Disappearing Rooms: The Hidden Theaters of Immigration Law by Michelle Castañeda (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Disappearing Rooms: The Hidden Theaters of Immigration Law by Michelle Castañeda
• Jennifer Tyburczy

DISAPPEARING ROOMS: THE HIDDEN THEATERS OF IMMIGRATION LAW. By Michelle Castañeda. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023; pp. 200.

Michelle Castañeda’s book Disappearing Rooms: The Hidden Theaters of Immigration Law is a tour de force that clearly demonstrates how the study of cultural performance provides an indispensable tool for understanding social performances and everyday life. Castañeda diagnoses various institutions at the sites of their theatrical manipulations—the disappearing rooms in her title—to show how immigration law, the prison-industrial complex, and even sometimes immigration activists stage these institutional mise-en-scènes in ways that play into the [End Page 590] (in)visibility of carceral power. At its core, the book is a decolonial love letter toward the abolition of what Castañeda, borrowing from Michel Foucault, refers to throughout the book as the prison heterotopia. Viewed through the scenography of the various rooms (e.g., the removal room and immigration courtrooms inside detention centers) that make up the primary sites of Castañeda’s analysis, this prison heterotopia operates through a “strategic investment in incoherence” that incites a “delirious impression” and “the feeling of living among absurdly derealized forms [that come] to define the experience of imprisonment itself” (58–59). This absurdity, Castañeda deftly explains, is calculated, stylized, and carefully choreographed in high stakes environments where life-altering decisions are made. Who can enter and who cannot enter the US, yes, but also the rooms she details, hangs in the balance.

In addition to a writing style that is clear, engaging, accessible, and theoretically rigorous, Castañeda’s words perform alongside the illustrations of artist, activist, and journalist Molly Crabapple, who depicts many of the scenes that Castañeda vividly describes and unpacks in each of her three chapters. These illustrations, based on Crabapple’s interpretation of what she was told by volunteers such as Castañeda who accompany (im)migrants, make visible what Castañeda evocatively elicits in her prose: the absurdity of immigration’s “hidden theaters” and the ways in which those detained and contained by these rooms navigate, view, and perceive the colonial spaces of immigration law. The result is a uniquely innovative and interdisciplinary performance studies text that shows the intricate scenographic details of rarely seen environments and does the urgent work of accompanying people through the marked and unmarked doors of courtrooms and detention centers. Disappearing Rooms will be an indispensable text across several fields including theater and performance studies, Latina/x/o Studies, US-Mexico borderland studies, visual culture studies, and migration and immigration studies, among others. Suitable for undergraduate and graduate students alike, Disappearing Rooms is a model of academic writing at its best and a pioneer in writer-artist collaboration.

Castañeda’s cogent use of mise-en-scène as method becomes possible through her embodied practices of accompanying racialized and mostly Central American (im)migrants through the obscured spaces of detention centers and courtrooms. Her exquisitely penned meditations on what it means to practice accompaniment reveal the intentionally designed obstacles to bearing witness within a carceral theater predicated on “making the event of disappearance into a nonevent” (33). While taking care not to elide important differences between them, Castañeda delineates certain strategies of disappearance that connect US-Mexico border regimes and US-sponsored military dictatorships throughout the Americas. Namely, Castañeda analyzes a central paradox to the staging of disappearance as a “condition planned, executed, and arranged to appear as though nothing had been planned, executed, or arranged” (27). In the case of the immigration rooms that are the focus of her study, she argues that these disappearance strategies become evident through the mise-en-scéne that is at once dependent on the spectacle of inventing and removing the “criminal immigrant” while “erecting a shadow zone of law insulated from accountability and devoid of normativity” (39). The incoherence of immigration law’s mise-en-scène hinges upon this dynamic of simultaneously displaying and hiding. Alongside Crabapple’s illustrations, Castañeda’s accompaniment practices gift the reader with a multi-sensual “being with” that rearranges...