Charter Oak hosts ‘Uncaged Art’
Exhibit showcases detained migrant children’s art
When immigrant children are detained in jails on the border, not knowing where their families are, what do they think of all day, while waiting to find out what will become of them? That is the focus of a virtual exhibit opening Jan. 26 at Charter Oak Cultural Center in Hartford, and the title of the exhibit tells it all.
“Uncaged Art: Tornillo Children’s Detention Center” features dozens of artworks created by children in a now-closed tent city concentration camp just south of El Paso, Texas. A recurring theme in the artworks: They want to escape the cages, see something or someone familiar, go to church and play with friends.
Behind every beautiful piece of art is a child longing to be free. Freddy, a Honduran man imprisoned at Tornillo
“In the center, the kids played soccer one hour a day. It was the only time they got to be outside,” said Dr. Yolanda Leyva, a history professor at University of Texas at El Paso, who curated the
exhibit. “It was the part of the day they looked forward to the most.”
One of the artworks is a recreation of a soccer field made with old boxes and pipe cleaners.
“This soccer field is not where the kids are now, in the middle of the desert. It is a very green place, surrounded by grass, red flowers, men riding horses around the field,” Leyva said. “I imagined them thinking, I want to be back there, in the future we will be back in that happy place.”
Or in the words of “Freddy,” a
young Honduran-born man who once was a prisoner at Tornillo, “Behind every beautiful piece of art is a child longing to be free.”
The exhibit is 30 artworks created by youths aged 13 to 17 as part of an art project at the camp. Four hundred artworks were created by the teens. Camp staff chose 30 to preserve and threw away the rest.
“That was really heartbreaking to me,” Leyva said.
When the camp was closed due to public pressure in January
2019, a priest talked camp staff into releasing the art for an exhibit. Everyone on staff at the camp had to sign NDAs, but Leyva was able to meet briefly with the teachers who spearheaded the art project. Leyva also talked to “Freddy.”
“The teachers said they tried to help the kids feel more cheerful, optimistic, more connected to home,” Leyva said. “Freddy said their education, which was required by a court ruling, really consisted of them sitting in tents and watching videos in English that they didn’t know yet and with handouts.”
Resplendent quetzals, the brightly colored, long-feathered birds from Mexico and Central America, are seen in several artworks. In Mesoamerican mythologies, quetzals were considered divine and symbols of goodness and light. Also, according to legend, quetzals would die if they were kept in captivity too long.
Some pieces show shrines to the Virgin Mary and large crosses. Others depict playgrounds, lakes and meadows. In another, a feathered warrior with a shield and club fights, a quetzal flying overhead.
Leyva has never met the children who created the works. Some left the camp to the homes of sponsors. Others were transferred after Tornillo closed, to an
unknown location.
“We know nothing about the kids. To have their artwork is one way to have that connection and for people to know their story,” Leyva said. “I had also spoken to attorneys who had been allowed in the campus for two days. They had gone in with psychologists. The kids are very depressed. They didn’t know where they were. Texas didn’t mean anything to them. El Paso didn’t mean anything to them.”
According to the Council on Foreign Relations, 76,020 unaccompanied minors were apprehended at or near the U.S.-Mexico
border during the 2019 fiscal year. This represents an increase of 52% over 2018. At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, apprehensions dropped starkly, then started to tick back up again in September.
The kids in the Tornillo camp have been dispersed since it closed in January 2019.
“In early January, you had this massive camp with thousands of kids, and in the middle of January, nothing, no trace of it at all,” Leyva said. “Where are the kids now? About 2,000 were released to their sponsors. The remaining 300 or 400 were sent to other detention camps.
“Right after Tornillo closed another camp opened in Homestead,
Florida. They were probably sent there but we don’t know.”
A virtual opening reception for “Uncaged Art” will be Jan. 26 at 6:30 p.m. on Charter Oak Cultural Center’s Facebook page, and on Zoom. Leyva will speak. The exhibit will be viewable online until the end of February.
Leyva said those who want to help the children can write their congresspeople or donate to legal projects to protect them. Two of those projects are the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services and Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso