Silvia Rodriguez Vega, 2023, Drawing Deportation. Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children, New York University Press, 217 pp, ISBN 9781479810451

Keywords: immigration; deportation; childhood; trauma; creative methods.

In this compelling book, Silvia Rodriguez Vega engages with a challenging task: adding to the vast – and crowded – field of migration studies by focusing on the perspectives and experiences of an understudied social group, despite being among the fastest-growing demographics in the US: immigrant children. Due to the methodological and ethical constraints it implies, social sciences tend to shy away from conducting research with the youngest sectors of society. On one hand, the most common research methods, such as interviews and surveys, are generally conceived for adults and perform poorly when barriers such as stigma, language, and age get in the way of gathering strictly verbal information. On the other hand, working with underage populations and other vulnerable subjects increasingly requires the approval of ethical boards and committees and compliance with rigid procedures and codes of conduct. These precautionary measures are undoubtedly necessary to protect participants from any possible (intended or unintended) harm derived from the research. However, complying with such strict codes, administrative procedures, and regulations may also kill the joy of conducting field research. That is not the case with Rodriguez Vega, though: she proves to be neither shy nor looking for shortcuts. On the contrary, she embarks on a long-term journey aimed at unraveling the effects of legal violence – defined as “the various forms of structural injustice in society that directly or indirectly harm people through the rule of law” (Rodriguez Vega, 2023, p. 4), a concept she borrows from Menjívar and Abrego (2012) – on children with an immigrant background.

Building on her direct experience working in school and after-school art programs in two Latinx communities in Phoenix and Los Angeles over more than ten years, the author manages to unmask the consequences of prolonged exposure to state violence such as structural racism, detention, deportation, and family separation on the children of mixed-status families. She does that through a fine-grained methodology based on art and theatre, labeled as a praxis of art and healing, as it is meant to externalize and process trauma. Drawing, impersonating, make-believing, and other techniques are easily embraced by children and have proven to be very effective ways to channel and express feelings and thoughts that may be otherwise too complex to work out, verbalize and share with others, especially when subjects present a condition of chronic stress, as is the case for many kids in immigrant families. Rodriguez Vega shows how the cumulative effects of rampant anti-immigrant policies affect them regardless of their status or that of their parents, demonstrating once more that when state politics are imbued with the legacy of White supremacy, citizenship is not membership. The author is also adamant in stating that the antidote to chronic stress is not resilience: this is a coping mechanism that does not alter the cause