Kinship of the Flesh: The Carceral-Ethnographic Extractive and Kinship Violation in A Better Life

Deportations during the Obama era, along with antimigrant state legislation, such as SB 1070 in Arizona, made family separation a palpable reality for undocumented migrants at the end of the first decade of the twentieth-first century. A timely rebuke, Chris Weitz’s film A Better Life (2011) tells the story of a father and son whose hopes for a better life, planted in the Southern California gardening economy, are razed by deportation and family separation. This essay demonstrates how the film’s “authentic” depiction of the struggles of undocumented communities, gleaned from collaboration with Latinx and migrant NGOs in Los Angeles, has its lynchpin in what I term the carceral-ethnographic extractive, an ethnographic and filmic modality of life extraction integral to the accumulative strategies of a racial, capitalist, carceral state. Bringing Latinx studies to bear on racial theories of (de)valuation, this essay contends that A Better Life champions a migrants’ rights model that further cements citizenship as the primary arm of a violent settler racial state. I propose a kinship of the flesh to counter the film’s neoliberal multicultural logic by reexamining how the privatized economies of migrant family separation are grounded in the country’s foundational extractive histories of US kinship violation.