A visual collaboration with a letter written by a Honduran mother who is being kept at Karnes County Detention Center with her younger son after attempting to cross the border to be re-united with her family. Despite the traumatic and abusive conditions she faces at Karnes, she and her younger son reach across the US/Mexico Border to join hands with her older son who made it to Los Angeles. Their bodies are preserved with the light of a million stars, representing the millions of mothers, fathers, and children throughout history who attempt to cross the border into the US. Migrants risk enormous loss in the optimism of securing family and community in a new country. For as long as she lives, the Honduran mother, and millions others, reach for each other and form constellations in the night despite the borders, detainments, and abuse of the US. This image is a tribute to their undefeatable optimism and resilience.
This print includes a print of a poem by Jess X. Chen called "Hunger Drives The Body Into Imagination" and also the story behind the painting and collaboration with Culture Strike, Mariposas Sin Frontiers and End Family Detention.
Read the original letter here.
This illustration was commissioned by Culture Strike is part of Visions From Inside project: a series of art that illuminates letters from undocumented women and children kept at family detention centers for undocumented immigrants along the US/Mexico Border.
It was seen on the Huffington Post, on the cover of the Central American Refugees Conference at UCLA and exhibited at spaces such as the UN Human Rights Council at the Palais De Nations in Geneva.
