Young Migrants Detained in Texas Find Relief in Art
EL PASO, Texas — The young migrants often arrived at night. They were teenagers from Central and South America, brought by border agents to the Tornillo Detention Facility in Texas and led to rows of metal bunk beds in military tents ringed by barbed wire. Human touch was rare inside this secured city, where nearly 3,000 unaccompanied minors at a time were confined between June 2018 and January 2019.
The Reverend Rafael Garcia, a Jesuit priest from South El Paso, got his first inkling of the creativity within the camp when he noticed a cross with a red Sacred Heart entwined in yarn, handmade by incarcerated youngsters. They created tableaus inspired by their homelands: a miniature soccer field with pipe-cleaner players kicking a polka-dot cotton ball, or an elegant church with a crepe paper dome.
The inventive artworks by children in Tornillo are the subject of a haunting exhibition, “Uncaged Art: Tornillo Children’s Detention Camp,” at the Centennial Museum and Chihuahuan Desert Gardens at the University of Texas at El Paso through October 5. Crafted from memory, the scenes were fashioned from materials like bottle caps and Popsicle sticks as part of a social studies project in which teachers assigned to the camp asked the children to commemorate their native cultures. Birds — especially the emerald-tailed quetzal, the national bird of Guatemala and a symbol of freedom — were a recurring theme.
“If you cut the wings of a bird, it is no longer free,” explained a 17-yearold Honduran who gave his name only as Freddy.
Tornillo was opened to help the federal government manage an influx of children entering federal custody, those who had traveled alone as well as those who became “unaccompanied” after being separated from parents at the border. Typical stays at the temporary shelter were between 60 and 70 days, but some detentions stretched into months.
Crayons and paper “can be the portal into the child’s brain and what they’ve seen,” said Holly S. Cooper, a co-director of the University of California, Davis, Immigration Law Clinic, who uses art to elicit information from detained children.
The design of the “Uncaged” exhibition recalls the Tornillo confinement down to the chain-link fences and bunk beds. The show’s 29 paintings, drawings, costumes and dioramas were salvaged by Father Garcia before the camp was closed in January due to health and safety concerns.
“These are unaccompanied minors,” Father Garcia said. “But they are also talented children who have a desire to be productive human beings.”
Despite their circumstances, the children’s work was often infused with buoyancy, wit and prideful affection for landmarks of their native countries.
“There’s a sense of joy and beauty in the art that reflects everything in the environment they were being denied,” said Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, who interviewed children at Tornillo. “They could recover their identities and not be reduced to numbers on a wristband.”
Recent drawings by three children at the Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Center in McAllen, Texas, showed figures in border patrol custody in cages, some of them upside-down. “The drawings express a lot of darkness,” said Sister Norma Pimentel, who oversees the center. But she also pointed out that most of the art generated by youths was hopeful — full of hearts, houses and “I (heart) you’s.”
“It shows their resilience,” she said.
Art has been a tool used in the healing process for young people who have been released by United States Customs and Border Protection.
Even half a crayon can offer a calming, absorbing activity for children when their parents are speaking with attorneys in crowded trailers, recounting the violence that led them to seek safety in the United States. “These things give a degree of normalcy,” said Dr. Anita Ravi, a family physician in New York. “I think kids ache for that.”
At a day center for asylum-seeking families in Phoenix, Arizona, run by the International Rescue Committee, a 7-year-old Guatemalan girl asked for some Post-it notes. In 15 minutes, the girl transformed five hot pink Post-its into tiny, floral-patterned canvases.
“You can almost see the moms exhale seeing the kids enjoying themselves,” said Ellen Beattie, the committee’s senior director.
In one El Paso neighborhood, banners with images reproduced from “Uncaged Art” were displayed along a chain-link fence. But in June, city officials ordered that the banners be taken down.
“Those kids from Tornillo way over there wanted to show the world how to paint,” said Frank Mendez, a retired laborer. “Those designs came from their brains. That’s the future they took away.”