Artist Statement

Every year, tens of thousands of men, women, and children travel through Mexico in an attempt to enter the United States without authorization. The vast majority are Central Americans, mostly from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, trying to escape harsh socioeconomic and political conditions, food insecurity, grinding poverty, lack of opportunities, and extreme violence. As undocumented immigrants with no legal status, they are easy targets of arbitrary detention and lack of due process, which puts them at a heightened risk of abuse. On their journeys, men, women, and children face serious risks of human trafficking and sexual assault by criminals, other immigrants, and corrupt public officials.

The reality of thousands of Central American immigrants on the journey to the U.S can be devastating. Some disappear without a trace, kidnapped and killed, or robbed, assaulted and thrown off speeding trains by criminal gangs that prey on undocumented immigrants. Their deaths, like their lives, remain largely hidden from view. Excluded from mainstream society and effectively denied the protection of the law, undocumented immigrants are condemned to a life on the margins, vulnerable to exploitation, and largely ignored by many of those in authority who should be protecting them from human rights abuses.

This series wishes to portray the experiences of some of the thousands of undocumented immigrants that each year attempt to cross the U.S-Mexico border in the hope of a better future. The charcoal drawings in this series are portraits of immigrants during their long and extremely challenging journeys to reach the U.S. Some of the drawings depict fragments of the border wall and the landscape around it, inmigrants traveling on freight trains across Mexico, entire families struggling to cross the border, children walking into detention facilities for undocumented immigrants in Texas, border patrol agents arbitrary arresting and abusing immigrants, and bodies of immigrants found near Rio Grande. The reference for these drawings are images found on  newspapers, books, websites, and social media. While most of the immigrants' names and destinies remain a mystery, to me, their faces clearly reveal the many abuses  and horrors they encountered on their journeys, most of the time, invisible and unfamiliar to us.

With this series, I want people to see these faces and to confront each person’s pain and suffering. I want to show the inhumane conditions and systematic abuse thousands of immigrants endure on their journey to encourage people to reflect on and discuss this devastating reality. To ask, as Valeria Luiselli asks, “How? Why? What did we do? Where did we go wrong, as a society, to make things like this possible?”.

May, 2023