Description
Book SynopsisIllustrates how the children of immigrants use art to grapple with issues of citizenship, state violence, and belonging Young immigrant children often do not have the words to express how their lives are shaped by issues of immigration, legal status, and state-sanctioned violence. Yet they are able to communicate its effects on them using art. Based on ten years of work with immigrant children as young as six years old in Arizona and California and featuring an analysis of three hundred drawings, theater performances, and family interviewsSilvia Rodriguez Vega provides accounts of children's challenges with deportation and family separation during the Obama and Trump administrations. While much of the literature on immigrant children depicts them as passive, when viewed through this lens they appear as agents of their own stories. The volume provides key insights into how immigrant children in both states presented creative, out-of-the-box, powerful solutions to the dilemmas that anti-immigrant rhetoric and harsh immigration laws present. Through art, they demonstrated a righteous indignation against societal violence, dehumanization, and death as a tool for navigating a racist, anti-immigrant society. When children are the agents of their own stories, they can reimagine destructive situations in ways that adults sometimes cannot, offering us alternatives and hope for a better future. At once devastating and revelatory, Drawing Deportation provides a roadmap for how art can provide a safe and necessary space for vulnerable populations to assert their humanity in a world that would rather divest them of it.
Trade ReviewRodriguez Vega demonstrates how art will always speak truth to power.
Drawing Deportation is the book we’ve been waiting for—with gut-wrenching images that inspire us to continue the fight for social justice, immigrant rights, and children’s happiness! !Viva el teatro! !Vivan los niños! -- Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers Association and president of the Dolores Huerta Foundation
Through the lens of their art, Rodriguez Vega unveils not only the traumas and untold angst that our broken immigration system unleashes upon immigrant children’s lives but also the unmistakable resilience and resourcefulness so many demonstrate. Her child-centered, social justice-oriented voice rings loudly and is essential reading for developmentalists, educators, and policy makers who care to understand the realities of these children’s experiences. -- Carola Suárez-Orozco, Harvard University
Only Rodriguez Vega could write a book this ambitious, creative, and politically urgent—expressing children’s sheer resilience through art. -- Dolores Inés Casillas, University of California, Santa Barbara
Using innovative interdisciplinary methods,
Drawing Deportation highlights children’s creativity, agency, and ability to heal. Rodriguez Vega convincingly demonstrates that art allows children to create improved worlds. -- Leisy J. Abrego, University of California, Los Angeles
A work of heartbreaking vision and innovative scholarship, this landmark volume brings the power of art and science together to inform immigration policy. Youth provide extraordinary artistic testimony and resistance in confronting the harshest immigration enforcement, while Rodriguez Vega amplifies their voices with her analytic depth, rigor, and brilliance. -- Hirokazu Yoshikawa, New York University
This singular volume is at once heartbreaking and hopeful as it tells the stories of immigrant children through their own works of art. Silvia Rodriguez Vega has spent a decade with children in Arizona and California and has found that the experience of making art about their experiences helps them to express their feelings, process their pain and become active participants in their healing journeys. -- Karla Strand * Ms. Magazine *
