mention. These were written for Frederick William II of Prussia, at whose court Mozart had been a frequent attendant during the early spring of 1789. The first quartet
was completed in Vienna, in June, 1789. The other two were written about a year later. In Köchel’s index the three are Nos. 575, in D major, 589, in B-flat major, and 590, in F major.
All are very plainly written with a king in mind who played the violoncello. In most of the movements the 'cello is given a very prominent part, frequently playing in unusually high registers as in the announcement of the second theme in the first movement of the first of these quartets; in the trio and the finale as well. In many places the viola plays the bass part, leaving the 'cellist free to be soloist, as in the opening measures of the Larghetto in the second sonata. Thus these quartets, fine and free in style as they are, are not the fullest expression of Mozart’s genius, as the series of six dedicated to Haydn may be taken to be.
There are, as we have said, twenty-three quartets in all. The majority of the early ones were written under the influence of a certain mode or style, as experiments or as test pieces; and the last four were written with the purpose of pleasing the public or of suiting the special abilities of a king of Prussia. Only the six quartets dedicated to Haydn may be taken as what Mozart felt to be his best effort in the form, the expression, perfect as far as he could make it, of his highest ideals. As such they are almost unique in his music.
With the quartets may be mentioned the four great quintets for strings, written, two in the spring of 1787, one in December, 1790, and one in April, 1791. Of the combination of five string parts Haydn made little use. Boccherini, however, had written at least one hundred and twenty-five quintets. He was himself a 'cellist and, as might be expected, the added instrument in his quintets was a 'cello.
Mozart added another viola to the group. Though this added no new strand of color to the whole, it rather complicated the problems offered by the quartet. As Otto Jahn has carefully explained, with the volume of sound thus thickened, there came a need for even more active movement of the separate parts. Since the additional part was among the middle voices, the outer voices must be spread as far apart as possible so as to allow sufficient freedom of movement to
the inner. The extra viola might be treated as a bass part to the first and second violins, or as the upper part above the other viola and the 'cello. Mozart made use of this possibility of contrast nowhere more clearly than in the opening pages of the quintet in G minor.
The four quintets are respectively in C major (K. 515), G minor (K. 516), D major (K. 593), and E-flat major (K. 614). Of these that in G minor is clearly the most remarkable; and it is indeed conspicuous above almost all his instrumental music, for the passionate intensity of the moods which it voices. Needless to say it still holds its place as one of the supreme master-works in chamber music. More than a similarity of key unites it to the symphony in G minor. The themes in both works seem much alike, and both are equally broad in form and full of harmonic color.
FOOTNOTES:
[62] L. Piquot: Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de Luigi Boccherini; Paris, 1851.
[63] These are Nos. 1-18, inclusive, in Pohl’s index. The opus numbers by which Haydn’s quartets are usually designated are taken from the thematic index prefixed to the complete Trautwein Edition of 1844. These first quartets are: Opus 1, Nos. 1-6; opus 2, Nos. 1-6; and opus 3, Nos. 1-6.
[64] C. F. Pohl: ‘Joseph Haydn,’ Vol. I, p. 331.
[65] Eugène Sauzay: Étude sur le quatuor. Paris, 1861.
[66] Cf. C. F. Pohl: op. cit., Vol. II, p. 293.
[67] Étude sur le quatuor.
[68] Adagio, allegro, minuetto. The finale rondo was added some years later. Cf. ‘W. A. Mozart,’ by de Wyzewa and de Saint-Foix: Paris, 1912.
[69] Cf. Wyzewa and Saint-Foix: op cit. Gassmann was born in Bohemia in 1723 and died in Vienna in 1774. A great many of his works in manuscript are in the libraries at Milan. He had been appointed to a place in Vienna in 1762, and was hardly likely, therefore, to be in Milan when Mozart was; but he had lived at one time in Milan and came back there occasionally from Vienna to superintend performances of his operas.
