By Annika Hom, Harvard Public Well being
This article initially appeared in Harvard Public Well being journal. Subscribe to their e-newsletter.
When Isaac Contreras moved again to Mexico Metropolis in early 2024, Plaza Giordano Bruno, throughout the road from his condo, turned a well-recognized sight. Locals know the plaza for its ominous, hooded statue of the eponymous thinker, and, now, for a whole lot of Haitian and Central and South American migrants who’ve camped there over time whereas ready for a United States immigration appointment. Contreras watched each day because the migrants’ lives unfolded in public. And he wished to assist the children.
So he approached the Plaza Giordano camp with papers and markers. As an artist, he understood the ability creativity may unleash, and he requested them to attract how they bought to Mexico. The images shocked him. “There have been children who expressed their passage via the jungle—how they had been assaulted, robbed,” Contreras recollects.
The roughly 60-mile stretch via the Darién Hole—the “land bridge” that connects North and South America alongside southern Panama and northwestern Colombia—is a typical route for migrants from Africa, Asia, and Central and South America trying to find the American Dream. Within the first half of this 12 months alone, practically 198,000 migrants crossed there, based on the Panamanian authorities. It’s an arduous journey fraught with risks pure and human—predatory animals, scarce meals, in addition to violence, robberies, and sexual assault, whose victims embody kids.
“[A] five-year-old that’s crossed three nations, [through] the jungle—that’s not a typical expertise for a boy or woman of that age, proper?” Contreras says. “That’s once I realized [art] was indispensable for them…. It may give their experiences a form.”
Artwork, video games, and toys are proving highly effective instruments for addressing the psychological well being and trauma of migrant youth in Mexico. With initiatives from particular person volunteers like Contreras, in addition to psychologists and humanitarian organizations like Medical doctors With out Borders (which even produced an animated movie with kids’s drawings), unstructured play is changing into an essential if under-discussed a part of the humanitarian response in Mexico Metropolis and alongside the U.S.-Mexico border.
Kids play and draw at a migrant encampment in Plaza Soledad in Mexico Metropolis in October.
Analysis reveals that play remedy and artwork remedy are essential for baby growth and might enable kids to course of complicated trauma. One 2022 examine discovered that artwork can promote emotions of hope, empowerment, and optimism amongst children with minor psychological well being difficulties. Artwork will also be essential, the identical examine confirmed, “for expressing complicated feelings and emotions that can’t be simply verbalized.” And a wealth of scientific research present {that a} baby who has skilled trauma however has “one trusted grownup” of their lives is much less prone to expertise unfavorable psychological well being outcomes, and extra prone to develop self-confidence.
Contreras turned that trusted grownup for a lot of children on the plaza. He started holding a casual “faculty” for 2 to 3 hours, Monday via Friday. Most of his “college students” hadn’t been at school for months, a danger issue for unfavorable psychological well being and studying loss. Contreras turned “profe,” shorthand for “instructor” in Spanish, and his “class” grew to twenty migrant children. “They’d at all times ask me, ‘Are you going to come back? Are you going to come back?’” he says.
Throughout Mexico’s Kids’s Day, Contreras placed on a public artwork exhibition of the children’ work. Haitian children sang of their native Haitian Creole, and Contreras projected their drawings with a projector to indicate Juaréz “their humanity”—an initiative that felt particularly essential given its timing. Within the months earlier than the exhibition, neighbors had protested in opposition to the migrant camp and requested the federal government to close it down—one thing the children famous and typically interpreted as racism or hate, Contreras says. After they noticed their drawings projected, he recollects, “they had been so excited. They stated, ‘I made this at school! I made this at school!’”
For youths dwelling in migrant camps just like the plaza, the unknown may cause nervousness. And there are numerous unknowns: When will the immigration appointment come? What is going to this new nation be like?
Drawing “permits them to really feel some type of company and management” and make sense of an unsure scenario, says Sita Patel, a group psychologist at Palo Alto College who makes a speciality of psychological well being in immigrant communities. This January, she and different psychologists visited a migrant camp within the Mexico border city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas and requested children to attract a home. Regardless of the children’ actuality of dwelling in tents, particulars instantly sprang to thoughts: They drew their imagined future, she says.
Hope is a recurrent theme throughout the migrant camps of Mexico. Unprompted, 12-year-old Doriana, a Venezuelan dwelling within the Plaza Soledad migrant camp in Mexico Metropolis’s downtown, imagined and drew her “new residence” in the US. It had a red-tiled roof, a tree within the yard, and blue specks showering the scene to characterize snowflakes, regardless that she’s by no means seen snow earlier than.
