The Oppresive Contradictions of Neoliberalism on the United States and Mexico Border

CRAFTING A PARADOX:

THE OPPRESIVE CONTRADICTIONS OF NEOLIBERALISM ON THE

UNITED STATES AND MEXICO BORDER

BY LOUISA CLARK

A SENIOR THESIS SUBMITTED TO PROFESSOR MANU VIMALASSERY

IN FULFILLMENT OF THE DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF ARTS

DEPARTMENT OF AMERICAN STUDIES

BARNARD COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

17 APRIL 2015 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... 2

INTRODUCTION...... 3

1. Margarita Cabrera: The Fabrication of a Crafted Resistance...... 8

2. The Purépecha Artisans of Santa Clara del Cobre: Survivance by Indigenous Craft....16

3. Maquiladora Workers on the Border: Crafting Value in the Face of Femicide...... 31

CONCLUSION: How can we Decolonize the Border?...... 39

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 43

Clark 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To my parents, thank you for always supporting me in all of my endeavors and never questioning my ability to do my best. I would not have been able to survive this year without your unwavering belief in me.

To Rosy, thank you for getting through this with me. There is no one else who understood how hard this process was better than you and I am so grateful to have you as my sister and my inspiration in life.

To Manu, thank you for providing me with valuable insight and repeated reminders of my ability to do this on my own. I appreciate how you constantly make me question my own assumptions and role in the world.

To my friends, near and far, thank you for listening to me and being there when I needed you.

Clark 2 INTRODUCTION

At the end of the 19th century, an era began in which white Euro-Americans greatly expanded their collections of Native American arts and crafts. They mistakenly saw these baskets, blankets, and beaded works as symbolic of a free and natural life carried on in a distant history. Contradicting this primitive view, native artists including

Zitkala-Sa and Angel DeCora produced significant work at the turn of the century that art collectors and tourists widely consumed. As Native art was growing in popularity, however, it was continually reduced to an association with domesticity and the white

Euro-American women that stayed within the home.

DeCora’s work challenged these notions “as she struggled to distinguish native craft from white women’s devalued domestic labor.”1 In 1899, DeCora successfully confronted the norm of indigenous art being confined to the home by publishing two stories and six illustrations in the widely read Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, “a powerful forum for establishing notoriety for writers and artists.”2 By infiltrating the magazine, a medium usually dominated by her white male counterparts, DeCora was able to augment her Indian identity by furthering the worth of her art beyond the home. She saw her stories and illustrations as economically valuable and therefore forced the topic of Native art into a new sphere, whereas Euro-Americans had tried to restrict its worth by keeping it within the home and not acknowledging its value in the capitalist economy.

DeCora highlighted the economic value of her work by publishing it in a cultural magazine effectively moving it outside of the domestic sphere. She made it possible for

1 Jane E. Simonsen, “Border Designs: Domestic Production and Cultural Survival,” in Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860-1919, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 185. 2 Ibid, 189.

Clark 3 her “work [to be] a tool for creating Indian identity while redefining domestic production as having both cultural and economic value.”3 By getting her stories and illustrations into

Harper’s, she was able to make her art sustainable within an economic system that typically excluded it.

Unfortunately, most Indigenous artists do not receive the exposure that DeCora did and exclusion is still a reality for those working in today’s neoliberal world economy.

Whether they are the artists themselves or they are included in the work of a non-native artist, Indigenous groups are still largely absent from the front lines of the commercial art world. Indigeneity, labor, and art intersect frequently on the United States and Mexico border. The region is a zone of forced separation where an imaginary line has been scratched across the desert. The border aims to keep people apart on opposite sides of this line when, in fact, it actually becomes a cross where people mix and merge together more so than in other areas of the world. This paradoxical zone creates an area of high tension, where Indigenous women travel far from their homelands to work for cheap in the maquiladoras,4 where they are raped and murdered at an unimaginable rate, where artists flock to try to come to terms with this cross so fraught by its mistaken identity as a line.

In her book, Curating at the Edge: Artists Respond to the U.S./Mexico Border,

Kate Bonansinga examines various artists currently working in the region. One such artist is Margarita Cabrera, a woman from Monterrey, Mexico who moved to the United States as a child. In 2001, after receiving her MFA from Hunter College in New York City,

3 Ibid, 185. 4 Maquiladoras are factories or manufacturing plants located mostly along the border of the U.S. and Mexico. They employ mainly women and are labor intensive operations that utilize American imported materials to produce goods that subsequently get exported immediately back to the United States on a tariff-free basis. “Maquiladora FAQ," The Borderplex Alliance: A Bi-National Economic Alliance, Accessed April 15, 2015, http://www.borderplexalliance.org/regional- data/ciudad-juarez/twin-plant/maquiladora-faq.

Clark 4 Cabrera returned to the border when presented with an opportunity to take part in a

Border Art Residency in La Union, New Mexico. Over the past 13 years, Cabrera has developed her art into large scale, multidisciplinary workshops that utilize indigenous craft techniques in constructing projects that challenge the neoliberal turn toward mass construction and humans as capital and instead highlight the significance of individualized creation.