CHAPTER XVI
THE STRING QUARTET: BEETHOVEN
Beethoven’s approach to the string quartet; incentives; the six quartets opus 18 The Rasumowsky quartets; opera 74 and 95 The great development period; the later quartets, op. 127 et seq.: The E-flat major (op. 127) The A minor (op. 132); the B-flat major (op. 130); the C-sharp minor (op. 131); the F major (op. 135)
IBeethoven’s six quartets, opus 18, were first published in 1800. He had already experimented in other forms of chamber music, not only for strings alone. The sextet for two clarinets, two bassoons, and two horns; the quintet, opus 16, for piano, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon; the string quintet, opus 4; three trios for violin, viola, and violoncello; the trio, opus 11, for piano, clarinet, and violoncello; and sonatas for violin and piano, and violoncello and piano, had already been written. The pianoforte sonatas up to that in B-flat, opus 22, and the first symphony had likewise been completed. Beethoven thus turned to the composition of string quartets after an experience with almost all other branches of music had made him master of the art of composition.
Apart from any inner development in the man which waited thus long before attempting expression in that form in which the very last and
in some ways the most remarkable of his thoughts were to find utterance, one or two external circumstances probably turned his attention to the string quartet. One was undoubtedly the morning musicales at the house of his friend and patron, Prince Lichnowsky, where such music was especially in demand, and where Beethoven must constantly have heard the quartets of Haydn and Mozart.[70] Another was his personal acquaintance with Emanuel Aloys Förster, [71] a composer of quartets for whom Beethoven had a high regard.
These first quartets appeared in two groups of three. They are not arranged in the order of their composition. For example, that in D major, the third in the first set, is probably the oldest of the six. But the series presents little evidence of development within its limits, and there is hardly reason to attach serious importance to the order in which the various quartets were created. Besides, with the exception of the quartet in C minor, No. 4, the entire series is expressive of much the same mood and intention. If one quartet is at all distinguished from the others, it is only by a few minor details, usually of biographical or otherwise extrinsic significance. The technique is that of Haydn and Mozart, lacking, perhaps, the assured grace of the earlier masters; the character, one of cheerfulness, with only here and there a flash of the emotional imperiousness with which Beethoven took hold of music.
No. 1, in F major, is known as the ‘Amenda’ quartet. Beethoven had sent an earlier form of it (completed in 1799) to his friend Karl Amenda. A year later he wrote Amenda, saying that he had greatly altered it, knowing now for the first time how truly to write a quartet. The later arrangement differs from the original in details of workmanship, not in spirit. There are four movements, in conventional form and sequence: an allegro con brio, 3:4; an adagio affettuoso ed appassionato, in D minor; a scherzo and a final rondo. Amenda had a story to tell of the adagio, to the effect that when Beethoven had completed the quartet he played this movement to a friend and asked him afterward of what it made him think. It seemed to the friend to have represented the parting of two lovers.
Beethoven is reported then to have said that in composing it he had had in mind the scene in the tomb from ‘Romeo and Juliet.’
The second quartet of the series, in G major, is known as the Komplimentier quartet, because of the graceful character of the opening theme, and, indeed, of the whole first movement. The third, in D major, is not less cheerful. The final movement is a virtuoso piece for all the instruments. The triplet rhythm is akin to the last movement of the Kreutzer sonata, and to that of the sonata for pianoforte, opus 31, No. 3; both of which originated not later than in 1801. Similarly the whole of the fifth quartet—in A major—is in brilliant concert style. There is a minuet instead of a scherzo, standing as second, not third movement, as was frequently the case in the works of Haydn and Mozart, and, indeed, in later works of Beethoven. The third movement is an andante and five variations in D major. Finally the first movement of the sixth and last of the series —in B-flat major—cannot but suggest a comparison with the first movement of the pianoforte sonata, opus 22, in the same key, which originated about the same time. Both are very frankly virtuoso music. The last movement of the quartet is preceded by a short adagio, to which Beethoven gave the title, La malinconia. This whispers once again for a moment not long before the end of the lively finale in waltz rhythm.
The fourth quartet of the series is alone in a minor key. It is of more serious nature than those among which it was placed, and may be related in spirit, at least, to the many works in the same key (C minor) which seem like successive steps in a special development.
