 Hello, welcome everybody, I'm Niall Greenberg and I'll quickly introduce our speakers for the night. This is a conversation, as we say. It's between Tatiana Bilbao, who's an architect based in Mexico City, with a very impressive practice of residential projects, long history of research in affordable housing, and recently an exhibition in Monterey at the Museum of Contemporary Art. She is leading this academic initiative, which this is sort of one of the flagship, first flagship conversations as a part of that, called Two Sides at the Border, which she'll explain a bit. She has invited Sara Lopez, who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. She is an environmental built environment historian, and her book, The Remittance Landscape, the full title, is The Remittance Landscape, The Space of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA, has served as a sort of guide for our studio this semester, and she has come multiple times to our studio and helped articulate many of the ideas which we're developing. And then finally the author, Valeria Luiselli, who went to Unam and came to Columbia to do her PhD, and she is a fiction and non-fiction author. Her books include some very really interesting and inspiring books, if you haven't read them, but most recently Tell Me How It Ends, an essay in 40 Questions, which is sort of documenting her work, working with migrants in New York, well, different types of people coming to New York and translating and going through the legal system here. Before that, The Story of My Teeth, which is a sort of experimental project-based novel of some sort. It's very interesting, but documenting one story in a really broad and complex way. Before that, Sidewalks and Faces in the Crowd, all sort of impressive books. She is faculty at Hofstra, but is currently teaching an experimental writer's workshop at City College, which is called Beyond Identity, which is based around scholarship, activism, and sort of creative writing as in a way to generate new ideas, I guess, new forms of activism, maybe, or anything. So it's a really interesting conversation, which will be moderated by Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo, who is sort of part of the initiative, one of the 12 studios that are occurring this semester, and she's at Cooper and is the co-founder of Pedro Ijuaná, practice in Mexico City. And the format will be quite simple. It will be presentations and a reading, and then afterwards a panel discussion, moderated by Ana Paula, and general questions from everybody. So thank you, and I'll invite Tatiana Bilbao first. Thank you, Nal. Thank you, everybody, for being here for me. It's an important day because it's one of the first public debates we're starting to do, opening this topic about two sides of the border in the schools of architecture as a program that I intended to start to think how we can reimagine our region, which I basically think the issue goes way beyond a border or even a wall. The region that we're talking about obviously is Mexico and the U.S. that currently has become part of the political discourse, especially in this country. And I do believe that this is a region, it is socially, it is economically, it is culturally, it's physically a region, unfortunately it's not politically a region. So how can we bring this discourse and trying to understand what is it about this that it's so important to debate? How is it that it is a social entity that it's becoming more and more one? What is it that is an environmental entity? What is it about a physical environmental entity that is about? What is this about the economic entity that we can talk about? And how we could in many ways be able to explore this topic and create more knowledge about it. I believe that the border creates obviously a condition of a confrontation that is unique, is unique in the world. The longitude of the border is the largest border in the world with two cultures that are so different, two countries that have so many incredible differences in terms of culture, culturally language, and is the largest border that shares the largest exchange of goods, of people, and of many things in the world. So the border is a topic of discussion always. But it is not only about the border. I mean, it's about the 11.9 million Mexicans that are living in this country or the 2.3 million Americans that are living in Mexico. It's not only about the cities that confront directly in the border. It is also, I think, about topics that go beyond territoriality, goes to social spaces, immigration, housing, cultural definitions, creative industries, regional productions. It is not only about, again I say, about this confrontation of these two places directly in the border, which it is. But it is about New York, and it's about the public sphere in New York, and it's about Mexico City, and it's about the public sphere in Mexico City. That is also about our region. It is about Chicago, as well as in the public sphere in Chicago. But it's about Culiacán as well, or a little town in the north of Puebla in Mexico, or the Great Plains. It is about all these areas. It's not just about the border, because all these areas are changing dramatically through the relationship of these two countries. This is in the Great Plains that have been filled up with Mexicans. We're only Americans, white Americans, now they downgrade it into 60%, they lost 60% of the population 20 years ago, and now they're again very thriving and vibrant because they're filled with Mexicans. What is about those towns in the Great Plains? It is about these little towns in the Sierra de Puebla in Mexico that the migration is going to the US. They're not going anymore to the big Mexican cities, although they are, but in majority they go to the US to search for better opportunities. What happens there? What happens with the people that remain? How the people that live in these little towns are receiving all those people back or not? What is it about this cultural interchange that is happening? The most important Jaripeo place, it's in Chicago, it's not in Mexico anymore. What is about this cultural blend that is happening in places like Puebla York, in Emelus, in Queens? What is the territory, the approach that we need to start overlooking to create these places better places? I think that we need to start doing that discussion. What is these social organizations of people that live in New York and adopt an entity, for example, of an image of a sport that it's only or basically derived from this culture in this side of the border, but that they create an entity that works on their little towns in the other side of the border? People that become really proud on how they were affected by their experience in the other country, how they really reflected even in their hometown. For that, I invited, as Nile said, 12 plus universities that are each having a studio, Architecture Studio, developing a project that has to do with any topic that the professor, the leading professor in these schools, decided to address in order to start the conversation of reimagining the region, reimagining that we are a region and how can we re-imagine that place, how can we make it better for everybody to become one? It's not something that I think it's good or bad. Maybe we could think that becoming one region is not good for things, but it's a fact. It's something that is happening. It's very hard that we fight against that, that we really think that we can put a wall and then that would separate us completely. That would not separate the physical ecosystems of migrations, of birds, of animals that go back and forth. Why would it separate us? I don't think that a wall would separate us now, that we are totally blend, a little bit, I think, very, very blended. Here at GSAP, I'm leading a studio where we're working on the remittance landscape. It's about the architecture of remittance. Remittance from migrants to the US to Mexico is the second largest income, currently the second largest income of the whole country. You can imagine how much the money that goes back influences in our country. That income topped the oil in 2014. 2014 became the year that remittances were the largest income in the country. That income, a little bit, around 40% goes to construction. Construction of that income, 80%, is about building a house. Building a house for relatives, building your dream house when you go back, building your mother a house. And normally, it comes with all the wishes and desires that a migrant one has. Because it's a way of reflecting their success, also a way of saying to the fellow in their communities back in Mexico that they were successful when they were in the US. It has many, many things behind the topic. I'm not going to go into it very deep. But the thing is that it's a process that it's defining the landscape of rural Mexico in many, many ways. There are conflicts with it, and I think that architects, we can deal with those. I mean, construction methods in the US are very, very different on those construction methods in Mexico. Although the style of the houses are being important and done in Mexico with local materials, local ways of doing it, and obviously this creates a problematic. So we're trying to address this issue by designing a house for someone that is here, is earning his money here, and it's planning to go back and build a house back in Mexico. How we architects can help these people to use that dream, that possibility of this beautiful, huge house into a local context. We're asking students to develop a construction manual as those construction manuals that are given to migrants here in the US or in Mexico on how to build a house. Because obviously it's a huge business that it's happening since 20 years at least in Mexico. On the other hand, at Yale, I'm also leading a studio, which there we're addressing these topic about these little towns that remain for even almost a century, some of them without young male population. These young male population that needs to emigrate to other places, mostly to the US to have an income. They leave their hometowns, the families never leave their places, the families are there, so the women stay with the whole work on top of them. They need to take care of the children, of the elderly, and then create something of an income. Normally, they are just receiving the remittances. So what happens with these little towns? What's the landscape and the possibility of these places, and what is it that architecture also can do to create a link and more possibilities for these towns to thrive and to become places also for the desire of people to come back or to stay? In that sense, I think in a way that a landscape, it's only defined as