Silvia Rodriguez Vega on Drawing Deportation

Leonard Lopate at Large on WBAI Radio in New York

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 agents of their own stories. According to Professor Rodriguez Vega, when children are the agents of their own stories they can reimagine destructive situations in ways that adults sometimes cannot, offering alternatives and hope for a better future. Join us when Assistant Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara Silvia Rodriguez Vega, provides key insights into how immigrant children presented creative, out-of-the-box, powerful solutions to the dilemmas that anti-immigrant rhetoric and harsh immigration laws present on this installment of Leonard Lopate at Large. 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 a world that would rather divest them of it.