Undocuments

Undocuments is an archive of documentary ephemera collected not to construct a coherent whole, but to trace the visible and invisible connections among them. Documents perform differently in the pages of the book, revealing their constitutive and deconstructive capacities.'— ALH Online Review

‘A tour de force, UNDOCUMENTS breaks rules and creates new ones. Through deft handling of texts, both theoretical and historical, Rivera offers us a compendium of diverse people and items such as documents, poems, the Florentine Codex, Anzaldúa, Bataille, [and] philosophy, along with objects like el molcajete. Using a true mestizaje of genre and approaches, he cooks up a rich poetic stew that is stimulating, intriguing, and nourishing.’—Norma Elia Cantú, author of Cabañuelas: A Novel

‘UNDOCUMENTS is an intrepid, unsettling, and complex account of documentary practices that regulate the appearance and disappearance of Indigenous, Mexican-descendant, and contemporary Latinx life-worlds available to the historical record. In this profound work, John-Michael Rivera integrates critical commitment and personal memory with a plural poetics attuned to such survivals as the Florentine Codex in latter-day U.S. policy that turned the Sonoran Desert into a massive graveyard for migrants. Rivera is an experimentalist haunted by the obliteration of lives in the mirror-encyclopedia of the past; by the ghost ontology erasures begot in the present; by the spectral encounter of Bataille, Derrida, Emma Tenayuca, Rubén Salazar, and Anzaldúa; and by the quest for justice that a research imagination enables.’—Roberto Tejada, University of Houston

‘This genre-bending joyride asks readers to consider how undocumentation shapes Latinx lives and what we know about them. With wit and theoretical acumen, Rivera offers an interactive experience that will foster conversation for years to come.’—Lee Bebout, author of Mythohistorical Interventions: The Chicano Movement and Its Legacies

‘Haunting and haunted, John-Michael Rivera’s UNDOCUMENTS delves into the bordered unconscious—a militarized and surveilled zone between nations and languages heretofore only visited by mystic seers, some Latinx, some not, and divinely touched authors—Myriam Gurba, Salvador Plascencia, and James Joyce come to mind. Is this a memoir? A reliquary? Both? As the pages turn and readers and viewers (word and image vie for attention in this testimonial book for the ages) consume Rivera’s masterpiece, they will become mestizajefied, not metastasized, as this clever opus crawls its way into their psyche.’—William Anthony Nericcio, author of Homer from Salinas: John Steinbeck’s Enduring Voice for California

'Undocuments will make an important contribution to medical humanities and medical anthropology courses for the ways in which medical histories are unearthed through seemingly unrelated documents and stories and then connected back to present lives. In my experience working with medical students, it is important for them to see and feel how cultural violence and traumas become inherited pathologies and passed down in ways that are material and palpable. Undocuments is an important book—a consolidation of truths and [T]ruths that we must see, beautifully written, and unexpectedly but necessarily vulnerable.'—Elizabeth Farfán-Santos, Journal of Latin American Caribbean Anthropology