it, when it's recognized, when it's seen, when it's talked about it, when it's described. And I do think that that's what happens when we are talking about a region. Until we are able to talk about it, to define it, to discuss it, we're going to be able to see it. We're going to be able to enhance it. We're going to be able to create a region that hopefully it's also sometime soon, later, sooner than later, a political region. Thank you. Hi. Thank you very much Tatiana for including me in this initiative. I find it fascinating, as you know, and very, very germane to the way that I think, the way I do research, the way that I teach. So all of this is about me also trying to connect my own dots in my process as well. One of the things about what you just heard in terms of this introduction and this framing of two sides of the border is just how broad this question that Tatiana is posing to us is, right? How many directions we could go in terms of answering it, engaging with this. So I have two different research projects, one that I've sort of finished, although things are never finished, and one that I'm starting-ish. And what I'm going to be focusing on today is migration and is detention. The marginal role of design in immigrant detention and our spatial imagination. But before I do, I want to just touch base very quickly with where I'm coming from. So this is the cover that I have on my book, and this is the Statue of Liberty, in case you didn't recognize it. And it is in Mexico, it is built by a man who has lived and worked in the United States for 30 years, over 30 years, and sent money home and built this Statue of Liberty in the courtyard of the house that he also built with dollars. And indeed the book is about the remittance landscape of which this house is one architectural example of. And as you already heard, the remittance is simply an economic term. It's a term that's about the transfer of money from one place to another. And it's a term that's often used by demographers and political scientists. I also think of the term importantly as a verb, which means to postpone to defer, which is an interesting way for us to think about remittances, because you're acting, you're sending the money, but in sending the money you're deferring that future promise. You're putting it off, you're postponing it, right? It's an action that sort of keeps one waiting, if you will. I also like to think of remittances in terms of the material product that arises from them, right? So I follow the money. I follow the money from migrants in the United States to the heart of Jalisco in Mexico, in different pueblos throughout Mexico. I've done my work in Michoacán and Juana Huato as well. And looked at these buildings formally, but for me as an architectural historian it's very important also to look at them socially. And to think about how do these buildings actually create structural distance within extended and fragmented families. So you see here a woman who's receiving the money and living in the remittance house from the husband and son who are working and sending the money from Oakland, California. So I'm actually not going to focus on that project, although it is a perfect project for this idea of the region and reimagining the border. What I am going to focus on is in some ways it's mirror image, which is the immigrant detention center, which you see here kind of mirroring that remittance house. One being a very aspirational architecture, a place in many ways where future ideals and expectations reside. And the other, unfortunately, being a place where in terms of migrants' journeys, hope goes to die. Not for everybody, but for some. And if not, at least migrant journeys are halted and greatly transformed. I come from a place that is at the front lines where the treatment of migrants is going from bad to worse. That place is Texas. That is where I live. This is a state that incarcerates and detains more women, men, and children than any other state in the United States. And we can see here a map where we have these almost blemishes, these sort of peach lesions which are dots, which are resembling all of the different detention centers and immigrant prisons. And you see it's not a border issue, right? This is a state issue and it's a national issue and it's a bi-national issue and it's a global issue. But in terms of just looking where it is in Texas, it's definitely throughout the state. So how did we get here? How did we get all of these different detention centers built? And what does this mean? I'm very interested in particular in what a landscape of immigrant detention means for our collective capacity to imagine alternate futures. Today, as I and potentially we scramble to perceive a violent present, which is so normalized by this landscape, I fear that my own imagination is at risk. And I'll talk a little bit more about that at the end. First we have to define what a detention center is. And so I have thrown this up, the Geary Act from the 19th century, which is an expansion of the Chinese Exclusion Act which forced Chinese laborers to carry internal permits. It was a way of regulating Chinese labor at the time. Labor to carry a permit could lead to detention and deportation. At the time, this act was challenged on constitutional grounds. And so historian Kelly Lyle Hernandez has analyzed these congressional cases. And a lot of arguments at the time were made about the undue harm that was inflicted on persons who were forcibly removed saying, you know, really to deport someone is punishment. And as these debates went back and forth, deportation was defined not as punishment but as an administrative process. And what that meant for deportation and for detention to be an administrative process was that the rights and the punishments that are associated with criminal prosecution like the Fifth and the Sixth Amendment don't apply in most cases to migrants. So that you could detain and deport migrants who didn't have the proper authorization. You had the right to do that as the government, as the U.S. government. So here you see a quote that is from that time, from the 1890s. Deportation is not a punishment for a crime. Detention is not imprisonment in a legal sense. And you see that same quote today. That still holds today. So immigration proceedings and civil proceedings and immigrant detention is not punishment. And this is a quote by a woman who is a former ICE employee. She worked for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She did an audit, an internal audit for the bureaucracy. And this is her saying, you know, the mission of ICE is not to punish migrants actually, right? So clarifying for us indeed what that mission is. Yet what we find is a landscape of prisons. And it's important for us here to pause for a second and think about architecture. We have to think about the architecture of immigrant detention. Both reflects and constitutes the changing attitudes and policies of the state towards migrants. We have to think about how the concrete form of detention facilities fix the abstract and ambiguous position of foreign subjects. These facilities broadcast messages to a wider public about criminality. They incur long-term ethical, social, and political implications, right? Not to mention directly harming individuals' lives. So when I look to government financed and sponsored buildings, I look to them for that messaging, for that sort of collective, representational, and spatial messaging of what it is that the position and attitude of the government is. So I look to that, you know, when I look at these spaces of incarceration. Also, and this is something people have debated me, debated with me about, right? So you may not all agree. But for me, I do not see architecture as merely the outcome of social processes, practices, and attitudes. I do not see architecture as merely a reflection of larger, more complex issues. I see architecture itself as a complex issue that shapes political, social, and cultural realities. And that's not something that everybody agrees with me on. So who's responsible for designing the system of detention in Texas? And what role does design and construction play in immigration policy and enforcement? It's important to note that private prison corporations are at the helm of designing the immigrant detention system. In the general U.S. prison system, the private corporations have, they own and manage 15%. In the immigrant detention system and immigration prisons, nationally, currently, we're at 73%. And in Texas, that's well over 80%. And these small collection of private prison companies, roughly five, are directly supported by ICE, county officials, and ultimately the public. So with this in mind, we can look at what some of the formal decisions that have been made by both architects and these companies together and think about their implications. This is a useful place to start, the directory of the AIA, American Institute of Architects Justice Facilities Review. It dates back to 1979. And it has a jury that is a corrections officer, an architect, and a judge. And what they do is they highlight interesting, important courthouses and prisons, notable works. It's interesting to look through the trajectory of this magazine and see that there's a retrenchment of the role of the architect in producing prisons. 27 projects were highlighted, for example, in the 1998 issue. And as you move toward the current date, by 2015, only one project is highlighted. So prisons are quickly falling out of this magazine. