Guadalupe Maravilla, Requiem For My Border Crossing
About this video
Guadalupe Maravilla maps his own journey as an eight-year-old undocumented child escaping El Salvador's civil war in 1984. He uses drawings from a 16th-century manuscript about early migrations in Mexico and Central America, removes their information, re-collages them, and draws over them with Tripa Chuca, a line game he played during his two-month journey. A curator explains that the game, played with people who crossed borders too, becomes a way of sharing experiences and healing, and that his story deserves a place in history books.
You'll be able to
- describe Maravilla's journey from El Salvador to the United States.
- explain why he uses drawings from a 16th-century manuscript.
- explain how the game Tripa Chuca works and what it means in his art.
- explain how sharing border-crossing stories can be a form of healing.
Key words
- undocumented
- Living in a country without official permission or papers.
- coyote
- A person paid to guide migrants across borders.
- manuscript
- A handwritten book or document, especially an old one.
- collage
- Art made by cutting and arranging pieces of paper or images into a new composition.
- Tripa Chuca
- A two-player line game where players connect numbers without letting lines touch.
- requiem
- A piece of music or art honoring the dead or a painful past.
Transcript
So basically what I've been doing in the last couple years is I've been working on mapping my own route that I crossed as eight-year-old kid. I was the first wave of undocumented children that came over in 1984 and were escaping the civil war in El Salvador. And I went from El Salvador to Honduras, Guatemala, all the way to Mexico with various coyotes being passed from person to person.
I invited Guadalupe Maravilla to present this body of work titled "Requiem for my Border Crossing," because I was interested in the ways he maps the immigrant experience onto drawings from the 16th century. The origin, the source for the drawings is a book—a manuscript from the 16th century and it told the history of the original groups from Mexico and Central America that migrated throughout that territory.
So I was completely fascinated because they saw like these these mountains, these rivers, these crossing routes, footprints and I was like wow like this is really fascinating because this is kind of the same area that I crossed. I then took all the information out of the map so it was just like the paper and then I re-collaged them and created these images. So on top of that like I played this game, Tripa Chuca which is the line drawings that you see. And basically this is a game that I actually used to play as a child, and I played this game a lot during my two months journey from El Salvador to the US.
Basically it's a piece of paper and you draw a pencil and you play with another person and you put person numbers on a piece of paper and then you take turns you alternate. And basically the only rules are that the lines cannot touch, and it starts to form like this bond between two people. And to me, it's like they're like really kind of lines that create a form of mapping. And also like the lines actually become like the border, like this endless maze.
He plays this game with people who have had a very similar experience to his own border crossing. So when we're sitting in actual you know like the drawings are out and we started talking about how they cross so it's like we're sharing information. We're sharing their experiences and in a way for me like that's a form of healing that happens because there's sometimes it's like really hard to share these experiences.
These beautiful drawings, in my interpretation of them, and the reason why I wanted to bring Guadalupe into the show, is because they tell this story that is worthy of being in books this is an epic that must be told and it must be in every history books not just in Central America but also in the US.
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