“Ball Pit” is a comic-style artwork inspired by the stories and experiences of the immigrants and refugees held in the Otay Mesa Detention Center. As an artist, I revel in infusing and twisting childlike concepts with very real, adult experiences. It is both thrilling and captivating to me. With “Ball Pit”, I wanted to take a youthful activity and portray it through the eyes of an adult who has seen and experienced hardship and loss.
Although I have never been directly affected by Otay Mesa, I deeply resonate with familial stories that recount parents struggles in seeking a better life in the United States. Despite having clean records and promising personalities, my parents faced detention, rejection, and a treacherous journey back to Mexico on multiple occasions. Subsequently, my dad, despite his innocence, found himself entangled in legal troubles, raising the possibility of deportation and further demonstrating the nature of the immigrant experience. Today, I am fortunate enough that my dad was released in a short time and has been within a close distance ever since. Yet, I recognize how others are not as fortunate.
After looking through many heavy photographs of the inside of the detention center, my attention was immediately drawn to the number of images taken behind bars or in locked rooms. The visuals triggered a sense of claustrophobia and entrapment within me. This mirrored my experiences of childhood discomfort due to tightly packed play centers. The connection between constricting play centers of youth and an oppressive detention center felt ironically perfect in the worst way. I wanted to create a juxtaposition between these two concepts with comics and non-realism to achieve an oddly youthful feeling.
To children, ball pits are symbols of colorful wonder that encourage exploration and imagination. My goal was to take this and mute it to demonstrate how people of color are seen as more colors to add to a pile or numbers to a list rather than a joy. The mistreatment and dehumanization of the people within Otay Mesa shows this idea story after story. They are not viewed as responsive individuals with emotions or needs for living. In a tragic narrative, the detention center becomes a confined living space akin to a tight ball pit, suffocating with trapped colors. It is a metaphorical representation of a society that seems more comfortable seeing colors confined than engaging with them as another human.
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