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, the jury repeatedly discussed a trend toward designing increasingly, quote, non-normative environments. Non-normative environments, which they also referred to as, quote, the hardening of facilities, relies on spaces like you're seeing here. So this is actually a recreational space. This is defined as a recreational space. Obviously, it's a room with a clear story that is fenced. But this little pod here, for example, is one of the things that they noted as sort of an example of a hardening of a facility. They talked a lot about the absence of natural light, replaced by borrowed light, where skylights and clear stories are used to channel indirect light in lieu of windows. So basically just dropping windows out of design and adding, of course, the fluorescent lighting. They also talked about increasing use of concrete floors, crude signage, and minimal person-to-person contact. That's an important one. That one is achieved by a reliance on, quote, according to them the indirect supervision concept. So things like video visitation and non-overlapping circulation spaces. Today, indirect supervision through the use of video monitoring and one-way glass, as well as facilities designed for minimal employee circulation, really works to strip inmates of contact on a daily basis and to kind of perpetuate a feeling of sort of constantly being watched. This retrenchment is mirrored by the rise of the private prison corporation. Oh, actually, before that, these were some quotes that I pulled out from the Justice Facilities Review in their opening kind of commentary before each issue, where they said things like, feelings were that once a facility is toughened, there may be no going back. It's difficult to rescind philosophical and architectural decisions. The behavior of those confined and the response of those who operate these facilities will be directly influenced by the built environment. In this room, we might all agree with that, but that actually is something that seems to need to be broadcasted from now and time again. Our corrections and detention systems are racing to keep pace with an ever-increasing demand, and these are quotes from the 90s. The use of prototypical designs is a major trend. At the same time, good construction sites that are acceptable to our communities are few and far between. Can we really afford to continue to try to solve our problems by building more beds, right? So here, we see also at this time the rise of the private prison corporation and beyond their role of managing detention and providing security, which is what a lot of us think of private prison corporations doing, as in the case of Geo Group. Since at least 1992, they have initiated a design build component into their corporate structure, which means that in-house designers and construction companies oversee building from start to finish, and they also oversee the long-term management of facilities. That's an awesome amount of power over a space and its future function. In the 1990s, we also see the rise of construction companies, big, national, now global construction companies that sometimes work with these firms and sometimes operate independently. And a lot of these construction companies are innovating things that will facilitate rural construction, right? Because there's a lack of expert labor, a lack of manual labor on these rural sites, and it makes it difficult to build in these remote locations. So that's why you see things like mass-produced modular cells, this terrible slide which I had to pull from their website because I couldn't get my own. Also here, these are mass-produced off-site solitary confinement cells that are trucked in on ship beds to these remote locations. So you have rooms that are fully wired and piped in a city or in a shed and sent somewhere else. Or here you see an example of the technology integration. So this is a video visitation room eliminating again the opportunity to have face-to-face visitation with family and friends in some cases. In some cases, that opportunity is eliminated anyway because people who are living and working in New York and who get detained might be sent to a detention center in Texas. So they can't be visited anyway because of the distance. So what is the role in ICE in all of this? In Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in the design of detention facilities? In 2007, they published this design standards and it's a big, fat manual, 300 and some pages. And it, quote, defines their organizational, operational and functional requirements. It's filled with specifications for employees and other quote, non-governmental agencies. And in this, you'll find pages like this, which have, you know, ICE administration, officer in charge, specs down to where the window should be, the placement of the desk, how many chairs, and I've talked to people before about some of the designing for government facilities and indeed these are followed very precisely. But what troubled me and fascinated me and revealed a lot to me is that finally when I got to around page 250, which is what I was looking for, I was looking for how ICE articulates designing the detainee living spaces, right? That's the heart of the program and I wanted to see what their sort of architectural solutions were. And so you see here a programmatic diagram, right, where the red is detainee housing, contractor space detailed. On the next page, it was blank and it said contractor responsibility. It said these spaces are quote, typically defined and controlled by the contract detention facility service provider. So what does that mean? It means that ICE is not actually designing those spaces. It means ICE is passing the gauntlet and allowing CCA and geogroup and other private prison corporations to make critical decisions about how detainees are housed, at least in terms of the minutiae of some of the architectural and spatial details. They control the amount and the kind and quality of light in their own offices, but they abdicate the responsibilities for the building's main program. So how was I going to find out about how these spaces are experienced and what they look like? So these are my students and myself. I'm blending in, because I, you know, right? I look so young in this photo. The, in front of Peersall Self Texas Detention Center, we were not allowed access. And although legally, we all as citizens actually have a right to access detention facilities, they are taxpayer supported. That's something we might wanna talk about more. So what we did is we did cognitive mapping exercises with formerly detained persons. So for example, we asked people two things. One, well, tell me about your journey. So this is a man who faced extortion. He was a musician in Panama. And then, as you can see in his journey, he did have a run in also with the Zetas, crossed the border, and this is where he was detained. And he was there at Peersall for four months before he actually is one of the cases that was someone who did win the asylum claim and was released. And then the second question we asked them was, you know, to draw the pod. Because that's really what we were curious about was about these spaces and how they work. So what you're seeing here is the one public plan that I could find of a detention center. And so this is a pod, right? You see the pods are stacked along a spine. And this is the blowout of the pod. These are bunk beds down each wall. These are communal eating tables. This is the outdoor rec space. This is the bathroom here. This is a little room that was used for multiple purposes, such as church services, spiritual purposes. And I don't know how to say it. When you get in trouble, you know, when the guards wanted to yell at you, whatever that would be called. So multiple spaces. And this is for 100 persons speaking multiple languages. And one of many remarkable things came out of this exercise and talking to him and working with him. But one of the things that's obvious here is this is a space that people are staying in 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We're not here looking at a building where there's a cafeteria, as the research I've done shows the detention centers of the 1960s and earlier have. We're not looking at a space where there's actual outdoor space or where it's just, where there's a building that's dealing with program that allows people to have even mobility in this immobilized space of being incarcerated. What we are looking at here is a space of hyperclastrophobia, right? Where one is amidst 99 other men for months on end. And you get a really kind of incredible comparison of the extent of these journeys and the movement and the time against the stasis of the detention. And one of the things that's really incredible to learn about is that a lot of people are traveling through all of the Americas. So this is someone who's coming from Somalia who then went up through South America, all the way up through Central America, eventually through Mexico and the United States. Some of these journeys last for years and years and years because people will actually think they are able to start a new life somewhere and until xenophobia might start again or persecution might start again and they have to flee. Some people will spend years in refugee camps before they're able to move on. So some of these journeys are just absolutely epic. And then again, finally the moment comes where they arrive to the United States and there's such a relief and they go to the US Mexico border and they seek out the border patrol and they put their hands up because they're looking to actually begin an asylum claim and what they're met with is imprisonment. So it's really, really, I mean, the people I spoke with they were shocked. They had no idea that was in their fate when they were gonna finally make it to the United States. This man was particularly shocked because he got thrown into solitary confinement which is also called segregation for something that he said he didn't have a fight with a guard, he didn't steal anything. He was just completely at a loss for understanding the action taken against him. The ACLU has done a lot of studies. A lot of people are doing a lot of studies but the ACLU in particular about how these companies are actually using segregation and solitary confinement as overflow space. So it's not that you even necessarily do something wrong, it's literally just seen as another bed but we all know about sort of the effects of what it means for people to be in solitary. In 1989, CCA built the nation's first detention facility in Houston. In the 1990s, two more facilities were built and one was remodeled. Between 2000 and 2005, five facilities came online. Between 2005 and 2010, 11 large detention facilities and city and county jails were used to detain migrants and were built. And also in that period, there was a separate system which I'm not gonna talk about now of criminal alien requirement facilities or immigration prisons that was also built in Texas. Five were built from the 1990s to the present. And here you just see the footprints of all of those facilities kind of likened to typical prison design. We also have to remember that some of these facilities like Dilly are places where women and children are held. This is a facility where 2,400 persons are held and the capacity is actually growing. Detention facilities are built on average 105 miles away from the nearest city with pro bono legal services and the immigration prisons are approximately 204 miles from the nearest city with a population of 300,000 or more. So why all of this building? I'm not gonna go into the details but policy like Ira Ira in 1996 and then even before that, the criminal alien requirement program has created a framework. Also these companies have lobbied Congress and have gotten congressional change. Also we know about nativist politics and tough on