Living in the USA in April 2017 meant having to face the reality of “Trump’s America”.

While my non-immigrant position was most secure than most, it wasn’t certain. The institution that backed me - Th Fulbright Program- was also receiving threads, as well as the visa status I held.

But I was safer, I had a clear place to go back to, I had the backup of NYU, of my government and my family. There were many other Mexicans that were suffering a way more real threat, to their safety, to their lifelyhood… to their dreams.

This inspired me to generate a responsive program in Python.

I wanted to find a way of extracting meaninful works from real texts written by real "victims" of deportation.

I found that one of the most used ways of fighting a deportation order is by getting a Letter of Cancellation of Removal written by anyone that can show a close relation to the person being instructed to be deported.

So I really wanted to get some of these genuine letters because my idea was to build love poems from out of them using spacy to break them down and then probably a tracery system to build the love poems.

But they are not just going around the internet, unless you know someone who has either got one wrote for them or someone who wrote one, it is nearly impossible to get a real one.

Yet while looking for them I learnt about the Obama’s administration battle to make sure that people who came in without documents but had been contributing for a long time to their communities could find ways of staying. His big loss was the blockage of the "Deffered Action for Parents of Americans"

1. It was a federal court in Texas who blocked this excecutive order. Ohio was one of the states who supported this blockage, yet it was met with a very strong citizen mobilization to lyft the support.

2. While Trump is pushing for massive deportations to be excecuted, it was reminded through the press that over a century ago his grandfather wrote a letter pledging to the Prince Regent of Bavaria to not be deported.

So with this information in hand I went around the internet looking for the corpus of my final piece which ended up being:

1. Letters from Ohaioans to current governor asking and explaining why they demanded their state to lift support to the blockage to the DAPA excecutive order.

2. An open letter by a school teacher from Berkley to an Inmigration Judge, pledging in favor of one of his student´s father who had recieved an instruction of deportation. (the only thing close to a legitimate Letter of Cancellation of Removal).

3. Trump´s Grandfather´s letter to the Prince Regent of Bavaria.

4. The poem "Indeseable"(Unwanted) by Jose Emilio Pacheco.

This corpus allowed me to build the .py for my performance.

A reading of the poem created from the concatenation of these texts. A reckoning on the reason why should someone loose the capacity to pursue their dreams.