The death of a family member brought Miguel Martinez, a painter and teaching artist living in New York City, back to Mexico earlier this year for the first time since he left his Guanajuato hometown for Houston, Texas, 23 years ago, when he was nine years old.
Because of his immigration status, Martinez needed special permission, known as advance parole, to leave and return to the United States. Even with permission, reentry is not a guarantee.
Martinez is one of more than half a million recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an Obama-era program delaying deportations of individuals brought to the US as children. DACA status also authorizes recipients to work but restricts movement outside the country except under special circumstances. The program made Martinez’s artistic career possible when he was first approved in 2013; he pursued his BFA at the University of Houston and his MFA at Hunter College in New York, where he is currently an adjunct faculty member.
As Republican state lawmakers seek to put an end to the program, an appeals court heard a defense of DACA on October 10, continuing a legal battle that could place it on the Supreme Court docket for the second time since 2020. In 2023, a judge in Texas blocked new applicants but allowed existing recipients to renew.
Regardless of any court decision, paths to legal status under DACA are rare. As the fate of the deferral program is decided in federal court and anti-immigrant rhetoric increases ahead of the presidential election, visual artists living under DACA, like Martinez, face uncertain futures. Hyperallergic interviewed six visual artists who are current or former DACA recipients about life and art under the program.
Some artists, including Martinez, have considered self-deportation — a choice that would bar them from reentry for a decade — rather than enduring the uncertainty of DACA. For artists who are former DACA recipients, marriage to a US citizen has offered a path to permanent status. Some use their art to process their experiences and counter stereotypes about undocumented life.
For over a decade, these artists have renewed their DACA status every two years, a process that costs around $600 per filing with a discretionary decision from United States Citizens and Immigration Services (USCIS) arriving four to five months after submitting. Most artists see marriage to a US citizen as one of their only paths to becoming lawful permanent residents.
“You’re in this middle ground where you don’t have the same kind of rights as people who have been here the same amount of time, and you can’t really travel,” Martinez told Hyperallergic.
Martinez said he is considering an eventual relocation to Mexico City, fueled by the uncertainty of his immigration status and a desire to move more freely transnationally.
“It’s going to be hard financially anywhere as an artist, so why would I not just be at a place where I can not worry about these legalities?” Martinez commented.
In the meantime, he hopes showing art internationally will bring him abroad under advance parole, which sometimes permits foreign travel for work-related activities.
“It shouldn’t take someone dying for me to be able to go to Mexico,” Martinez said.
Martinez has a solo exhibition at Grimm Gallery in Manhattan on view through November 2, named after writer Valeria Luiselli’s book on migrant children, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions (Coffee House Press, 2017).
Curator and mixed-media artist Francisco Donoso has more concrete plans to leave the US by 2026. Like Martinez, Donoso — who immigrated to Miami from Ecuador when he was five years old — is part of the first wave of DACA registrants launched into the art world by USCIS-authorized work permits.
Donoso said he worked at the Museum of Modern Art and the Queens Museum and also as a manager for the Parsons Scholar Program before becoming a full-time artist, now with over 40 group exhibitions and six solo shows under his belt.
Later this year, Donoso plans to marry his Swiss partner, eliminating one of his only clear paths to long-term immigration security. “DACA is really a purgatory,” Donoso said. “There’s no pathway to adjust to your status when you have DACA, you just have DACA.”
Over the next two years, Donoso said he is preparing to move to Switzerland. But that decision, Donoso added, would likely bar him from returning to the US due to reentry restrictions.
Donoso said he remembers dreaming about having his own apartment, no roommates, and an art studio. All of that came true. “I know that I’ll be leaving behind a career that I built in New York,” Donoso said. “But the wonderful thing is that I’ve lived that life, so no one can take that from me.”
“The beautiful thing about being an artist is that you can see life through so many different lenses,” Donoso continued.
Donoso sees himself as a “perpetual migrant.” “I’ve never felt like home was a place,” he said. Citizenship, he added, was never his goal.
As he plans to leave, Donoso is annotating his immigration documentation to incorporate into a large artwork.
Chicago-based filmmaker Martha Osornio Ruiz said DACA completely changed her life. Orsonio entered the US through the southern border, where she “literally crawled through a fence” when she was two years old.
She graduated from high school in 2008, and without a work permit, pursuing a higher education was not an option. For several years, Osornio Ruiz attended community college, but without a social security number, she said, any career felt impossible.
“It was just this grief and this burden,” Osornio Ruiz said.
When her DACA application was approved in 2013, Osornio Ruiz said she had a new lease on life. She enrolled at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where she found inspiration among the film crowd. She pivoted to a major in cinematic arts.
In her graduate thesis, Osornio Ruiz said she recreated the scene of the moment she crossed the border, based on her mother’s retelling.
