THROUGH FENCES

Latinx youths experience the violence and trauma of politics, dehumanization, self-hatred, racism, and illness in stories set along the southern U.S. border.

This multiethnic collection featuring people from Guatemala, Mexico, the United States, and another unnamed country is enhanced by the effective use of colors combined with stark black-and-white imagery. The artwork includes some full-page panels with benday dots that appear at the end of stories, depicting a significant moment, as well as black gutters, and pages without panels that have black backgrounds. The palette creates a sense of foreboding as families head toward border separation, detention, and other tragedies. In the story of Alicia Xóchitl Arai, a Japanese Mexican teen social media influencer who moved to San Ysidro, California, six years earlier, the color scheme fittingly makes use of Instagram’s tropical sunset colors. “El Celso” follows a queer boy whose story ends in tragedy, “Alberto” spotlights a Mexico-born Border Patrol agent who projects his internalized hatred onto others, while “Rocky” shares the perspective of a “white dude who hates the world.” English and Spanish are interwoven in most of the entries. Despite the social significance of the stories’ perspectives and their context within the many manifestations of border struggles, their brevity stifles their own potential for greater emotional resonance and impact on readers.

Visually effective and necessarily disturbing and difficult as it sheds light on inhumanity.