crime sentiments in the Clinton era and beyond and add to that very specific and discreet humanitarian crises that have been faced nationwide. So what's at stake and why does architecture matter in conclusion here? The incremental construction of facilities in Texas has institutionalized policy and architectural trends into an infrastructure of detention. Why? Because of the inertia of the built environment. Unlike other aspects of immigration enforcement that might change from administration to administration, buildings, building contracts and building industries shape immigration enforcement and detention practices on the ground for years to come. So we don't just have punitive policy, we have punitive architecture defined by rural siting, inhumane scales, temporary building materials and irresponsible and inhumane management practices. The fast production of hardened detention space, a space that architects, engineers and construction firms have worked for years to perfect has in turn created its own crisis of detention. So what's at stake is not just the fact that the government has granted corporations broad powers to make decisions about where to locate centers and how to house detainees. It's not just the harm inflicted on those detained. It is also our, the public's ability to envision alternate solutions for enforcing immigration law and policy. It's the work that these facilities do to our capacity to imagine what the relationships are or should be between migrants, citizens and their environments. Thank you. It was fascinating and very depressing, Sarah. No, but thank you. It was truly fascinating to hear you. When did you enter the United States? Why did you come to the United States? When did you leave your home country? With whom did you travel to this country? Did you travel with anyone you knew? How did you travel here? What countries did you pass through? Did anything happen on your trip to the US that scared you or hurt you? Has anyone hurt you, threatened or frightened you since you came to the United States? How do you like where you're living now? Are you happy here? Do you feel safe? Do you still have family members in your home country? Do you have any close family members who live in the US? What is their immigration status? Did you ever live with anyone else? How do you get along with the people that you lived with? Did you work? Did you go to school? Have you ever been a member of a gang? Do you have any tattoos? Have you ever been arrested, detained for anything anywhere in the world? So those are some of the questions in the 40 question, questionnaire 40 to 45 question questionnaires that are used in court in the, at least in the court in New York, the Federal Immigration Court in New York, to screen undocumented minors so that they can hopefully find a pro bono, hopefully pro bono lawyer who then might be able to make the case that they are eligible for asylum or some other form of immigration relief such as a CIDJ visa or a few others that are less common. This particular questionnaire was put together in 2014 when we saw the so-called immigration crisis unfolding at the border. I say so-called because other people have advocated that it was not an immigration crisis but a refugee crisis because it involved dozens of thousands of undocumented children who had come alone fleeing from what I would call parastate violence, not state violence necessarily, but state negligence and parastate violence. In other words, the violence enforced, the systematic violence enforced by very well-organized gangs such as the MS-13 and Barrio 18. So what I'm going to do is, I'm pre-technological so I decided not to even try to make a PowerPoint. I looked at my PowerPoints when I was still a PhD student and my eight-year-old daughter does better PowerPoints now. So I'm a writer, that's what I do. So what I'm gonna do now is read to you and I'm going to read a few pages from three distinct sections in my most recently published book, tell me how it ends, which I picked out as I listened to you and I hope that somehow they round up and connect the two things. I was gonna read something else about an auctioneer who auctions teeth and has a house built with rebar because it's another topic that Tatiana and I have spoken about before, but after your presentation, I was not gonna speak about teeth auctions. So here we go. I started working as an interpreter in the New York Immigration Court in March 2015. I convinced my 19-year-old niece to come with me at least for the first day. She had just moved to New York, was living with us and was waiting for a college application results. Her life was, as it should be for anyone at that point, a wild and beautiful mess. On our first day of work, my niece and I took the subway downtown in the early morning and walked to the big ominous building at 26 Federal Plaza. Security procedures to enter the building are a little like the ones at the airport. You have to show your passport, take off your jackets, scarves and shoes, deposit your bags on an inspection belt and go through a metal detector monitored by the police. Inside, the building branches vertically and horizontally into hallways, offices, windows, courtrooms and waiting rooms. There are few signs and few people you can ask for assistance or a direction so it's easy to get lost. The building's labyrinthine architecture is in a way a replica of the US immigration system. And as in any labyrinth, some might find their way out and some don't. Those who don't might remain there forever, invisible specters who go up and down escalators and elevators and wander the hallways, imprisoned in circular nightmares. A lawyer from Eila, whom I had contacted by phone a few months earlier, met us on the ground floor of the building. She led us up to the 11th floor and there she introduced us to two lawyers from the door, a Manhattan-based non-profit that provides kids and teenagers with services ranging from legal assistance to counseling to English and hip-hop classes with whom we would be working that day and over the following months. After the official introductions, the lawyers from the door asked us to wait for a while in the little room adjacent to the one where the interviews are conducted. We had arrived too early. They hadn't finished planning the agenda for the day and no children had shown up yet. I picked a chair in the waiting room and my niece went to peek into the screening room where the lawyers were preparing. Through the door left a jar. She promptly returned to report with pride and enthusiasm in keeping with her age that all the staff members from the door were young women. I responded with a stoic nod, perhaps in an effort to display more fortitude and aplomb than I actually have, to appear neither moved by her comment nor frightened by what awaited for us on the other side of the door. Soon after, the lawyers led us into the screening room where they outlined the procedure we would follow. The plan on that first day was for each of us to shadow a lawyer, learning how to use the intake questionnaire and how to conduct the interviews. Once we were familiar with the process, we would interview the children directly without a lawyer. But so many children showed up that morning that the lawyers decided to hand us packets with copies of the intake questionnaire and trust that we'd do the job well on our own. We had no idea what we were doing, no idea of the depth and magnitude of what we were dealing with. Between the summer of 2014 and the first months of 2015 when my niece and I began working in courts, constant coverage of the children's crisis had slowly made the general picture a little clearer for everyone who followed the news. This much at least was clear. Most children came from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. The three countries that make up the Northern Triangle. And practically all of them were fleeing gang violence. Although the flow of youths migrating alone to the United States from these territories had been observed for years, there had been a considerable and sudden increase in the numbers. From October 2013 to the moment the crisis was declared in June 2014, that's less than a year. The total number of child migrants detained at the border approached 80,000. This sudden increase set off alarms in the United States and provoked the declaration of the crisis. Later in the summer of 2015, it became known that between April 2014 and August 2015, more than 102,000 unaccompanied children had been detained at the border. The rumor screenings are conducted in the New York immigration court fields improvised. Like a small refugee camp, occupied temporarily by local organizations and the children they screen tirelessly every day. By the way, since the Trump administration took over that space, which was the only space where lawyers could screen children and have a space where they could try to connect them with possible lawyers, disappeared, it is no longer available to non-profit organizations. The space resembles a church, a rectangle, vast on austere, furnished only with benches lined one after the other. At its front, a wooden balustrade with a little door in the center cordons off an area with two large mahogany tables at which the children, lawyers and interpreters sit for the interviews. Crayons and pads of paper are set out at the ends of the tables to entertain the younger children. During each interview, the child's relatives sit on the benches on the other side of the balustrade and wait, like spectators in a silent mass. It's against protocol for relatives to join the children during the interviews since their presence could influence the answers they give. Against the walls of the room instead of statues of saints or paintings that would decorate a church are movable chalkboards on which lawyers and their interpreters make notes and children draw and scribble while they wait their turn. We didn't quite grasp the bigger picture during our first hours in court conducting screenings. Blindly, we simply followed all the questions on the intake questionnaire one by one and translated the answers. What we were really doing there that morning was providing backup for organizations dealing with an emergency. Not the emergency at the border, detonated with a surge of arrivals, but the quieter, more bureaucratic legal emergency created by the federal government's decision to create a priority juvenile docket in response to that surge. A priority juvenile docket for those of you who don't know much about law is basically a group of cases that has priority in court to be addressed in court before others. Before that priority docket was created by the Obama administration, children who were seeking