Drawing Deportation: Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children

Drawing Deportation showcases how immigrant children use art to navigate issues of citizenship, state violence, and belonging, offering insights into their creative solutions to anti-immigrant rhetoric and harsh immigration laws. Through art, they demonstrate righteous indignation against societal violence and offer alternatives and hope for a better future.

Format: Hardback
Length: 272 pages
Publication date: 14 February 2023
Publisher: New York University Press

Young immigrant children often struggle to find the words to express the ways in which their lives are shaped by issues of immigration, legal status, and state-sanctioned violence. However, they are able to communicate the effects of these factors on them through art. Based on ten years of work with immigrant children in Arizona and California, Silvia Rodriguez Vega presents accounts of children's challenges with deportation and family separation during the Obama and Trump administrations. While much of the literature on immigrant children portrays them as passive, when viewed through this lens, they appear as agents of their own stories. The volume offers valuable insights into how immigrant children in both states have developed creative and innovative solutions to the dilemmas posed by anti-immigrant rhetoric and harsh immigration laws. Through art, they have demonstrated a righteous indignation against societal violence, dehumanization, and death as a means of navigating a racist and anti-immigrant society. When children are the authors of their own stories, they can reimagine destructive situations in ways that adults sometimes cannot, offering us alternatives and hope for a better future. Drawing Deportation provides a powerful and necessary platform for vulnerable populations to assert their humanity in a world that often seeks to divest them of it.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781479810444