Lost Children Archive,
Valeria Luiselle

How can we show through dance the changes and events the siblings experienced while showing their relationship?" With this question in mind, we created our dance to David Bowie's Space Oddity. Using levels to our advantage, we show the different challenges and obstacles that affected their relationship, while keeping the creativity of being a kid. We mirror each other, replicating the way children play with one another. Sound, lyrics, and movement all come into play when viewing our creation.

My project centers around my childhood blanket: the same blanket that traveled with me and my family from Bolivia to the U.S. As someone that’s never explored this part of their life, I saw it a good opportunity to start, even if my experience was much nicer than those of undocumented immigrants. The boy and the girl went through a small peak of what loss of innocence can be; in the end still retaining what they had before because of the amount of time spent on the journey and the reception they got once found again. I felt as though that loss was still important to showcase; to understand the difference between typical loss that happens while aging, and what can happen when going through traumatic events such as crossing the border. It’s crucial to differentiate loss in innocence and how they affect children because how are they, undocumented children, supposed to feel the American dream if their journey leaves little to dream about. As said before these paintings depict my childhood blanket in different stages of disarray; going from completely intact, to seeing some distress, to completely broken. It’s important to note these are burn marks. Smaller holes are able to be patched up with dedication, but after a while they are unable to be saved. 

I created a song that expresses the loss of yourself. At many points in the story the characters are put through situations that lead to them giving up or losing something. These scenarios are very real and happen to everyone, including myself. So it inspired me to make a song. I've been making songs for a while now and this was fun for me but I got burnt out from this one so it's still in its creation phase.

The idea for this project is to show what happens within the elegies found within the book Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli. The author makes a clear decision by not having any or very minimal descriptions for characters, so when planning out this project the people were drawn as a black silhouette, as a shadow can come from anyone regardless of their appearance. The decision for the peice to be done in black and white is a contrast to the narrow view that a majority of people seem to have towards those from other countries, much less any trying to immigrate. 

For my project I created a poster for missing children. In the book, one of the main plot lines is the children who are going missing at the border between Mexico and America. No one really knows who these children are and there’s not that much information on where they could be beside the fact that the last time they were heard from was when they were crossing the border. Even though some of these children have families that know who they were, the families don’t know exactly where these children are or what might have happened to them. In the book we don’t even get to know the names of the mothers' children who also go missing for a while. The poster that I made has descriptions and information on the missing kids but it isn’t very helpful due to the text being messed up and the images of the kids are distorted making it hard to tell what they actually look like. Both of these aspects represent how the missing children are known by some people but not much is actually known about them.

This project represents the long journey the family took with its different terrains and locations. Similarly, this shows the journey of the lost children. Both of the highways are away from each other, which represents a mother being disconnected from her lost child while going through the border. I interpret the meaning of my project as the reality of people crossing the U.S. border and how families get lost. The highways being presumably miles apart shows the distance between the mother and child, as well as how far the rest stop is from the highway, which is 63 miles on the mother’s side. On the child’s side, there are huge mountains and a lack of any form of civilization from what the paper can see. My project suggests the mistreatment and dehumanization of people crossing the border and how it can end with young children being split apart from their families and potentially dying in the hot weather. It also shows society being dehumanized by it due to the fact the signs are still up with bullet holes and cobwebs, showing how long they’ve been there. 

My project is a side-by-side painting, of the perspective of the boy and the girl, as well as Manuela’s two daughters who were trying to cross the border.  I wanted to show the feeling of being lost through the children's perspective, both having different circumstances, but both share the experience of disappearing, being lost, and only having each other. One side shows the boy and girl walking past Echo Canyon, which is where the boy planned for him and his sister to meet their parents. The second side shows a depiction of Manuela’s daughters dresses and how I imagined they would look like. In the book Manuela says that she put her phone number on the inside tag of the girls dresses so that when the girls reach America, someone could call the number and bring the girls to her. While these two kids are missing for completely different reasons, they also share the similarities and experiences as lost children.  

My drawing is a polaroid photo of the daughter taken from the son’s camera. It’s supposed to represent the second act of the book where the boy is writing / saying all of this for his little sister when she’s old enough to understand that there won't be another trip like this. It also shows that the boy values his little sister above anything else.