Abstract
“Deep visual listening and children’s art during times of crisis” explores a way to understand children’s art created amidst crisis as well as the meanings we can discern from it through the lens of the “Uncaged Art Tornillo Detention Center” exhibit. In 2018, the U.S. government opened a detention center to hold youth who either crossed the border by themselves or were separated from their families through Trump’s Zero Tolerance policy. The youth were from Central America and came seeking asylum. Fleeing profound poverty and violence, they came to save their lives. To deter asylum-seekers through a series of cruel policies, the United States detained the youth in militarized camps where they were under constant surveillance. They did not know when or if they would be released and experienced depression and trauma. An art project at the detention center resulted in their creating approximately 400 pieces, of which 30 survived. “Uncaged Art” exhibited these works in 2019. This article answers the question “What can we learn about the children, the anonymous artists who created the works, through visual listening?” Visual listening is a process that involves all our senses. Listening requires conscious action, unlike hearing which is automatic and is one of the first senses we develop while still in our mother’s womb. This methodology allows us to engage with children’s art in times of crisis more profoundly than simply seeing the artwork. There are two parts to this practice: deep listening and visual listening. Combined, they provide a powerful way to listen to the stories, the histories, the memories, and the emotions embodied by the art and brought to life by our reflections and understanding
Introduction
One Sunday in January 2019, I received a call from Father Rafael Garcia, SJ, from Sacred Heart Catholic Church in El Paso, Texas. He had just given mass at the Tornillo detention center, officially known as the Tornillo Temporary Influx Center, where over 2600 youth were detained after having been separated from their families through government policies or after crossing the border alone seeking asylum. He told me that he had seen a display of artwork created by the youth and asked if I wanted it. I said of course. Two days later, a large van drove to my campus and delivered 29 pieces of art, ranging from vibrant paintings to 3-D scenes created from recycled boxes to mannequins with colorful dresses decorated with exquisite paper flowers.
A blue church immediately caught my attention. Created from the most common of materials—construction paper, Popsicle sticks, yarn, and recycled boxes, as well as small rocks gathered from outside the tents, the church exuded faith and hope. I learned later that the rosary hanging on the cross had belonged to one of the young men interned at the center. It was the beginning of an exploration into the meaning of children’s art created in a place of suffering and crisis.
Blue church featured in “Uncaged Art.”
In this article, I explore a way to understand children’s art created amidst crisis as well as the meanings we can discern from it through the lens of the “Uncaged Art Tornillo Detention Center” exhibit. The exhibit at the Centennial Museum on the campus of the University of Texas at El Paso, and in digital form in exhibits across the nation, featured 30 works created by youth detained in Tornillo, Texas in the winter of 2018, shortly before the detention center closed. The exhibit framed the art in the context of where and how the children were detained with text panels about the government policies that had resulted in the detention of migrant children as well as the living conditions. There were also text panels about other art created in detention in the Terezín camp in Poland and the Japanese American internment camps in the United States during World War II. A replica of a large white tent was installed with a bunk bed in one corner to provide the feeling of the tents where the youth lived. There was also barbed wire atop a chain-link fence along one wall. Behind it, we installed the 3D models. Following the closing of the exhibit in December 2019, the art returned to the Institute of Oral History’s Museo Urbano project under my care.
As an oral historian, a scholar of borderlands and migration history, and co-curator of “Uncaged Art” (along with Dr. David Dorado Romo), I have reflected long on the meaning and implications of this body of artwork, both to the children who created it (who are anonymous to us) and to the visitors from across the United States and abroad who viewed it, often multiple times. For now, it is impossible to know what it meant to the children artists. Because they were minors, their identities are unknown to us. We do not know where they went after the center closed although we know most went to sponsors across the country who had been waiting for them; several hundred went to other detention centers.
In the absence of conversations with the artists, what can we, the outsiders, the viewers of this work created in an environment most of us have never experienced, do? When David and I first began conceptualizing the exhibit, people told us “The art will speak for itself.” Honestly, I did not know what that meant as a curator of the exhibit. This article delves into what I learned over almost 2 years of engaging the art. I propose that we use “deep visual listening” to understand children’s art created in traumatic conditions or where children may be unable to speak to the audience. These silences may be the result of the young artists’ anonymity, as in this case, or it may be they cannot speak because trauma is difficult to verbalize. Before expanding on this methodology, however, the article explores the social and political conditions that created a detention center like Tornillo and led to the government separating thousands of children and youth from their families who were detained in large, white tents in the Chihuahuan Desert.
