Emancipatory Spaces Through Arts-Based Activities With Migrant Families at the U.S.-Mexico Border

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: The Power and Possibilities of Art-Based Community Participatory Research and Pedagogy in Preparing Critical Educators

Abstract

Migrants encounter profound challenges prior to leaving their home country, during their journeys and upon arrival at their destination. When traveling through these spaces, they experience fear, uncertainty, despair, confusion, and other emotions. What outlets are they afforded to express these emotions? Would creative expressions through drama, poetry and the spoken word, creative writing or photography, for example, provide them with opportunities to name and narrate their worlds? Do artistic undertakings create a healthier emotional and mental state for migrants and their loved ones? Can arts-based experiences at least temporarily free individuals from pain and desperation?
This presentation addresses these questions. I argue that arts-based experiences provide migrant youth and families with the opportunity to “perform themselves” Cahnmann-Taylor & Souto, 2010) through the power of words, ideas and action. Using Augusto Boal’s (1995) Forum Theater, the central component of his Theater of the Oppressed, actors (protagonists) present a scenario and are joined or replaced by audience members (spectators). Together, “spectactors” explore different ways of narrating and confronting real situations. During the summer of 2019, a collaborative team of community organizations, video documentarians, and university researchers organized creative writing sessions, theatrical performance and improvisation with migrant youth and families in shelters and detention facilities along the U.S.-Mexico international borders. These encounters offered participants a powerful means of voicing their encounters with discrimination and acceptance, exclusion and inclusion, hostility and hospitality in their home countries, and during travel to the border. Participants also expressed their hopes and anticipations about settling in the United States.
These dramatic encounters helped participants become “spectactors” for a brief time, allowing them the possibility of transforming themselves into “protagonists of the dramatic action and to rehearse alternatives” (Boal, 1995, p. 40) to the desperate socio-political limbo of their current circumstances. Equally important, participants created moments of hope that penetrated the hopelessness many of them felt. As Freire (1992, p. 2) reminds us, hopelessness paralyzes and immobilizes people from gathering the strength they need for “a fierce struggle that will recreate the world.” Boal (1995, p. 39) echoed Freire when he wrote, “A well founded hope: if the actor can become a sick person, the sick person can in turn become a healthy actor.”
Immigration policy has been a controversial topic in recent years, especially in the United States. Although media coverage of the “migrant experience” has been extensive, it has not often included the voices of migrants themselves. Arts activities thus provide an appropriate venue for people to express their own perspectives. We have seen how sharing a space for creative expression facilitates verbal and non-verbal expression, problematizes oppression, and provides emotional healing.

Author

• Elizabeth A. Gaxiola, University of Arizona