INTRODUCTION TO THE PRESIDENTIAL PLENARY "TRANSNATIONAL FAMILIES: THE IMPACT OF SEPARATION BETWEEN PARENTS AND CHILDREN"

Marcelo Pakman

Welcome to the presidential plenary. This is the plenary of AFTA president, Celia Falicov. She asked me to give an introductory address, and supplied me with the title of the plenary, •Transnational families: the impact of separation between parents and children.• So, as I began to work, I knew that I had to link two things: an Introduction and a Subject, which, in a broad sense, had to do with the life of immigrant families. This subject proved too difficult to introduce, so I left it for the presenters. After all, I thought, that is what presenters do: they present something. I could always present the presenters and not bother about the rest. But they were going to present themselves while doing their presentations. Besides that, at the time I prepared these remarks, I had no interest in annoying you with a hyperbolic presentation of their merits•not that this wouldn•t have been easy, because they have many, but their presentations will speak for themselves.

Still, I had to say something. If the presenters were going to present themselves, and the subject was going to be presented by them, I was left with the concept I had started with: •introduction.• What are the traditions linked to •introductions?• The first two that came to mind were of little or no help to me. The traditions of Prefaces and Forewords come from literature; they do not apply to presentations like this one, which are, in a way, performances. I was glad, then, to find that there was a third concept•one that comes from the performative tradition•that is, the concept of prologue. The tradition of making prologues gave me insight as to the task at hand•this introduction•and, surprisingly, told me something about the subject that I am supposed to introduce that I want to share with you.

Originally the Greek term •Prologos,• literally, •before the word or before the discourse,• was the part of the drama explaining what the Romans would call the •ante-factum,• meaning •before the facts,• so as to provide a context. It also had the surrogate goal of producing what the Romans later called •captatio benevolentiae,• to capture the benevolence of the audience.

It was with the roman author Luciano that the Prologue was first identified with an actor, now named •Prologus•: the one making the first speech. This tradition of casting the Prologue as an actor was later taken up both by the Elizabethan theater, in which the Prologue followed the tradition of an actor proclaiming the subject of the drama to follow, and by the Italian Comedia dell•Arte. It is from the Comedia dell•Arte that it was taken by musicians like Ruggiero Leoncavallo, who opened his famous opera I Pagliacci, •The Clowns,• with the beautiful •aria• in which a baritone sings: •Io sono il Prologo,• •I am the Prologue.• In this tradition, Prologus is not someone who, sharing the script with the actors, starts revealing it to the audience. He unveils not only something the audience does not yet know, but something the characters themselves do not know either, and will not know until the moment at which the drama unfolds later on. Even at that point, though, the actors will experience the plot in a way, and from a position, different from that which Prologus had presented to the audience.

The tradition of Prologus as the unveiler to the audience of things even the actors do not know themselves, started with Plautus, who cast the god Hermes as Prologus. To the extent that, in this new incarnation, Prologus embodied as Hermes was presenting something the actors themselves did not know•something they would not even know upon the completion of the drama•what Prologus was presenting was something absent from the drama. Hermes, thus representing what was absent in the presentation of the actors, was making what in French is called an •explicitation• and, in English, an •interpretation.• No wonder, then, that Hermeneutics, the twentieth-century discipline of interpretation, took its name from that Hermes, the unveiler of the drama who tells things about the presenters even they are not aware of. Thus, Hermes interprets what is going to be present and presented; and he represents it in one among many possible ways.

Prologus, in his acting performance, not only presents (showing what is there, that which presents itself by the act of being), but also represents (makes present what is not there, trying to bring forward what is absent). Thus, Prologus interprets. It was building on and making visible this inevitable and powerful interpretive quality of Prologus that Jorge Luis Borges imagined writing a book of prologues for nonexistent books, one that would be full of •exemplary quotations from these possible works.• This book would show that a prologue is, as he put it, •not a subservient form of a toast, but a marginal species of critique.•

But critique, or, interpretation, as Serge Leclaire has shown, always entails a certain degree of violence. Interpretations always transform, and thus disrespect, what is present, making it visible through a particular lens that somehow distorts it. We see what is present through what is represented. Presentations, ultimately, infinitely regress, and as Jacques Derrida has pointed out, every presentation, when deconstructed, leaves us only with further representations. Representations frame what is present and make it available to perception and reason, to emotion and action, to meaning and further representing. Closing the hermeneutic circle, if a Prologue is critique and interpretation, every presentation is ultimately Prologue.