In order to understand Cabrera’s protest against neoliberalism, one must first obtain a basic understanding of the current neoliberal state of the border economy and the many contradictions that it presents. David Harvey describes neoliberalism as the economic theory that “human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional frame work characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”5 Neoliberal politics manifest at the border as large American corporations own and operate factories just across the national boundary in Mexico in the name of “free” trade. Here in the maquiladoras, groups of mainly Indigenous women workers manufacture products made from American imported materials. Once completed, these commodities are shipped immediately back across to the American side of the border free from being taxed due to the North

American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA. The passing of NAFTA in 1994 acted as catalyst to the maquiladora economy. The number of Mexicans employed in maquiladoras rose from 689,420 to over a million in the first three years after NAFTA.6

5 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3. 6 Rachael Kamel and Anya Hoffman, editors, The Maquiladora Reader: Cross-border Organizing Since NAFTA, (Philadelphia: Smith Edwards Dunlap, 1999), 3.

Clark 5 The maquilas7 along the border represent the neoliberal state of the economy because their existence is based on the ideals of private property and free trade.

Neoliberalism also assumes that, hypothetically, any individual could succeed under these ideals if they work hard enough to use their own skills. Neoliberalism rejects the fact that this institutional framework has hundreds of years of oppressive history that informs how individuals succeed in the economy. It is within these assumptions that the contradictions of neoliberalism begin to reveal themselves. The neoliberal theory highlights a belief in the individual when in reality, it benefits very few individuals and favors large-scale corporations.8 While in premise, neoliberal ideals vie to give opportunity to each individual by promoting freedom, neoliberalism actually gives opportunity for major growth only to those individuals that are already in a historically situated position to succeed, mainly the wealthy white male majority. Historically within the neoliberal turn, the benefits have been highly skewed as “the ruling elites along with foreign investors did well enough, while the people in general fared badly.”9 Some scholars even “go so far as to argue that neoliberalism was from the very beginning a project to achieve the restoration of class power to the richest strata in the population.”10

And so far on the U.S. Mexico border, this has been the result.

If the market is free, any person, even an Indigenous one, theoretically should be able to succeed in the neoliberal border economy by promoting their own business and utilizing their entrepreneurial skills. This opportunity should give a voice to those marginalized groups such as Native peoples and women workers, but it does not. This is

7 Shortened form of maquiladora. 8 David Harvey, “Neo-liberalism as Creative Destruction,” Geografiska Annaler, Series B: Human Geography, 2006, 145-58. 9 Ibid, 148 10 Ibid.

Clark 6 the biggest internal contradiction of neoliberalism. It claims to support and give voice to the silenced individual yet it actually provides a framework that just substantiates the already existing system of oppression and exclusion.

Clark 7 MARGARITA CABRERA:

THE FABRICATION OF A CRAFTED RESISTANCE

When I began examining the work of Margarita Cabrera in September of 2014, I was impressed by her commitment to give voice to the populations that are so often silenced or overlooked on the border, mainly Indigenous people and women. It seemed as if her work provided a much-needed protest against the neoliberal contradictions present at the border by highlighting the paradoxical exclusion of certain individuals within a system that supposedly provides opportunity for all.

In one of her first projects, Cabrera began researching the maquiladoras along the border in Ciudad Juarez and became interested in a factory that produced the outer, plastic layer that holds together all the parts of small kitchen appliances.

In Pink Blender (2002),

Cabrera replaced these plastic parts of the blender with pieces of colorful vinyl material.

She used pink fabric for the blender’s exterior and sewed it together with black thread Fig. 1. Pink Blender (2002) Margarita Cabrera, photo by Julio Grinblatt, Artlies Volume 36. leaving long untied

Clark 8 pieces hanging at the end of rows of stitches. Her work humanized the product, the pink fabric representing skin and the black thread hair. The malleable, fluid stature of the blender itself mirrored that of a woman. She wished to bring value to the craftsmanship of sewing in contrast with the generally mundane and repetitive act that the maquiladora workers actually endured in the creation of these plastic pieces of appliances. However,

Cabrera’s small sculptures were just the beginning of inspiration for her larger projects.11

Two years later, Cabrera decided to scale up her first project and create a

Volkswagen Beetle from fabric and thread. But to produce a work of this size, she needed more seamstresses than just herself, so she posted an ad in the El Paso Times soliciting

Fig. 2. Vocho (Yellow) (2004), Margarita Cabrera. William J. Hokin Collection, Chicago, Photo courtesy of Sara Meltzer Gallery. help. She received a large number of responses mainly from those that had worked in the

11 Erica M. Shamaly, “The Latina Experience Begets Unclassifiable Originality,” Artlies Volume 36, (2002), 23, Accessed November 10, 2014, http://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228065/m1/25/.

