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July 2016
Feature DACAmented Youth: The Art of Constructing Waves YWCA Gallery, Tucson by Ryn Shane-Armstrong |
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ACastelar_Holding On to the Dream_
There’s little more vexing to demagogues and opportunists who work to build walls between us than the art and artists willing to look at those walls through a clear lens. Some of those walls are literal - a barbed wire fence, a line of police officers in riot gear. Some walls are merely conceptual, existing only when the conflicted psyche dreams them into being. They are the walls in our collective unconsciousness that prevent us from seeing the multitudinous “other” now huddled in detention facilities and refugee camps all over the world. These are the myriad invisible walls in the human mind that serve to blind us to one another; walls that playwright Eugene O’Neill once likened to “mirrors” in “a solitary cell.” And still other walls inhabit both the real and unreal at the same time - the madness-inducing bureaucratic walls that seem, almost supernaturally, to birth even more barriers like some sort of alien object torn from the pages of a dystopian nightmare.
[click on images to enlarge]
[click on images to enlarge]
DACAmented Youth opening
For the seven youth participants of the DACAmented Voices in Healthcare project who are currently exhibiting their artwork at the Galleria at the YW (YWCA Gallery), the omnipresence and absurdity of walls - be they physical, imaginary, or both - are all-too familiar and deeply troubling. Even with the new rights and benefits extended to them through 2012’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, significant gaps yet remain in their ability to obtain sufficient health care. Most notably, DACA youth are ineligible for Medicaid, state equivalents like AHCCCS, and general health insurance plans via the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The so-called “DREAMers” now represent a whole new category of quasi American complete with quasi rights. While many improvements to quality of life have certainly come to pass - school and work permits, permission to acquire a driver’s license, and a temporary reprieve from the ever-looming threat of deportation - on the paramount issue of health, DACA youth are still slamming into walls.
Sofia Gomez
"I’m interested in the intersection of immigration and healthcare,” says Sofia Gomez, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Arizona’s Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health and the principle organizer behind the DACAmented Voices in Healthcare project. “This is participant observation research,” she explains, over the din of a seemingly run-of-the-mill, Friday night art opening in the west side YWCA. “And who else to speak to these issues?”
Of the seven DACA youth who participated in the project, all of them are of Mexican descent, and their age-range runs from 18 to 26. It’s a relatively small contingency, especially for a border city like Tucson with its vibrant and growing Hispanic population. But the sparsity of willing DACA youth also serves to implicitly expose the severity of our nation’s immigration woes. Their absence begs the question: so what about the nameless hundreds of thousands of Hispanic youth now floating precariously between the promise of opportunity suggested by reform legislation like DACA and the segregation it continues to affirm? What of all the other immigrant youth in Arizona and beyond whose creative output we don’t see hanging on the walls of a community art gallery? Where are they?
Ms. Gomez’s speech is precise and practiced, and a day later I read it all over again in the online edition of the Arizona Daily Star and the Tucson Weekly. She stays on message: the DACA solution has “left families divided.” DACA youth inhabit a vaguely liminal space in American society, caught somewhere between citizenship and illegality. They are coded into government spreadsheets and databases but barred from the totality of privileges those administrative tools ostensibly provide. In a sense, DREAMers are still in a dream state - simultaneously known and unknown, seen and unseen, there and not there. Even within their own families, legal status is distributed arbitrarily.
Of the seven DACA youth who participated in the project, all of them are of Mexican descent, and their age-range runs from 18 to 26. It’s a relatively small contingency, especially for a border city like Tucson with its vibrant and growing Hispanic population. But the sparsity of willing DACA youth also serves to implicitly expose the severity of our nation’s immigration woes. Their absence begs the question: so what about the nameless hundreds of thousands of Hispanic youth now floating precariously between the promise of opportunity suggested by reform legislation like DACA and the segregation it continues to affirm? What of all the other immigrant youth in Arizona and beyond whose creative output we don’t see hanging on the walls of a community art gallery? Where are they?
