Artist, Regina José Galindo: America's Family Prison is a piece I made in San Antonio, Texas, and it has to do with dispossession and migration.
In 2007, 2008, new legislation arose in the United States that criminalized migrants from the northern triangle: Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. When they crossed the border, they were immediately criminalized and had to serve sentences of at least three months or at most three years in privatized prisons in the United States.
But within this prison, they had to work for free, gluing tennis shoe soles, making cups for important coffee brands, or working on keyboards for some brand of computer.
These privatized prisons were family prisons. That is, they were set up so that entire families could serve their sentences together, and the prisons came equipped with cribs and the necessary furniture for the entire family.
Children from families in prison were not educated and were in uniforms with shackles while their parents and them served time. These privatized prisons later became prisons for children and young people traveling alone. And we saw five Guatemalan children die inside these prisons.
For this project, what we did was rent a real cell in a prison factory. We put it inside the gallery space. And the performance consisted of living in the real cell with my family—with my eight-month-old baby and my husband—for 36 hours. And the public could only see us through a small window in the cell.
It was a difficult 36 hours because the cell had a very strong industrial paint smell and our baby got sick while we were inside the prison. So, it was the anguish of the sick baby and the commitment to finish the performance. But we work as a team. My family and I are a team.