So, we have briefly traced a few milestones in the tradition of performing introductions. What does this dialectics of presenting and representing, of presence and absence, of interpreting, tell us about the life experience of immigrants?

I see at least four possible connections . . . readings . . . interpretations:

First. The circumstances of immigration make particularly visible to what extent  we, our vacillating identities, are defined not only by what is present and visible but also by what is absent, invisible, and in need of representation. Disrupted ties now maintained in the distance•the flavors, the colors, the skies, the sounds of music and language, the humor, the eroticism of everyday life, the whole texture of the home country•form a permanent absence, an invisible background the immigrant tries hard to represent and recover. The immigrant•s performed behavior is always lacking, for the other in the host society, and thus for him or herself, the clues for that pervasive absence to be represented as a dominant frame from which to give him a meaning which would still make him or her feel him- or her-self. Immigrants suffer from invisibility. What made them themselves is no longer there. •The self does not find him or herself among us anymore.• It can, to a certain extent, be represented, but what happens with the representations of immigrant themselves in the cultural borderland in which they meet with the representations of the host society?

This leads to the second point. In the cultural borderland immigrants inhabit, their behavior tends to be read not only and not basically through their own representation of what is absent and would make it meaningful, but through the more dominant representations the host society has of both the immigrant•s own country and his/her current life as an immigrant. Like protagonists of one of the nonexistent books Borges was imagining could be prologued, immigrants• lives become punctuated and constructed through the available representations provided by the host society, observing, accepting or refusing, stereotyping or misunderstanding, integrating or excluding them. In the market of representations, immigrants• own ones tend to be devalued or subordinated to further reframing by the most dominant host society. Thus, the only option for the immigrant trying to reconstruct selfhood, quite frequently becomes the option of trying on the identities that are offered by the dominant society.

Although most Peruvians and Ecuadorians do not play the pan flute dressed with Andean clothing, most Argentineans are not macho tango dancers, most Spaniards are not bullfighters, most Colombians are not money laundering drug dealers, most Mexicans are not tequila drinking serenade players, most Brazilians do not live in a permanent Carnival, most Latin American intellectuals are not politically conscious human rights defenders from exotic lands, and a lot of Spanish speaking people do not come from palm tree-ridden countries of warm weather, many end up playing those roles, redefining themselves, their present and their pasts through the representations ready made for them to try on.

Third. Therapeutic approaches sometimes collude with this process in which immigrants are actors in a performance prologued by the host society in a way that leaves little room for their own representations to succeed in making visible what needs to be visible in order to rebuild selfhood in a meaningful and non alienated way. In the United States, the cultural competence credo, quite dominant among the official multiculturalism movement, has made way in the therapeutic world. Courses to train people about how to work with Latinos, Asians, African Americans, etc. are still mushrooming, correctly sponsored by academic institutions. Of course there are no courses to learn how to do therapy with plain Americans, because they are defined by default as those without ethnicity, to whom plain regular therapy applies.

Four. Immigrants• selfhood needs to be reconstructed through a process that is psychological, social and political. This process happens not exclusively in language. Immigrant neighborhoods do not protect people from ultimately breathing local air and eating local food, or at least cooking it with and drinking local water. Many new onset cases of gastrointestinal and respiratory illnesses happen to immigrants. The gastrointestinal and respiratory layers become the borders across which the tensions of living in cultural borderlands are frequently played. So, too, are the borders across which immigrants interact with the host society: the school system, the health system, and the legal system. But immigrant neighborhoods increase the chance for immigrants to gain some sovereignty over their own representations. Graffiti is only one outward sign of that battle. For many immigrant boys, control of neighborhood streets through violence, and for many immigrant girls, affirmation of control of their bodies through pregnancy, become the only territories in which to reconstruct themselves in an illusionary freedom that also shows the mark of alienation in stereotyped roles.

Immigrant neighborhoods also provide a privileged place to speak the mother tongue and recreate what is not present. Even without a visible territory, immigrants speaking their mother tongue recreate what an Eastern European author called a •language kingdom made up only of words,• one that, though •without a king or a parliament, an army or civil service,• exists •only in the minds and mouths of its speakers, and they keep it a secret from everyone else.•