(suspenseful music)
- The name came to me very naturally.
I was in Oaxaca and I had a dream
that kind of shook me up.
I remember seeing a lot of butterflies
and lightning bolts together in the storm.
And that morning I got up, I was at a red light,
and there were two abuelitas,
and they were talking about
how this healer would often come and heal the town.
Her name was Mariposa Relámpago.
That's when I said, "Oh, wow.
I just had a dream about butterflies and lightning bolts."
That's where the name comes from.
"Mariposa Relámpago."
(wind whooshing)
(harmonica blowing)
This is spirits playing right now.
(gentle harmonica music)
Sound is really powerful.
There's a universal way of experiencing healing,
and it's by using sound.
And everyone feels it.
Everyone that's alive feels it. The plants feel it.
The animals feel it. The babies feel it.
I think everyone needs to heal something.
(bell chimes)
What's happening in the border in the United States
is a major impact in who I am.
I was an undocumented unaccompanied child
coming from El Salvador, escaping the Civil War.
I migrated here in the '80s.
For me, the border is not just the physical wall
that's separating Mexico and United States,
but a whole journey that asylum seekers take.
(dramatic music)
A lot of the work that I have done for myself
is to actually confront those cities and those towns
that I traveled as an undocumented unaccompanied child.
(suspenseful music)
The bus culture growing up in the '80s
was really big in El Salvador
because we would have these blinged out,
formerly American yellow school buses.
I was fascinated by these buses
because they were highly decorated.
And I was obsessed with looking at all the details,
all the shiny objects, all the handmade things,
all the absurd things.
So the whole idea for me came that I wanted
to bring a school bus from El Salvador to the United States,
and I wanted to have the same migratory path
that I had as a kid.
(suspenseful music)
In order to turn it to a gong,
we have to first flatten it out.
Like it has this giant ding here
and a few imperfections there, but I think we can get it.
(birds chirping)
For me, it's always been important
to make my own instruments.
Even when I'm making sculptures,
I'm always really thinking about
using recycled materials for them,
and repurposing objects.
Thinking of animism and the energy
that these materials hold is really important
to what I'm exploring.
(birds chirping)
When I was a student in New York City,
there weren't that many role models that I could look up to.
I realized that my teachers didn't know
what I had gone through and how important
healing was for me.
The main influence that I had was looking back
at my ancestry, the Maya, the Curanderos.
Okay, go for it, Billy.
They were the healers.
They were the ones that could write and draw and sculpt
and also create rituals.
Directly connected to them,
I was like, "I want to make healing rituals."
(gentle harmonica music)
It's a vibrating bus.
It's a vibrating healing instrument.
"Mariposa Relámpago" has around 700 objects.
Every object has a meaning for me.
Part of the work is to actually find the objects.
(bell chimes)
I was in Mexico City
and I saw a pair of metallic silver slippers,
and it looked like a child had been walking
for a lot of time.
I almost got emotional when I saw it,
and I felt the energy of the walking
and all the unaccompanied,
displaced children that were traveling with me.
There's been thousands of people
that have experienced "Mariposa Relámpago"
in all these different cities
that it's traveled through.
I really wanted to bus to tour the border
as much as possible.
(gentle music)
(crowd chattering)
Everyone, thank you for coming.
Think of being in the park or being by the ocean
when you sit there and just listen to the birds.
You don't have to be an expert in meditation
to feel the experience.
Just listen to it.
(gentle ambient music)
When I'm doing a ceremony
and we're producing sound,
it doesn't feel like I'm even playing an instrument.
Sound can be used in different ways.
The power of "Mariposa" can be felt around the bus,
but also inside of the bus.
You can sit or lay on the bus
and feel the vibration
and the healing qualities that it has.
I had so many mixed feelings going to the ceremony.
(gentle music)
It was open to the general public,
but also we had border patrol agents
on the bus during the ceremony.
Being in Marfa, an environment that is similar
to the same lines that I crossed when I was a child,
I think I was in tears at some point.
And it's a very scary space.
There's certain roads you gotta show ID
and tell them that you're a citizen.
There's actually a blimp that travels in the area
looking for refugees to arrest them and deport them.
My community sees them as very threatening,
but I realized that I wanted to do a ceremony
for border patrol agents
because it's not just about healing those
that have been hurt,
but also healing other more complex situations as well.
(gentle ambient music)
- [Irlanda] The camp that I was working at,
it's a place where unaccompanied children
that cross the border,
first, they go to the border patrol center,
and from there, they get sent to a camp.
They are just kids,
so it makes it very hard to see them worried
and see their sadness.
They are some of the most resilient kids
I've ever met in my life.
I was on the phone with my coworker
and I'm telling her about you.
"Dude, this guy, he's a grownup version
of the kids we were taking care of."
- It's funny that you said that
because yesterday,
I was talking to law enforcement that works at the border.
When she started talking to me,
she was talking to me like I was that 8-year-old little boy
that she encountered, you know?
She was like, "Yeah, I wanted to embrace you,
I wanted to hold you, but I couldn't."
(bell chiming)
(wind whooshing)
(waves splashing)
(gentle harmonica music)
As a child in El Salvador,
I would be constantly drawing the New York City skyline.
So when I look at that skyline,
it just symbolizes the journey through the United States.
That journey still continues to this day.
Healing is gonna be happening for the rest of my life.
Sound is medicine.