migration maps

Final project for sophomore architectural studio course, Scales of Design. In six panels of approximately 4x8 feet, I consider the globe through the pathways of those who forcibly traverse it. I have anonymously mapped three oral histories conducted with Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center during the summer of 2021. When I was told these stories, their carriers, from Haiti, Yemen, and Nigeria, were all detained in southwestern Texas ICE processing facilities, seeking asylum in the United States. These individuals traversed enormous sections of the globe’s surface to reach the United States, making a significant portion of their journeys on foot. Drawing from Joaquín Torres-García’s América Invertida, I depict pathways in the order through which individuals passed through countries, with little regard for geographic positionality: north-south, or east-west, cognizant of the inherent hierarchical, hegemonic binaries imposed by these directional distinctions. This work urges one to consider how notions of a global center are intensely individual. After all, an individual does not themselves feel they are moving up or down as they pass across boundaries. Likewise, the terrains of desert, water, forest, remain constant across international boundaries. Any sense of transition is implied only through our own construction. I’ve spaced countries out across the surface of this globe. There exists significant space where individuals, rendered in stitch, move outside of national bounds; perhaps not physically, but legally and socially, coming to occupy a kind of liminal, blank space.