Remembering the Migrants Who Died in US Detention
Artist Jackie Amézquita will lead a caravan of trucks with the names of the deceased to LA sites representing systems of oppression and solidarity for immigrants.
Matt Stromberg 2 days ago
LOS ANGELES — In 2014, Jackie Amézquita was looking for her brother. He had recently arrived at the US southern border with his pregnant wife seeking asylum after being kidnapped and extorted in their native Guatemala, but she hadn’t heard from him in two weeks. She contacted an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office, where an officer recommended she look for his name on an online database of detainees. She found that he had been detained and would remain so for nine months until his request for asylum was approved. (He was released the day after his daughter was born.) While searching for his name, she also stumbled upon a list of detainees who had died in ICE custody since 2003. The most commonly listed countries of birth were Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Cuba, but others had come from China, Ghana, Haiti, the Czech Republic and elsewhere.
This list formed the basis of her 2022 MFA thesis exhibition at the University of California, Los Angeles, Gemidos de la Tierra (Wailing of the Land/Soil). She collected dirt from states where migrants lost their lives in detention centers and mixed it with masa (ground corn dough), rainwater, and salt. She then cast letters out of the adobe-like mixture, baked them, and used them to spell out each of the roughly 200 migrants’ names on large four-by-eight-foot white panels.
. . .
Jackie Amézquita in her studio (photo Matt Stromberg/Hyperallergic)
In the process of her research for the project, Amézquita discovered two records of detainee deaths in ICE custody: One listing deaths from 2003–2017 and one beginning in 2018, with a nearly year-long gap between the two. She noticed that children were conspicuously absent from the lists, a stark contrast from the accounts of child detainee deaths she found in news accounts online.
“How can I engrave into these panels the names that are not here?” she wondered. To honor these children, she shredded all the documents she had collected which mention their deaths, cast letters from them, and implanted them with chia seeds, which have just begun to sprout.
On the front grill of each truck, Amézquita will attach ears of corn, another element central to Indigenous traditions throughout Central America and Mexico. This references not only the Maya origin story of humans having been created from corn, but also represents the Maya deities believed to help one transition from life to death. She will electroplate the ears of corn with copper, so they will turn from a metallic gold to a bright blue as the organic matter decays and the copper oxidizes.
More:
https://hyperallergic.com/808878/jackie-amezquita-remembering-the-migrants-who-died-in-us-detention/
= new reply since forum marked as read
