On the steps of the Statue of Liberty on Sunday, I organized greater than 50 folks to show our grief right into a collective demand: Free the 238 males unlawfully disappeared into CECOT.
In 2019, I spoke to a bunch of asylum-seeking girls who informed me of the months they spent trapped in a detention middle in southern Texas after attempting to hunt asylum on the US-Mexico border. They had been denied showers for weeks on finish, pressured to bleed via their garments throughout their intervals, and got rotting meals to eat. These girls endured circumstances meant to interrupt them. However as an alternative of staying silent, they organized a llanto de libertad—a cry for freedom.
One night time, over a thousand girls screamed in unison. It was a wail, a protest, a collective act of resistance, a requirement to be heard and launched.
Think about the act of defiance: one thousand girls screaming for his or her freedom as armed guards watched over them.
They believed if these of us on the surface heard them, we might care. However we refused to listen to them and so nobody got here.
Their llanto de libertad has haunted me for years. A cry unheard. A narrative untold. I perceive now: They weren’t solely demanding their freedom. They had been attempting to warn us. If solely we had paid consideration.
In March, our authorities, performing in our identify, forcibly despatched 238 Venezuelan males to a infamous mega-prison in El Salvador often called CECOT. Some had been eliminated beneath the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act. Many of those males had been asylum seekers or had authorized grounds to be in the US. But they had been rounded up at midnight, branded as criminals, and disappeared into a 3rd nation’s jail.
Present Challenge
Although the US authorities has insisted that these males are “harmful,” it has produced no proof to help such claims. Authorities officers have constantly misled courts and the public. These gross human rights violations are constructed on the federal government’s lies. The federal government should manipulate reminiscence to conscript us into their false narrative and justify the erosion of our most basic values. It should erase historical past. It should overwhelm us with misinformation and worry.
That is the equipment of authoritarianism. And that is precisely the place artwork turns into important—not ornamental, not symbolic, however pressing and crucial. Within the face of institutionalized gaslighting, artwork turns into a vessel for truth-telling. It resists silence. Artwork insists: We had been right here, we noticed, we keep in mind.
On June 1, I turned my very own grief into protest—and my protest into artwork.
I conceived, directed and arranged greater than 50 individuals who gathered on the steps of the Statue of Liberty to reclaim our public area as a website of reminiscence and denunciation. We gathered to point out that our nation, a spot that after welcomed immigrants, now disappears them. We insisted on fact in a rustic that’s now being constructed on silence.
With the chilly wind whipping round us, a beam of daylight broke via the clouds simply as I started to talk the names of the 238 males disappeared into CECOT. One after the other. Every identify a breath. Every identify a wound. Every identify a warning.
It was a ritual to their existence. A reckoning. A public refusal to overlook.
After which from silence, we screamed.
Our personal llanto de libertad.
A collective cry, a requirement: Freedom for the 238 males who had been unlawfully disappeared into CECOT.
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Artwork has at all times been our reminiscence—etched on cave partitions, woven into cloth, painted on the perimeters of buildings. It’s how we have now remembered ourselves via centuries of violence, silence, and erasure. We want solely look a handful of years again to search out roadmaps for resistance via artwork.
Throughout the globe, actions have used artwork to hold reminiscence the place governments tried to erase it. In Chile, the Brigada Ramona Parra (BRP) reminds us that partitions are by no means impartial; they’re battlegrounds for reminiscence and fact. Below Pinochet’s dictatorship, public expression was crushed, protest criminalized, and the reminiscence of the disappeared violently suppressed. However within the years that adopted, BRP reclaimed the streets with daring, collective muralism—acts of defiance in coloration and kind. They painted what official historical past tried to erase. They confirmed that artwork is just not a passive reflection of a second—it’s a software to confront energy, carry reminiscence, and ignite motion.
In Argentina, Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo turned grief right into a type of efficiency artwork—a dwelling, respiratory denunciation of state terror. Because the navy dictatorship disappeared 1000’s of little children, the regime insisted they by no means existed. However the Madres refused erasure. They gathered each Thursday in Buenos Aires’s Plaza de Mayo, circling silently with white headscarves—symbols of mourning, defiance, and maternal energy. Their march was not loud, however it was thunderous. They used their our bodies as dwelling testimony, a public efficiency that shattered the dictatorship’s fastidiously constructed silence. It was protest. It was artwork. It was reminiscence made seen.
In my residence nation of Colombia, La Columna 13 in Medellín—as soon as one of the vital violent and marginalized areas of town—has change into a logo of resistance via artwork, and at its coronary heart is hip-hop. For many years, the Colombian state uncared for the individuals who lived there, providing solely militarization and abandonment. However the youth of Columna 13 reclaimed their story via rap, graffiti, breakdancing, and DJing—the 4 pillars of hip-hop. They turned ache into poetry, trauma into fact. Artists and native collectives started utilizing hip hop as a software to demand justice, doc state violence, and have a good time neighborhood resilience. Their music and murals reworked the neighborhood’s steep, winding streets into an open-air archive of resistance.
On Sunday, as our screams echoed off the Statue of Liberty, our our bodies stood frozen—rooted in a spot of defiance, reverence, and collective energy. Nobody needed to maneuver. It felt sacred, crucial to remain.
Then my dearest pal, Yara Travieso—Venezuelan, fierce, and full of fireside—broke the silence and mentioned, “Our want for liberation is stronger than our worry of repression.”
All of us repeated it. A mantra. A vow.
I carry these phrases with me now, not simply as consolation, however as path.
Might they information you, too—via worry, via doubt—as we struggle for the center and soul of our nation.
