Abstract
Foremost among exilic texts in the Bible are the themes of homeland and journey. Their production bespeaks Israel’s recourse to symbolic and stylized language as a way to give form to personal and collective suffering. Indeed, these texts reflect the enlistment of poetic forms not merely to record a past but to bear the painful marks of Israel’s exile. Hence, what I want to suggest in this chapter are ways in which the exilic themes of homeland and journey constitute a discourse of healing for the lived experiences of exile and captivity. How might contemporary refugees envisage their lived experiences of exile and captivity within the biblical themes of homeland and journey? Moreover, how might their artistic expressions of homeland and journey intersect with and diverge from the exilic texts in the Hebrew Bible? One way I have sought to answer these questions is through an expressive art and social advocacy project called, Arte de Lagrimas: Refugee Artwork Project. In this chapter, I first describe briefly the humanitarian mission and social objectives of this project. Second, I examine two color-drawings of homeland and journey created by Génesis, a nine-year-old asylum-seeking girl from El Salvador. The drawings were completed several hours after she and her family were released from an immigrant detention facility near McAllen, Texas. In my image analysis, I read her artwork not through a clinical or psychoanalytic lens or simply as symptomology of trauma. Rather, I read them through exilic biblical texts of homeland and journey to show that both the refugee artwork and the biblical texts can be regarded as engendering a common language of healing that proceed from the lived experience and memories of exile and captivity.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Pew Research Center, “Religion in Latin America: Widespread Change in a Historically Catholic Region,” Religion & Public Life, accessed February 5, 2016, http://www.pewforum.org/2014/11/13/religion-in-latin-america/.
- 2.
Center for the Study of Global Christianity, comp., Christianity in its Global Context, 1970–2020: Society, Religion, and Mission, 50, June 2013, accessed February 5, 2016, http://www.gordonconwell.edu/ockenga/research/documents/ChristianityinitsGlobalContext.pdf.
- 3.
Ibid., 58.
- 4.
Pew Research Center, “Religion in Latin America.”
- 5.
Jacqueline Maria Hagan, “Religion and the Process of Migration: A Case Study of a Maya Transnational Community,” in Religion Across Borders: Transnational Immigrant Networks, ed. Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2002), 75.
- 6.
Haeyoun Park, “Children at Our Border,” The New York Times, October 14, 2014, U.S., accessed February 6, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/15/us/questions-about-the-border-kids.html.
- 7.
Michael D. Shear, “U.S. to Shut 3 Interim Shelters Housing Immigrant Children,” The New York Times, August 4, 2014, U.S., accessed February 6, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/us/us-to-close-3-emergency-shelters-used-for-migrant-children.html?mcubz=3.
- 8.
Molly Hennessy-Fiske, “Hundreds of migrant youths held at Texas military base,” The Los Angeles Times, June 5, 2014, accessed February 6, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-texas-immigrant-youth-shelter-20140605-story.html.
- 9.
BCFS, “Correcting Misinformation about Lackland Operations,” BCFS Health and Human Services, accessed February 5, 2016, https://bcfs.net/correcting-misinformation-about-lackland-operations.
- 10.
Alex Altman and Elizabeth Dias, “This Baptist Charity Is Being Paid Hundreds of Millions to Shelter Child Migrants,” Time Magazine, August 4, 2014, accessed February 6, 2016, http://time.com/3066459/unaccompanied-minor-immigration-border/.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
Richard A. Marini, “Preaching to the Children,” San Antonio Express News, August 14, 2014, Lifestyle, accessed February 6, 2016, http://www.expressnews.com/lifestyle/columnists/richard_a_marini/article/Preaching-to-the-children-5689865.php; Ken Camp “San Antonio minister preaches to immigrant children,” Baptist Standard, July 16, 2014, accessed February 6, 2016, https://www.baptiststandard.com/component/digitaledition/126-29/16719-san-antonio-minister-preaches-to-immigrant-children.
- 13.
