Reconstructing Disrupted Lives : the Canadian exhibition of children's art from refugee camps

• Main Author: Mantooth, Meredith Diane
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2012
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/42211

During the 1980s International Observers from Canadian churches and development organizations went to Central American refugees living in Honduras and México who fled from conflict zones in El Salvador and Guatemala, respectively. While there the observers commissioned and collected drawings by children living in the refugee camps. Shortly after this, the drawings were exhibited across Canada from 1986-1987 as part of the exhibition Disrupted Lives: Children’s Drawings from Central America. In this paper I argue that the exhibition of children’s drawings gave voice to a silenced aspect of Latin American history – the experiences of children living abroad in refugee camps displaced by the violence and civil wars in their home nations Guatemala and El Salvador. The “unsilencing” (Michel-Rolph Trouillot; 1995) of their histories also positions the drawings as illustrated examples of testimonio as defined by John Beverley (2004).