Family separation at the border
The U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement authorized the creation of the Tornillo Influx Center, which activists labeled a “children’s prison,” following the implementation of the Trump administration’s Zero Tolerance policy, which went into effect in 2018. Beginning in 2014, growing numbers of Central American migrants began to request asylum at the U.S.-Mexican border. Mind-numbing poverty, gang violence, and political turmoil made staying in their home countries impossible. While single Mexican men had long been the most numerous demographic crossing the border, children and families from the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) outnumbered them beginning in 2015, according to Williams (2016). In response, the Trump administration began to institute increasingly cruel policies consciously employing cruelty as a deterrent to future asylum-seekers.
In May 2018, the federal government instituted the “Zero Tolerance” policy. As Shear et al. (2020), of the New York Times reported, then- U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions told a meeting of federal attorneys, “We need to take away children.” This policy separated thousands of children from their parents when they crossed the border without documents, including asylum-seekers. Although Zero Tolerance and the subsequent separation of thousands of children from their parents went into effect officially in 2018, the practice began as early as June 2017 in El Paso, Texas. A “pilot program” started in October 2017 in El Paso when four parents and one grandparent, all from Central America, were arrested and their children were taken from them as “unaccompanied minors” (Seville and Rappleye, 2018). A high-ranking Border Patrol official told PBS Frontline that separating children from their parents “was the most horrible thing [he] had ever done” (Taddonio, 2020).
In February 2017, the Hope Border Institute and the Border Immigration Council released a report, “Discretion to Deny: Family Separation, Prolonged Detention, and Deterrence of Asylum Seekers at the Hands of Immigration Authorities along the U.S.-Mexico Border” that addressed on going human rights abuses by ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents and officers as detailed through interviews with 25 legal experts as well as comprehensive information from over 120 cases of asylum seekers and other migrants. According to the report, “the most egregious cases documented in our study were those in which ICE and CBP decisions separated minor children from their primary caretakers, forcing children - often asylum seekers - into state-sponsored shelters or foster care” (Borderland Immigration Council, 2017: 8). The attorney described over 30 family separations between January and July 2016 (Borderland Immigration Council, 2017: 8). Between April 19 and May 31, 2017, over 2000 children were separated from their families as the federal government implemented its Zero Tolerance policy to deter future asylum seekers from coming to the United States. Although the separation of children from their families occurred before the Trump administration, with one attorney noting an increase in family separations in 2016; since 2017 the Trump administration’s policies have produced removals that are more systematic. Until the implementation of the new policy, parents and children who attempted to cross the border without documents were not incarcerated but typically returned to the Mexican side of the border, according to a report by the United States Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (2021).
In October 2020, congressional Democrats from the House Judiciary Committee released a report based on documents from Health and Human Services (HHS) that detailed an increase in children, including babies, placed in the care of HHS shelters. One particularly heartbreaking statement was made by Jonathan White, an official with HHS, who reported “We had a shortage last night of beds for babies” (Merchant, 2020). A New York Times article from June 2018 described the “tender age” shelters created to house babies, toddlers, and other children under 12 as Trump’s family separation policies continued. Children as young as 8 months were separated from their parents and advocates often had no idea who the parents were (Dickerson and Fernandez, 2018). In June 2018, ProPublica released a sound recording of 10 Central American children who had been separated from their parents (ProPublica, 2018). The heartbreaking sounds of children crying for “Mami” and “Papi” provided just a glimpse into the emotional, psychological, and physical harm that children experienced through these policies as pediatricians and psychologists have warned. (Edyburn and Meek, 2021) The same month, a court ruled in Ms. L v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that parents must be reunited with their children. The report states that 2.737 children were separated. The report also reveals that “Thousands of children may have been separated during an influx that began in 2017, before the accounting required by the court.” (United States Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, 2019)
It is not surprising given the Trump administration’s use of cruelty as a disincentive that more than 3 years since the pilot project began in El Paso and more than 2 years since family separation became an official policy, at the end of 2020, 545 children remained in government custody. The government cannot find the parents they deported (Armus, 2020). According to a PBS News Hour report (2020), prior to the 2018 court ruling, the government kept inadequate records of separated families and information on the location of the parents was often out of date. In a report, the Office of the Inspector General reported that “the lack of an existing, integrated data system to track separated families across HHS and DHS and the complexity of determining which children should be considered separated” created difficulty in reunifying families (United States Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, 2019a). Although the media, advocates, scholars, and elected government officials have highlighted the separation of children from their parents and families, amid much controversy and protest since 2018, the practice continued even after the court ruling, according to the United States Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (2019b).