Clark 9 bustling textile industry of pre-NAFTA El Paso. These seamstresses aided Cabrera in her eventual construction of three life-sized Beetles or Vochos and one Hummer made in the same style of the appliances, where the car parts manufactured in Mexico are replaced by flaccid vinyl fabric stitched together by long untied and uncut pieces of thread. The project represented similar themes of valuing craft over mass production, and humanizing the workers through the product. Most importantly, the process of working on the vochos with a group of women whose livelihood had been directly affected by NAFTA represented a shift in the way Cabrera would think about why she was creating art. “The work became more focused on others telling their stories and not so much about my attempt to portray challenges,” stated Cabrera.12

In 2008, while Cabrera was a resident artist at Artpace San Antonio, she conceptualized The Craft of Resistance. Cabrera created a temporary workspace that mirrored conditions of maquiladoras along the border using florescent lighting, assembly line production, and repetitive tasks. She invited residents of San Antonio to participate in the performative workshop and together they crafted 2,500 life size copper butterflies, imprinted with the pattern of Monarch wings on one side and the American penny on the other. After their completion, the butterflies were transferred to the private home of an

Artpace patron and shown by appointment only. They can now be viewed via photographs of the house interior. The project aimed to challenge the modern maquila economy by displaying its harsh environment in the performance element and replacing the typically Mexican produced commodities with tiny, hand crafted Monarch butterflies.

12 Kate Bonansinga, Curating at the Edge: Artists Respond to the U.S./Mexico Border (El Paso: University of Texas Press, 2014), Interview with Margarita Cabrera, April 18, 2010.

Clark 10 In Bonansinga’s description of this particular project she outlines how the

construction of the butterflies was “inspired by the metalsmithing traditions of the people

of Santa Clara del Cobre,” and how “Cabrera had visited this village in Mexico, and she

taught the San Antonio participants how to craft the butterflies—in effect, sharing

traditional craft techniques and extending their life and impact.”13 At an initial reading,

one can see how Cabrera’s intentions shifted since her creation of Pink Blender. She has

an increased focus on the people participating in the construction of her project and she

also has considered and researched a specific indigenous crafting technique.

Fig. 3. Inside Cabrera’s maquiladora where the construction of butterflies took place. Photo courtesy of Artpace San Antonio.

13 Bonansinga, Curating at the Edge, 129.

Clark 11 In The Craft of Resistance, this craft technique is coppersmithing. Cabrera supposedly traveled to Santa Clara del Cobre before executing the project yet in all the information surrounding it, there are no specific details of what Cabrera did on her visit, from whom she learned these indigenous techniques, and how long she stayed in order to master the basics so that she could teach them to the participants in her workshop. I contacted Cabrera asking her where she had studied when in Santa Clara del Cobre, but received no response. The intentions of the artist to extend the life of a native craft are admirable, yet good intentions are not always sufficient. Without actual references to what the specific techniques are or to the people who have triumphed to continue their own indigeneity throughout the colonial history of Mexico, The Craft of Resistance falls short of protest.

Similarly, Cabrera attempts to include the maquiladora workers that work along the border in The Craft of Resistance by setting her performance piece in the setting of a recreated maquiladora. At first this seems to be an admirable inclusion of a community of people who are normally marginalized. Cabrera set up long tables with different stations that the participants would move through as they put together the small copper butterflies.

It was an assembly line type of construction, there was florescent lighting and the tasks were slightly repetitive.14 However, upon further investigation, other than these three qualities of the space, there is no additional evidence of how the project’s setting mirrors an actual maquiladora. The instructions that the participants received at each station are not made available and there is no indication of what type of precise research the artist did on maquiladoras in order to find out what the conditions inside these factories were like. Just like the artisans from Santa Clara del Cobre, it appears that the maquiladora

14 Ibid.

Clark 12 workers that Cabrera had wanted to include in her sculpture piece have actually been excluded as well.

It becomes apparent that Cabrera’s The Craft of Resistance is a contradiction in itself. Cabrera tries to bring attention to an indigenous Mexican community by supposedly using their traditional crafting techniques yet she gives them neither authorship nor recognition in the execution of her sculpture other than mentioning the name of their town. Additionally, the traditional coppersmithing techniques still in use by the artisans of the indigenous community of Santa Clara del Cobre are very different from how Cabrera constructed her butterflies. The artist attempts to recognize the community of women workers employed in the maquiladora system of the neoliberal border economy by presenting her performance piece in the setting of a maquiladora that she created. Again, however, she fails to give the actual women who work in these factories any role in her sculpture. Not only are the women continually excluded, the maquiladora qualities which she uses to describe the space do not actually represent the horrific conditions of true maquilas on the Mexican side of the border. Her simple execution of a space defined by long tables, florescent lighting, and repetition fails to recognize the “the fragmented nature of the production process, its suppression of creativity, its alienating character, and how this constrains human intellectual development,” as well as the “dehumanization that results from giving priority to production values rather than workers’ health.”15 The labor issues present within maquiladoras go far beyond Cabrera’s portrayal in The Craft of Resistance. Her incorrect

15 Norma Iglesias Prieto, Beautiful Flowers of the Maquiladora: Life Histories of Women Workers in Tijuana, translated by Michael Stone with Gabrielle Winkler, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), xx.

