Invited Migration from Argentina, Hispanidad, and Spain's Tightened Borders: Ariadna Pujol's Documentary, Aguaviva (2006)

This paper examines how Ariadna Pujol's prize-winning documentary, Aguaviva (2006), creatively addresses the complexities of contemporary invited migration from Argentina into rural Spain in the context of tightened migration policies. The film thus places Latin American immigration into a context different from the US focus on undocumented movement from south of the US-Mexico border that is based on considering Latin American migrants as racially different from the majority US nation. Aguaviva documents a repopulation project that invited carefully preselected migrant families from Argentina to the small Spanish town of Aguaviva based on the notion of a shared ethnic affinity between Spaniards and Latin Americans as symbolized in the notion of Hispanidad. Through its use of traditional documentary formats, the film explores the ensuing conflicts between the townspeople and the newcomers, especially their diverging ideas about national identities, assimilation, and spatial imageries, in order to question the efficacy of an ethnically-based local immigration policy such as the one undergirding Aguaviva's repopulation project and its relationship to the larger context of tightened Spanish and European immigration.