Guadalupe Maravilla (b. 1976; San Salvador, El Salvador) remembers all of it.
El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, crossing the U.S. border at Tijuana into San Diego. His two-and-a-half-month journey as an 8-year-old unaccompanied minor to rejoin his refugee parents in America. Their’s wasn’t a migration of better opportunity. They weren’t pursing the “American Dream,” whatever that is.
Maravilla was part of the first wave of unaccompanied, undocumented children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. His uncle was a student protesting the war–captured, tortured, and killed by the military. His family was branded as communists, forcing Maravilla’s father and mother to flee El Salvador urgently, without their children.
Guadalupe and his sister were left behind to care for a grandmother. She eventually found and paid a coyote to take the siblings to U.S.
One of the many big lies America tells about immigration to this county is that it’s driven by choice. By economics. By opportunists looking to take advantage of this county’s milk and honey and jobs and healthcare.
Nonsense.
As often as not, it’s driven by terror. A choice of life or death. The last resort.
“El Salvador is a different place now, it is actually a really beautiful place to be,” Maravilla, who became a U.S. citizen in 2006, told Forbes.com. “It’s a gorgeous tropical country, why would anyone leave unless there's something pushing you out? Look how beautiful Costa Rica is, if it's at peace, why would (anyone) leave to come here where it's cold and they’re forced to work 24/7?”
For many immigrants, the choice is not El Salvador or the United States, or Guatemala or the United States, or Haiti or the United States, it’s life or death. People don’t generally leave their home countries and families with nothing more than what they can carry to face a dangerous and uncertain future in a country where millions revile them for the prospects of working a minimum wage job–at best.
Imagine the choice as a parent–the choice Maravilla’s parents made–of leaving young children behind or risking your–and their –life to stay.
“Once you visualize that, you understand the severity of the situations they are escaping–(children) have a better chance of surviving if they go on their own than to just stay where they are,” Maravilla said. “We dehumanize the people coming over; people see them as ‘illegals’ and ‘aliens,’ but all those people have complex stories. I’m one of millions of stories worldwide, this isn't anything new.”
Immigration, however–and perhaps its always been this way in America–is more focused on the politics than the people.
“It's a humanitarian crisis that is not talked about in that way. (The United States is) not equipped to handle the excess numbers (of immigrants) and unfortunately people are being used as pawns in some political game that's happening right now,” Maravilla says of America’s current conversation around immigration. “People are escaping extreme violence and corruption and they're risking their lives and their own children to do it. It breaks my heart to see this struggle, and politicians using that as a political game, they're playing with people's lives.”
Politicians more interested in creating clever slogans than humane solutions.
Maravilla pours the trauma of his childhood immigrant journey into art, along with the experiences of another trauma: cancer.
Colon Cancer
As an adult, Maravilla was diagnosed with colon cancer. He links the illness with the stresses of his migration experience. He believes the systemic abuse of immigrants physically manifests in the body.
Throughout Maravilla’s recovery process he was introduced to ancient and contemporary healing methods. He found sound therapy particularly helpful.
“Sound healing did not heal my colon cancer. It was a big part of my own healing journey. I used Western medicine and a lot of ancient medicines and new medicines to overcome colon cancer,” Maravilla explains. “I used sound to heal the spirit. A lot of indigenous cultures believe that in order to heal an illness, you have to heal the spirit as well. That’s something Western medicine wouldn't talk about, it's just about extracting the tumor, but there's a lot of trauma, and a lot of history there that is just left, and sometimes the tumor can reemerge from that.”
As an adult, Maravilla was diagnosed with colon cancer. He links the illness with the stresses of his migration experience. He believes the systemic abuse of immigrants physically manifests in the body.
Throughout Maravilla’s recovery process he was introduced to ancient and contemporary healing methods. He found sound therapy particularly helpful.