Clark 13 and oversimplified portrayal of these spaces has further excluded the workers that survive them daily.

Even though it was not her intention, Cabrera has created a sculpture piece that is an actual mirror of the contradictions within neoliberalism. Her project claims to present an opportunity for the voiceless to finally be heard yet ends up continuing their silence.

Even more importantly, the voices it reclaims are explicitly different from the true existence of the marginalized groups. The Purépecha artisans of Santa Clara del Cobre participate in daily survivance16 by continuing to utilize the indigenous techniques of their ancestors while they create copper crafts. The way Cabrera constructed her butterflies diverged greatly from these traditional methods. The women who labor in the maquiladoras along the border survive and endure horrific conditions and a dangerous daily existence by living in a region strained by an ongoing femicide.17 The conditions under which Cabrera’s volunteers “labored” in her mock maquiladora in San Antonio cannot begin to represent the daily struggles of the actual maquiladora workers.

Neoliberalism attempts to create opportunities for all individuals to be recognized and Cabrera’s The Craft of Resistance attempts to provide an opportunity for the more

16 The term survivance is a combination of the words survival and resistance used widely in indigenous movements meaning the mere fact that Indigenous groups have survived global colonialism is an act of resistance in itself. In Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence, Gerald Robert Vizenor articulates how the term is also “more than survival, more than endurance or mere response; the stories of survivance are an active presence.” The act of surviving is resistance and the act of resisting means survival. Gerald Robert Vizenor, Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 15. 17 Femicide or feminicide refers to extensive violence against women often resulting in death that implicates both the state and the individual perpetrator. Specifically, these terms refer to the phenomenon that emerged during the 1990s of “unspeakable forms of degradation and violation of women’s bodies and their being: disappearances, murders, mangled, burned, and tortured bodies, raped girls and women, both in the context of wartime and so called ‘peacetime.’” Rosa- Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano, editors, Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Américas, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 3.

Clark 14 typically marginalized individuals to reclaim their voices and show their true existence.

Not only does Cabrera not give the actual individuals any recognition, she also explicitly brings to light techniques and conditions that are not representative of the reality of the communities she claims to recognize. Because her sculpture project mirrors the larger contradictions of the neoliberal border economy, it can provide an opportunity to question these paradoxes that aid in the continuation of an oppressive reality. By recognizing how these contradictions are so engrained that they penetrate even a project that was attempting to do the opposite, we can begin to decolonize the border.

Clark 15 THE PURÉPECHA ARTISANS OF SANTA CLARA DEL COBRE:

SURVIVANCE BY INDIGENOUS CRAFT

While Margarita Cabrera’s The Craft of Resistance strives to protest global neoliberalism, it fails due to the absence of explicit and detailed indigenous inclusion.

Contrastingly, artist Michele Feder-Nadoff and the Cuentos Foundation dedicate a significant section of their book Rhythm of Fire: The Art and Artisans of Santa Clara del

Cobre, Michoacán, México to first person interviews with 19 artisans from Santa Clara.

Feder-Nadoff articulates how Santa Clara del Cobre became the perfect location for Cuentos’ first large project because “the story of Santa Clara del Cobre is larger than

Santa Clara. The community’s struggle, their history, their challenges, and their accomplishments speak about a process (of cultural transformation, migration and exchange) taking place all over the world.”18 In this statement, she localizes the work of the artists in Santa Clara del Cobre yet simultaneously argues that their regional struggle is one that is happening across transnational borders. This focus on “adamantly emphasizing the diversely localized projects and struggles,” helps in understanding

“these subjugated or ignored struggles not as the detritus of history but as the work of a still ongoing decolonization, the place of different social imaginaries and formations, actively preserved and invented.”19 This framework for analyzing art proves valuable in determining a piece’s ability to play a significant role as a protest to neoliberalism.

However, not only must culture as protest to colonialism and neoliberalism be examined for its diversity at the local level while maintaining significance on the global level, it

18 Michelle Feder-Nadoff, Rhythm of Fire: The Art and Artisans of Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán, México, (Chicago: Cuentos Foundation, 2004), 31. 19 Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, Editors, The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 6.

Clark 16 must also place indigenous people in a more central role. Cabrera’s The Craft of

Resistance wants desperately to exist as such a protest due to its holding up of indigenous craft techniques while simultaneously challenging the current border economy that relies daily on the exploitative labor of maquiladoras. This type of labor sits in stark contrast to the individualized and indigenous craft of making her butterflies. Yet to claim to be utilizing, and therefore preserving, an indigenous crafting technique, while not giving any details as to what that technique actually is or whom one learned it from causes the overall protest of the project to fail.

The chapter of first person interviews in Rhythm of Fire composed by María

Ofelia Mendoza Briones, the National Historian for the Institute of Anthropology and

History for the state of Michoacán, combines Mendoza Briones’ own analysis of her time spent interviewing the artists and utilizes much of their actual voices translated into

English. By providing an extensive resource committed to the narratives of the artisans themselves, the Cuentos Foundation has made it possible for the reader to see how the art and the artisans of this Mexican town can act as a protest against global neoliberalism.

