Migrant Children: Telling the Cure and Prejudice

Abstract

In April 2019, Abraham Pineda Jácome photographed two people drowned in the Rio Bravo. They were Óscar and Valeria, father and daughter, Salvadorans, migrants on their way to the United States. The girl, less than two years old, and her father, 25 years old, are wrapped in the same T-shirt. From the materiality of the clothing that turns a coat into a shroud, this work aims to investigate how the condition of migrant children is narrated in their relationship of dependence on the other. Following Adriana Cavarero’s reflections in Horrorismo. Nombrando la violencia contemporánea, this relationship exposes them to both care and harm. On the other hand, the clothing acquires a metonymic function that, addressing the case of El Salvador, on which the article focuses, can be traced in many other texts by Salvadoran authors who address the issue of migration, in different periods. The diachrony shows that there is a permanent forced migration in the country, from the late nineteenth century to the present. For this reason, while providing data and concise information on the historical and social context, the article presents and comments on one of the first stories on the theme of the bond between father and son in a migratory context: “Semos malos” by Salarrué, published in 1933 in the collection Cuentos de barro. Then the analysis focuses on the relationship between migrant children and adults in Lotería! by Salvadoran playwright Jorgelina Cerritos, published in 2019, and concludes with the photos El último atuendo de los desaparecidos by Salvadoran photographer Fred Ramos, published in “El Faro” in 2014. The chosen texts present some variants of family relationships in the migratory context: abandonment, helplessness; protection, support and above all shelter, a polysemic term that refers to the metonymy proposed here as a common thread. These are “necessary” texts (in the broadest sense of the term) that, by (re)presenting the pain or death of migrants, raise a question about the very exercise of writing and photography, to which the article tries to answer by analyzing the function of metonymy and deepening the notion of vulnerability.