asylum or other forms of immigration relief in the US had about one year to find a lawyer who could defend them against deportation. After the creation of the priority docket, children only had 21 days. So you tell me which child might achieve that, how many children were going to actually find lawyers. It was basically a way for the kind of backdoor way for the federal government to ensure that most of the children that had arrived would be duly deported. I'm gonna skip now to another section. Often my daughter asks me, so how does the story of those children end? I don't know how it ends yet, I usually say. My daughter often follows up on the story she half hears. There's one story that obsesses her, a story I only tell her in pieces and for which I have not yet been able to offer a real ending. It begins with two girls in the courtroom. They're five and seven years old and they're from a small village in Guatemala. Spanish is their second language but the older girl speaks it well. We sit around the mahogany table in the room where the interviews take place and their mother observes from one of the benches in the back. The little girl concentrates on her coloring book, a crayon in her right hand. The older one has her hands crossed as an adult might and she answers my questions one by one. She's a little shy but tries to be clear and precise in her answers, delivering all of them with a big smile, toothless here and there. Why did you come to the United States? I don't know, how did you travel here? A man brought us, a coyote, no a man. Was he nice to you? Yes, he was nice, I think. And where did you cross the border? I don't know, Texas, Arizona? Yes, Texas, Arizona. I realize it's impossible to go on with the interview so I ask the lawyers to make an exception and allow the mother to meet with us at least for a while. We go back to question one and the mother responds for the girls filling holes, explaining things and also telling her own version of the story. When the younger of her daughters turned two she decided to migrate north and leave them in care of their grandmother. She crossed two national borders with no documents. She wasn't detained by Border Patrol and managed to cross the desert with a group of people. After a few weeks she arrived in Long Island where she had a cousin. That's where she settled. Years passed and the girls grew up. Years passed and she remarried. She had another child. One day she called her mother, the grandmother of the girls and told her that the time had come. She had saved enough money to bring the girls over. I don't know how her grandmother, I don't know how the grandmother responded to the news of her granddaughter's imminent departure but she noted the instructions down carefully and later explained them to the girls. In a few days a man was going to come and get them. A man who would help them get back to their mother. She told them that it would be a long trip but that he would keep them safe. The man had taken many other girls from their village safely across the two borders and everything had gone well. So everything would go well this time too. The day before they left their grandmother sewed a 10 digit telephone number on the collars of the dresses each girl would wear throughout the entire trip. It was a 10 digit number. The girls had not been able to remember or memorize as hard as she tries to get them to. So she had decided to embroider it on the dresses and repeat over and over again, a single instruction. They should never take off this dress, not even to sleep. And as soon as they reached America, as soon as they met the first American policeman they were to show the inside of the dresses color to him. He would then dial the number and let them speak to their mother. The rest would follow. The rest did follow. They made it to the border, were kept in custody in the Yelera or the icebox for an indefinite time period. They didn't remember how many days, but they said that they were colder in there than they had ever been before. After that day, they went to a shelter. And a few weeks later, they were put on an airplane and flown to JFK where their mother, baby brother and stepfather were waiting for them. That's it, my daughter asks. That's it, I tell her. That's how it ends. Yes, that's how it ends. But of course it doesn't end there. That's just where it begins, with a court summons and a first notice to appear. And finally, I'm gonna skip to a section toward the end of the book, which I think is in conversation with the idea that we live in a region that cannot really be chopped up into countries if we wanna actually understand that region. Between Hempstead, Hempstead is by the way, the place where I usually teach, Hofter University is there. And it's a town that has been ridden by gang violence for many, many years. There's several books and even movies about the Bloods and Crips and their battles there. And now it is a town that is also full of MS-13 and Barrio de Scioccio and Salvadoran with Pride and Neo-Nazis and all kinds of things. Between Hempstead and Tegucigalpa, there's a long chain of causes and effects. Both cities can be drawn on the same map, the map of violence related to drug trafficking. This fact is ignored, however, by almost all of the official reports. The media wouldn't put Hempstead, a city in New York, after all, on the same plane as one in Honduras. What a scandal. Official accounts in the United States would circulate in the newspaper or on the radio, the message from Washington and public opinion in general, almost always locate the dividing line between civilization and barbarity just below the Rio Grande, or Rio Bravo. A brief, particularly disconcerting article in the New York Times in October 2014 postulated a series of questions and rapid responses about the child migrants from Central America. The questions themselves had a tendentious tone. Why aren't child migrants immediately deported? Was the first question. As if baffled or enraged by the fact that the children are not met at the border with catapults that will return them back to their home countries. If the questions themselves showed a light bias, the answers were worse. They seemed like something from an openly racist 19th century magazine or a reactionary anti-immigration serial, not the New York Times. Quote, Honduras statute adopted with bipartisan support, minors from Central America cannot be deported immediately. NSA cannot be deported immediately. But a United States law allows Mexican miners caught crossing the border to be sent back quickly. Note, the majority of children are not caught. They turn themselves in to Border Patrol. Another question read, where are the child migrants coming from? The answer. More than three quarters of the children are from mostly poor and violent towns in three countries, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The italics, the book has poor and violent in italics. The italics are mine, of course, but they underscore the less than subtle bias in the portrait of the children. The children caught while crossing illegally laws that permit their deportation. Children who come from the poor and violent towns. In short, barbarians who deserve subhuman treatment. The attitude in the United States towards child migrants is not always blatantly negative, but generally speaking, it is biased on a kind of misunderstanding or voluntary ignorance. Debate around the matter has persistently and cynically overlooked the causes of the exodus. When causes are discussed, the general consensus and underlying assumption seems to be that their origins are circumscribed to sending countries and their many local problems. No one suggests that the causes are deeply embedded in our shared hemispheric history and are therefore not some distant problem in a foreign country that no one can locate on a map, but in fact, a transnational problem that includes the United States. Not as a distant observer or a passive victim that must now deal with thousands of unwanted children arriving at the southern border, but rather as an active historical participant in the circumstances that generated the problem. The belief that the migration of all those children is there, the southern barbarians' problem is often so deeply ingrained that we, the northern civilization, feel exempt from offering any solution. The devastation of the social fabric in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and other countries is often thought of as a Central American gang violence problem that must be kept on the far side of the border. There's little said, for example, of arms being trafficked from the United States into Mexico or Central America, legally or not. Little mention of the fact that the conception of drugs in the United States is what fundamentally fuels drug traffic in the entire continent. But the drug circuit and its many wars, those openly declared and those that are silenced, are being fought in the streets of San Salvador, San Pedro Sula, Iguala, Tampico, Los Angeles, and Hempstead. They are not a problem circumscribed to a smaller geographic area. The roots and reach of the current situation branch out across hemispheres and form a complex global network whose size and real reach we can't even imagine. It's urgent that we begin talking about the drug wars as a hemispheric war, at least. One that begins in the great lakes of the Northern United States and ends in the mountains of Selaque in southern Honduras. It would surely be a step forward for our governments to officially acknowledge the hemispheric dimensions of the problem, acknowledge the connection between such phenomena as the drug wars, gangs in Central America, and the United States, the trafficking of arms from the United States, the consumption of drugs, and the massive migration of children from the Northern Triangle to the United States through Mexico. No one, or almost no one, from producers to consumers is willing to accept their role in the great theater of devastation of these children's lives. To refer to the situation as a hemispheric war would be a step forward because it would oblige us to rethink the very language surrounding the problem, and in doing so, imagine potential directions for combined politics and policies. But of course, a war refugee is bad news and an uncomfortable truth for governments because it obliges them to deal with the problem instead of simply removing the illegal alien. Thank you. This was quite amazing, and I think we're dealing with a super urgent and interesting topic, to say the least. I'm super honored to be part of this table with such an amazing woman. I'm a fan of all of you, actually. And I also love, well, thank you Tatiana for organizing this