Dan Trevino, comp., Advertisement for Bible Donations (n.p., 2014).
- 14.
Marla Bearden, email message to author, February 15, 2016; Camp, “San Antonio Minister Preaches.”
- 15.
BCFS caseworker, e-mail message to author, February 29, 2016.
- 16.
Trevino, Advertisement for Bible.
- 17.
Bruce St. Thomas and Paul Johnson, Empowering Children through Art and Expression (London, UK: Jessica Kinglsey Publishers, 2007), 13.
- 18.
Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 9.
- 19.
Stephen K. Levine, Poiesis: The Language of Psychology and the Speech of the Soul (London, UK: Jessica Kinglsey Publishers, 1997), 41.
- 20.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “Southwest Border Unaccompanied Alien Children FY 2014,” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, last modified November 24, 2015, accessed February 6, 2016, https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-border-unaccompanied-children/fy-2014.
- 21.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “Southwest Border,” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Sonia Nazario, “Outsourcing a Refugee Crisis: U.S. Paid Mexico Millions to Target Central Americans Fleeing Violence,” interview, War and Peace Report, Democracy Now!, October 13, 2015, hosted by Amy Goodman, accessed February 6, 2016, https://www.democracynow.org/2015/10/13/outsourcing_a_refugee_crisis_us_paid; Sonia Nazario, “The Refugees at Our Door,” The New York Times, October 10, 2015, Opinion, [Page #], accessed February 6, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/opinion/sunday/the-refugees-at-our-door.html?mcubz=3.
- 22.
Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, “Criminal Obsessions, after Foucault: Postcoloniality, Policing, and the Metaphysics of Disorder,” in Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 2006), 274.
- 23.
Ibid., 274.
- 24.
Elizabeth G. Kennedy, “Refugees from Central American Gangs,” Forced Migration Review 43 (May 2013): 51.
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, NY: Routledge, 1994), 103–104.
- 27.
Comaroff and Comaroff, “Criminal Obsessions,” 274.
- 28.
Nestor Rodriguez and Cecilia Menjívar, “Rodriguez/Menjívar: ‘Crisis’ label deflects responsibility for migrant children,” Houston Chronicle, August 26, 2016, Opinion, accessed February 6, 2016, http://www.chron.com/opinion/outlook/article/Rodriguez-Menj-var-Crisis-label-deflects-5714150.php.
- 29.
Jonathan Tilove, “Gov. Perry to deploy up to 1,000 Texas National Guard troops to border,” Austin American Statesman, July 14, 2014, Opinion, accessed February 6, 2016, http://www.statesman.com/news/state%2D%2Dregional-govt%2D%2Dpolitics/gov-perry-deploy-000-texas-national-guard-troops-border/fkYE4dMhDX2RSzKFol9SsJ/.
- 30.
Aviva Chomsky, How Immigration became Illegal (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2014), 104; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “Detention Management,” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, last modified 2014, accessed February 6, 2016, https://www.ice.gov/detention-management.
- 31.
Migration and Refugee Services, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and Center for Migration Studies, “Unlocking Human Dignity: A Plan to Transform the US Immigrant Detention System,” Journal on Migration and Human Security 3, no. 2 (2015): 164, accessed February 8, 2016, http://jmhs.cmsny.org/index.php/jmhs/article/view/48.
- 32.
Chomsky, How Immigration, 109.
- 33.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “Southwest Border,” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
- 34.
Gregory Lee Cuéllar, “Arte de Lágrimas,” Feminist Formations 28, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 86–93.
- 35.
Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 42.
- 36.
Bennett, Empathic Vision, 27.
- 37.
Cúellar, “Arte de Lágrimas,” 86–93.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cuéllar, G.L. (2018). Channeling the Biblical Exile as an Art Task for Central American Refugee Children on the Texas–Mexico Border. In: Agosto, E., Hidalgo, J. (eds) Latinxs, the Bible, and Migration. The Bible and Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96695-3_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96695-3_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-96694-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-96695-3
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)