First and most importantly, these interviews highlight how the art of coppersmithing is truly an indigenous craft. The artisans have gained their knowledge through multiple generations of apprenticeship that predate colonialism. The techniques themselves originated with the native group of the area known as the Tarascans or the

Purépecha, and the strong theme of family shows how these traditions began with these pre-colonial tribes and have continued through to today. However, many artisans are still struggling to fully support themselves and their extended families. Most incorporate some newer non-indigenous techniques into their work and others have had to migrate to the

Clark 17 border region or to the United Sates in order to make more money. Even though they are

struggling, the artisans’ continued commitment to maintaining the indigenous techniques

of coppersmithing and teaching them to younger generations exists as a protest against

neoliberalism.

The artisans of Santa Clara del Cobre are known for their traditional techniques,

specifically cobre martillado or hammered copper. Essentially, this technique utilizes

hammering by hand to extend a piece of raw copper into a thinner mold that can then be

formed into any of the various copper objects such as cazos or large pots, pitchers, vases,

and decorative ornaments. One artisan points out “the tools…all have Purépecha

names.”20 The indigenous language used to describe the process and the tools themselves

is still known and used by the cobreros.21 An additional section of the book put together

by Master Artisan Felipe Pérez Pamatz and Purépecha translator Benjamin Lucas lays out

Fig. 4. A copper cazo or kettle on display at the museum in Santa Clara del Cobre.

20 María Ofelia Mendoza Briones, “The Voices of the Artisans of Santa Clara del Cobre,” in Rhythm of Fire: The Art and Artisans of Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán, México, Michele Feder-Nadoff, (Chicago: Cuentos Foundation, 2004), 258. 21 Spanish for coppersmith.

Clark 18 an extensive chart that lists all terms relating to coppersmithing in Spanish, English, and

Purépecha so that the reader can see the continued knowledge of the indigenous words.

Kostani is the Purépecha term for extending or stretching a copper disc with a sledgehammer and cendrada is the Spanish translation for p’itakua, which describes “a mold dug directly into the earth and lined with ash, in which the copper is smelted.”22

These and many other Purépecha words still circulate in Santa Clara del Cobre. Although the community has new Spanish and English terms for explaining their work, the

Purépecha words are still present in the culture and the minds of the artisans. This continuation of indigenous language, technique, and tools is important to the native craft and shows how survivance is currently happening in Santa Clara. As one artisan emphasizes, “Here one does what one wants with one’s own hands.”23 The unique character of the crafts that come out of Santa Clara is due to the fact that they are executed by hand without the use of modern machines that have the capability to more easily thin out pieces of raw copper in a uniform fashion ultimately getting rid of any unique qualities that each hand-crafted piece would obtain.

While reading about these techniques and seeing photos of the enormous copper cazos crafted by these artisans, the metal working that Cabrera executed in The Craft of

Resistance seems far from the indigenous reality experienced in Santa Clara del Cobre.

Cabrera’s butterflies are made from small thin pieces of copper that do not appear to have been hammered by hand because they lack the indicative welts made by a hammer and they are a uniform thickness. Additionally, they have smoothly cut edges clearly executed by a mechanical tool and their etchings of Monarch wings and the American penny could

22 “Glossary of Coppersmithing,” in Rhythm of Fire, 393-398. 23 Mendoza Briones, “The Voices of the Artisans of Santa Clara del Cobre,” in Rhythm of Fire, 306.

Clark 19 not have been done by hand due to the uniformity across all the butterflies. After witnessing these staggering differences between Cabrera’s work and that of the indigenous artisans from Santa Clara del Cobre, it becomes clear that Cabrera’s attempt to reclaim voice for these artists has blatantly failed.

However, even more important is that no one seems to notice that she has. When

Kate Bonansinga describes the piece, she praises Cabrera for having “visited this village in

Mexico, and [having] taught the San Antonio participants how to craft the butterflies— in effect, sharing traditional craft techniques and extending their life and impact.”24 But Fig. 5. Detail of Cabrera’s butterflies. Photo courtesy of the techniques she utilized Artpace San Antonio. were explicitly different from the actual indigenous ones of cobre martillado. This attempt to “extend the life” of indigenous crafting is a way in which Cabrera was trying to protest the turn toward mass production and the supposed support of the individual in neoliberalism. However, the fact that her project ended up so far from the actual techniques of these people shows how

Clark 20 entrenched neoliberalism is on the border. Her sculpture that was supposed to challenge the oppressive reality has actually ended up using its manipulative processes and therefore mirroring it.