initiative. I'm also part of the initiative and teaching at Cooper Union, and we're dealing with, well, both side of the border, us through Kansas. And so it has been quite a journey to kind of understand all these interconnections between policy, architecture, the landscape, et cetera. I mean, so I'm just gonna start with a simple question, and I love how you said to kind of, like the job now is to kind of think about the future or alternative realities to what we have, and I wonder how much policy can be changed through what we do as architects, historians, or writers. So I just wanted you guys to kind of talk a little bit about the limits and strengths that you have through your practice and how can you maybe also share that urgency of the subject and to an audience that maybe is not, doesn't think the same way that we do, and how can we kind of push that subject, I guess. So whoever wants to start, I don't know. Okay. Well, so I'm a historian, I'm an architectural historian, and to me, the process of uncovering the architectural history of something, the past of something, the how of how that something came to be is the way I see what that thing is. So when, to me, there's a kind of normalizing that happens by virtue of the fact of taking in and receiving your everyday, ordinary built environment in real time. It's like, as a function of survival, we accept on some level our surroundings and we move through them. So in some ways, being a historian for me is sort of taking a step away from that and actually trying to find the collection of things that made it be the way it is. And the reason I think that that dovetails or has some relevance to the world of policy and politics is because you can't, you can't, you don't feel that you can sort of intervene with policy when you're not a politician or when you're not on the front lines of the legal advocates in many ways. You know, in many ways it feels like, okay, what do I do as a citizen? I vote, if you vote, maybe I have commentary, et cetera. But creating one's political position and creating one's policy orientation to me happens through historical understanding. So it's about actually sort of, I mean, I know this might sound cheesy, but for me it's been a self-empowering process to learn about how the landscape of detention came to be because then I get to start stepping backward and imagine undoing it. Right, like a process of revelation and understanding if you don't know it. And I feel like I saw certainly like a comment that you made, Valeria, when somebody was asking if it was, if constantly just talking about something, does that create like a certain kind of tiredness? Because right now it's subject that we're constantly dealing with, like in the news, or like it's just around. And some people might not like feel overwhelmed by it and like kind of stop, like instead of kind of dealing with it more like walking backwards. But I feel like the book, especially in the sense how it has also revealed a certain part of responsibility of Mexico. And this kind of shared hemisphere responsibility from both sides of the border and to the south. And it's something that happens, obviously, not only in this condition, but in many. So. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, someone once asked me if I didn't think that talking too much about this issue was going to create a kind of empathy fatigue, is what they called it. And I thought about it and I mean I thought, I mean no, first of all I don't think that empathy is a kind of resource that like petroleum finishes. I hope not. I hope not. Empathy is I think endless in its reinvented endlessly. But also it's just not about empathy. And I think that's what's important. I think that the argument around immigration and immigrant rights has to be made in the framework of a legal argument and of historical responsibilities as I just read. It's not about, oh empathize with the poor migrant. Listen to this story of this little boy who made it here and all he wants to do is join the American dream and be a good American and he gets straight A's and that's not the narrative I think. I think that's the narrative that we usually hear in the radio and in Disney movies and everywhere else. But that's a very short, that is like a short sighted argument and one that cannot make it too far because it just can't sustain the weight and complexity of the historical phenomenon of migration basically, not the problem of migration. Migration is not a problem, but a reality, right? And then just briefly address your question about where we're coming from and our own disciplines and how that may or may not contribute to this discussion. I mean, of course, as a writer I am nine out of 10 days depressed because I know that my writing doesn't, a book will never save a person's life or change policies or do absolutely, and no one cares, no one gives. Some people buy books, but then they really read their telephone most of the time. People read less and less today. But some people do read and words and I think writers can function as custodians of the language in turn, of the language that's circulating in our era, right? And the press and the media, for example, are full of on the one hand euphemisms to describe the systematic violence that targets communities of color and undocumented communities and minorities, as is said here in the US, and also political violence. So we have words circulating all the time like removal, right? Which is a word used to talk about deportation. It's a removal. It's a kind of cute way of describing something that's rather brutal, right? It's the same word, by the way, that was used after the Andrew Jackson laws that caused the removal of Native Americans into reservations, right? The same word historically, interestingly. We have words like other euphemisms, like people being sent back according to, what is it? The term is a voluntary return instead of deportation. And then we have just the violence of the language, just the notion itself that someone is called illegal and that that's such a common way to describe a person who does not have the proper documents is, I think, unacceptable, right? To say you are illegal, it's absurd as well. No one is illegal. You can do something illegal, but you are not ontologically illegal. It just doesn't make sense. Yet, well-intentioned people use the term illegal to describe undocumented migrants simply because that is what is accepted. So I think that what books can do is question that language and circulate ideas that push towards a further complexity of the paradigm that we are, or the moment that we are living. I do think that architecture has not the solutions for not even a little part of the world, but I do think that we architects can really imagine our environment in many ways that could at least make or start a conversation on something. And I think that that's actually my interest with these. So I don't believe that we would design things that would solve all these problems, but I do believe that by addressing those issues and trying to understand the problematics and by responding, for example, by designing a house for an immigrant, we can start even so identifying ourselves with a problematic. Which I think that this is something that it's really important to start with. When we, and I remember a part of your book where you're describing how by doing this questioner to these children, it started to bring up your own problematic about becoming an American citizen at that moment, or a green card holder. I don't know, so for me it's exactly the same by starting to understand the problematic, now I'm starting to be part of it in a way. So I think that that is already a beginning because in a way if we are more and more part of it, we will indeed become part of the solution. So I do believe that by starting to address these topics and bring the distance closer to us on those problematics, we'll start to do something. And I always think how useful it is to imagine our environment and how useful is that everybody would do in not only architectural ways, although I start with architecture. Right, because you are an architect at the end of the day. We all try to address this from where we stand, I think. And I think it's obviously something that we are doing with this initiative and it has changed both us and the rest. And in the idea of this conversation, I wanted to maybe ask the public, we are a small crowd, if you have any questions may you want to try? I don't know if we have a microphone for me. Yeah, because then do you, it's. So one of the things that really strikes me about all the work and looking at it from all these different perspectives is the incredible, the broad, but incredibly important definition of aspiration and that we see this in such a deep definition. And I think from on one side, you have this in the worst cases, like the aspiration of survival, right? The basic thing. And then you have the scale where things are getting more and more aspirational to success and to desire. And I'm not sure about the last one, but I was like eventually maybe belonging, whatever that means. I think it might be a very complicated one. But it's one thing architecture in looking at the remittance landscape examines very eloquently this idea of success or desire in a way. And but all of these, this huge range of ideas of aspiration. What's interesting about all the work and I think like Valeria in the story of my teeth, you see all these different perspectives which are all sort of looking at the idea of aspiration through different lenses, let's say. And I was just wondering if you wanted to like comment on like the sort of what is the definition of aspiration and how is that playing into the bigger story somehow? I mean, I'll say something quick. To me, one of the things that's interesting about your question is I think of aspiration as very universal. And I'm not someone who thinks of very many things as universal or really ever uses that word. But in the sense that if I were to define it, aspiration is just having a viable life. Aspiration is being able to live a life. One aspires to live a life. One aspires to be somewhere and be, if not at peace, in a situation and in a context in which they can use the resources of their personhood to exist. And so when you take that and you put it in the context of migration, where people aren't finding that viable life and so that's where we start the movement. Then it starts to become, as you say, it starts to become this kind of other thing, which is like this spectrum of aspirations because all of the sudden one is defined by vulnerabilities and uncertainties and unknowns, future unknowns. And so the question becomes, well, what