Tornillo Influx center
It was in the context of family separation and growing numbers of asylum-seekers arriving at the border that the Tornillo detention center came into being. The first time I drove with my family to the center, 30 miles east of El Paso, I did not know what to expect. Following the directions of my car’s GPS, we drove east on Interstate10, turning off on a farm road that led us through a small town, eventually taking us through pecan orchards and pockets of honeybee hives and onto a road leading us to the Marcelino Serna Port of Entry. It was there at the port of entry connecting Tornillo, Texas, and Caseta, Chihuahua that the federal government built the Tornillo Influx Center, overseen by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and administered by the Baptist Child and Family Services. The ORR is a program housed within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and provides assistance to refugees within the country, including asylum-seekers. In 2018, the ORR outsourced the housing of separated children to the Baptist Child and Family Services, a non-profit organization that focuses on emergency shelters.
The cotton fields, the border fence dividing Texas and Chihuahua, the multiple layers of security guards, and the ever-present barbed wire created a striking contrast between the vastness of the West Texas sky overlooking the fields and the sterile artificial nature of the heavily guarded tent city. There was little evidence of the children who were detained there. The white tents that housed them were hidden behind tall mounds of earth placed there to diminish the public’s access to seeing the camp. Occasionally, we could see a soccer ball fly up into the air or hear the distant excited yells of the soccer players.
Originally designed to hold 400 children, the Tornillo detention center eventually expanded to a capacity of 4000, holding at its peak 2800 teens before it closed in January 2019 (Burnett, 2018; Kates, 2018). Growing larger and larger each week, the tent city was constructed on vacant land adjacent to a Border Patrol facility. Large white tents that could hold up to 20 youth were erected, potable water from a nearby fire hydrant was trucked in, and waste was trucked out multiple times per day. Mobile buildings were set up for administrative offices and for attorneys to meet their young clients. A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire enclosed everything. Only employees could enter the facility and each employee was required to sign a non-disclosure agreement. It was an expansive and secretive place. It was also an extremely expensive endeavor, costing $66 million over its 5-month existence (Aguilar, 2020). It was with this background that children created the art that eventually made its way to my office to become the “Uncaged Art Tornillo Detention Center” exhibit.
Listening to children’s art in times of crisis
On the opening day of the exhibit in April 2019, we invited “Freddy,” [he chose this as a pseudonym for this event] a young Honduran youth who had been detained at Tornillo in the months before the art project to join us. Released from Tornillo and living with his father, who was his sponsor and who had been in the United States for 15 years, “Freddy” served as an important witness to what we were unable to see inside the detention camp. We reached him through a network of activists and invited him to travel to El Paso. Early on opening day, we entered the exhibit so he could see it before the public entered. I was concerned that the exhibit might bring back traumatic memories and I spoke to him before we entered. He assured me that he would be fine and we entered the gallery alone, an hour before it was to open to the public. I stood back as he walked through the exhibit. When he walked up to the chain-link fence with barbed wire, he put his hands on it and stood there silently. After a few minutes, I walked up to him to ask how he was. “This is how it felt.” Again, he assured me that he was fine. Inside the gallery, the Theater Department had built a facsimile of the white tents used at Tornillo. We placed a bunk bed in the corner and installed the artwork outside the tent to portray that it was “uncaged.”
As we walked along the perimeter of the exhibit where the radiant landscapes and portraits were displayed on the gallery walls, “Freddy” told me “Detrás de cada hermosa pintura, hay un niño desesperado por salir,” which means “Behind every beautiful painting, there is a child desperate to leave.” It was at that moment that I realized that viewing the art was not enough. To use only my eyes would allow me to see the talent, the creativity, the use of bright colors, and the happy memories embodied in the works, but it would not bring me to knowing the deeper story, the story of the youth and their experiences in detention. Only visual listening would do that. In the sections that follow, I explore several art pieces through the process of deep visual listening. 1 Deep visual listening employs the practice of deep listening—listening without judgment, allowing the senses to absorb every nuance of the story,—and applying it to the act of viewing an image. In Listening to Images, Campt (2017) writes, “listening to images is constituted as a practice of looking beyond what we can see and attuning our sense to the other affective frequencies” of images.
