Guadalup Maravilla Retraces Migrant Journey With ‘Mariposa Relámpago’

Guadalupe Maravilla (b. 1976; San Salvador, El Salvador) remembers everything.

El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, crossing the US border at Tijuana to San Diego. His two-and-a-half-month journey as an unaccompanied 8-year-old to reunite with his refugee parents in America. There has been no migration of better opportunities. They weren't chasing the “American Dream,” whatever that is.

Maravilla was part of the first wave of unaccompanied and undocumented children who arrived at the U.S. 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 labeled communists, which forced Maravilla's father and mother to flee El Salvador urgently, without their children.

Guadalupe and her sister stayed behind to take care of a grandmother. He eventually found and paid a coyote to bring the brothers to the United States

One of the many big lies America tells about immigration to this county is that it moves by choice. For economy For opportunists looking to take advantage of this region's milk and honey, jobs and healthcare.

Nonsense

More often than not, it's driven by terror. A life or death choice. The last resort.

“El Salvador is a different place now, it's actually a very beautiful place to be,” Maravilla, who became a US citizen in 2006, told Forbes.com. “It's a beautiful tropical country, why would anyone leave unless there's something for you? Look how beautiful Costa Rica is, if it's peaceful, why would (anyone) leave to come here where it's cold and are forced to work 24 hours a day?”

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 is life or death. Generally, people leave their home countries and their families with nothing more than what they can carry to face a dangerous and uncertain future in a country where millions of people insult them at the prospect of minimum wage work , at best.

Imagine the choice as a parent, the choice that Maravilla's parents made, to leave young children behind or risk your life and theirs to stay.

“Once you see that, you understand the gravity of the situations they're escaping from: (the kids) have a better chance of surviving if they go alone than if they stay where they are,” Maravilla said. “We dehumanize the people who come; people see them as “illegals” and “aliens”, but all these people have complex stories. I am one of millions of stories around the world, this is nothing new.”

Immigration, however, and perhaps has always been this way in America, is more about politics than about people.

“It is a humanitarian crisis that is not talked about in this 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 going on right now,” Maravilla says of the current conversation of America on immigration “People are running away from extreme violence and corruption and risking their lives to do it. It breaks my heart to see this fight, and the politicians who use it as a game politician, they play with people's lives.”

Politicians more interested in creating clever slogans than humane solutions.

Maravilla pours the trauma of her childhood immigration journey into art, along with her experiences of another trauma: cancer.

Colon cancer

As an adult, Maravilla was diagnosed with colon cancer. He relates the illness to the stresses of his migratory experience. He believes that the systemic abuse of immigrants manifests itself physically in the body.

During Maravilla's recovery process she was introduced to ancient and contemporary healing methods. He found sound therapy particularly helpful.

“Sound healing did not cure my colon cancer. It was a big part of my own healing journey. I used Western medicine and many old and new medicines to overcome colon cancer,” explains Maravilla. “I used sound to heal the spirit. Many indigenous cultures believe that to heal a disease you also need to heal the spirit. That's something that Western medicine wouldn't talk about, it's just about taking out the tumor, but there's a lot of trauma and a lot of history left, and sometimes the tumor can re-emerge from that.”

It's been over 10 years since Maravilla's cancer diagnosis and she continues to raise awareness about trauma and expand access to healing. He has become a trained sound healer himself, regularly conducting workshops for undocumented immigrants and cancer patients and survivors.

“For these particular cancer ceremonies, I hope to create a little bit of hope. I've been in that situation where you're fighting cancer and things aren't looking good and you're just looking for a little bit of hope, just a little ray of hope. just to get over you, let something positive happen to get through another day,” Maravilla said. “Everyone is queuing (after) and my shirts are full of tears because everyone is crying on my shoulder after every ceremony, it's very emotional, very beautiful. I don't believe that sound therapy will cure any kind of disease, especially one as serious as cancer, but the point is to show people that there are tools to heal the spirit, and healing the spirit is also healing cancer. .”

Another tool Maravilla uses to heal the spirit is her artwork.

Lightning Butterfly

Maravilla's monumental sound-healing sculpture Lightning Butterfly born from the artist's experience with immigration and as a cancer survivor. He bought a yellow school bus in El Salvador with the intention of retracing his migration route from his native country to the United States, which he has 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 instrument of healing, the work was transformed from a school bus and elaborately reconstructed with hundreds of objects that told the story of Marvel. This task was carried out in Mexico City, where the artist created approximately 50 jobs during seven months of production, a practice of establishing “microeconomies” around his work Maravilla is very proud of.

Now adorned with a chrome, the bus features fringes made of cutlery and a series of objects imbued with spiritual, political and medicinal meaning, from models of children's torsos, intended to refer to the ghosts of the first to use the 'bus and those who have done it. crossed borders in search of safety, to symbols of Mesoamerican cosmology, indigenous practices and spiritual emblems, as well as contemporary images of illness and medicine.

Each of the thousands of objects has a meaning, nothing is random, and all were obtained along the route of his immigrant journey to El Salvador or Mexico.

“I think it's important to face trauma. I was a child of war, I lived through war, so going back to these places where I experienced these traumas was part of my healing journey,” explained Maravilla. “Eventually, I began to collect materials that became part of my own shrine, my altars, and eventually these objects began to become part of my sculptures and my paintings.”

The forks, spoons and knives on the bus refer to the importance of community. Throughout this sculpture, he has reused large pots known as tamaleres used to steam tamales. At an outdoor antiques market in Mexico City, he found the little carousel on top of the bus. He had the vision to place it there as a “memorial to the children lost on their way to the border”.

Lightning Butterflybelongs to his “disease launchers” series and It also includes gongs and other tonal objects suspended from its sides. The artist activates them during sound ceremonies together with a team of healers.

The bus currently resides in The Contemporary Austin's outdoor sculpture garden, Laguna Gloria, where it will be on view until November 3, 2024.

“At a time when debates about migration are rampant, it is especially meaningful to have this powerful piece of art installed in the heart of the Texas capital, where some of the most violent border policies are being mobilized,” Alex Klein, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at The Contemporary Austin, said when Mariposa Relámpago's the tour schedule was announced.

Originally commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston in May 2023, Lightning Butterfly made its Texas debut at the Marfa Ballroom in late 2023 and, following a run at The Contemporary Austin, will make its final Texas stop at the University of Houston's Blaffer Art Museum.

“Butterfly Lightning”

Lightning Butterfly translates to “butterfly lightning” in English. Lightning and butterflies came to Maravilla in a dream when he was in Oaxaca, Mexico, retracing his migration route.

“Then I'm in front of a traffic light and I see two old ladies of about 80 or 90 years old, old, beautiful, women – grandmothers, grandmothers – and they talk about this old healer who came from the south when they were children and they said his name was Mariposa Relampago”, recalls Maravilla. “I said, 'Wow, that's exactly who visited me in that dream!'

The bus had a name.

“I go back to these places and I see the immigrant children traveling to the United States and I see families begging for money on the street,” Maravilla continues. “Sometimes it's very obvious, Haitian families on the highway when I enter Mexico City, or another part of Mexico by car from the airport, and I see 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 sheltered most of my life,” Maravilla said.

Mariposa Relampago is watching over him.

“Hell yes it is,” he said.