Gemidos de la Tierra, 2023

Gemidos de la Tierra 2023 (Wailing of the Land/Soil) was a two-day, mobile procession activated across Los Angeles County. A three-truck caravan transported twelve monumental panels, each inscribed with the names of 222 individuals who perished in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody over twenty years (2003–2023).

This memorial honors the humanity of those whose lives have been reduced to statistics, offering a stark contrast to the cold, bureaucratic erasure that often accompanies death within carceral systems. Gemidos de la Tierra holds space for communal grieving and human connection, birthing new modes of resistance while challenging centuries of marginalization, systemic oppression, and exploitation.

Community participation was central to the work’s power. People were invited to join the procession to mourn, witness, and stand in solidarity. This invitation transformed the piece from a moving monument into a collective ritual, where each step became an act of remembrance and resistance.

Each name was hand-cast using soil from the state where the person died, combined with masa, salt, and rainwater—materials that carry cultural, ancestral, and elemental resonance. This method of making was both devotional and political: a way of calling the body back into presence, of refusing erasure. The panels acted like spiritual spells—rituals of return that resurrected the memory of those lost, placing them in landscapes that once refused to make space for them.

On the first day, the procession began in front of the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in downtown Los Angeles. Participants gathered to share a warm meal provided by Across Our Kitchen Table and witness Amézquita engraving names into the panels before the public procession began. The caravan then traveled to ICE detention centers—sites of confinement, disappearance, and institutional neglect. The day concluded with a return to the MDC, where Amézquita and collaborator Natalie Godínez burned copal and read the names aloud in remembrance.

On the second day, the procession began at Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights and traveled to pro-immigrant mutual aid organizations, bringing attention to both the systems that perpetuate harm and the grassroots networks that affirm life. The day closed at MacArthur Park, where artist Dorian Wood joined with a powerful vocal performance as the community gathered to share tamales provided by Rubén Ochoa, sitting together on blankets and petates, holding space for the closing of the procession.

In this way, Gemidos de la Tierra was not simply a memorial, but a living altar. It invoked the sacred through public movement, grounding remembrance in the body, land, and collective witness. The title, Gemidos de la Tierra, or Wailing of the Land, functions as a ritual invocation, calling the names of the dead back into the presence through the very elements that make up the earth. It evokes a spiritual lament rising from the soil—a mourning sung by the land for lives uprooted, lost, and often forgotten. It speaks, too, of the quiet stories of souls separated from their homelands—lives uprooted by force, longing, and survival—whose journeys ended far from the warmth of home, yet remain etched in the memory of the land that bore witness.

As the caravan moved through city streets, it reclaimed public space as a site of mourning, healing, and resistance. It transformed roads into corridors of testimony, where names once hidden were spoken, held, and honored. It marked two decades of ICE’s existence not with statistics, but with presence—with soil, salt, and names made visible.

Gemidos de la Tierra 2023 offered more than a moment of mourning by weaving together movement, memory, ritual, and solidarity. It was a spiritual and political act—a summoning of the disappeared, a call to witness, and a demand for justice. It reminded us that even in places built on exclusion, we can create space for memory, dignity, and collective healing.

This project was initiated by LACE’s former Chief Curator and Director of Programming Daniela Lieja Quintanar, who invited Amézquita to work with LACE and LAND for the execution of the mobile public art component of Gemidos de la Tierra (Wailings of the Land/Soil); Lieja Quintanar continues to support as an advisor. Gemidos de la Tierra (Wailings of the Land/Soil) is supported by Angeles Art Fund, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Mohn LAND Grant, AltaMed, and National Performance Network (NPN).