Art speaks if we listen. Art is a language of its own and is particularly significant for refugee children and youth whose languages and cultures may be distinct from those around them (McArdle and Spina, 2007). Such was the case for the youth of Tornillo. The great majority of them came from the Northern Triangle of Central America-Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Many were Indigenous children whose first language was one of the numerous Mayan languages still spoken there, especially in Guatemala. One piece, “Lenguajes de Charlie 1” highlighted the three languages spoken in the Charlie 1 tent. All the housing tents were labeled in the military alphabet and words like “Alpha,” “Beta,” and “Charlie” were written on the artwork to identify the team who produced them. The art project allowed both individuals to produce pieces of art and teams to work collaboratively on pieces. The teams were comprised of youth living in specific tents so tent “Charlie I” had its own team.
The “Lenguajes” piece displays common everyday phrases like “play,” “work,” “I am 14 years old,” “We are in Tornillo,” and “Thank you God” in English, Spanish, and Chuj, a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala and Mexico.
Listening requires conscious action, unlike hearing that is automatic and is one of the first senses we develop while still in our mother’s womb. How often have we witnessed in movies and on television fathers speaking to their unborn children or mothers singing to them? Vision and hearing both influence each other. For people who are either deaf or blind, their respective sense of seeing or hearing becomes much more developed (Ludden, 2015). What we see influences what we hear. What we hear influences what we see. Developing a methodology of “deep visual listening” fuses the sense of seeing with the conscious decision to listen. The idea of “listening” to children’s art moves us beyond superficially seeing the art. While it is absolutely possible to develop a mindful way of viewing and experiencing art, adding “deep listening” to our practice enriches both the experience and our understanding. Listening entails “sensing, interpretation, evaluation, and response” (Hunsaker, 1991). The act of combining viewing with deep listening creates a relationship between the viewer and the art, one in which the viewer can make internal sense of the art. Listening rather than hearing elicits a relationship between two people or one person and, in this case, a piece of art.
The art project
In the fall of 2018, Tornillo’s two recently hired social studies teachers created a 4-day art project. The teachers instructed the students to create art that reflected their homeland, its history and culture, and of what they were most proud. In other words, they would not be creating art representing the trauma either in their homelands or on the journey through Mexico nor would they be producing work that showed their lives in detention. The teachers provided basic materials: construction paper, Popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners, recycled boxes, paints, and canvases. Over the 4 days, the youth created 400 pieces of art, both working alone and in teams. Tornillo center staff, including teachers and support staff such as guards, chose their favorites and created a small exhibit in the administrative office. The staff threw away the other 360 plus pieces. We can never know what this loss of artwork meant to the children who created it or what knowledge was irretrievably destroyed. Whether intentional or merely a matter of lack of storage space or whether the art that was destroyed was considered “bad,” this act embodies the power of the staff to control the children.
Lenguajes de Charlie I.
From the first day I received the art, I wondered how such beauty could be produced amid what attorneys and psychologists who entered the detention center had described as a context of depression, trauma, and suffering. The teens’ trauma and distress were not solely the result of their detention: they carried with them trauma from their homelands and their journey north to the United States. A policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) cited a 2012 study that showed that 77% of children leaving their homelands did so fleeing violence. The AAP also quoted studies indicating that children who experienced detention showed “high rates of posttraumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and behavioral challenges. Additionally, the expert consensus has concluded that even brief detention can cause psychological trauma and induce long-term mental health risks for children” (Linton et al., 2017). Attorney and scholar Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, currently a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and who had visited inside Tornillo, told me in conversation that the youth felt isolated and anxious because they did not know where they were and whether they would ever see their parents again. Father Rafael Garcia described Tornillo as a combination of Disneyland with its artificially joyful and fun atmosphere, and a concentration camp.
