Excerpt

Anthropologist Susan Bibler Coutin’s On the Record is, at its core, an ethnographically informed intervention peeling back the strata of documents (and attendant processes of documentation) whose creation, storage, retrieval, and ultimately use by various stakeholders is central to what it means - and what it takes - to be an undocumented immigrant in contemporary United States (US). Based on several years of hands-on fieldwork with the staff and clients of a nonprofit that provides low-cost legal services for individuals seeking immigration relief, Coutin’s work is in the business of, to borrow from the author, documenting documentation: it seeks, in other words, to explicate the multitude of ways in which both government-issued immigration forms and ordinary everyday records including (but not limited to) paychecks, utility bills, receipts, bank statements, school files and the like play enabling and disabling roles as such individuals strive to navigate a seemingly impossible bureaucratic terrain and a complex legal matrix.

One major contribution of On the Record is its deployment and unpacking of a key heuristic, papereality, in the context of the pursuit of legal status by undocumented immigrants. Leveraging David Drey’s definition of that concept as a situation presenting ‘a world of symbols, or written representations, that take precedence over the things and events represented’ (p 12), Coutin discusses the archiving strategies immigrants develop and implement, with guidance and assistance from the legal service providers, to shoulder the (sometimes nebulous) administrative burdens incidental to the pursuit of status. Here, archiving emerges as a form of agency whereby immigrants, often acting in a mode of prescient anticipation, document - with miscellaneous written records of daily life - the origins, flows, trajectories, transitions, and destinations of their own lives in an effort to satisfy the dictates and expectations of immigration law (with respect, for instance, to dates of entry, duration of presence, moral character et cetera). This is understood, in the author’s account, as a form of documenting back to the very state which sees itself – through, among other mechanisms, its exercise of epistemic, administrative, and judicial authority over immigration law, paperwork, and various institutions – as the ultimate arbiter of who belongs (and who does not) in the national body politic.