ArtCorps, Inc.

Beverly, Massachusetts

With regional office serving both Guatemala and

El Salvador in Guatemala City

Mission

To advance social change initiatives by promoting arts and culture as powerful tools to generate cooperative and sustainable work between development organizations and the communities they serve. ArtCorps accomplishes its mission through a volunteer program that places professional artists with development organizations in developing countries.

Our Land and the Eagle

Partnering with nonprofit organizations in developing countries to create local opportunities through community-based art projects like Our Land and the Eagle, through which youth worked with a visiting artist to create a mural.

Community Context

To come to the United States, every immigrant leaves a place that he or she calls home. Lack of economic opportunity back home propels immigration just as the access to opportunity here in this country attracts it. By accessing opportunity in the United States and sending remittances back home, immigrants can satisfy the day-to-day need to support their families. However, the long-term need to create opportunities back home—so that the next generation can support families without leaving—is a different matter.

A global community of development organizations is spending enormous amounts of brains, brawn, and money to improve the living conditions and opportunities in immigrants’ homelands, and yet many organizations struggle to create a lasting impact. In order for an impact in these places to be sustainable, local people need to participate and take leadership in development programs. ArtCorps was founded on the premise that organizations face many challenges in building strong partnerships within these local communities: How can they compete with life ’s distractions for people’s attention? How can they communicate their work in a digestible, culturally resonant, and lasting way? How can they initiate dialogue around critical environmental and social issues when few understand the issues? How can they build a sense of community around projects when racial, ethnic, and religious tensions prevail? How can they get people to engage actively when decades of paternalistic development have taught people to receive without questioning?  

ArtCorps

ArtCorps provides a vital link that connects organizations to the communities they serve by introducing the arts as an innovative educational, engagement, and empowerment methodology. ArtCorps does this by sending professional artists to volunteer with development organizations working in environmental conservation, public health, and human rights. Our artists provide tools to establish trust, build confidence, and develop initiative. These tools tap into the imagination and voice of the people, and create an opportunity for local organizations to initiate dialogue around the why and how of development issues. By developing the skills of critical reflection and action, the arts transform communities into partners in the development process, empowering them to change the conditions of their own lives.

Since 1999, ArtCorps has sent 32 artists from around the world to over 16 different organizations in Guatemala and El Salvador, impacting over 30,000 people in more than 180 communities. Each artist’s experience is unique. An artist might focus on sustainable agriculture, disaster response, reproductive health, literacy, civic participation, domestic violence, and much more in a range of rural to semi-urban settings, depending on his or her host organization and host community. The organization identifies priorities for each year, for example, campaign against forest fires or develop youth leadership. The artist works with the organization to develop concrete arts projects, such as murals designed to prevent against forest fires or youth theater groups speaking out about teen concerns. All of them are confronted with communities who have lost and continue to lose leaders and youth to immigration. Cristina León Lara’s story about the mural Our Land and the Eagle (below) provides a glimpse of one artist’s encounter.

Through our artists, ArtCorps has contributed to reduced forest fires near Uaxactun, Guatemala; to a five-fold increase in school attendance by Mayan girls at the Ak’Tenamit boarding school; to the first ever large-scale gathering of women in Chiché, Guatemala that included women from all indigenous groups; and much more.

Of the many, many lessons ArtCorps has learned over the years, perhaps the following three have made the most difference for ArtCorps recently.

(1) The need for continuity over time; each ArtCorps artist works with the same NGO and community for one year at a time, and ArtCorps sends different artists to the same NGOs and communities for three to five years in a row.

(2) Particularly when collaborating with partners that do not have previous experience with the arts, provide an orientation into how the arts have been used to achieve social change across time and continents; the better the organizations understand the concept and realize it has been tried and tested, the more committed and better able to integrate it into their programming they will be.

(3) By nature, creative projects deviate from the plan and many influencing factors are out of the organizers’ control; clear and open communication about visions and logistical details must be cultivated at all steps.

ArtCorps will continue refining its approach and documenting its methodology during the next three years in order to replicate its model beyond Central America.

Our Land and the Eagle

El Salvador and Migration: My experiences working as an ArtCorps Artist with the Hermano Mercedes Ruiz Foundation

by Cristina León Lara, Colombian visual artist, 2007 volunteer artist

I worked for nearly one year in El Salvador with a local community development organization called the Hermano Mercedes Ruiz Foundation (Fundahmer) as an artist in the 2007 ArtCorps program. With Fundahmer, I was able to share ArtCorps’ vision of supporting social action through art in communities across the country. Here, I would like to tell you about one project called Our Land and the Eagle.