then is my aspiration for the future? Or where is that viability? And you chase it and you go after it and you try to get it in increments and pieces. So the remittance house is one attempt. It's one grasp at creating that viability. And as I write about and as you guys are researching and know, it's riddled with all kinds of problems that keep it from being a complete, not even utopia, but a complete picture or answer to a viable future. So I think it's a very interesting question and I don't know what kind of makes me think of a thing with that way. I was asking Tatiana yesterday, we were talking and I was asking her about the rebar, left in many Mexican constructions. Probably not only Mexican, probably it's probably a phenomenon that goes, is reproduced in other countries. Mostly in poor environments. Mostly in poor environments. And aspirational. And what Tatiana said was, I said, why the rebar? Is it to evade taxes because the house is not complete or what is it really? And she said, it's aspiration. It's the symbol of the next floor that's going to be built eventually. I would say, so if you think about it as a remainder, like a spatial remainder of something, the centimeter that you can still sort of cover. My house is full of books, many of which I have not read. It's my aspirational kind of gesture one day. One day, it's again like a sort of spatial, definitely spatial occupation. When I finished the day that I defended my PhD dissertation, which I wrote actually in this building, the library upstairs in Avery, I went to this really expensive furniture shop completely beyond my means as a student. And I bought this couch. I threw away my, I gave away my horrible Ikea couch that looked like a fat old man in like a jumper suit. It was like this thing in the living room. And I bought this beautiful modern Danish couch, which I'm still paying. And it was like an aspirational gesture. I finally finished my bloody thesis. I will get a job. I will sell that book. I will, and some of it's turned out well, so it's that extra, it's that extra that you move toward, right? And I do believe that architecture, the fine aspiration in spaces. I mean, that's what it is. I don't see it differently in many, it obviously has many colors, no? Between those two words, aspiration and architecture, but I do think that it's exactly that. It's just a physical representation of the aspirations of the civilization. And one very interesting part of it that I'm like right now very into the topic is these steel bars of hope, which is defining landscapes all over the world and of unfinished or unrealized wishes, which I think it's also a very interesting topic that goes way beyond migration. It's just a human condition of growth, no? Right. Okay. Thanks for a great panel. And Sarah, I've taught your book a few times. So I'm really interested that you've gone from remittances to prisons. And so I'm curious how long, how long have you been doing the prison part? It's a bit of a story. I'll make it short. Well, 2015. Yeah, okay. And I became a part of Humanities Action Lab, which is a team, 20 professors headed out of the new school. And so in 2015, we all taught classes nationwide. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. So because remittances are... That's a good one. That's a good one. I needed to know that, I'm sorry. Because remittances is such an informal topic, right? In the way that you address it is through interviewing people and through really looking at what they do in that whole group in Chicago and what happens in the particular suburb in Mexico. And as architects, I think we bring a lot of value systems and judgments actually to what people are building. And so there's so many people who are trying to organize, to organize migrants' money to be invested in so-called good, better ways than the big suburban house, which gets copied in that, right? In even less, I don't know. Yeah, I don't wanna say better or worse. But so I'm just curious, Tatiana as well, where you think the architect's role is? Because I don't think it's that self-evident, right? That an architect can do good in this world actually. And I mess around with it myself, so I'm doing it more in an identification way. But I think that's a big, it's such a huge issue over here. And so the prison is this kind of looming figure and I do think it's really important on the border to look at that, but it's the relationship between these formal, the formal systems and then the informal ones, which undo it, right? And it's through money you can't see and it's through people you can't see and all of that, so I'm just curious. It's a massive question. Well, in the case of the maintenance houses, what I do think architects can do is to help really realize those aspirational dreams of a house in a better way. And as you say, we're judging what is better and what not. But what is really something true is that these houses often get built and they don't have real proportions for a room or windows are high and people then cannot use them as windows or rooms become really wide and strange because they copy those houses with normally a photo or sometimes they will have a plan but the people who build them there, they don't know how to read plans. So definitely there is a technical capacity that we have that we can provide to that. How do those people become the client? Yeah, that's the thing. That's, I think that's one of the problems is how do you really act as the architect and become their ID? Because what is certain is that there is a whole system as I said that, as I mentioned before, the construction companies that are taking advantage of, they're giving out manuals, construction manuals to the people to build their homes. And these construction manuals basically obviously are to promote the use of their materials very clearly. But the people base their constructions in those manuals often, you know? So what we're doing here at Gizub is we're designing a house and we're doing then a construction manual for that house that could be. To get to the developer. Hopefully, we'll find, if we'll see, we'll find a client. But at least it's the exercise to understand how we could participate in this issue and in this space. And I also think it's also about the research and the fact that you are going there with the students and like achieving, like going to places that you might not have been before. And I think it's also not just about the actual construction of something, but the work behind as an architect that we also tend to do. And I think that is quite important. And we're jumping from your point. Just very briefly, it's also about, which I forgot to really address. We're also addressing a big topic on how to translate style and how to, how style would reflect or through the construction matter or through only aesthetic as it is, normally reflect the era, the desire, the possibilities and how the copy of those styles and what is the reflection of that. So it is also something at top, an aesthetic topic that we're bringing into the table, which concerns definitely too. And aesthetic in New York there's a lot of what are called hometown associations where groups of people join together to do a joint, to do a joint project with remittances in their hometown. And some like in Oaxaca, I understand that they've actually done some very bad things with concrete and the river and all of that that has gone on. So yeah, so I do, I think it's a really, it's a kind of architecture where you really do have to work on both, on both sides. I don't know, I just think it's very complicated. We were discussing the idea of the open kitchen yesterday, for example, in a lot of remittance housing. I myself, ignorant about many things of architecture, I just moved to the Bronx and wanted an open kitchen and Tatiana said, you're crazy. If you're Mexican, you can't have an open kitchen because you put a chile poblano on the fire and the entire house fills with this very stingy smoke that makes your children cry and your nose bleed. So you need a very closed kitchen if you're Mexican. So I think that's it. It's not an example of a good and bad or but it is an example of functionality. With respect to local customs and forms. Yeah, the topic of the bathroom. For many of these people that get these houses in Mexico and rural Mexico, the idea of having a bathroom inside a room, a bedroom is absolutely insane. I mean, why would you have a bathroom which normally needs to be a dry bathroom because there's no sewage inside a room? I mean, these would not work at all. So also those kind of issues when you're trying to do these, it's something that we architects could solve. But to help, I understand your question with this mind. How then you entering to that? No? Yeah. Hi. Oh, it's okay. Then you get recorded. Ciudad Acuña is a city in the border, really right in the border from Ecuador and El Paso. And it was heated by a tornado. In Mexico, we never had a tornado before in the history of the country, but now probably you are exporting tornadoes as well. Or the climate change is doing its way to Mexico as well. And so we had a tornado which swiped basically 600 houses, 23 of them completely. 