“The Worst That We Can Imagine Already Happening Now’ – Silvia Rodríguez Vega.

Rodríguez Vega is the author of

Drawing Deportation
Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children
NYU Press Hardcover & Softcover 232 pages

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 interviews—Silvia 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 active 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 dehumanization, societal violence, and death, and used it 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 milieus that would rather divest them of it.

Silvia Rodriguez Vega is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the Department of Chicana/o Studies. Her research highlights the understudied preadolescent children of immigrants—both U.S.-born citizens and undocumented immigrant children. More broadly, Silvia is also concerned with issues of structural inequality, immigration policy, mixed-status families, transborder relations, undocumented youth and children, and arts and artivism through performance and digital media.