During 2018 and 2019, at least seven migrant children died after being taken into custody by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In this large-scale watercolor, Rodriguez records the names and ages of these individuals and marks the locations of their deaths on a painted map of the southwestern United States and Mexico. Within the map, she includes small vignettes drawn from Mesoamerican sources, including a visual recipe for healing susto, or trauma, as recorded in the manuscript Codex de la Cruz-Badiano, a 16th-century compilation of Nahua medical and botanical knowledge.

This entire scene is rendered on handmade amate paper from Mexico, and it incorporates pigments ground from medicinal plants gathered along the current U.S.-Mexico border. Drawing from Indigenous imagery and materials, Rodriguez illuminates a connection between contemporary border issues and a violent history of colonization, while simultaneously asserting the resilience of Indigenous cultures and their value when confronting contemporary injustices.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)