23 of those 600 houses were totally destroyed and people, not at all of them, but some on those houses died. And so then the government had to do this relief action. The people, those houses affected were in Fornavit housing. In Fornavit is the bank of the social housing bank founder. Yeah, the ones that give funds. And so they needed to respond because all those affected were people that were their clients. And they needed to rebuild. So they decided to rebuild those houses because the people is insured. And through the insurance, they rebuild the 600 houses minus 23. It's not 600 point, it's 592 something like that. And then the 23 that were completely destroyed needed to be rebuilt from scratch. They asked us to do our design, our prototype design that we were developing for other, to be adapted in different regions in Mexico. And we adapted to the conditions on that side and tested it within a unit, which is not normally what we do. What we did with the prototype and we build those 23 houses there and the government restored the other 600. That's the project, basically. That are really great, if you wanna have a look, I mean, they're really history, history. And anywhere in any place in the world. So I mean, in America, our business in America is trying to manage this, trying to manage this. There's magazines, books, people want the timing on. Well, there is something that an architect can do. What you were saying, because I do think there are many, many models of houses of these price. The thing is that oftenly it's not thought by an architect. They're done by companies that produce those in masses or by developers or by NGOs that are working in the countries or by different actors. And then there's very few, well, not very few. There are also actually quite a lot of architecture development through it. And then you can see the benefits of it. When a house is developed by an architect, then you are able to optimize space in a way that will create more space with the same amount of money. This is actually what we were able to do very easily. When I first was confronted with the issue, I was like, well, we're not gonna do anything different from those 2,000 that are in the market and already in Mexico, because if we have that little budget with all those restrictions, then it's impossible. But guess what? By getting into the process and really actually looking at that, I was able to see that with little moves in terms of understanding the structure, how it worked, the modularity, we could give a lot of more possibilities than those houses that were already there that were just like very straightforward, probably thought for a mass consumption thing only for an economic solution and not really for a spatial solution. So that's something that an architecture can really do. Yeah. I think that what the tenor is saying that there is the power of design, where that lies, that there is a possibility of doing it right in the same amount of money. You can do it right or wrong with the same amount of money. Basically anything, no? Anybody else? I had a little... There's one. I just wanna say a few words. My name is Marlene, I'm from Puebla and I get really, really inspired for everything you said, you talk about this and I feel like really, really identified because I mean, I live in Puebla, you talk about the state and I saw at the beginning the pictures of the houses in Mexico. So I could see that the architecture for those houses are just like my abuelas home. So I feel like really, really identified and I was living in the border last year ago in Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta. So I've read your book, I'm a big fan of your book. Actually, I'm very inspired because when I was there in Arizona, I was working in education and I was trying to make a combination between these cultures, the American culture and the Mexican culture because they're in Douglas, Arizona. There's this high school, Douglas High School and I was working there with small research and we're talking about in this high school. The teachers are bilingual over there and new kids, new students that get the citizenship, like I mean, they are 15 years old and they become American citizens. So they go to this school and they don't even know how to speak in English. So they get in trouble, they get like, I'm not gonna say like difficulty, so they find with a barrier, cultural barrier while they're learning and the school doesn't allow them to speak in Spanish, sorry. And also there's a law in Arizona that not prohibit, it not say that, but teachers are not really allowed to speak in Spanish in school, in that school. Even if the students doesn't know how to speak in English. So they put all the students together, the one who doesn't speak English in one class. So they need to be there in that classroom till they get like the essential skills for speaking in English. So if they can't continue or they don't pass the exams, they stay there like for many years so they can see how other students can continue with other classes and they stay there all the time. So when you were talking about the prisons that they were just like a whole room, the small spaces that they have over there. So I imagine that was like, it was sad for me to hear that in a school they have those kind of spaces where kids are there trying to learn like a new language. So it was really, really sad for me and it was like a shock and I'm really, really impressed that the three of you are working to get like better, to get to improve these conditions. And actually I'm here, my parent, well my father, he's an immigrant and now I was talking to my friends and I tell them, all of them, that I'm here to follow the American dream because I'm here and I'm trying to look for new opportunities to work with immigrants. So I want to study somebody here. I'm trying to look right now what to do because it's like really, really hard for me right now. And I really want to work here to study more about immigration and then go back to my city in Puebla in Atlisco, it's a small town and do something about politics and change like something over there because in Atlisco, this city in Puebla, I would say that 70% of people who lives there, they know or they have a friend or a relative who is an immigrant. So it's like really, really a really important issue for me because my family are immigrants. Now I'm here trying to do like more things. So I have a question for you. So what would you say to people? To, especially for me, because I'm sometimes kind of lost. I'm trying to, I wanna cry right now, sorry. I wanna, I want to follow this dream, but for me, it's really hard to do it. So I'm sorry, I'm really sorry. I don't know what to do now. I'm sorry, I'm embarrassed. And would you recommend us to new generations to continue working with this topic? So that's it. Thank you. I will encourage you to continue to ask questions like you did today. I think it's very courageous and it talks a lot of what you have accomplished now. So thank you very much and thank you for posting that question. It really hits to the heart, I think, of many of the things that we're trying to understand and to deal with. I mean, I can start. Primero que nada, no te olvides que además de todos somos 60 millones de hispanoparlantes, ese es un país hispanoparlante. So when they say in high school, you can't speak Spanish, you have to remind everyone, everyone you know, like the guy in the deli. You know how many Hispanics, how many people speak Spanish in this country? 60 million people. The US is the second largest Hispanic country in the world. Es un país hispano, first Mexico, then the US. The fact that it doesn't conceive itself as Hispanic is obnoxious. Your generation that will have more of a chance to push forward, I think, the idea that this is, we are not foreigners here. I mean, I am a foreigner, my passport is Mexican, but Hispanics are not, Latinos are not, brown people are not foreign to this land. Now, what to do in terms, I mean, I'm not sure, it would be responsible of me to give you concrete advice because I don't know if you want to be an architect or a writer or you like cooking or you, I don't know anything, but I'd be happy to speak to you personally if you want and review my email or whatever. Yeah, I'm not sure that the exchange can happen, so I feel a little bit like embarrassed suddenly. But I agree, and when you were talking about the language that you writers are the language keepers, I'm very glad that we have people like you keeping the language certainly, especially in this moment where the political use of language has changed so much. And that's something that I would say basically is that for many generations of immigrants that had to adapt to a culture had to really give up of their language to start and then many other things. So language was not transmitted in generations to children. And right now, we all know the power and in the world, everybody knows the power of children knowing more and more languages. So definitely keeping your language, and as Valeria said, making clear that Spanish is an important language and that it's very well spoken in the world actually is the second largest more spoken language in the world as well. And before English, so it's after Chinese and before English, so you should, for me, what I could advise you is to definitely defend your language, Spanish, Español. Vamos a hablar en Español. Just briefly, thank you for your commentary and sharing your story with us. That makes me feel like I'm a part of something. What your comment raises for me is this sort of what I see more and more seeming to be this kind of myth and ideology of the American dream and I'm looking around for where it is and how one gets it. And what troubles me is that I still feel like there's a lot of pressure on young people and it's often repeated to work hard to try to achieve the American dream that's still being repeated. And I often hear what seems to me to be a slogan, which is you can do it, it's just about meritocracy, you work hard, you can achieve it, you can do anything you wanna do. And as you grow, as you evolve in this world and as you get to know how things work and how systems work and infrastructure works and law works and it becomes more and more apparent that one exists within a series of institutional relationships and there are limits that are put on you that are imposed upon you and you might try really, really hard and you might be very, very earnest and dedicated and you might not be getting open doors and it's not your fault and it's something that's happening to so many people and it's something that is frustrating people and terrifying people and it's something that people, we still as a public discourse aren't talking about the fact that we're a really fractured society and that this idea of the American dream is something that really has lost the kind of traction that I think people felt it had several decades ago. And that's a comment and a story I've heard from many migrants who have said to me, you know, I came in the 70s, I felt that the American dream was attainable but I don't know if that's true for my children. I've heard that again and again and again. On the other hand, I see in the work I've done and in the work I'm doing, lots of activism, lots of grassroots work happening on the ground, good people doing good things. It's out there. It's about connecting with the right people. It's about finding the people doing the good work and they're out there. You have to find them. You have to connect with them. You have to put yourself in vulnerable situations. You know, go to an immigration clinic like you write about that you did or not an immigration clinic but a translation, you know, go, you know, find out something that's going on that seems unusual, seems outside your field, seems interesting but you don't know. And show up. And show up and see if you find a friendly face. You know, and try to make a connection. And hope for the best. You know, don't give up. Right? Thank you so much. Thank you for bringing this up and thank you everybody for being here. I think with that note we can close the panel unless somebody else wants to have a last saying or something. Thank you. Thank you.