Paul Bekker suggests in his ‘Beethoven’[72] that we may consider a C minor problem in Beethoven’s work; and points to sonatas, opus 10 and 13, the pianoforte trio, opus 1, the string trio, opus 9, the pianoforte concerto, opus 37, the duet for piano and violin, opus 30, and finally the fifth symphony and the overture to Coriolanus, all of which are in C minor, and all of which follow closely one after the other. Whether or not the quartet in question may be thus allied with other works, there is evidence that it is closely connected with an early duet for viola and violoncello (with two obbligato Augengläser)
which originated in 1795 or 1796. Riemann[73] is of the opinion that both the duet and the quartet are rearrangements of some still earlier work. The first movement is weakened by the similarity of the first and second themes. The second is a delightful Andante scherzoso, quasi allegretto, in C major, 3:8. The third movement is a little minuet and the last a rondo.
II
The year after the publication of these first quartets appeared the quintet for strings, in C major, opus 29. This is the only original string quintet of Beethoven’s, except the fugue written for a similar group of instruments in 1817, probably as a study. The quintet, opus 4, is a rearrangement of the octet for wind instruments, written in 1792, before coming to Vienna. The quintet, opus 104, is an arrangement of the trio in C minor, opus 1, which Beethoven made in 1817, following an anonymous request, and which he regarded humorously
In 1808 were printed the three great quartets opus 59, dedicated to Count (later Prince) Rasumowsky. Beethoven’s earlier patron, Prince Lichnowsky, had left Vienna, and the famous quartet under the leadership of Schuppanzigh, which had played such a part in his Friday morning musicales, was now engaged by Rasumowsky, Russian Ambassador to the court at Vienna. Rasumowsky commissioned Beethoven to write three quartets in which there was to be some use of Russian melodies.
Between the quartets, opus 18, and these so-called Russian quartets, Beethoven had written, among other things, a number of his great pianoforte sonatas, including opus 27, opus 31, opus 53, and most of opus 57, the Kreutzer sonata for violin and piano, the second and third symphonies, and Fidelio. These are the great works of the second period of his creative activity; and the qualities which are essential in them are, as it were, condensed, refined and
assembled in the three quartets, opus 59. They may be taken as the abstract of his genius at that time.
Nothing gives more striking evidence of the phenomenal power of self-development within Beethoven than a comparison of opus 18 with opus 59, or, again, of the latter with the five last quartets. Of course, to compare the early with the late sonatas, or the first two symphonies with the ninth, will astonish in a like measure. But there are intermediate sonatas and symphonies by which many steps between the extremes can be clearly traced. The quartets stand like isolated tablets of stone upon which, at three distinct epochs in his life, Beethoven engraved the sum total of his musicianship. The quartets opus 74 and opus 95 hardly serve to unite the Russian quartets with opus 127.
The Russian quartets are regular in structure, but they are as broad as symphonies by comparison with opus 18. The style is bold, though the details are carefully finished, and the instruments are treated polyphonically, each being as prominent and as important as the others. This in particular marks an advance over the earlier works in the same form. There is in them, moreover, an emotional vigor, which, expressed in broad sweeps and striking, often strident, harmonies, worked in the opinion of many contemporaries a barbarous distortion of the hitherto essentially delicate form. To interpret them is but to repeat what has been already made familiar by the sonatas of the period, by the Eroica, and by Fidelio. It is the same Beethoven who speaks here with no less vigor, though with necessarily finer point.
The first quartet begins at once with a melody for violoncello, unusually long and broad even for Beethoven. It has in itself no Russian quality; but the monotonous accompaniment of chords, repeated with but the harmonic change from tonic to dominant for eighteen measures, suggests a primitive sort of art, a strumming such as may well be practised by Russian peasants in their singing. The harsh dissonances created by the long F’s in the melody, and a little later by the whole-note D, against dominant seventh harmony
will not pass unnoticed. Such clashes between melody and harmony can be found in other works of about the same period; for example, at the return of the first theme in the third section of the first movement of the Eroica; and the much-discussed, prolonged D-flat of the oboe against the entrance of the A-flat melody in the second movement of the fifth symphony. Elsewhere in this quartet the same procedure makes a striking effect; namely, in the approach to the second theme, where, however, the long G’s—sharply accented— are in the nature of a pedal point. The second theme—in C major—is cognate with the first. The interweaving of the instruments in its statement is noteworthy. The first phrase is anticipated by the first violin, and then sung out broadly by the viola; from which the first violin immediately takes away the second phrase. The second violin and 'cello, and even the viola, after its first phrase, interchange with each other the broad C’s which lie at the foundation of the whole. The line of the melody itself and the suave flow of polyphony will suggest certain passages in Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger.
