DOWNTOWN — Overlooking Lake Michigan on a snowy Saturday afternoon, more than 60 migrant children participated in the breaking of the Rosca de Reyes at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave.
Rosca de Reyes is an oval bread decorated with colorful dried fruits and sugar patches. It’s eaten on Día de Reyes, or Three Kings Day, which marks the end of the Christmas holiday for Spanish-speaking countries and is celebrated widely across Latin America.
The museum hosted the children in partnership with the Mexican Consulate in Chicago for a full day of bilingual Three Kings Day activities Saturday that included exhibit tours and art workshops.
The children are all unaccompanied minors staying at various shelters across the city. Unaccompanied minors are undocumented children who have crossed into the United States without a parent or legal guardian.
The children are from a variety of countries, including Haiti, Afghanistan, Angola and several countries in South America. They are not associated with the more than 20,000 migrants that have been bused and flown from Texas to Chicago since August 2022.
For some of the children, it was their first time seeing snow; for others, it was their first time Downtown.
And for many, it was their first time in a museum.
Over the last year and a half, the MCA has worked to make itself more accessible to Latino communities by expanding its community engagement and bilingual services.
Saturday’s event was the start of a growing partnership with the Mexican consulate that the museum hopes will bridge the gap to making its programming and exhibitions more approachable.
“Inclusivity in museums is very important. … I really want to empower these students so that they can come and can feel like they’re in a true bilingual space where they resonate with things apart from the text that’s on the wall, but the programs, music, artists, workshops,” said Mayra Cecilia Palafox, manager of learning for students, families and bilingual programs at the MCA.
Students were separated into small groups and paired with Spanish and French translators to help guide them through the day’s activities.
Palafox spent the day translating a tour through the museum’s exhibition “Faith Ringgold: American People.” During the tour, she read and translated “We Came To America,” an illustrated children’s book by Ringgold depicting “America’s rich history of immigration and diversity.”
The children listened intently as Palafox read, their eyes scanning the colorful illustrations that showed people from different cultural backgrounds.
“We want them to feel that art is approachable. It’s not a … foreign and elitist thing that’s not accessible to them. We want them to enjoy everything and … know they belong in a space like this,” said Claudia Castillo, consul for community affairs at the Mexican Consulate in Chicago.
Workshop activities also included a group mural that began with a prompt asking the children where they would fly if given the choice. Each response was drawn on a large shared paper. Some drew the flags of their home countries; others drew peaceful landscapes.
“This is such a fun day,” said one child to another.
The day concluded with the breaking of the Rosca de Reyes. Several children exclaimed they celebrate Three Kings Day in their home countries, as they came up for a piece of the colorful bread.
The sweet bread is traditionally embedded with one or more small figurines of a baby symbolizing baby Jesus. Whoever finds the doll is believed to receive good luck, but is also obligated to throw a holiday party the following Christmas. Several kids laughed as they found a tiny figurine in their treat.
As the children left the museum, they were greeted by longtime Heartland Alliance volunteer Carmen Arellano, who held a large gift box filled with candy. Smiling, each child grabbed a handful as they left.
The MCA hopes to host similar events as it continues to expand its programming, according to Manuel Venegas, director of media relations for the museum.
“At the end of the day, the importance of today’s event was about how we can create an experience for [the kids]. For one day, they can escape from their routine [and] do something different,” Venegas said.
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