About This Case Study

Silvia Rodríguez Vega spent the decade between 2008 and 2018 working with immigrant children in Phoenix and Los Angeles, asking them to draw what they could not always say. The more than three hundred drawings she collected — of sheriffs and helicopters, fences and deportation buses, family members hiding in homes they could not leave — became the basis for Drawing Deportation, her argument that children's artistic production is not merely expressive but evidentiary. The drawings, she argues, document the racial, political, and emotional geography of the U.S. deportation regime in ways that surveys and interviews cannot.

This exercise takes Vega's methodological claim at its word. It asks you to engage a selected set of drawings as ethnographic objects — as evidence about what the deportation regime does and how children of mixed-status families know it — and then to bring what you have found into conversation with Audra Simpson's concept of refusal: the political stance of declining to accept the terms on which the settler state would recognize you. The aim is to see what the drawings can argue that statute and statistics cannot, and where Simpson's framework sharpens what you find.

Before You Begin

Pre-engagement is required. Choose one path:

• If you have access to the book: Read Vega's introduction and one substantive chapter of Drawing Deportation: Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children (NYU Press, 2023).
• If you do not have access to the book: Watch Vega's book talk on YouTube (about 60 minutes — search "Silvia Rodríguez Vega Drawing Deportation"), and read the palabra feature "Children Drawing Deportation" by Beatriz Limón with photographs by Julie Leopo (palabranahj.org, July 2023), which includes images of the drawings and substantial methodological background.

You should also have at hand your notes on Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, especially her account of refusal. Simpson's framework is the analytic instrument you will bring to the drawings in the exercise's final phase.

While reading and watching, keep these prompts in mind:

• How does Vega describe what the drawings do — what they let her see that interviews and surveys cannot?
• How are state agents (sheriffs, officers, vehicles) represented across the drawings she discusses? Where, on the page and in the family's space, do they appear?
• What does Vega mean when she treats children as analysts of the political world, not just as subjects of it?

The Exercise

Phase 1: Setting Up the Gallery (8–10 minutes)

Select four drawings from Vega's book or talk to engage as your gallery. If you don't know which to choose, the following set anchors the exercise reliably; each appears in the book and is referenced in the publicly available materials:

• Chris's mural concept (Phoenix, 2008). Chris, age nine, drew Sheriff Joe Arpaio shaking hands with a Mexican worker in response to Vega's question about what peace looks like. The mural was never completed; the community center's leadership found the imagery too controversial.
• Alex's drawing (Phoenix, 2008). A seven-year-old's drawing rendered entirely in pencil, occupying only the bottom-left corner of the page, even when colored pencils and crayons were available.
• A Mother's Day drawing (Los Angeles, 2016). A girl's representation of Mother's Day without her mother, who had been removed to El Salvador two years prior. The mother is present in the drawing as absence.
• Mario's drawing (Phoenix, ca. 2011). The drawing that became the cover of Drawing Deportation: a fence topped with sharp spikes, a helicopter shining a yellow searchlight on a single figure, and a deportation bus with detainees framed by barred windows.

Have access to these images as you work — in the book, in screenshots from Vega's talk, or via the palabra feature. Lay them out side by side (on screen or printed) so you can move between them.

For groups: decide in advance whether all members will engage the same four drawings (better for discussion) or distribute them across the group (better for breadth). Either works.

Phase 2: At Each Station (25–30 minutes)

Take each drawing in turn. Spend roughly six or seven minutes per image. For each, work through these five prompts in your notes:

1. Description. What objects, persons, and scenes does the image include? What is foregrounded; what is at the margins; what is left out?
2. State and force. How is the state represented — its agents, its weapons, its vehicles, its built infrastructure? What does the image claim about the state's presence in the spaces of family and home?
3. Composition and scale. Where on the page does the drawing sit? What is the scale of the figures relative to the page? What does the choice of medium (pencil, color, mixed) tell us?
4. Perspective and knowledge. Whose viewpoint is centered? What does the drawing claim to know that an interview or a statistic could not capture?
5. Time and absence. What temporal moment is represented — a single event, an ongoing condition, an anticipated future? What or who is present as absence?