Deep visual listening
Influenced by the work of composer Pauline Oliveros, oral historians such as Martha Norkunas and Alessandro Portelli, leadership and creativity scholar Laura Brearley, Black feminist visual theorist Tina Campt, and especially Indigenous elders such as Abuela Ilhuicatlahuili-Bea Villegas (Mexica), I offer a methodology for “deep visual listening” (Brearley, 2014; Norkunas, 2011; Villegas, 2014). This methodology allows us to engage with children’s art in times of crisis more profoundly by using the characteristics of “deep listening” to enhance our viewing. Combined, they provide a powerful way to listen to the stories, the histories, the memories, and the emotions embodied by the art and brought to life by our reflections and understanding.
Blue church interior.
A library search for “deep listening” will show that a diversity of disciplines and peoples, from Buddhist teachers to musicians, therapists, and oral historians, employ the term. While the definitions vary, they all have two aspects in common: making a conscious decision to listen rather than simply to hear and to reflect intensely on the story. Composer and musician Pauline Oliveros descended into a 14-foot underground cistern to play music and it was there that for her, the concept of “deep listening” was born. For Oliveros, “deep listening” was both metaphorical and literal in that case. Deep listening is “learning to expand the perception of sounds to include the whole space/time continuum of sound—encountering the vastness and complexities as much as possible. Simultaneously one ought to be able to target a sound or sequence of sounds as a focus within the space/time continuum and to perceive the detail or trajectory of the sound or sequence of sounds” (Ontiveros, 2005: xxiii; Oliveros, 2012). Oliveros writes “
Visual listening grows from the Indigenous understanding that listening employs all the senses. According to Aboriginal artist and scholar Treahna Hamm (Yorta Yorta), Deep Listening has been a long tradition for thousands of generations of Aboriginal people in Australia. The immersing of all senses to observe, learn, create, share and grow throughout time is of vital importance to our cultural knowledge. Deep Listening opens up a space to think about inner experience. It means listening not only with our ears. It’s deep listening with our eyes, deep listening with all the senses (Brearley, 2014: 97).
Blue church exterior close up.
Mexica elder Abuela (Grandmother) Ilhuicatlahuili-Bea has taught me the same concept during our 20-year relationship. In ceremonies on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, she has stressed the importance of listening with our ears, our eyes, and all our senses to learn traditional ways. To Abuela Ilhuicatlahuili-Bea, our listening goes beyond hearing her words. She taught us to observe her relationship to ceremonial items and the land, to notice the way she addresses elders and the young, and to be attentive to the entirety of the ceremonial experience. When Abuela Bea asks us how we are feeling, we listen to our bodies, our heartbeat, our breath, and our emotions. Our listening is both external and internal. Visual listening calls on us to look internally, to reflect, and externally, to see our relationship with everyone and everything around us. Deep visual listening provides us a path to connect to the past, the present, and the future. A practice might include the following steps: (a) Take a moment to look at the art piece without distractions. (b) What do you feel your body physically experiencing? (c) What thoughts come to your mind? (d) Do any memories come to your mind? Does this remind you of anything? (e) Take a moment to put all of this together. What meaning can you make of listening to the art by listening to your body, your mind, and your emotions?
With this understanding, we will listen to several pieces of art from the “Uncaged Art” exhibit.
Original image of Divina Misericordia (Wikipedia).
Listening to the past
From the beginning, the blue church drew me in. Over several months, I returned to it, listening to what it told me about the youth detained at Tornillo. Each time I went to it, I saw a new detail, sometimes a miniature element that brought me more understanding, and that helped me listen to the story behind the art.
The blue church, the product of teamwork, was exquisite in its detail. Tiny rocks outlined the front of the church with its yarn bushes and trees. The small stones were the one bit of nature incorporated into this piece, evidence of the desert that existed outside the white tents. A small sign made of Popsicle sticks announced, “Welcome to the Divina Misericordia Chapper,” (I believe it probably meant to say “chapel”). Listening to the art, I imagined the young artists asking their teachers how to say capilla in English in an intriguing attempt at bilingualism seen only in one other art piece.
