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From the late nineteenth through the twentieth century, every immigrant and would be citizen of the U.S. generated an “Alien File” (A-File), containing, in theory, the complete record of their application for citizenship and all the attendant documents that track the aspects of that individuals life that concerns the state.
This project uses Wax to build this online exhibition which displays, dissects, and interprets the evolution of the A-File over time. In doing so, we can parse out the functions and fears of the state in relation to immigrants and potential citizens. The exhibition therefore tells the story of how the U.S. devised an increasingly harsh regime of restriction and border control through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the legal developments of restriction are likewise reflected in the individual forms and documents contained in every A-file.
But every A-File also represents a life, and this online exhibition will work against the onerous apparatus of the state and its method of reducing human beings to any number of categories like race, gender, financial worth, or national origin. This project, therefore, seeks to do history from both the bottom up, and from the top down. It will critically examine the methods of exclusion and migration control perpetrated by the state through the bureaucratic banality of the A-File, while using the state generated forms intended to reduce and categorize as a basis to also tell the individual story of immigrants lives.
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