The interviews in Rhythm of Fire highlight the deep importance of family within the coppersmithing trade. It is an art that has been passed down through generations since pre-colonial times.25 These strings of generations show how the art of working with copper is truly indigenous in its roots and the use of families to pass down the craft has made the survival of these roots possible. Felipe Pérez Pamatz, the same Master Artisan who aided in the glossary of coppersmithing terms, currently works in Santa Clara, has a

Masters degree in metallurgy and “does research on copper alloys and other metallurgical matters connected to the town’s traditional raw material. But above all, he expresses family pride in the extraordinary career enjoyed by his father, Don Jesús Pérez Ornelas, as part of the artisan tradition of Santa Clara del Cobre.”26 Pamatz has reached a higher level of academic education concerning copper crafts than most other artisans in the town, yet he still expresses that what makes him most proud is his father’s long career of crafting copper in the traditional cobre martillado style. This distinct pride in one’s family is a widespread feeling among most of the artisans in Santa Clara. They value their families very highly and therefore take pride in their work, as it is a reflection on themselves and their relatives.

It is common for children of cobreros to grow up in their parents’ forges learning from a young age how to work copper by hand. When sons get married it is common for them to leave their father’s workshop and open their own (although many women have

25 Feder-Nadoff, Rhythm of Fire. 26 Mendoza Briones, “The Voices of the Artisans of Santa Clara del Cobre,” in Rhythm of Fire, 296.

Clark 21 started to open their own studios as well). This way, “the forge takes on yet another meaning: it is the hearth around which the newlyweds begin their life together.”27 The taller or studio is the foundation for the new marriage and the place in which they will carry on the tradition of teaching their children about the forge. Because the family holds an essential role within the art of coppersmithing, it is natural that the act of teaching younger generations about copper also becomes important. Not only do the artisans express their deep gratitude and respect for their families, they also articulate how important it is to teach the traditions they learned from their elders to their children.

The prioritized importance of family in Santa Clara del Cobre is another element of indigeneity that Cabrera leaves out of The Craft of Resistance. Rhythm of Fire mentions all the artisans by name and lists the names of their wives and children. This explicit naming is an important element of highlighting the family’s role within the craft.

The act of self-naming is critically important to indigenous identity as “there is power in naming, in renaming…Many communities struggle with the names given to them by others, and the deconstructing of the categories and borders placed on identity.”28

Indigenous communities like the Purépecha became more well known as the Tarascans which was a name given to them by Spanish colonizers. By reclaiming the Purépecha words for their tools and by explicitly highlighting the names of their family members, the cobreros can effectively construct their own identities for “it is time for the settler to end the process of naming that which he has not right to own, and for us collectively to reclaim our humanity.”29

27 Ibid, 282. 28 Winona LaDuke, Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming, (Cambridge: South End Press, 2005), 132. 29 Ibid, 149.

Clark 22 In Cabrera’s piece, she fails to mention anyone by name. The authorship of the final sculpture is given to her and her corporation FLOREZCA30 even though a large group of volunteers completed the majority of construction on the butterflies. This exclusion of naming is an element of Cabrera’s project that ends up mirroring the exclusion of neoliberalism. When Margaret Thatcher was elected in Britain in May of

1979, the rise of neoliberalism was already well on its way. She argued, “all forms of social solidarity were to be dissolved in favour of individualism, private property, personal responsibility, and family values.”31 This shift away from social solidarity would supposedly benefit the individual. It did not however, go well for those individuals who were not already positioned to succeed as part of the white richer class. This contradiction within the new economic system is exactly what Cabrera’s The Craft of

Resistance ended up duplicating. Neoliberalism is a system that claims to provide opportunity for all individuals and in this case ironically mentions its support of family values. Anyone is expected to have the ability to succeed yet large groups of already marginalized people are preemptively excluded and Cabrera excluded them as well.

Most children in Santa Clara grow up learning the art of crafting copper from their parents. However, in order to extend the lessons to children that are not growing up with artisan parents, a group of master artisans formed the Casa del Artesano de Santa

Clara de Cobre in 1973 which functions as a school for copper crafts which most of the town’s children attend, even those that are children of campesinos or poor farmers of the

30 FLOREZCA was founded by Margarita Cabrera in 2011 and is a “for-profit enterprise functioning as a multinational corporation that promotes cultural capital.” Cabrera states that the corporation “functions both as business and art” and can more easily obtain visas for Mexican artists to travel to the United States and participate in and lead some of her workshop projects. “Who We Are,” FLOREZCA: Creatively Changing the World, accessed April 16, 2015, http://florezcacreativa.com/about.html. 31 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 23.

Clark 23 area. One of the current teachers at Casa del Artesano explains, “What we are trying to do here is to make sure that we don’t lose the tradition of cobre martillado. We have always thought that this art that we inherited from our ancestors, and which has become a tradition—we don’t want it to be lost.”32 The art of crafting copper by hand is carried through by generations of family and through the commitment to teaching younger children how to carry on the traditional techniques. Existing here at the school and in the homes of the cobreros is a strong emphasis on teaching to carry out a tradition throughout generations. Without this commitment, the traditional techniques that rely heavily on crafting with one’s hands could easily be lost among the trend toward mass production and globalization.

