Immigrant Rights Documentaries and Engagement: Eliciting Emotion to Counter the Latino Threat Narrative

This article analyzes the way Immigrant Rights Documentaries elicit emotion in order to engage the viewers. “Engagement theory,” developed by C. Plantinga, is used to shed light on the cognitive but also affecting processes at work in these films. Four documentaries, released between 2005 and 2009, are scrutinized: La Americana (Nicholas Bruckman, 2008), Point of Entry (Zeus Quijano Jr, 2009), Al Otro Lado (Natalia Almada, 2005) and Crossing Arizona (Dan DeVivo and Joseph Mathew, 2006). Since these films exclusively involve Latino immigrants who crossed the US-Mexico border without authorization, the study will focus on the way emotional engagement can contribute to counteracting the Latino Threat Narrative (Leo R. Chavez) that portrays Latino immigrants as “aliens” coming to invade the U.S.