The country of El Salvador is highly dependent on the remittances that Salvadorans living in the United States send back to friends and relatives. Remittances comprised more than 17% of the country’s GDP in 2006! It is estimated that approximately a fourth of all Salvadorans live outside of their country—the majority in the United States. For this reason, the issue of immigration is important across the entire country, and many youth dream of going to the United States to have “a better life.” It can be difficult to believe this when you look at this marvelous country with its friendly and joyful people—but then when you also observe the daily fight for survival of much of the population, the violence in the cities, the economy of exploitation, the abandoned countryside, you get an idea of the immigrants’ motives. The culture of the United States is also affecting the country, with “gringo” malls growing up and out every day.

We visited and worked with different communities throughout the country, and I saw that the majority of them are affected by problems of immigration. I lived in one of these communities for a time, a community that lies in the department of Morazán, which is perhaps more forgotten by the government than any other region. The people of Morazán are dear, and although life is difficult, my host family shared everything with me—from their smiles to their food. Juan, the father of the family, was saving money to be able to travel north: “This month I cannot travel,” he told me, “but next month I hope to be able to go. I am saving for tennis shoes.” At first I did not understand, until I realized that he did not even have shoes for the trek.

The path to the United States lasts approximately one month, if one succeeds in crossing the Salvadoran border through Guatemala, then through Mexico—all the way to the Río Grande, passing through thieves, corrupt police, and gangs of human traffickers. Rodrigo, another man in the same community, had to pay $6,000 to his “coyote” to be taken to the great country up north. During the trajectory, he had to wait in a “safe” house in Guatemala—dirty, full of peop le, without enough food—until they received the green light to continue on. They traveled in a truck to Mexico, enclosed in darkness, with almost no air to breathe, without seeing the sun or the moon. Arriving at the United States border, the worst began: the desert and the fight against “la migra,” the border protection agents. It seems like an unfair fight: the all-terrain vehicles, automatic weapons, movement detectors, cameras and binoculars against the immigrants barely equipped with torn shoes and perhaps a bag of personal belongings.

One of the projects that I most enjoyed during my year with Fundahmer was a great mural called Our Land and the Eagle, in the community of El Transito in San Salvador. We worked for days with community youth, aged 14 to 18. The majority were students, very concerned about their country, and working for social change. Before beginning the mural, we met to discuss possible subjects for the mural, and we quickly agreed upon the subject of immigration among Salvadoran friends and family to the United States. Together with the youth and with my Fundahmer colleague Carlos Vázquez, we created the ideas and the sketches for the mural. The youth spoke a lot about the wall that has been constructed along the United States’ border and history’s lesson about the wall dividing the two Germanys. It seems that politicians have not understood that their walls and borders should not be constructed between human beings.

The youth face a harsh reality: despite the difficulties, Salvadorans continue to travel—whether to unite the family, earn money, or escape the precarious conditions so common in their own country. However, the youth also talked of the beauty of El Salvador, of its people, its landscape, its tropical climate, its fruits and dishes, its villages and its potential. For these youth, all of these factors are a big reason to continue fighting for changes inside their country.

We created the drawings based upon everything the youth said. The idea behind the mural is that it is possible to see the situation from a different angle: El Salvador as a beautiful country, with a native culture that has suffered terribly from more than 500 years of struggle against foreign invaders and genocide, but that is remembered and is being revitalized. The United States as a sad destination for a majority of immigrants. To enter this world that is so gray for so many who go, one must pass by the great eagle, watching over the wall.

In El Salvador, the youth want to look forward without forgetting their past. The massacres, the suppression, and the corruption will not be forgotten. But is it possible to focus on change. To achieve change, it is of utmost importance that the greatest source of potential of any country—the youth and children—do not leave their land of birth but rather stay to work for a better future here at home.

Our Land and the Eagle was a channel of personal and public affirmation for these youth’s beliefs and also for putting their commitment into practice, beautifying El Transito’s spaces.

Learn more

As materials about ArtCorps’s approach and methodology are developed, they are published on its website, www.artcorp.org .

Contact

Suzanne Jenkins, Program Officer

978.927.2404

artcorps (at) nebf.org

Photos

Our Land and the Eagle project. The text in the mural reads, "It is sad to have to leave your homeland because there is no just order in which one can find work.”

Photos, Cristina León Lara; courtesy of ArtCorps, Inc.

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