Do not try to interpret before describing. Stay with the image. The interpretive work happens in Phase 3.

For groups: each member produces their own notes in this phase. Do not share yet.

Phase 3: Reading Across the Gallery (12–15 minutes)

Now examine your notes across the four drawings. The question is no longer what each drawing shows individually but what the body of work asserts collectively. Look for:

• Recurrences. What objects, figures, vocabularies, or spatial arrangements appear across more than one drawing? Where does the same element recur with variation?
• Patterns of composition. Do the drawings share certain spatial choices — where the family sits on the page, where the state appears, how absence is represented?
• Divergences. Where does one drawing depart sharply from the others? What does the departure tell you?

Then ask: if you treat the four drawings as a single archive — an evidentiary corpus rather than a set of individual images — what is the corpus's central argument? What does it document about the deportation regime that the readings in Unit 1.3 do not?

For groups: members present their station-by-station notes in turn (two minutes each). The group then identifies one or two recurrences that everyone noticed and one divergence that surprised someone.

Phase 4: Returning to Simpson (10–12 minutes)

Simpson's argument, in compressed form, is that settler states present themselves as neutral administrators of who belongs — sorting populations into citizen and non-citizen, immigrant and native — and that refusal names the political stance of declining to accept those terms. Refusal is distinct from resistance: it does not necessarily protest, organize, or speak back. It withdraws recognition. It declines the sort.

Bring Simpson's framework to your gallery. Ask:

• Where, in the drawings, do you see refusal — declining the terms the state offers, withdrawing recognition, asserting a belonging that does not depend on settler permission?
• Where, alternatively, do you see something else — testimony, witness, fear, longing — that is not refusal but operates in a different register?
• Where do Vega's argument that art is evidence and Simpson's argument that politics is sometimes refusal meet? What does the meeting let you see that neither does alone?

The drawings of mixed-status families are not made by Indigenous people, and Simpson's framework arises from a specific Mohawk experience. The question is not whether the drawings are refusal in Simpson's sense, but whether Simpson's conceptual move — declining the terms of settler recognition — illuminates anything specific in what the drawings do.

For groups: work this phase as a full-group discussion. Move quickly through the first two questions and spend the most time on the third.

Closing Reflection

Complete this thought in two or three sentences:

Across the four drawings, the deportation regime is documented as __________. What Simpson's framework adds to this reading is __________. The hardest thing to hold steady, after this exercise, is __________.

The value of the sentences is in the precision of what you name — in the words you find yourself choosing, and in what you find yourself unable to fit.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work through the four phases in order. The station notes from Phase 2 and the cross-gallery reading from Phase 3 are the central artifacts; keep them for reference when answering Question 5 (on Simpson and the Vega case study) in the unit's Questions for Reflection.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Phase 1 is collective (selecting drawings together) or distributed (each pair taking a different drawing); Phase 2 is individual; Phase 3 begins with brief presentations and moves to collective synthesis; Phase 4 works as full-group discussion. If group time is short, the closing reflection can be assigned as individual writing after the session.

After the Case Study

• Return to Question 5 in the unit's Questions for Reflection, which asks you to read Vega and Simpson together. The Phase 4 work supplies most of the material for this answer.
• To extend the exercise: Joanna Dreby's Surviving the ICE Age (Russell Sage, 2025), in the unit's Further Readings, follows mixed-status families through the post-2016 enforcement intensification and provides interview-based evidence to set against the visual archive Vega assembles. Reading the two together raises the methodological question of what each form of evidence can and cannot do.
• The palabra feature also includes biographical material on Vega — including the fact that she was herself an undocumented child of the Maricopa County period her early drawings document. Reading her project alongside her account of her own positionality opens an additional dimension on the question of who can do this kind of fieldwork, and on what terms.