Ms. Gomez’s speech is precise and practiced, and a day later I read it all over again in the online edition of the Arizona Daily Star and the Tucson Weekly. She stays on message: the DACA solution has “left families divided.” DACA youth inhabit a vaguely liminal space in American society, caught somewhere between citizenship and illegality. They are coded into government spreadsheets and databases but barred from the totality of privileges those administrative tools ostensibly provide. In a sense, DREAMers are still in a dream state - simultaneously known and unknown, seen and unseen, there and not there. Even within their own families, legal status is distributed arbitrarily.
Alejandro Castelar
Further complicating the situation is the Supreme Court’s recent 4-4 split decision that effectively upheld a lower court’s ruling to allow an injunction on President Obama’s DACA expansion and the new DAPA (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents) program, both announced in 2014. While this ruling doesn’t affect the seven participant-artists in the DACAmented project - they fall under the rubric of the original 2012 DACA legislation - it may still have chilling consequences for their family and friends, some of whom make up a portion of the estimated 1.4 million undocumented immigrants currently residing in the United States.
“I was also surprised to discover,” Ms. Gomez continues, “the problems of the undocu-queer.” She quickly identifies Alejandro Castelar, one of the few LGBT members on the project who suffers the double whammy of status marginalization and homophobia. After a brief introduction, he agrees to answer a few questions.
Alejandro Castelar is a tall and slender man with a dark beard and a soft voice. He is thoughtful and earnest, and it’s not long before we are investigating the hardships of his particular immigrant experience. He tells me of several difficult encounters he’s had with the local police, including time served in a detention center under the oversight of the now-infamous Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He also acknowledges that he is a survivor of sexual assault, though he is understandably ambiguous on the details.
“I was also surprised to discover,” Ms. Gomez continues, “the problems of the undocu-queer.” She quickly identifies Alejandro Castelar, one of the few LGBT members on the project who suffers the double whammy of status marginalization and homophobia. After a brief introduction, he agrees to answer a few questions.
Alejandro Castelar is a tall and slender man with a dark beard and a soft voice. He is thoughtful and earnest, and it’s not long before we are investigating the hardships of his particular immigrant experience. He tells me of several difficult encounters he’s had with the local police, including time served in a detention center under the oversight of the now-infamous Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He also acknowledges that he is a survivor of sexual assault, though he is understandably ambiguous on the details.
 Alejandro Castelar_El Aguante_
Photographic arts are not new to Mr. Castelar, it turns out, having worked with a camera back in high school. But he readily admits that it is only now via the DACAmented project that he has finally been able to explore “a topic close to [his] heart.” Mr. Castelar carries himself with a quiet and comforting sincerity. Gazing into the middle distance of the gallery, he says plainly, “I think it’s important to showcase vulnerability.”
Our conversation is speckled with fits and starts as he struggles to find the precise words to illuminate the broader meanings in his art. Mr. Castelar’s self-portraits are impossible to ignore, including one especially powerful triptych entitled “El Aguante” (or “Resilience”), wherein the middle panel depicts the artist himself from the waist up, semi-nude, his body awash in the ethereal warmth of a stray yellow light, his face encircled by a noose, and superimposed over the whole subject we see the iconic image of the Virgin de Guadalupe. Clearly, Mr. Castelar is informed by his Mexican heritage, but he appears to also honor a contemporary American desperation: this is a new kind of immigrant with a new kind of burden. He explains that the photography is, “a way for queer, brown people to ask for help.” When I attempt to spotlight Mr. Castelar’s sexual orientation and the ways in which it might inspire his burgeoning creative process, the tenor shifts dramatically. He shuffles his feet. Suddenly the alienation of being a DACA youth is no longer about the walling off of the American health care system; it’s about something a little more nuanced and intimate. With his discomfort, Mr. Castelar hints at a deeper internal strife within the Hispanic community. “I can tell my mother about [the work and the show],” he admits, ”but no one else.” On the topic of sex and love and where it overlaps with the creative, he concludes, “We don’t really talk about it.” Though I already know the answer, I ask anyway. None of Mr. Castelar’s family members came to the opening. |
Alejandro Castelar_El Aguante_(triptych) 
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Perla Rojas
By contrast, Perla Rojas can’t stop smiling. Every time she speaks, I feel that she’s on the cusp of an exclamatory giggle or an affirming wink. Even her posture exudes a kind of vitality. “I was unlimited,” she says, with a grin, in summation of her artistic efforts during the DACAmented project. “I never had that type of experience where I could express myself.” To describe the resulting photo exhibit at the YWCA she offers only one word: “Beautiful.”
