Immigration law, through its discursive system of courts, codes, customs, agencies, and agents, negotiates the future citizenry by interpreting and defining the terms through which a nation may systematically recognize, represent, neglect, or oppress its inhabitants. Policing of recognition is internal to representative democracy in establishing the state, the law, and its practice, whether through formal hearings or through what Jacques Ranciere would call “the partitioning of the senses,” as the distribution of that which can be seen, heard, or otherwise sensed in different spaces at different times. These “distributions of the sensible” are constantly at work, formally and informally, through the negotiations of signs, performances, and facts that bind bodies and identities, and these, to politics. The status quo is the resulting distribution of recognition and resources influenced by the way we comprehend and organize in the face of the powers that be, otherwise received as “the future” denoted as a prospective condition of success or prosperity. 

As Christopher Pinney points out in The Waterless Sea: A Curious History of Mirages, “the internalized beholder may have been necessary in order to direct the viewer’s attention to an inadequately presenced mystery.” Likewise, the territory in which undocumentation is enacted is mystified in jurisprudence and its performative codes of representation. Think, for instance, of the positions lawyers take behind their clients as they perform their role within the legal system to convey a claim for “the future,” and their client’s future more precisely. Hold this thought while Pinney directs us to Joseph Leo Koerner’s examination of Friedrich’s usage of the Rückenfigur motif: 

...as a figure of belatedness who obstructs our possession of the picture space. In the absence of the halted traveller, our eye moves freely through the landscape represented within the image. The presence of that figure ‘radically alters the way we see the painted world beyond us... I do not stand at the threshold where the scene opens up, but at the point of exclusion, where the world stands complete without me.’ 

In order to open legal territory to inch closer to a more comprehensive image of the pluriverse we need to develop ways to recognize perceptions beyond the codes through which “the future” is framed. Higuera’s work presents facsimiles of migrant images documenting moments of intimacy with territories beyond the courtrooms, and to be invoked there, to claim the space and time for recognition and “the future” along with it.