“Divina Misericordia,” Divine Mercy, is a beloved prayer, practice, and image of Jesus Christ. Developing from a 1935 vision of Christ that appeared to a young rural Polish girl with only 3 years of education, Helena Kowalska, the Roman Catholic devotion to the Divine Mercy centers on Christ’s suffering and mercy for all. Kowalska is now Saint Maria Faustyna Kowalska of the Blessed Sacrament following her canonization in 2000. In the image, two rays of light emerge from Jesus’ chest; one ray of light represents the blood, and the other the water that sprung forth when he was wounded by a spear while on the cross. Within a milieu of their suffering, la Divina Misericordia takes on increased significance. The prayer itself, uttered by devotees across the world and in the Central American countries from which these young artists came, includes the words, “ten misericordia de nosotros y del mundo entero.” “Have mercy on us and the entire world.” For young people who were at the mercy of an immigration system that put them behind barbed wire and separated many of them from their parents for seeking asylum, God’s mercy provided hope.
White church.
The blue church also featured several images of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Empress of the Americas, a Marian vision that appeared to Juan Diego, an Indigenous man in 1531, a decade after the Spanish gained control of the Mexica (Aztec) civilization. She is the universal mother figure, a source of faith for millions of Mexicans and Central Americans. More than likely, a teacher or other staff member provided the images of the Guadalupana, which appear four times in the art piece. On the border, her image is seen in murals throughout the city. Although youth were allowed to use the phone once a week for 10 minutes, for some, speaking with their parents provided little comfort. “Freddy,” for example, spoke of the difficulty of speaking with his mother in Honduras and hiding his suffering because he did not want her to suffer (“Freddy,” 2019, conversation during his visit to the exhibit). For children separated from their mothers and their families, Our Lady of Guadalupe provided hope and maternal love. The blue church speaks of the past, a time before the teens were separated from those who loved them.
Listening deeply for resistance
The collection features a second church, also constructed from recycled boxes. Unlike the blue church that includes both the exterior and the interior, the white church incorporates only the exterior of the church. It features a Christmas decoration: Our Lady of Guadalupe on a small artificial pine tree base. Since the art project took place in December, it makes sense that staff could purchase such an ornament with both Christmas and the day of Our Lady of Guadalupe occurring in the same month.
White church with UAC (unaccompanied alien child) sign.
When we first explored the white church, we looked beneath its base, which was heavy and solid, unlike the recycled boxes we had seen. The base said, “Female UAC restroom.” Camilo Pérez-Bustillos, a scholar and attorney then working with a local organization, the Hope Border Institute, accompanied us to view the art on the day we discovered the label. 2 I asked him, “What is UAC?” “Unaccompanied alien child,” he answered. My stomach knotted at the thought of “alien children.” As a child of the sixties, I grew up watching the benign aliens of the original “Lost in Space” series or the more horrifying ones in “The Twilight Zone.” To me, aliens were strange creatures with fantastically colored skin and shiny space outfits that invaded earth and horrified humans. As I listened to the art, the vibration of the piece, I heard the story of a humiliating sign turned upside down and a beautiful creation built on top of it. I wondered if they even knew the government bureaucracy labeled them as “UAC.” From my work as a volunteer at asylum seeker sanctuaries, I knew that everyone understood they had an “a number,” an alien number. Whether intentional or not—the symbolism and the resistance were clear to me. In visual listening, listening goes beyond hearing the obvious to listening to the affective aspects, both those of the artist and ourselves. In this case, the artwork brought up strong emotions in me as a former child “alien.”
Listening to the land
Most of the art pieces featured landscapes, nature, or wildlife, and vegetation. Central America is lush, mountainous, and tropical. In West Texas, the teens found themselves in the Chihuahuan Desert with its arid landscape, distant mountains, and heat. I remember first noticing how difficult it was for Central American asylum-seekers to acclimate to El Paso when I was serving lunch to a long line of refugees outside a temporary shelter during the fall of 2018. I had on a long-sleeved shirt and felt warm. They wore jackets and sweaters and shivered as they stood waiting for their plate of black beans and rice. “Tienen frío?” I asked them. They all smiled nervously and said yes, they were very cold. At that moment, months before I saw the artwork from Tornillo, I was struck by the challenge of entering a country whose landscape and climate were nothing like home. When I received the art and began to look at it, the green landscape present in almost every image took me back to that moment of realization.
Pink tree landscape.
Visual listening provides us a venue for listening to the land, whether we are physically there or connecting with the land via an artist’s vision. Oliveros writes about her mother giving her a tape recorder when she was a child in the 1940s. She set the tape recorder on the windowsill and noticed that when she listened to it, she heard all kinds of sounds she had not noticed. So too with listening to the land, the sounds of birds, of leaves, of wind.
