American Literary History

Returning from Tijuana, visiting temporary refugee camps, creating art in a shared authorship with the most impoverished communities of the Western Hemisphere We created and lifted a ladder towards the sky to take us to another planet, another land or another home. We saw a miniature wall from above as we imagined alternative worlds. We created small dwellings and imagined the color of carpets and number of rooms. We talked and created sculptures. My question is [h]ow does art alleviate? How does art transform? [H]ow does art provide? [H]ow does art educate? [H]ow does art speak? And is art making in a time like today an act of privilege or an act of revolution?

Caleb Duarte, Instagram post (13 January 2019)

The imagination allows us to strive for goals that transcend material, empirical realities. . . . To imagine is to believe in different possibilities, ones that we can create.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies

This essay focuses on two performative acts. The first is the fall 2018 caravan, a work of political performance, which involved thousands of Central American migrants/refugees fleeing their countries in response to structural and other forms of violence. These caravaneros (caravaners) traveled collectively through Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico to protect themselves from being targeted by state and nonstate actors en route to the US–Mexico border. The [End Page 1015] second performative act, which took place in Tijuana in January 2019, involved an artistic collaboration between Caleb Duarte and a group of caravaneros temporarily residing at El Barretal, a heavily guarded Mexican government-run refugee camp. Together, Duarte and the caravaneros co-authored a sculptural performance, creating a fabric ladder tied to helium balloons, which the wind lifted above the camp. I argue that Floating Ladder enacts how these caravaneros imagine their movement and mobility, as it challenges the regional immigration regime aiming to block migrants/refugees from making asylum claims in the US. In response to Duarte’s question regarding the role of art within this context, I draw upon Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s argument in Decolonizing Methodologies (2012) for the importance of political imagination in overcoming material obstacles. Both the fall 2018 caravan and Duarte’s collaborative artwork with caravaneros are political acts that demonstrate the “politics of living” by migrants/refugees. These “practices of generating forms of viable life” (Espiritu 51) entailed the construction of social and political imaginaries beyond the constraints and violence of national borders.¹

This essay focuses on the formation of the fall 2018 caravan that left San Pedro Sula, Honduras on 13 October 2018, the caravaneros’ political acts—including marches, acts of “spatial disobedience” (such as pushing past immigration checkpoints or refusals to be relocated or evicted)—and hunger strikes, as well as Floating Ladder, to contest US enforcement measures in a transnational context and to make public their right to asylum.² These are all performative acts, according to Judith Butler’s theory of performativity that she describes as “the moment in which a subject—a person, a collective—asserts a right or entitlement to a liveable life when no such prior authorization exists” (224). These performative acts are also performances in which the caravaneros narrate their experiences as social actors within the context of a displacement crisis. The power of these recent migrant/refugee caravans emerges from their collectivity, their perceptibility, as well as their appropriation of “certain spaces as sites for resistance,” which include roads and other spaces and places that are “not configured for their use” (Jeffers 85).³

Duarte’s social media post questions the role of “creating art in shared authorship” with caravaneros during what they referred to as “el éxodo centroamericano” (“Central American Exodus”). I contend that Duarte’s collaborative artworks with caravaneros are central to the political project of the caravan. The sculptural performance Floating Ladder was an inextricable part of the caravan—which itself was a kind of performance—and its significance is tied to its creation at a moment when the caravaneros met an [End Page 1016] impasse at the Mexico–US border. In this sense, the Floating Ladder urgently...