DACA put Osornio Ruiz in a position to further her artistic career: She was named a Chicago Artists Coalition resident in June and displayed work in a show at Agnes Scott College’s Dalton Gallery in Decatur, Georgia.
Like Martinez, Osornio Ruiz said she has only left the country once to visit Mexico, also under advance parole. She said she applied for permission to visit sick relatives, but by the time the application was approved, one relative had already died.
“DACA helped me tremendously, but it wasn’t a solution,” Osornio Ruiz said. “I don’t want to be renewing a work permit every two years for the rest of my life.”
Osornio Ruiz eventually got married to a US citizen, but she said she wants “a pathway for everyone, not just myself.”
The prospect of marriage as the one clear solution, though, can weigh heavily on artists’ private lives, said New Orleans-based illustrator, fiber artist, and interpreter Karla Rosas.
“I have to make a choice about marrying someone, and what does that involve? Ideally, it involves love,” Rosas said. “These deeply personal choices I have to factor in against the possibility of a green card.”
Rosas was in college at Loyola University New Orleans when she was approved for DACA in 2014. She entered the art field by painting political banners for an immigrant rights activist group and has now completed several residencies and caught the attention of the Los Angeles Times for her illustrations.
Her practice tackles “the nonlinear aspects of the experience,” she explained, in contrast to conventional ideas of art by immigrants as having something to prove. Rosas said she’s not interested in proving anything.
“Art made by immigrants always has to be in service to, like, a particular political message or to prove our humanity, or to prove that we’re good people,” Rosas said. “I’m interested in how the immigrant experience, specifically being ‘illegal,’ impacts our understanding of our own bodies, of romance, family history, relationships to our family members, God, and nature.”
As an artist, she feels compelled to “bear witness” to her experience and that of her community, but feels a sense of exhaustion in having to tell that story again and again.
“As artists, a few of us use the studio as a place where we make sense of what it means to have DACA,” said Chicago-based painter and University of California Davis Assistant Professor of Art Fidencio Fifield-Perez.
For the first time since 2013, Fifield-Perez did not file to renew DACA when his two-year permit expired this year. He explained that when he got married in 2016, “a lot of us thought they were going to use all the information that we’ve willingly given to the government as a way to round us up.” He now has a green card. In election years, he said, the anti-immigrant rhetoric gets worse.
When Fifield-Perez was accepted into an MFA program at the University of Iowa, he’d been waiting for his DACA application to be approved for a year. Without it, he couldn’t have gone.
Fifield-Perez said that when people ask him why his art is political, he responds, “Because it is the only thing that allows me to physically be in the studio and have the studio and pay for the studio.”
His series DACAments (undated) features painted potted plants on immigration envelopes.
Juan Molina Hernández, a photographer for the Art Institute of Chicago and a multimedia installation artist, said he chooses not to center DACA or immigration in his work.
“I don’t write it on my artist statements,” Hernández said. “These are identifiers placed by like other entities, and they don’t come from my community.”
Instead he tackles what he calls the “aesthetics of homemaking.”
“Early on I thought a lot about belonging and feeling like I didn’t belong. Lately, I have been thinking about the ways in which people create their own spaces,” he said, adding that he finds freedom in the framing of belonging everywhere rather than nowhere.
Hernández returned to Mexico for the first time since he was six years old under advance parole in 2016. Since that trip, he has been considering a possible move to Mexico City.
“It’s always in the back of my mind,” he said. “My dreams are too big to be caged in the US.”
Hernández also said he knows DACA was not just “given” to him but emerged from activism from his community.
Erika Hirugami, who is formerly undocumented but never received DACA, co-founded the UNDOC+Collective, a group fighting to shape “the future of ‘undocreatives’ working in the contemporary art system.” It connects artists across what she calls the “Undoc+ Spectrum,” which accounts for a diversity of immigration statuses.
To her knowledge, Hirugami said, she is the only person in the country studying the “aesthetics of undocumentedness,” which she defines as “something that happens when Undoc+ individuals make creative artwork about their experience,” as part of her doctoral candidacy at University of California, Los Angeles.
DACA recipients, she said, represent only a small percentage of the 11.7 million undocumented immigrants living in the US. And while she said that they have privileged access to higher education and other institutions, they also live through what she called one of the “meanest psychological tortures in the world.” In the art world, Hirugami feels their experiences are often exploited when access to artistic spaces relies on their ability to put their undocumented status and trauma on display.
“We’re still in the baby stages of trying to get beyond fetishizing this community within the creative industries,” Hirugami said. “There’s a need to also highlight the beauty of our community, and a need to challenge policy and politics. But at the same time to do so from a vocabulary that isn’t so legally toxic, because in this community, language affects us.”