The second movement (allegretto vivace e sempre scherzando, Bflat major, 3:8) has in rhythm at least a strong Russian flavor. Here again there are repeated chords in the accompaniment even more barbaric in effect than those in the first movement. The 'cello alone gives in the opening measures the rhythmical key to the whole; and in the next measures the solo violin (2d) announces, staccato and pianissimo, the chief melodic motive. The effect of the whole movement is at once fantastical and witty. The following Adagio in F minor, in essence and in adornment one of the full expressions of a side of Beethoven’s genius, dies away in a long cadenza for the first violin which, without ending, merges into a long trill. Softly under this trill the 'cello announces the Russian melody upon which the following wholly good-humored and almost boisterous finale is built.
The second quartet of the series is less forceful, and far more sensitive and complicated. The key is E minor. Two incisive, staccato chords, tonic and dominant, open the movement. One remembers the opening of the Eroica. There follows a full measure of silence and then the melodic kernel of the first movement, pianissimo in
unison—a rising figure upon the tonic triad (which will again recall for an instant the Eroica) and a hushed falling back upon the dominant seventh. Again the full measure of silence, and again the rising and falling, questioning, motive, this time in F major. After an agitated transitional passage, the first violin gives out the second theme, a singing melody in G major. But the threefold first theme—the incisive chords, the measure of silence, and the questioning figure—carry the burden of the work, one of mystery to which the second theme is evidently stranger. At the beginning of the middle section, and again at the beginning of the long coda, the chords and the breathless silences assume a threatening character, now hushed, then suddenly angry, to which the figure reluctantly responds with its unanswered question.
The second movement (Adagio, E major) must, in Beethoven’s own words, be played with much feeling. The chief melody is like a chorale. It is played first by the first violin, the other instruments adding a note-for-note, polyphonic accompaniment. It is then repeated by second violin and viola, in unison, while the first violin adds above it a serious, gently melodious counterpoint. Other more vigorous episodes appear later, but the spirit of the movement is swayed by the sad and prayerful opening theme.
In the trio of the following scherzo another Russian theme is used as the subject of a fugue. The last movement is unrestrainedly joyful and vigorous, beginning oddly in C major, but turning presently to the tonic key (E minor), from which the rondo unfolds in more and more brilliant power.
The last of this series of quartets—in C major—is for the most part wholly outspoken. There is little obscurity in meaning, none in form. At the basis of the slow introduction lies a series of falling half-tones, given to the 'cello. The first allegro is almost martial in character. The second movement—andante con moto quasi allegretto, in A minor— is in the nature of a Romanza; and the frequent pizzicato of the 'cello suggests the lutenist of days long gone by. There follows a Minuet instead of a Scherzo; and at the end there is a vigorous fugue.
Between these three quartets and the final series beginning with opus 127, stand two isolated quartets: opus 74, in E-flat major, and opus 95, in F minor. Neither indicates a considerable change in Beethoven’s method, or in his attitude towards his art. The former, composed in 1809 and dedicated to Prince Lobkowitz, is in the spirit of the last of the Rasumowsky quartets; that is, outspoken, vigorous, and clear. The relatively long, slow introduction alone hints at a tragic seriousness; but it serves rather to show from what the composer had freed himself, than to expose the riddle of the piece. The first theme of the first movement is stalwart and well-built; the second, of rather conventional character, chiefly made up of whirring scale groups. In the development section there are many measures of arpeggio figures, at first pizzicato, later growing into arco; by reason of which the quartet has been given the name of Harfenquartett (Harp-quartet). In connection with this passage Dr. Riemann has remarked that all such experiments in sound effects [such as pizzicato, harmonics and playing on special strings] serve only to reveal the actual lack of different tone-colors in the quartet; and, indeed, distract the attention from the ‘drawing’ [i.e., the pure lines of the various parts] which is peculiarly the affair of the quartet.
