![]() ![]() It wasn’t uncommon for children to tell her they had witnessed a deportation raid in their community, or that they were looking for a family member who had gone to pick up an impounded car, or other bureaucratic task, and did not return. As a mentor in an after school program, Rodriguez Vega developed a rapport with children that led to conversations about their lives. Her research first began during her undergraduate years, when she worked at a community center in Arizona. “In their drawings, children are exposing the things that are impacting and hurting them but also, through the tool of art, we can mitigate some of these policies.”Īrguing that immigrant children are not passive in the face of the challenges presented by anti-immigrant policies, she contends that art can be a space for vulnerable populations “to assert their humanity in a world that would rather divest them of it.” “It’s about the unintended or intended consequences of anti-immigration laws and their impact on children,” Rodriguez Vega said. In the book, based on 10 years of work with immigrant children as young as six years old in border states Arizona and California - and including an analysis of 300 drawings, theater performances and family interviews - Rodriguez Vega illustrates how the children of immigrants use art to grapple with issues of citizenship, state violence and belonging. In her book, “Drawing Deportation: Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children” (NYU Press, 2023), she provides accounts of children’s challenges with deportation and family separation during the Obama and Trump administrations, using the children’s drawings as a window into their interior lives and experiences. citizens, are afraid of police officers, security guards and other armed officers because they represent a memory of that occurrence of family separation.” “Even after reuniting, even children who are U.S. ![]() When that bond is disturbed for any reason, it can hinder a child’s ability to grow up healthy,” Rodriguez Vega said. “The bond between a parent and a child is one of the most important bonds in life. “When a child is separated from a parent, it impacts every facet of the child’s life in emotional, physical and financial ways,” said Silvia Rodriguez Vega, assistant professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at UC Santa Barbara, whose new book considers hundreds of drawings by children living on the American side of the U.S.-Mexico border. Yet they are able to communicate its effects on them using art. Young immigrant children often do not have the words to express how their lives are shaped by issues of immigration, legal status and policies of family separation. ![]()
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