Julio Underground America

On May 2nd, my group performed a story of Julio, from the book Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives edited by Peter Orner. We then received feedback from our professor and other students about what we need to improve on. Since then, we have brainstormed ways to make our performance more effective. On May 18th, my class will combine our performances to create one long performance with our improved performance opening the piece. I will discuss how it was like working with a group, and
My group worked well together, despite a few hiccups. We all found revising the performance was frustrating. We knew what needed to be fixed, like making it broader and refining certain points to be more abstract. However, none of us knew exactly …show more content…
We decided to have balloons that will be popping. One, in particular, will be a black balloon that represents one of the fallen undocumented immigrants that die on the way to the United States, which Julio is supposed to discover. This alarming sound will be unexpected compared to the other events of the piece. According to Bell (2008), the alienation effect shocks the audience when they are left with uncomfortable feelings (pg. 203). The balloons popping, along with the red lights that we have kept from our first performance, will push alienation effect for the audience.
Our piece will utilize the act of mimesis. Through the act of repetition, our story will have greater meaning within the piece (Madison and Hamera, 2006, pg. xviii). In this piece, I will be representing the border patrol and will be making rhythmic marching noises as I’m moving closer to Julio. We will also have “Julio” be trying to run through a human border that tries to keep him out. In both of these examples, the repetition assigns meaning to these specific actions which can be differently interpreted by an …show more content…
According to Stephanie Anderson (2016), the first learning objective is “Students will be able to place contemporary developments in cultural, historical, environmental, and spatial contexts.” This performance explores the social issue of undocumented workers who experience undue hardships because of the harsh immigrations laws of the United States. These human stories can be understood by us as students through our wish for a better life despite the differences in circumstances. This fulfills the second learning objective for the class, which states that through the class, “Students will be able to identify the dynamics of ethnic, cultural, gender/sexual, age-based, class, regional, national, transnational, and global identities and the similarities, differences, linkages, and interactions between them,” (Anderson, 2016). The third learning objective according to Anderson (2016) is “Students will be able to evaluate social science information, draw on different points of view, and formulate applications appropriate to contemporary social issues.” This performance is an example of how the collection of people’s stories, shows a pattern of difficulties and sorrow. These issues can be directly stemmed from the social issue of immigration, and if the outlook of the issue changed, so would these stories. It can be hard to remember that laws that don’t directly affect us