Guadalupe Maravilla

The response to the pandemic has left many vulnerable groups unsupported. To bridge this gap, Maravilla has begun crowdsourcing funds to support undocumented immigrants in his community and to to provide food and resources to immigrant families with the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Maravilla is a transdisciplinary visual artist, choreographer, and healer. His performances, objects, and drawings trace the history of his own displacement and that of others, nurturing collective narratives of trauma into celebrations of perseverance and humanity. When he was eight years old, Maravilla was part of the first wave of unaccompanied, undocumented children to arrive at the U.S. border in the 1980s as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. In 2016, Maravilla became a U.S. citizen and adopted the name Guadalupe Maravilla in solidarity with his undocumented father, who uses Maravilla as his last name. As an acknowledgement of his own migratory past, Maravilla grounds his practice in the historical and contemporary contexts of immigrant culture, particularly those belonging to Latinx communities.