“Sound healing did not heal my colon cancer. It was a big part of my own healing journey. I used Western medicine and a lot of ancient medicines and new medicines to overcome colon cancer,” Maravilla explains. “I used sound to heal the spirit. A lot of indigenous cultures believe that in order to heal an illness, you have to heal the spirit as well. That’s something Western medicine wouldn't talk about, it's just about extracting the tumor, but there's a lot of trauma, and a lot of history there that is just left, and sometimes the tumor can reemerge from that.”
Mariposa Relámpago
Maravilla’s monumental sound-healing sculpture Mariposa Relámpago was born out of the artist’s experience with immigration and as a cancer survivor. He purchased a yellow school bus in El Salvador with the intention of re-tracing his migration route from his native country to the United States–something he’s done many times.
El Salvador has a culture of fantastically decorating decommissioned American school buses and putting them back into service as public transportation. Maravilla also traveled by bus during his migration.
Equal parts sculpture, shrine, and healing instrument, the work was transformed from a school bus and elaborately reconstructed with hundreds of objects speaking to Maravilla’s story. That task was accomplished in Mexico City where the artist created roughly 50 jobs over seven months of production, a practice of establishing “micro-economies” around his work Maravilla takes great pride in.
Now adorned with chrome plating, the bus features fringe made of cutlery and a range of objects imbued with spiritual, political, and medicinal meaning, from models of children’s torsos, intended to reference the ghosts of those who first used the bus and those who have traversed across borders in search of safety, to symbols from Mesoamerican cosmology, Indigenous practices, and spiritual emblems, as well as contemporary imagery of disease and medicine.
Each of the thousands of objects has meaning, nothing is random, and all were sourced along the route of his immigrant journey in El Salvador or Mexico.
“I believe it's important to confront trauma. I was a child of war, experienced war, so going back to these places where I experienced these traumas was part of my healing journey,” Maravilla explained. “Eventually, I started collecting materials that became part of my own shrine, my altars, and then eventually these objects started becoming part of my sculptures and my paintings.”
Forks, spoons, and knives on the bus reference the importance of community coming together. Throughout this sculpture, he has repurposed large pots known as tamaleras used to steam tamales. At an open-air antique market in Mexico City, he found the small carousel that sits atop the bus. He had a vision to place it there as a “memorial to children lost on their way to the border.”
Mariposa Relámpago, belongs to his “Disease Throwers” series and additionally features gongs and other tonal objects suspended from its sides. The artist activates these during sound ceremonies alongside a team of healers.
The bus currently resides at The Contemporary Austin’s outdoor sculpture garden, Laguna Gloria, where it can be seen through November 3, 2024.
“At a moment when the debates around migration are rampant, it is especially meaningful to have this powerful artwork installed within the heart of Texas’ capital city, where some of the most violent border policies are being mobilized,” Alex Klein, Head Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at The Contemporary Austin, said when Mariposa Relámpago’s touring schedule was announced.
Originally commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston in May 2023, Mariposa Relámpago debuted in Texas at Ballroom Marfa in late 2023 and, following the presentation at The Contemporary Austin, will make its final stop in Texas at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston.
Butterfly Lightning
Mariposa Relámpago translates to “butterfly lightning” in English. Lightning bolts and butterflies came to Maravilla in a dream when he was in Oaxaca, Mexico, retracing his migrant route.
“Then I'm standing at a traffic light and I see two elderly ladies in their 80s or 90s, ancient, beautiful, women–abuelas, grandmothers–and they're talking about this ancient healer that used to come from the south when they were little and they said her name was Mariposa Relampago,” Maravilla remembers. “I was like, ‘wow, that's exactly who visited me during this dream!’”
The bus had a name.
“I go back to these places and I see the immigrant children traveling up to the United States and I see families asking for money in the street,” Maravilla continues. “Sometimes it's really obvious, Haitian families on the highway as I'm entering Mexico City, or another part of Mexico in a car from the airport, and I see the Haitian families traveling with children. It's very heartbreaking. I was one of those kids.”
One of the lucky ones.
“I feel like I've been protected most of my life,” Maravilla said.
Mariposa Relampago is looking out for him.
“Hell, yeah she is,” he said.