Javier Zamora and Undocuactivism: a digital humanities project on Instagram
By: Jade Yeung
Tags: Digital Humanities, Activism, Undocumented, Immigration, Poetry

This essay accompanies my final project for Contemporary Latinx Literature: Undocumented Subjects, taught in Fall 2020 at Rutgers-Newark University by Professor Laura Lomas.

Background by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash. Design by Jade Yeung.

In this digital humanities project I created a public Instagram (IG) account and positioned Javier Zamora’s words next to activists, artists, and academics in order to show how a poetics of resistance informs Zamora’s work. By extending Unaccompanied, Zamora’s debut poetry collection, beyond the print medium and into IG I am also attempting to reconcile the descendent gesture of the final poem in the collection. By scrolling through the IG feed a reader will find that each subsequent post contextualizes the previous, seeing juxtapositions and parallels. Taken all together, the visuals will help them generate a multifaceted understanding of political poetry. The work of Zamora resists normalized narratives of uplift and it is this resistance that parallels other undocumented artist activists of his generation who consciously use Instagram to trouble colonial and assimilationist attitudes. By using Instagram to position Zamora’s work alongside his contemporaries and canonical influences I also create a visual rhetoric of counternarratives that advances Zamora’s connection to a black American poetic and activist tradition.

AGAINST UPLIFT

When I first finished Unaccompanied I was struck by how the last poem, “June 10, 1999,” deals less directly with the speaker’s trauma, like much of the book does, and turns instead to questions about the value of poetry and the value of trauma. In this last poem Zamora writes an ars poetica in which he corrects his own memories and expresses doubt over his career choice. When he writes, “when I ride the bus / correction when I rode buses,” and “I’m tired of writing the fence the desert,” and “when will you [speaker] stop / not being that June 10,” there’s a sense that Zamora has confronted his trauma so often in the process of writing this book that he has started to wonder if poetry is changing anything for himself or for his community (79, 81, 83). With frankness he writes, “I was supposed to be . . . someone of value” (89). In the same poem series Zamora is concerned with how his grandmother won’t leave the house and in trying to write about it he seems to suggest poetry’s failure to convey this hurt. He writes, “no bullshit / no metaphor” (86). The last section of “June 10, 1999” ends with “I sit here type . . .” Then Zamora repeats the first line of the first section of the same series and eventually ends the book with, “nothing has changed” (91). Additionally, the section titles are identical, as if Zamora is cycling back to the page in repeated attempts to make language do what he wants and needs it to do. What are we to make of this despairing ending? One could easily conclude that Zamora is a pessimist or a defeatist, but I’d argue that the ending of Unaccompanied is actively resisting narratives of uplift and ascendent gestures that are often expected of poetry.

When a writer who’s been through a traumatic experience decides to share their story, like Zamora has done, they often have to reconcile how they want to tell their story and the reader’s expectations of their story. In the poetry industry the reader’s expectations often have more to do with their own desire for narratives of uplift and closure than with the poet’s actual experience of complex, ongoing trauma. In an interview Zamora spoke about his experience with Louise Glück at Stanford where he had to reconcile her expectations of him. He said, “[Glück] encouraged me to stop writing about immigration,” and went on to say,

“I might be one of those writers that always has to write about immigration. I don’t want to, but there’s something still inside of me that’s like, dude, you’re not healed yet” (Alam 00:33:15–00:34:15).

It’s possible that because of literary dissonances like these Vievee Francis, a black poet, regularly teaches a workshop called, “The Sky Is Falling: Ascendant And Descendent Gestures In The Poem,” in which students consciously question and resist the poetics of uplift. One course description reads, “We will discuss . . . how we may use various types of closure to free ourselves from received (and often gendered) uninterrogated beliefs around positivity in our efforts to write resonant, impactful work” (“Look!”). Unaccompanied troubles expected ascendant narratives of healing, and instead renders the trauma of being an unaccompanied minor as a circuitous, unresolved journey that confounds the reader’s desire for moral or political closure.

Unaccompanied reveals an open wound created by a traumatic migration experience. This “herida abierta,” as Gloria Anzaldúa would use the term, is apparent in the descendent gesture at the end of Zamora’s book. In “June 10, 1999,” Zamora writes, “I wasn’t born here / I’ve always known this country wanted me dead” (87). This admittance of survival is reminiscent of Audre Lorde, who wrote,

“For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson — that we were never meant to survive”

(Lorde 42). For Zamora, poetry maps the discontinuity of pain and healing, and demonstrates healing even as the cure fails. The reader is left with the open wound, the continuance of trauma even after repeated attempts at resolution; nothing has changed. And yet this stasis of healing becomes a site of political resistance because continual survival and expression is required of the poet if they’re to coalesce at all. To stop writing about immigration, as Glück has suggested to Zamora, is to plug up the wound and say that the past is done, everything has changed and America is good now; it’s time to be quiet.