The second movement is an adagio in rondo form; the third a scherzo, with an astonishing trio in 6/8 time; and the last consists of a theme, oddly syncopated so that the groundwork of the harmonic progressions may be traced only on the unaccented beats of the measures, together with five variations.
The quartet in F minor, opus 95, was completed in October, 1810. In the autograph copy Beethoven gave the work the title Quartett serioso, omitted in the engraved editions. Theresa Malfatti is supposed to have refused Beethoven’s offer of marriage in April of this year. He confided himself rather freely in his friend Zmeskall von Domanowecz, during these months. The fact that the quartet, opus 95, was held to be serioso by Beethoven, and furthermore that he dedicated it to Zmeskall, are at least some sort of evidence that the work sprang from his recent disappointment in love. However, the first movement is rather spiteful than mournful. It is remarkable for
conciseness. It is, indeed, only one hundred and fifty measures long, and there are no repetitions. The dominant motive is announced at once by all four instruments in unison, and is repeated again and again throughout the movement, like an irritating thought that will not be banished. There is a second theme, in D-flat major, which undergoes little development.
The second movement, an allegretto in D major, 2/4, is highly developed and unusual. It opens with a four-measure phrase of detached, descending notes, for 'cello alone, which may be taken as a motto for the movement. This is followed by a strange yet lovely melody for first violin which is extended by a long-delayed cadence. After this the viola announces a new theme, suggestive of the opening motive, which is taken up by the other instruments one after the other and woven into a complete little fugue, with a stretto. Once again, then, the 'cello gives out the lovely, and somewhat mysterious, opening phrase, this time thrice repeated on descending steps of the scale, and punctuated by mournful harmonies of the other instruments. The viola announces the fugue theme again, in F minor; and the fugue is resumed with elaborate counterpoint. And at the end of this, again the 'cello motive, once more in the tonic key, and the strange melody sung early by the first violin.
The movement is not completed, but goes without pause into the next, a strangely built scherzo, allegro assai vivace, ma serioso. The vivace evidently applies to the main body of the movement, which is in a constantly active, dotted rhythm. The serioso is explained by the part of the movement in G-flat major, which one may regard as the trio. This is merely a chorale melody, first given by the second violin. The lower instruments follow the melody with note-for-note harmonies; the first violin adds to each note of the melody an unvarying formula of ornamentation. All this is done first in the key of G-flat major, then in D major. The opening section is then repeated, and after it comes the chorale melody, a little differently scored; and a coda, piu allegro, brings the movement to an end.
The last movement is preceded by a few introductory measures, which are in character very like the Lebewohl motive in the sonata, opus 81. And the progression from the introduction into the allegro agitato is not unlike the beginning of the last movement of the same sonata. The allegro itself is most obviously in hunting-song style, suggesting in the first melody Mendelssohn, in parts of the accompaniment the horns at the beginning of the second act of Tristan und Isolda. The second theme is a horn-call. Just before the end the galloping huntsmen pass far off into the distance, their horns sound fainter and fainter, finally cease. Then there is a mad coda, in alla breve time.
III
There follows between this quartet and the quartet, opus 127, a period of fourteen years, in which time Beethoven composed the seventh, eighth, and ninth symphonies, the last pianoforte sonatas, the Liederkreis, and the Mass in D. He turned to the quartet for the last expression in music of what life had finally come to mean to him, stone-deaf, miserable in health, weary and unhappy. There is not one of the last five quartets which does not proclaim the ultimate victory of his soul over every evil force that had beset his earthly path.
In November, 1822, Prince Nikolaus Galitzin, a man who held Beethoven’s genius in highest esteem, asked him if he would undertake the composition of three quartets. In the spring of the following year Ignaz Schuppanzigh returned to Vienna after a sevenyears’ absence and resumed his series of quartet concerts. Whether these two facts account for Beethoven’s concentration upon the composition of quartets alone during the last two years of his life is not known. Before the receipt of Prince Galitzin’s invitation Beethoven had written to Peters in Leipzig that he expected soon to have a quartet to send him. But no traces of quartet composition are to be found before 1824. Probably, then, the quartet in E-flat major,
opus 127, was composed in the spring of 1824. In 1825 the quartet in A minor, opus 132, and later that in B-flat major, opus 130, were composed. These three quartets were dedicated to Prince Galitzin. The final rondo of the quartet in B-flat major was written considerably later (was, indeed, the last of Beethoven’s compositions). Originally the last movement of this quartet was the fugue, now published separately as opus 133, which the publishers felt made the work too long and too obscure. Beethoven therefore wrote the final rondo to take its place.