At the age of 18, Ms. Rojas is the embodiment of youthful idealism. Her story is essentially the same Americana fairy tale we all know (and love) but seldom attribute to the undocumented. She came to the United States as a toddler, learned English, found a community, and ended up living most of her brief life in Tucson, a journey that culminated this spring in graduation from high school. Brimming with ambition, Ms. Rojas intends to enroll at the University of Arizona to pursue a double major in Psychology and Foreign Language Translation (Spanish). She eventually hopes to enter medical school to become a psychiatrist. Of the American health care system in which Ms. Rojas will one day serve, she is not nearly so sanguine. “It’s damaged,” she says without smiling, and finally I see a little of the hurt hidden behind all the charisma. “I live in limbo.”
At the age of 18, Ms. Rojas is the embodiment of youthful idealism. Her story is essentially the same Americana fairy tale we all know (and love) but seldom attribute to the undocumented. She came to the United States as a toddler, learned English, found a community, and ended up living most of her brief life in Tucson, a journey that culminated this spring in graduation from high school. Brimming with ambition, Ms. Rojas intends to enroll at the University of Arizona to pursue a double major in Psychology and Foreign Language Translation (Spanish). She eventually hopes to enter medical school to become a psychiatrist. Of the American health care system in which Ms. Rojas will one day serve, she is not nearly so sanguine. “It’s damaged,” she says without smiling, and finally I see a little of the hurt hidden behind all the charisma. “I live in limbo.”
Perla Rojas_Gilded System_
You can’t see much of that limbo in Ms. Rojas’s photography; you have to feel it. In a simple but elegant landscape photograph she calls “On Hold,” we see the desert sun rising from behind a mountain range in the east. Everything is slightly blurry, as if viewed from a fast moving vehicle. We are going somewhere quickly; an emergency perhaps. In the blackness that frames the bottom half of the image, I barely make out my own reflection. Momentarily at least, it appears that I have become the “moneyless man who puts his health on hold,” as depicted in Ms. Rojas’s elaborate artist statement. Ms. Rojas puts the viewer in the position of an undocumented immigrant on the run, a human being who must make an impossible choice between personal well-being and freedom from deportation and the breakup of the family. Through minimalism, sensory imagery, and motion, Ms. Rojas lets the audience live, ever-so briefly, in the disquiet of her world.
“I love America,” she says, once again smiling ear-to-ear. Clearly, Ms. Rojas wants to end the interview on a high note. With a passion for slam poetry, I’m not at all surprised that she refuses to let the numerous challenges of her legal status reduce her and her DACAmented cohorts to a narrative of pity. I watch her eyes dart over the ceiling as she ponders an appropriate and poetic analogy. DACA youth are “kind of like that of a surfer,” she explains. “But we have to construct our own waves.”
“I love America,” she says, once again smiling ear-to-ear. Clearly, Ms. Rojas wants to end the interview on a high note. With a passion for slam poetry, I’m not at all surprised that she refuses to let the numerous challenges of her legal status reduce her and her DACAmented cohorts to a narrative of pity. I watch her eyes dart over the ceiling as she ponders an appropriate and poetic analogy. DACA youth are “kind of like that of a surfer,” she explains. “But we have to construct our own waves.”
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The DACAmented Voice in Healthcare exhibit will be on display from June 24th to July 15th at the YWCA of Southern Arizona, which is located at 525 N. Bonita Avenue, on Tucson’s west side. You can access the YWCA Galleria anytime Monday through Friday from
9 - 5pm. |
Alejandra Baltazar-Molina_I Live in a Bubble_
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