UNDOCUACTIVISM AND VISUAL LITERACY

According to his Instagram, on September 9, 2019 Zamora visited the exact spot where he believes he crossed the border in Douglas, Arizona twenty years before. In the post he writes, “there was a rainbow and it started to rain. #salvi.” It was on this trip that Zamora returned to El Salvador for the first time since he was nine and was eventually able to secure a EB1 visa. If we read through Unaccompanied into Zamora’s social media we find, in fact, some things have changed — there is rain and rainbows. We find that the poet continues the stasis of healing. For immigrant artists and Instagramers such as Sonia Guiñansaca, Divya Seshadri, and Jess X. Snow the practice of resistance by way of self-care and community care is advanced in the visual and written rhetoric of their IG accounts. In this Instagram digital humanities project I position Javier Zamora’s words alongside writers and artists who embrace an intersectional practice of healing and resistance. This positioning will bridge the descendent arc of Unaccompanied to undocuactivism’s call for community care, rage, action, and advocacy.

Background by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash. Design by Jade Yeung.

Unlike other social media networks, Instagram’s potential for polyvocality made it the perfect platform to draw parallels between Zamora and other artists who resist in similar ways. I would be lying if I said that I was comforted by the resistance to closure I saw in “June 10, 1999” at first read. I had been trained to desire transcendence in poetry, too, and after I finished Unaccompanied I checked Zamora’s Instagram the way I might check on a friend I used to be close with but didn’t really know anymore. I wanted to know, how’s he doing — is he okay? I was delighted to find that he had in fact been able to return to El Salvador and had obtained a visa. These autobiographical facts don’t erase Unaccompanied’s themes of homesickness and childhood loss, but they did make me want to extend the book so that it came in conversation with Zamora’s personal Instagram and other immigrant artists on the platform. I only joined Instagram after encountering numerous poets at readings and workshops who used the platform to stay in touch with each other. I relented and finally created a personal account last year. Since I was joining late in the game and had heard friends complain about Instagram already, I was mindful of the platform’s issues with both physical superficiality and the romanticization of poetry, the latter supposedly being better than the former (Pâquet 299). Given all this, I purposely curated my feed by only following black, brown, queer, immigrant writers and artists, as well as organizations that had a mission to further social justice.

I hadn’t known it at the time but I was curating a feed full of “undocuartivism,” as Joanna B. Pérez would call it. In Pérez’s article, “Undocuartivism: Latino[x] Undocumented Immigrant Empowerment through Art and Activism,” she focuses on the activists who were prominent during the “Undocumented & Unafraid” movement in the early 2000’s and defines “undocuactivists” as “undocumented immigrant young adult activists” (Pérez 30–31, 23). The activists of the time were mostly concerned with getting the public to simply see that undocumented people were deserving of respect and the figure of the “DREAMer” was perfect for this messaging (30). In 2006, activists organized the Day Without An Immigrant boycott. At the time Zamora was a teenager and although he witnessed the historic event from the sidelines, he credits that movement for giving him the courage to write his own immigration story (Alam 00:11:52–00:13:18). Since the 2000’s, the undocumented activist movement has shifted away from this strategy of visibility and is now more concerned with an anti-assimilationist, anti-Latinidad, decentered, and decolonial rhetoric. Pérez says that the movement of the 2000’s played an “essential role in dispelling myths of undocumented immigrants while also providing spaces of resistance and empowerment for undocumented immigrants” and in many ways, today’s campaigns are still interested in this (23). However, today’s undocuactivists are more willing to “resist liberal respectability and pragmatism,” as Urayoán Noel points out (533). In Noel’s article, “The Queer Migrant Poemics of #Latinx Instagram,” he posits that “the hashtag activism of queer migrant poets such as [Sonia] Guiñansaca and [Alan] Pelaez Lopez embodies an irreverent, radical decentering of US Latinidad and its proximities to hegemonic identities (whiteness, citizenship, the gender binary, and so on)” (532). Although Pérez and Noel are dealing with two distinct periods and practices, they overlap in the way they cover the undocuactivism of Sonia Guiñansaca, a queer Ecuadorian poet and organizer from Harlem.