One American artist who took part in the creation of the school was James

Metcalf, a sculpture from New York. Upon moving to Santa Clara del Cobre in 1965,

Metcalf described his initial experience:

I found a group of artisans making a copper kettle being sold to the poorest social strata of Mexico. In Europe and the United States, wealthier people seem to get along with iron or aluminum substitutes. Yet the Santa Clara cazo is a necessary household item for a great many Mexican families. Culturally, this is very interesting. How is it that these peasants still prefer copper kettles? As poor as they are, they can still afford a copper kettle, more and more of a luxury everywhere else. This is what impressed me most when I first discovered Santa Clara. After thirty years, it is still the foundation of my interest in this community of artisans. The artisans of Santa Clara with an unimaginably primitive technique predating Homer and the Bible (where smiths forge on iron not stone) have been able to underbid modern industry for at least a section of the Mexican market.33

Metcalf immediately realized the importance of the indigenous origins of the coppersmithing industry in Santa Clara. The prosperity of the native constructed cazo or

32 Mendoza Briones, “The Voices of the Artisans of Santa Clara del Cobre,” in Rhythm of Fire, 322. 33 Roy Skodnick, “James Metcalf of Santa Clara del Cobre,” Metalsmith 18, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 37.

Clark 24 kettle was an essential element of survivance in the small Mexican village. The economic success of the copper cazo portrays how “survivance… is more than survival… It means holding on to ancient principles while eagerly embracing change. It means doing what is necessary to keep our cultures alive.”34 Even though the town was experiencing an economic depression like the rest of Mexico, its residents still put value into the craft of their copper and therefore they maintained a competitive edge over the massive industrialization of most commodities produced in Mexico. They were able to continue their indigenous tradition within an increasingly exclusive neoliberal framework.

To a certain extent, the emphasis on teaching traditional techniques through generations of family fosters a space in which the indigenous roots of coppersmithing can be preserved. However, in recent years, the artisans of Santa Clara have struggled to survive solely on their traditionally crafted pieces. When the Casa del Artesano was first founded in 1973, it functioned on monetary support from the Michoacán state government. Annual competitions among the artisans created additional funding opportunities because the top pieces always sold for a good price. More recently, the

Casa del Artesano has lost significant funding and “some years ago the state government discontinued its practice of buying the winning pieces at the annual concurso,35 then donating them to the Museo Nacional del Cobre in Santa Clara.”36 Facing these dwindling economic conditions, artisans are teaching their “young apprentices in the principles of martillado, as well as in the use of modern tools, materials, and techniques

34 Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners, quoted at “Our Lives: Contemporary Life and Identities” (on going exhibit at the National Museum of American Indians on the National Mall, Washington, D.C.), in Donna Deyhle, Reflections in Place: Connected Lives of Navajo Women, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), ix. 35 Spanish for contest. 36 Mendoza Briones, “The Voices of the Artisans of Santa Clara del Cobre,” in Rhythm of Fire, 312.

Clark 25 that have become essential in order to survive in a highly competitive market with no support from the government.”37 Some of these more modern techniques include the uses of lathes, machines that rotate a piece of copper mechanically against a variety of tools, and more modern ways of welding two pieces of copper together as opposed to the more traditional way of using one piece and extending and thinning it out to form a finished product.

These more modern techniques are being introduced but by no means is the traditional cobre martillado being forgotten. In their interviews, many of the artisans envisioned how the indigenous techniques might be supported fully without compromises being made to include modern techniques. Mendoza Briones highlights the ideas of

Master Artisan Félix Parra Espino in response to the dire economic situation of the artisans:

To address the lack of markets for artesanías,38 a problem that has plagued cobreros for many years, Don Félix has proposed developing a chain of stores that would operate not only in Mexico but abroad. Copper pieces would be exhibited and sold in the stores, and trained, English-speaking demonstrators would be available to explain the whole production process. ‘And if possible,’ he adds, ‘there should be a small workshop where an artisan could be making his pieces—because without that live demonstration, there is nothing.’39

Espino wants to create a market for Santa Clara’s copper crafts that could be profitable in the increasingly global economy. He wants to be able to spread the unique hand crafted goods made by him and fellow artisans across Mexico and even past international boundaries. The key element to his idea is that the authorship and the compensation would go directly to the artisans themselves and it would not be an outsider’s interpretation like The Craft of Resistance.

37 Ibid, 284. 38 Spanish for craftwork, handicrafts, or craftsmanship. 39 Briones, “The Voices of the Artisans of Santa Clara del Cobre,” in Rhythm of Fire, 280.

Clark 26 As Santa Clara’s artisans sought a global market for their crafts, artist Margarita

Cabrera created a project entitled, Mexico Abre la Boca in 2011. This piece takes the

form of a taco stand and makes appearances at various exhibits of Cabrera’s to offer

“information about FLOREZCA, a for-profit multinational corporation recently formed

by Cabrera that produces, sells and exhibits original works of art that address issues

impacting immigrant and migrant communities.”40 The merchant at the stand also

“promotes and sells artistic cultural productions from Mexican craft communities.”41 In

this photo from the cart’s exhibit at the Texas Biennial in 2011 it looks as if the crafts

being sold are copper pieces from Santa Clara.

