Review: OUR LADY OF THE SAN DIEGO CONVENTION CENTER Finds Childhood Innocence Amid the Harsh Realities of the Immigration System

Our Lady of the San Diego Convention Center is a story about immigration, about children, about faith, but above all, about San Diego.

Written by Mario Vega and directed by TuYo Theatre co-founding artistic director Maria Patrice Amon, the play tells the story of two young girls, Fátima (Lulu Stezano) and Lourdes (Julieta Flores), staying at the San Diego Convention Center in the spring of 2021 while waiting to be reunited with their mothers in the United States. It also follows two youthcare workers, Milli (Alejandra Villanueva) and Lupe (Vanessa Orozco), as they care for the girls while navigating job restrictions that make creativity difficult, including no music, no outside snacks and no dancing.

The audience is dropped into a sleeping area with cots and blankets on the floor of the San Diego Convention Center in the spring of 2021, as the center had been transformed into a temporary shelter for unaccompanied migrant children seeking asylum and waiting to reunite with family members or sponsors in the U.S. For context, the center had operated as a homeless shelter from April 2020 to March 2021 before the city and county agreed to use it to temporarily house unaccompanied migrant children amid a surge at the southern border. The temporary shelter could accommodate up to 1,450 children, opening as Border Patrol facilities struggled to keep up with the influx and children were being held beyond the 72-hour period before being transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). According to the HHS, more than 2,400 unaccompanied children had been reunified with their sponsors by the time the Convention Center shelter closed in July.

The play grew out of Vega's own time as a youthcare worker at the Convention Center during that time. What began as a story rooted in his personal experience was later developed through festivals and workshops into its first full production. You can read more about how the play came about in this interview with Vega.

But Our Lady is not interested in treating these children as statistics. It puts the two girls at the center of the story. Fátima arrived two weeks before Lourdes, and they soon become friends. They share tender moments over their faith and pray the rosary together to the Virgin Mary, hoping she will answer their prayers to be reunited with their mothers. They laugh over the differences between Mexican, Guatemalan and Salvadoran Spanish while also sharing how they arrived at the Convention Center and their fears about what will happen to them.

Meanwhile, Milli and Lupe try to bring some light and reassurance to the girls. Milli's free-spirited, “no sabo” personality clashes with Lupe's more rule-following approach. Villanueva shines as the creative and funny Milli, bringing precise comedic timing and physicality to the role, while Orozco brings a grounded performance as Lupe, who makes sure everyone is taken care of while balancing her studies to become a lawyer. The two also embody different ways of caring for children, becoming surrogate sources of comfort and protection while navigating information they cannot share and constantly moving between the English spoken by supervisors and the Spanish spoken by the girls.

That language barrier is one of the production's most effective elements. Parts of the play are spoken in Spanish, with Lupe sometimes translating for Milli and for the girls. Audience members who do not speak Spanish can still follow the story, but this inaccessibility creates its own kind of disorientation, offering a small glimpse into what it can feel like to be surrounded by people speaking a language you do not understand.

As the months progress, the girls become increasingly anxious as their futures remain uncertain. Fátima eventually reaches a breaking point in an emotional monologue about feeling abandoned by everyone in her life. That fear of being alone is terrifying even as an adult; imagining it through the eyes of a child who is far from home, separated from her mother and watching her friends leave one by one makes the moment particularly heartbreaking. Stezano and Flores bring emotional depth to their roles, balancing the innocence of childhood with moving performances that convey what it means to feel alone in an unfamiliar world.

Faith Carrión plays multiple roles throughout the production, including an ICE agent at the Convention Center and various mothers whose stories offer different perspectives on immigration and family separation. Her final appearance as an immigrant mother, sharing what it feels like to lose her child to the system, offers a striking contrast to the institutional side of the story she inhabits earlier in the play.

The colorful lighting design by Stephanie Ma'alona and the crashing waves and other environmental sounds designed by Eliza Vedar bring a vibrant theatricality to what I can imagine was an otherwise sterile environment. That theatricality is especially welcome as the play navigates challenging subjects such as migration, borders and family separation. The crashing waves and sounds of seagulls in the area surrounding the Convention Center and nearby Seaport Village create a striking contrast: the ocean and San Diego's waterfront are just outside, yet the children cannot leave. The effect is almost claustrophobic, making those physical restrictions feel real.

The production opened at The Old Globe on Sept. 11 and continues its tour to more than 10 venues and communities across San Diego County through Oct. 18. The production is staged in the round, meaning there is no bad seat. For more information on dates and venues, click here. TuYo Theatre operates on a pay-what-you-can model, with a suggested donation of $25.

Our Lady of the San Diego Convention Center brings forward a real issue through real stories from our city that deserve to be told. It puts a human face on family separation and asks audiences to sit with the consequences of an immigration system that can leave children separated from the people they love. Even today, migrant children are being held in detention facilities beyond the 72-hour government standard, with some children and families in San Diego held for weeks and facing troubling conditions. Their stories continue to matter, too.

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