When I was a student at Hunter College I knew of Guiñansaca, who was two years ahead of me, but the first time I met them was probably at the launch of AMPLIFY(HER), a “first-ever zine by and for undocumented wom[x]n from the Asian diaspora” of which I was the production coordinator (“AMPLIFY(HER) Launch.”). The journal was started by members of RAISE and DRUM, nonprofit organizations that serve local AAPI communities in New York City. RAISE was specifically created by students who were supporting each other as they worked on their DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) applications, and in this sense they’re a part of the generation from the early 2010’s that benefited from DACA while also knowing that, by design, it was “exclusionary and liminal” (Pérez 39). It was this paradox that made them aware that “there was still a need to carve out spaces of resistance and empowerment,” as Pérez has said of the earlier undocuactivists (40). In 2015 Angel Sutjipto, my friend and project manager of AMPLIFY(HER), invited me to work on the journal. As a U.S. citizen I was humbled and heartened to have been a part of the project. And seeing all the undocumented artists and activists working on the project gave me hope during the 2016 presidential election. Through my network at Hunter, at AMPLIFY(HER), and beyond I encountered immigrant activists such as Guiñansaca, Jess X. Snow, and Aja Monet whose intersectional politics of self-care and resistance were two sides of the same coin. I became aware of how protest art created a “counternarrative of undocumented immigrants living in the US,” as well as counternarratives for queer, disabled, and Afro-Latinx people (Pérez 23). So naturally, when I joined Instagram years later they were the first people I followed and the first artists I thought of as I clicked into Zamora’s IG feed to see how he was doing. I should point out that I’m not attempting to queer Unaccompanied by drawing paralles between Zamora and the artists that Noel covers in his article, but I do wish to show how Zamora’s anti-uplift poetics are a kind of undocuactivism as well.

Zamora YAWP! An Open Dialogue on Creativity and the Arts at Quinnipiac University

Social media has the potential to continually upend, distort, and recontextualize narratives, but before there was social media there were projects like The Black Book. M.A. Harris and Toni Morrison worked with collectors to compile the content that eventually made it into The Black Book in 1974. In the preface, while using the book as a persona, Morrison writes,

“I am all the ways I survived . . . I am all the things I have ever loved . . . I am not complete here; there is much more, but there is no more time and no more space . . . and I have journeys to take, ships to name, and crews” (Harris).

This preface partly sparked my idea for this digital humanities project, but what really helped me conceptualize the project was thinking about the ways in which The Black Book and the goal of undocuactivists are slightly different. The Black Book was created before the 24-hour news cycle and before a generation of children watched the Twin Towers fall non-stop on TV. It was created before the rise of mass shootings and before the world watched Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and George Floyd die on camera.

Open up to any page in The Black Book and you’ll find triggering, racist images ranging from lynchings to cereal advertisements. The book was created when people said it was important to look, one must look at atrocities. Others will say for the sake of mental health, one doesn’t need to look at these images. These two schools of thought, both grounded in generational and cultural differences, are argued even more fiercely today (Jones). More recently researchers have been looking into how media and PTSD are related and studies are finding “that people can be affected vicariously, by physically watching” a traumatic event (Jones). Similarly, in an article titled “Self-Care for Black Journalists,” Patrice Peck speaks with a psychologist that “advises her Black clients . . . to unplug from social media to recover from stress and recommends they not watch videos of Black people being harmed” (Peck). Our current state of media with its autoplay violence is another reason why artists on Instagram seek to carve out spaces for empowerment that are safe from trauma. This conflict of whether to look or not look played out in 2019 after a photo of Óscar Alberto’s and Angie Valeria Martínez Ramírez’s dead bodies circulated widely in the news and on social media. Some argued that the photo could change hearts and minds, others like Sonia Guiñansaca argued that the nonmigrant Latinx people circulating the photo were “building large platforms and cultural capital on the pain and death of migrant bodies” (Noel 549). Throughout this project I remained mindful of all of these arguments and tried to stay clear of any images or text that could cause harm.

Even with its candid images of violence, The Black Book is still important because of the way it simultaneously preserves history and recontextualizes it. Howard Rambsy observes,

“Taken together, the contents of the page visually and linguistically present a horrific scene of antiblack racism. Readers are inclined to exercise both prose and visual literacy in order to absorb the implications of the text” (85).

He goes on to say that “positioning of the poetic excerpts reveals that verse could assist in defining the apparent meaning of images” (87). In some ways, Instagram requires users to exercise the same dual literacy and it is what I intended by positioning Zamora’s words next to the artists I reposted in the project’s IG feed.

METHODS

To create this Instagram digital humanities project I had to plan the IG page as if it were a marketing campaign. I researched and collected visual and textual content for the IG feed, then organized all the content into a timeline that exhibited thematic cohesion. For every feed post I had to conduct photo research, design graphics, write captions with the appropriate hashtags, write alternative text (for accessibility), and properly credit or cite any sources. I also created a Linktr.ee that directs users to the website of every artist or writer I cite in the IG feed. Additionally, I requested permission from Javier Zamora to create this project and I cleared permissions for every piece of IG content I reposted. Because these content creators already have their work on IG and the platform has an unofficial practice of users reposting content, it made sense to use IG for these reasons as well. Finally, I didn’t want the concerns of this project to appear in a vacuum so I also created story highlights that elevate organizations that have intersectional missions related to immigration rights, prison abolition, and black liberation.