The Department of Spanish and Portuguese would like to congratulate Associate Professor Dr. Ana Puga on the publication of her book Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration: Heroes, Martyrs and Saints, co-authored with Victor M. Espinosa: 

"Focusing on archetypal characters with nineteenth-century roots that recur in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries – heroic saviors, saintly mothers and struggling fathers, martyred children and rebellious youth – [Performances of Suffering...] shows how theater practitioners, filmmakers, visual artists, advocates, activists, journalists, and others who want to help migrants often create migrant melodramas, performances that depict their heroes as virtuous victims at the mercy of evil villains. In order to gain respect for the human rights that are supposedly already theirs on paper and participate in a global market that trades in performances of suffering, migrants themselves sometimes accept the roles into which they are cast, or even cast themselves. Some express their suffering publicly, often on demand. Others find ways to twist, parody, resist, or reject migrant melodrama." 

The book draws on a transdisciplinary methodological toolkit, from performance studies to ethnographic fieldwork, to examine "the political economy of suffering."  While recognizing the longer historical trajectory of this economy, the book is also an extremely timely analysis of the current moment. The book is available on the Palgrave Macmillan website.

Congratulations, Ana and Victor!