Drawing Deportation: Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children by Silvia Rodriguez Vega is an intimate and heart-wrenching ethnography examining the impact of legal violence as well as a hostile anti-immigrant atmosphere on immigrant children in California and Arizona. It is a publication of which the author boldly states, “I wish this book did not need to exist and that I did not need to write it” (143). Yet, having been raised in Arizona while undocumented, Rodriguez Vega is uniquely positioned to convincingly bring to light the impact of separation, deportation, and detention within the immigrant community. The author uses a multisite ethnography of children in Phoenix, Arizona and two student cohorts utilizing theater play in Los Angeles, California. Over 300 children’s drawings, theater performances, and family interviews were then analyzed in conjunction with the ethnographic observations. In this five-chapter book, along with an introduction and a concluding chapter, Rodriguez Vega...

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