In “Pink tree,” we listen to the land through the ears and eyes of the young artist. The painting reveals the yellow of the rising sun and the departure of the night or perhaps the glow of sunset with the coming of night, telling us a story of nature’s balance. In the ancient painted books of Indigenous Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America), daytime and nighttime exist together, in balance. Because I knew that many of the youth were Indigenous, I was curious about how that would influence their work. Despite the various images of Indigenous men, it was this painting that most embodied an autochthonous vision to me.
Parque Nacional de Honduras..
When I first saw the piece, the pink tree fascinated me. Initially, I thought it was great creativity on the artist’s part to use these striking colors. Then I listened. There is a tree with majestic pink flowers native to Central America, the maquilishuat (Nahuatl for “five leaves”). It is the national tree of El Salvador. This piece, along with others, speaks of the cultural knowledge that children hold. It also made me aware that my knowledge of traditional Indigenous cosmology and symbolism also allowed me to listen to the piece in a profound way that acknowledges the connections of the ancient to the contemporary.
Listening to a hopeful past
“Parque Nacional de Honduras” was the “un-camp” according to David Romo’s interpretation of the piece. It represented everything that Tornillo was not: happy children playing in a park surrounded by trees, swings, a fountain, and a picnic table laden with food. The Virgen de Guadalupe stands at the entrance near a sign urging “Cuidemos el medioambiente” (Let’s protect the environment). Trees and bushes with red flowers made of crepe paper dot the landscape. The greenery and flowers portrayed throughout the body of art reflect their tropical homelands. The “national park” was a creation of the artists, a playground where children were free to play, eat, and enjoy the outdoors. The actual national parks of Honduras are not urban; they are tropical forests, beaches with azure water, and mountains covered in green. By labeling this piece “Parque Nacional de Honduras” the artists address Honduran children everywhere having the opportunity to be happy and free.
Listening deeply to the future
While the social studies teachers had asked the youth to consider their pasts, where they came from, and what they remembered, two art pieces, in particular, speak of both the past but equally of the future: the soccer field recreation and the Parque Nacional de Honduras (the National Park of Honduras). In recent years, I have conducted oral histories with many Mexican and Mexican elders in their 80s and 90s. I have listened to their stories about discrimination, humiliation, low wages, and mistreatment. At the end of the interview, however, they almost inevitably look back at their suffering and express gratitude for how their lives played out and how their families thrived. For asylum-seekers, including the youth at Tornillo, the opportunity does not yet exist to reflect on the entirety of their lives. They do not yet know the outcome of their asylum court case. They remain in limbo, waiting for the U.S. to allow them to continue in the asylum process or not. For the youth at Tornillo, who were at the beginning of their lives in the United States, they did not even know if they would be released or if they would ever see their families again. That is why listening to the future through their art is so powerful. If the past is trauma-filled and the present is anguished, the future provides some hope. As Tina Campt writes about photographs of Africans in the diaspora, photographs “force us to reflect on the historical continuities between black folks’ past, present, and future use of photography to embrace the future they want to see- now” [Author’s italics] (Campt, 2017: 113). The soccer field and the national park speak to us as much about the landscape they left as the landscape they desire to return to in their future.
Close up of soccer field featuring green horses.
While opponents to asylum often speak of migrants coming to the United States to take jobs from Americans or to take advantage of the welfare system, in oral histories with various women aspiring asylees, they spoke of wanting to be in the United States only temporarily or how they wished they could have stayed in their communities (Institute of Oral History, 2020). Journalist David Bacon documents Mexican resistance to being forced to migrate in his 2013 The Right to Stay Home. Many of the same factors that drive Mexicans from their homes, especially intense poverty and violence, are the same that have forced Central Americans to leave their home. Several Latin American forums held in places like Morelia, Michoacán (2007), and Tapachula, Chiapas (2008) connected the rights of immigrants to the right to stay home. In 2010, the Forum on Migration and Development met in Cuernavaca, Morelos, developing a program based on “No to forced migration.” Oscar Chacon of the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities (NALACC) asserts that the right to not migrate originates in Indigenous cultures. “How you belong to a community doesn’t depend on the place you live, but on your relations with other people” (Bacon, 2013: XX). Trapped in a tent city in the West Texas desert, the teens both recall their past while calling to a future time when they would join their communities again, the spectators in the stands.
