Generational Reenactment: Participating in Historical Reenactment to Confront Post-Deportation Trauma

The interpretation of trauma from memory, the belatedness of events, is important to a broader understanding of generational trauma and collective identity, especially in relation to the deportations at the core of Bisbee ’17 (2018), directed by Robert Greene. Affirming Grierson’s claim that “no construction of collective identity can entirely dispense with memory,” the use of memory and reenactment in Bisbee ’17 is a way to deconstruct the trauma that perforates the town of Bisbee following the Bisbee deportation of 1917 (112). Bisbee ’17 complicates the concept of participatory reenactment as a form of recovery, where “in these participatory reenactments, subjects use their words and bodies to both describe and perform their historical selves” (Fuhs 58). In the instance of Bisbee ’17, the deportation is reimagined through performance, the townsfolk playing historical characters that come to both represent themselves and the figures of the past – in the case of Mel and Steve Ray, this relationship is further complicated by their portrayal of ancestors involved in the deportation. Most notably, Greene’s use of Fernando Serrano, a young Mexican American, who is both directly and indirectly impacted by the Bisbee deportation – his own mother was deported back to Mexico – is an attempt to juxtapose past and present.