LOS ANGELES — In 2014, Jackie Amézquita was looking for her brother. He had recently arrived at the US southern border with his pregnant wife seeking asylum after being kidnapped and extorted in their native Guatemala, but she had not heard from him for two weeks. She contacted a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office, where an officer recommended that she look up her name in an online detainee database. She found that he had been detained and would remain so for nine months until his asylum application was approved. (He was released the day after his daughter was born.) Searching for his name, she also came across a list of deceased inmates in ICE custody since 2003. The most commonly listed countries of birth were Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador. , Guatemala and Cuba, but others had come from China, Ghana, Haiti, the Czech Republic and elsewhere.
This list formed the basis of his 2022 MFA thesis exhibition at the University of California, Los Angeles, Gemidos de la Tierra (Lamentation of the Earth/Soil). She collected soil from states where migrants lost their lives in detention centers and mixed it with masa (ground corn dough), rainwater and salt. She then cast letters from the adobe-like mixture, baked them and used them to spell out each of the names of the approximately 200 migrants on large four-by-eight-foot white panels.
Next weekend, March 25 and 26, Amézquita will present a two-day mobile version of Gemidosmounting the panels on the sides of three vans that will form the head of a caravan traveling to sites around Los Angeles that represent both systems of oppression and solidarity for immigrants – “spaces that speak to the diaspora of Central America”, in the artist’s words.
Curator Daniela Lieja Quintanar invited Amézquita to reconstruct the work in this new mobile version, a joint presentation between Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND).
“His work is deeply connected to the experience of walking across the earth, the struggle to sustain life collectively against the repressive system we live in,” Quintanar said. Hyperallergic.
“I understand Gemidos de la Tierra as Contemporary Maya Estelas that inform, testify and highlight the atrocities of American border policy that are being replicated around the world,” she added, referring to the carved stele monuments of the ancient Maya civilization. “But also as estelas that honor and present the names of those who fought to sustain life.”
During his research for the project, Amézquita discovered two death records of inmates in ICE custody: one listing deaths from 2003 to 2017 and one from 2018, with a gap of almost a year between the two. She noticed that children were conspicuously absent from the lists, a stark contrast to accounts of deaths of detained children she found in online accounts.
“How can I carve names on these panels that aren’t there?” she wondered. To honor these children, she shredded all the documents she collected that mention their deaths, leaked letters from them, and implanted them with chia seeds, which are just beginning to sprout.
On the front grill of each truck, Amézquita will attach corn cobs, another central element of indigenous traditions in Central America and Mexico. This not only references the Mayan origin story of humans having been created from corn, but also represents the Mayan deities believed to aid a transition from life to death. She will galvanize the cobs of corn with copper, so they will turn from a metallic gold to a bright blue as the organic matter decomposes and the copper oxidizes.
Saturday morning in the MOCA Geffen parking lot, Amézquita will begin the performance by adding names to the panels of four adults and one child who have died since she first performed the work last year. She will then drive a caravan of around 30 cars driven by friends and supporters to sites associated with the detention and surveillance of migrants, including the offices of security firm G4S and GEO Group which invests in private prisons. , as well as an ICE field and detention office. centers. At each stop, she will give a bilingual lecture on the history and mission of each organization. On Sunday, she will lead another tour, this time visiting organizations that offer support, aid and solidarity to migrants.
The event will culminate in MacArthur Park, a longtime hub for Central American communities in Los Angeles, with a festive celebration open to the public including tamales and a performance by Dorian Wood.
Along the routes, participants can listen to a Spotify playlist in their car in which Amézquita recounts her own immigration experience. She left her hometown of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala at age 17, walking across the US-Mexico border and arriving in Los Angeles, where she was reunited with her mother, whom she had not seen since. that she had made the same trip in 1987, when the artist was only two years old. (After several years of undocumented immigration status, Amézquita became a permanent resident of the United States in 2015.)
It was traveling with Ambosan artist collective that explores issues around border and transnationality, several years later she began to explore ways to incorporate soil into her works.
“I started thinking about the water bottle I left behind when I had to flee immigration. ‘What happened to that bottle? Is it still there? Someone did he drink water?’ She began collecting soil from various locations in bottles, which serve as vessels for the history of the site and a personal connection to it.
There is also a mail art portion of the job, in which Amézquita will send approximately 100 letters containing information about the project and the two inmate death lists, the first of which was removed from the ICE website and is only available via FOIA request. She also created a QR code so anyone could access these listings online, a way to extend the life of the part beyond physical and temporal limitations. It’s a way to commemorate the names of the deceased, while continuing the grim task of documenting their deaths in state custody.
“I would like to take this project somewhere else, maybe a year from now, to see what happened that year,” Amézquita says. “How many names do we have to keep adding to this list? And when is it going to stop?