Arturo Ortiz is doing comparable work to Contreras, although from a distinct background and with completely different instruments. A former professor of psychology at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico Metropolis, he took his final batch of scholars out of the classroom and all the way down to the plaza for his or her closing assembly of the tutorial 12 months, in Might. His ten college students filed into the sq.; one held a rubbish bag stuffed with toys, balloons, and balls.
A handful of Plaza Giordano children, principally youthful and Haitian, swarmed once they noticed Ortiz’s college students. The scholars gathered the kids right into a circle and handed round balloons; the kids laughed and clapped. Some sat in college students’ laps.
This was the final day of play remedy for the children and for Ortiz’s college students, who had come to the plaza practically each Saturday for the semester to interact the children in unstructured enjoyable. Ortiz hoped it might enhance the psychological well being of the children, who continued to be uncovered to emphasize however lacked psychological assets.
Take David, a two-year-old Honduran baby who nonetheless waddles when he walks. David’s seven-month-old sibling Homer caught pneumonia whereas within the camp—“he wasn’t used to the chilly,” their mom, Daniela, says—and died within the hospital in April. Daniela was devastated. She saved Homer’s ashes by their tent, carrying them nonetheless once they lastly bought their visa and moved to Los Angeles. David, too younger to know demise, nonetheless typically asks the place his brother is.
Ortiz hoped play may unlock the “ache” to which David was uncovered. “Video games are like x-rays in psychology,” he says. They assist adults peer contained in the hearts of youngsters “as a result of children don’t have the verbal capability to precise themselves like adults.”
Kids typically play at issues they’ve skilled to course of trauma, says Peter Grey, a psychology analysis professor at Boston Faculty. That is true in quite a lot of traumatic settings, from the migrant border communities of at the moment to the Jewish ghettoes of the Holocaust. George Eisen, professor emeritus of historical past at California State Polytechnic College, says play helps kids “perceive, to be taught or possibly additionally accommodate actuality.” Eisen wrote a e book about play throughout the Holocaust, documenting how Jewish kids performed make-believe Gestapo brokers, amongst different video games that mimicked their actuality. “They’re getting ready themselves in some methods if it occurs to them,” Eisen says. “It’s how they cope.”
Medical doctors With out Borders makes use of play when visiting the youth in Mexico Metropolis’s migrant camps for comparable causes. “It’s very aggravating for them. You see once they arrive… they’re drained as a result of they’d a really lengthy journey,” says Valeria Reyes, a group methods and well being promotion supervisor with the group. Her workforce builds playgrounds, presents toys, holds story time, attracts and colours, and teaches well being training classes to the children. “After they come to the playgrounds, [the kids] actually take pleasure in it,” Reyes says. “They will be at liberty.”
Mateo, a gruff, three-year-old Haitian toddler who had lived in Plaza Giordano, was recognized for his perpetual frown—besides when he bought toys to play with. As soon as, two Mexican girls delivered a bag of toys proper to his tent. “JUGETES!!!” Mateo whooped, shouting the phrase for toys in Spanish—like many migrant children, he picked the language up in Mexico—and holding the bag of plastic constructing blocks over his head like a tribute gained in a conquest. “Yeah, yeah, yeah!”
Kids play soccer and experience tricycles on the migrant encampment in Plaza Soledad in October.
Play additionally permits youth, particularly teenagers, to take dangers, to be unbiased, and to take management of their lives, which is crucial for psychological growth. “Kids, like the remainder of us, want durations of time the place we’re not being managed by different folks,” Grey says. “It’s extraordinarily essential that we enable kids to have that point and alternative to do these issues.”
However in migrant camps that’s not at all times simple to realize, as Joyce Zangilu, 13, is aware of. Zangilu’s entire world was confined to the Plaza Soledad migrant camp in Colonia Centro in Mexico Metropolis; her mom wouldn’t let her go away its bounds for concern of her security—to not work under-the-table (as a result of she’s additionally “too younger”) nor go play with volunteers who come as soon as per week. Worst of all, she says, her mom wouldn’t let her have a telephone.
Zangilu admitted she’s harassed—the Angolan migrant has nightmares concerning the corpse she noticed earlier than getting into the Darién Hole, the primary lifeless physique she’d ever seen. She hated dwelling in a tent along with her six siblings and mom. “I’m not likely used to being poor.”
The little issues she may management made her really feel higher: Telling folks she’s 14 regardless that she’s 13, or renaming herself Joyce. (Her identify is basically Jordan, her sister whispered conspiratorially.) Zangilu destressed most when borrowing her pal’s telephone to play music, eradicating herself from actuality. Her favourite artists are angsty American popstars like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo. As soon as the music performs, Zangilu says, “I simply settle down.”
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