Lorena Molina

On view at Lawndale Art Center, Houston from March 28, 2026 – March 27, 2027.

In a place to hold you, I am growing a corn garden as a living site for reflection and conversations on immigration, agency, ideas of return, and the many forms of communal care practiced during violent times.

Corn is a central crop in Mesoamerica, in my Salvadoran upbringing, and throughout the places I have called home in the Midwest and Central New York. This plant has been carried across hemispheres, traded among nations, held in ceremonies, and tended through thousands of years of Indigenous knowledge. Corn, like many migrant communities, is also a displaced body. Its story is political, shaped and reshaped by colonial extraction, global trade agreements, forced transformations in labor and who gets to tend, enjoy, and benefit from the land.

Corn also reflects the political realities that shape movement today. After NAFTA and later CAFTA DR, the influx of subsidized corn from the United States destabilized rural economies in Mexico and Central America. Farmers were pushed into economic precarity, which accelerated and forced migration north. A crop that once rooted communities in place became evidence of how global policy displaces both land and people. Meanwhile in the United States, this same crop relies on immigrant labor to tend and harvest even as the systems that depend on that labor routinely refuse dignity, agency, and care to the very people whose hands sustain it.

At the same time, corn carries ancestral knowledge and embodies the ways my ancestors nurtured one another and fought for survival while holding its complicated current reality. By planting it at Lawndale, I draw a line from my family’s stories in El Salvador to present day histories of migration across the Americas.

The tended garden that will grow for multiple seasons at Lawndale stands in direct contrast to the state’s violent holding spaces such as detention centers, prisons, and border checkpoints, where waiting becomes a form of punishment, surveillance, and separation from kin. This installation is meant to create a tender, anti-carceral space where being held is an act of care. The space will be activated with rituals, conversations, music, and workshops that highlight how we care for each other in times of violence.

This work continues my ongoing practice of creating spaces for belonging and collective imagination. The garden becomes a site where land and community hold one another. It is a place planted to hold you, to hold us, as we imagine a gentler and safer future rooted in agency, dignity, and mutual care.