09/03/2025
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Powerful remarks at YDS today by Prof. Gregory Cuellar of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Here is what he said at the opening reception for the Arte de Lágrimas exhibit put together by him and his wife, Nohemi Cuellar.
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It is a privilege to open this year’s fall exhibit season at Yale Divinity School, and to do so with Arte de Lagrimas: Refugee Artwork Project. We are especially grateful to Professor Lin for introducing us to Tom Krattenmaker, and to Tom, the Yale Divinity School Wall Committee, and Dean Gregory Sterling for making this inaugural exhibit in the Sarah Smith Gallery possible.
Arte de Lagrimas was born from pain—and from the refusal to remain silent. In August 2014, as the number of asylum‑seeking children arriving at the U.S.–Mexico border surged, Nohemi and I, along with volunteers, ventured into the Sacred Heart respite center in McAllen, Texas. We carried with us crayons, paper, and a simple invitation: “Quieres dibujar?” What emerged were drawings of homes left behind, wildlife, landscapes, border crossings, their prayers, and self-portraits.
Arte de Lagrimas is more than an art collection—it is, at its heart, an act of welcome. The artwork component of this project is inspired by our four daughters, for whom art-making has always been a source of joy, healing, and self-expression. In that same spirit, we extend to children seeking asylum the gift of welcome: an invitation to sit down, to take crayons and paper in hand, and to create. However simple, this moment of art-making becomes a space of dignity, where children who are so often made to feel unwelcome can be assured that their sacred stories will not be forgotten.
These drawings are not sentimental keepsakes; they are snapshots and traces of children’s agency, their world-making creativity, and their insistence on being heard in spaces that routinely erase them. The original works in this exhibit were not taken, but gifted to us by the young artists. Their agency resides not only in the content and stories they depict, but in the very act of giving—a radical gesture of offering in a world that continually denies them belonging. As Christians, we confess that gifts are not meant to be hoarded or silenced, but shared. These drawings are gifts of hope, lament, and wisdom. And as gifts, they unsettle our Western nationalist imaginaries and disrupt our theological assumptions, pressing us toward a different understanding of God and of one another.
Since its founding, Arte de Lagrimas has traveled widely—exhibited at theological schools, universities, churches, and art spaces across the nation. Each venue exposes new communities to the unsettling witness of these children, forcing different publics—whether seminarians, churchgoers, or academics—to confront their own theological complicity in systems that criminalize migration.
At YDS—our eighth ATS theological school home—the exhibit continues to enact three profound gestures:
1. Disrupt: We center the migration stories of racialized children targeted by state violence. Pause: Consider the weight carried in a child’s drawing of a border crossing as an act of faith—or a world without borders.
2. Sacralize: These drawings are prayers, memories, and acts of world-making in visual form. Turn to your neighbor—or simply to yourself—and attend to what you see: the landscapes of loss, the traces of once-settled lives, the bonds of family, the blessings spoken in color, the scriptures and images of God. These drawings do not just depict—they sacralize, insisting that what the state treats as disposable is in fact holy.
3. Self-search: We are confronted with our own implicit biases—how silence, and how labels like “illegal,” work to obscure human dignity. And more: how our patterns of consumption, our nationalist imaginaries, our boundary-keeping and othering rhetoric all conspire to produce an “us versus them” mindset that hardens into social reality. Even the earth bears witness: the borderlands themselves are scarred by walls, checkpoints, and surveillance, landscapes made hostile not by nature alone but by human policy. To confront our complicity is also to reckon with how empire wounds creation itself. And we must also recognize that climate change and migration are inseparably linked—intensifying droughts, floods, and storms that uproot families, forcing them to seek refuge across borders. So I ask: how have our theologies, our institutions—even our classrooms—been shaped by this ‘us versus them’ logic, and how might we allow these sacred stories to reorient us toward justice?
As you walk through, you'll encounter themes: homes left behind, journeys to the border, self‑portraits, and prayers. We invite you to ask:
- How do stories from the margins challenge dominant theological discourse?
- Where do these images intersect—or diverge—with biblical narratives of exile, deliverance, and hope?
- How do we move from seeing drawings to hearing and healing real lives—deported parents, grieving families, children without voices?
- How can these drawings move you from the benches to the barricades—to engage in social justice and political activism for the vulnerable and those targeted for annihilation?
Arte de Lagrimas begins with a small crayon, but its invitation is vast. It invites disruption, sacralization, revelation. These drawings remind us that both people and the earth groan under empire’s weight. May you receive these drawings as the gifts they are—and may they return the favor.
Welcome—and thank you for being present to the gift.
