Marybeth Onyeukwu was nervous.
“Okay!” she said, standing in the frigid air in front of the Washington Monument, holding a spool of string. “So when I feel it, I let go?”
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The wind tugged at the string, and, at just the right moment, Onyeukwu, 26, of Temple Hills, started to jog backward. A large white diamond emblazoned with her image lifted jerkily into the air. She giggled excitedly and kept running, as her friends cheered.
Onyeukwu, who was born in Nigeria and moved to the United States when she was 2, is part of a wave of Dream activitsts — young undocumented immigrants who have recently been stepping forward and identifying themselves in a push for more rights.
On Friday afternoon, she joined a dozen other undocumented youth and their supporters to fly kites bearing their images on the Mall, in conjunction with “The Ripple Effect: Currents of Socially Engaged Art,” an exhibition at the Art Museum of the Americas.
Each kite bore a life-size photograph of the flier. On one kite, the person was praying. On another, the person was shouting. A few raised their fists. The participants, from the Washington area, Oakland, Calif., and New York City, ranged in age from 10 to mid-20s.
Sending personalized kites into the sky is a way of traversing boundaries that are otherwise hard to cross, said Miguel Luciano, 40, a Puerto Rican artist from Brooklyn, who conceived the project.
Funding and support came from the museum, the Washington Project for the Arts and CultureStrike, an Oakland-based arts organization that focuses on immigrant rights.
Luciano has done similar projects for other causes in Vieques, Puerto Rico, and Nairobi. In Puerto Rico, the kites flew above a U.S. military base closed to the public; the kite fliers, who were protesting test-bombing on the island, would have been arrested if they had tried to enter the base.
The Dream Act, which would provide a path toward legal status for eligible immigrants brought to the United States as children, failed to pass in the Senate in 2010 but has gained political momentum recently as Latino voters are playing an increasingly important role in elections.
The Obama administration in June announced a policy to allow some undocumented youth to get work permits and stays of deportation, and Maryland voters in November passed a version of the Dream Act that would allow them to pay in-state tuition.
For those here illegally, the nation’s physical borders have already been crossed. But other restrictions remain — on work permits, on college funding — and many live with the looming threat of deportation.
“Undocumented young people today in the United States are also about transcending borders,” Luciano said. “It’s all sort of a symbolic act, but I think there’s something important, especially for young people, in being able to fly freely wherever you want to go and doing whatever you want to do.”
The kite idea took off from a discussion he had with a group of young people years ago, who all had had actual dreams of flying. The kite project, he said, is a sort of enactment of that dream.
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