There is much internal evidence that while Beethoven was at work on the last two of the quartets dedicated to Prince Galitzin he was likewise at work on the quartet in C-sharp minor, opus 131, dedicated to Baron von Stutterheim. The quartet in F major, opus 135, was written later in 1826. It was dedicated to Johann Wolfmeier.
The first performance of opus 127 was given by the Schuppanzigh quartet[74] on March 7, 1825. On September 9th of the same year, Schuppanzigh led the first private performance of opus 132 at the inn Zum Wilden Mann. It was first publicly performed at a concert given by Linke on November 6, and was well received. Opus 132 was publicly performed first (in its original form, i.e., with the fugue finale) on March 21, 1826. The second and fourth movements were encored.
Of the five last quartets the first and last are formally the most clear; the intermediate three, especially those in A minor and C-sharp minor, are perhaps the most intricate and difficult music to follow and to comprehend that has been written. All but the last are very long, and thus tax the powers of attention of the average listener often beyond endurance. Their full significance is discerned only by those who not only have made themselves intimately familiar with every note and line of them, but who have penetrated deep into the most secret mysteries of the whole art of music.
Opus 127 begins with a few measures—maestoso—which, as Dr. Riemann has suggested, play something of the same rôle in the first
movement as the Grave of the Sonata Pathétique plays there. The passing over from the introduction to the allegro is only a trill, growing softer over subdominant harmony. The allegro is in 3/4 time, and the first theme, played by the first violin, is obvious and simple, almost in the manner of a folk-song. Yet there is something sensuous in its full curves and in the close, rich scoring. The transitional passage is regularly built, and the second theme—in G minor—pure melody that cannot pass unnoticed. Everything is simple and clear. The first section ends in G major, and the development section begins with the maestoso motive in the same key, followed, just as at the opening of the movement, with the trill and the melting into the first theme. This theme is developed, leading to the maestoso in C major. It is then taken up in that key. The maestoso does not reappear as the beginning of the restatement section, the first theme coming back in the original key without introduction. Instead of the simple note-for-note scoring with which it was first presented, it is now accompanied by a steadily moving counterpoint. The second theme is brought back in E-flat major. The coda is short and simple, dying away pianissimo.
The following movement is an adagio, to be played not too slowly and in a wholly singing manner. The time is 12/8, the key, A-flat major. The opening notes, which build up slowly a chord of the dominant seventh, are all syncopated. The first violin gives only a measure or two of the melody, which, thus prepared, is then taken up by the violoncello. The second strophe is sung by the violin. There is a full cadence.
The first variation opens with the melody for violoncello, only slightly altered from its original form. The violins add a counterpoint in dialogue. This variation comes to a full stop. The second brings a change in time signature (C, andante con moto). The theme, now highly animated, is divided between the first and second violins. In the fourth variation (E major, 2/2, adagio molto espressivo) only the general outline of the theme is recognizable, cut down and much compressed. The fifth variation brings back the original tempo and the original key. The violoncello has the theme, only slightly varied in
rhythm, and the first violin a well-defined counter-melody. The sixth and last variation (in this movement) grows strangely out of the fifth, in D-flat major, sotto voce, leads to C-sharp minor, and thence to Aflat major. There is a short epilogue.
The main themes of the Scherzo and Trio which follow are so closely akin to the theme of the adagio, that the movements may be taken as further variations. The main body of the Scherzo is in that dotted rhythm of which Beethoven made frequent use in most of his last works; and is fairly regular in structure, except for the intrusion, at the end of the second part, of measures in 2/4 time, in unison, which may be taken as suggestions of still another fragmentary variation of the adagio theme. The Trio is a presto in E-flat minor.
The Finale is entirely in a vigorous, jovial and even homely vein. The themes are all clear-cut and regular; the spirit almost boisterous, suggesting parts of the ‘Academic Festival Overture’ or the Passacaglia from the fourth symphony of Brahms.