Soccer field, view from above.
Fútbol, or soccer as it is known in the United States, is more than a sport in Latin America. It is profoundly connected with identity and nationalism and, although it began as an elite sport brought through British boarding schools, over time, it transformed into a game that all socioeconomic classes loved and played. (Nadel, 2014). Years ago, I visited a Southwest Key Immigrant Children’s Center with a group of attorneys. I remember our guide telling us that the youth detained there loved to play soccer and could easily win matches against local soccer teams even though they did not have the opportunity to practice. As I began to visit the Tornillo Center in the fall of 2018, I noticed that the only time I could see the children was when they were playing soccer in the southwest corner of the complex, furthest from the road. When Joshua Rubin, a witness who camped outside Tornillo for several months with a sign that said “Free Them,” walked behind the complex and spoke with several of the young men as they played soccer, the center’s administration quickly placed black tarps over the chain-link fence so that no one could see or speak with them again (Rubin, 2018, personal communication). During a conversation with one of the social studies teachers behind the art project, she told me “Soccer balls were gold” to the youth.
The soccer field model is one of the largest pieces in the collection. It is constructed of recycled boxes as the base, construction paper for the stands, red and green yarn for the flowers and grass, and pipe cleaners for the soccer players, spectators, and delightful green horses. The score of 0–20 echoes Bravo 20, the name of the tent where the boys lived. It is both the soccer field of the boys’ memories and the soccer field they hope to see again. It is the opposite of the field at Tornillo that had no grass (only Astroturf) and no flowers and perhaps most importantly of all, no spectators other than the staff and guards who continually surveilled the boys.
In the late fall of 2018, I took a walk behind the soccer field. A dry irrigation canal ran horizontal to the chain-link fence. To the west was the border fence where desert vegetation grew against the fence creating a thicket. Soccer balls laid in the canal and amid the vegetation, kicked over accidentally by the youth. In December, something changed. Rather than the accidental soccer ball, the young men began to write their names on the balls and purposely kick them over the fence. It was a poignant and strategic cry for recognition from the youth detained behind a fence covered with a black tarp. They knew that people walked behind the field in the hopes of seeing them and supporting them.
In June 2019, 5 months after Tornillo closed, the Trump administration cut soccer (as well as English classes and legal aid) for children in influx centers, including the Homestead center that had by then replaced Tornillo as the largest center among one hundred or so across the nation. Dr. Amy Cohen, a psychiatrist who visited centers and consulted with attorneys, told Vice News that this would be detrimental to the physical and mental health of the already stressed children, depriving them of Vitamin D and of healthy ways to release tension (Del Valle, 2019). Although the youth did not know that Trump would ban soccer in detention centers, this piece is a witness to the importance of soccer to the detained children.
Conclusion
In the second decade of the 21st century, unprecedented numbers of families from Central America arrived at the U.S. border with Mexico asking for asylum, fleeing extreme poverty, and gang and government-initiated violence. Government policies under Donald Trump created a desperate situation for thousands of them, separating children from their families as a way, it was claimed, to curtail potential asylum seekers from following their footsteps. Consequently, the Office of Refugee Resettlement began opening detention centers, or influx centers, to house children from newborn to 18 years of age. Tornillo detention center opened in June 2018 and for 7 months housed thousands of children. Within the confines of detention, anonymous youth at Tornillo created 400 pieces of art, the focus of this essay.
This essay asks the question, how can we learn about the children who created the art when we are unable to speak with them? Children’s art created in detention can speak to us if we make an effort to deeply, visually listen. Combining the idea of deep listening with visual listening, we can create a dialog between the art and ourselves. Deep listening encourages us to develop ways of listening to stories without judgment and open to reflection. Visual listening demands that we use all our senses to understand a story, a history, or a memory. Together, they are a powerful tool for listening to children’s art.
This article examined several art pieces created by youth detained at the Tornillo Influx Center to provide examples of deep visual listening. While the project was supposed to focus on the past, through deep visual listening we also heard the stories of resistance to dehumanization. We listened to a landscape and listened to stories of hope. Deep visual listening calls on us to use all our senses to listen to the voices of refugee children who created the beautiful art while desperate to be free.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