III
This E-flat major quartet was completed at the latest in January, 1825. Work on the following three quartets—in A minor, B-flat major, and C-sharp minor—began at once, but was interrupted by serious illness. About the sixth of May Beethoven moved to Gutenbrunn, near Baden; and here took up the work again. The A minor was completed not later than August, the B-flat in September or October, the C-sharp minor some months later, after his return to Vienna.
The three quartets are closely related. In the first place all show a tendency on the part of Beethoven to depart from the regular fourmovement type. There are five movements in the A minor, six in the B-flat major, seven in the C-sharp minor; though in the last, two of the movements are hardly more than introductory in character. The Danza Tedesca in G major in opus 130, was written originally in A major and intended for the A minor quartet. Finally the chromatic
motive, clearly stated in the introduction to the A minor quartet, and lying at the basis of the whole first movement, may be traced in the fugue theme in opus 130, and in the opening fugal movement of opus 131.
The A minor quartet is fundamentally regular in structure. The opening allegro is clearly in sonata-form; there follows a Scherzo and Trio. The Adagio consists of a chorale melody, thrice repeated in higher registers, with regular interludes. A short march and a final Allegro in A minor conclude the work. But the movements are all strangely sustained and at the same time intense; and there is a constant whisper of inner and hidden meanings, which cannot be grasped without deep study and which leave but a vague and mysterious impression. The chromatic motive of the introduction has a more or less cryptic significance; the chorale melody is in an unfamiliar mode; and there are reminiscences of earlier and even youthful works. So that the whole proves intricate and even in the last analysis baffling.
There are eight introductory measures (Assai sostenuto) which are in close polyphonic style out of a single motive. This motive is announced by the violoncello; immediately taken up, transposed, by the first violin; given again, inverted, by the violoncello; and in this form answered by the violin. The Allegro begins upon a diminished seventh chord in which all the instruments take part, and from which the first violin breaks with a descending and ascending run of sixteenth notes, founded upon the chord. The first theme is at once announced by the first violin, a theme which, distinct and full of character in itself, really rests upon the opening motive, or upon the harmonies implied in it. A single measure of adagio prepares for another start with the same material. The violin has another run, founded upon the diminished seventh chord, rising thereby to F. Under this the violoncello takes up the first theme, which is completed by the viola; while, it will be observed, the first violin, followed by the second, give out the opening motive, inverted, in augmentation. Later a transitional theme is announced in D minor by the first violin, closely imitated by the violoncello and the second
violin. The true second theme follows shortly after, in F major, a peaceful melody, sung by the second violin over an accompaniment in triplets shared by viola and violoncello.
The movement is fairly regular in structure. The development is short and is based chiefly upon the opening chromatic motive, with which indeed the 'cello begins it. The restatement begins in E minor, with the familiar diminished seventh run for the first violin. The second theme appears in C major, and is given to the 'cello. There is a long coda, which, toward the end, swells over a mysterious low trill to a brilliant climax.
The next movement is really a Scherzo in A major. The instruments have four measures in unison, each measure beginning with a halfstep which cannot but suggest some relationship to the chromatic motive of the first movement. But the short phrase of the first violin, begun in the fifth measure, is the real kernel of the main body of the movement. The Trio, in E major, is of magical beauty. The first section is over a droning A, shared by both violins, at first, to which the viola and 'cello soon join themselves. The melody is decidedly in folk-song manner, and is played by the first violin in high registers, and faithfully followed by the second a tenth below, both instruments maintaining at the same time their droning A.
This melody is supplanted by a lilting dance movement. The short phrases begin always on the third beat of the measure, and their accompanying harmonies are likewise syncopated, in the manner which is frequent with Brahms. The short phrases are arranged at first in dialogue fashion between first violin and viola. Later the viola converses, as it were, with itself. Only the 'cello is limited throughout the section to accompaniment. A few measures in unison between the 'cello and viola appear twice before the end of the section, the notes of which may be intended dimly to recall the chromatic motive of the first movement. A more positive phrase in alla breve time, played by second violin, viola, and 'cello in unison, brings back an epilogue echoing the opening phrases of the Trio; after which the main body of the movement is repeated.