Fig. 6. Mexico Abre La Boca (2011) Margarita Cabrera. Photo courtesy of UC Riverside Sweeney Art Gallery, Riverside, CA; and Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 40 “Margarita Cabrera: Mexico Abre La Boca 2011,” Texas Biennial, 2011, http://www.texasbiennial.org/images/Cabrera_TX11.pdf. 41 Ibid.

Clark 27 However, there is no authorship information available for which crafts were sold at which exhibits nor is there any data about how many are sold and if the project has been successful in making money for some of the artisans. Similarly, the Cuentos

Foundation has a page on Etsy, a virtual marketplace where individuals can sell handmade goods, promoting crafts from the artisans of Santa Clara del Cobre. Their page proudly announces “each purchase directly supports the livelihood of the artisans,”42 but there are no items actively for sale and their history shows a total of seven sales ever transacted. I contacted Cuentos via their Etsy page to enquire about the success of creating an online space for selling art from Santa Clara and they responded that they,

“have not really been working on it like [they] can”43 but hope to do more with it in the future.

Both of these attempts to bring the crafts of the artisans of Santa Clara del Cobre to a more global stage have been admirable but, in the long run, unsuccessful. More successful is the hard work and commitment that the artisans themselves have put into maintaining the traditional, indigenous roots of their craft despite having to diverge occasionally to more modern techniques and despite a small percentage of artisans changing professions. By doing work with their hands and passing their knowledge down through generations of family, the cobreros challenge the neoliberal ideals of mass production and free trade. Yet they are still struggling to survive solely on their craft.

They have introduced some more modern techniques and some have even been forced to immigrate to the United States in an effort to make more money to support their families.

However, despite these challenges, the majority of the artisans continue to execute the

42 “Cuentos About,” Etsy, accessed December 10, 2014, https://www.etsy.com/people/cuentos# 43 Cuentos Foundation, email to Louisa Clark, December 9, 2014.

Clark 28 traditional cobre martillado technique in the crafting of their art. Projects like Mexico

Abre La Boca and the online attempts of the Cuentos Foundation to sell art from Santa

Clara must become more focused on the artisans and even authored by the cobreros themselves. They must present the clear authorship of the artisans and a celebration of the specific indigeneity of their craft if they want to be able to succeed in supporting a community that provides a strong foundation for a larger protest to global neoliberalism.

The failures of these projects, like that of The Craft of Resistance, show how the contradictions of neoliberalism are so entrenched in our global economy. When outsiders attempt to assist a marginalized group in challenging the neoliberal economy, they end up continuing oppressive qualities like exclusion and mass production. The fact that attempts to challenge this global economy so often end up mirroring it shows us how ingrained neoliberalism is. Only when we turn the focus back to native peoples can we begin to decolonize the oppressive colonial reality of neoliberalism on the border.

Clark 29 MAQUILADORA WORKERS ON THE BORDER:

CRAFTING VALUE IN THE FACE OF FEMICIDE

In Margarita Cabrera’s The Craft of Resistance, the artist created a makeshift maquiladora factory inside her studio at Artpace San Antonio. Cabrera had set up this maquila as a setting in which community members and volunteers could assist in the construction of 2,500 life-size copper butterflies. The creation of the tiny sculptures themselves was intended to be a large part of the overall project. The artist “invited members of the San Antonio community to re-create a production line typical of a maquiladora environment”44 and she used this setting to draw attention to the conditions that women endure at the border while working in these factories to produce cheap goods that are immediately exported back to the U.S. after their completion under NAFTA.

Artists in other media have addressed maquiladoras and the maquila workers along the U.S. Mexico border and have placed these women in a more central role,

Clark 30 providing the viewer with a clearer picture of what the lives of these workers would actually entail. One such example is the documentary film Maquilapolis: City of

Factories (2006) by Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre. The film examines the lives of two maquila workers living in Tijuana. By putting the actual camera in the hands of the women, the workers themselves are given a first person voice, which is missing from The

Craft of Resistance. The film follows specific injustices and details the workers’ struggles against them.

Maquilapolis covers the struggles of two specific women, Carmen Durán and

Lourdes Luján. Durán fights a legal battle against Sanyo, a major American electronics corporation at which she was formerly employed, in order to receive severance. Luján has suffered various health issues along with other members of the community so she tries to organize an environmental cleanup at a factory site that was abandoned years before. These real women provide a significant and genuine look into the lives of maquiladora workers. In using their first person perspectives and focusing on their participation in each respective project, the filmmakers successfully provide a platform through which the world can learn more about the injustices happening at the border specifically to the workers of maquiladoras.

Filmmakers Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre put emphasis in their documentary film on the first person narratives of the women workers themselves.

Throughout the documentary, the women narrate scenes as they film on small hand held camcorders. The filmmakers clarify at the end of the film that “the women in this film developed and created its images, sounds and ideas in collaboration with the

Clark 31 filmmakers.”45 Funari and De La Torre wanted the women to have an integral role not only in starring in the film but also in making it. They clarify how this “collaborative process breaks with the traditional documentary practice of dropping into a location, shooting and leaving with the ‘goods,’ which would only repeat the pattern of the maquiladora itself.”46 This is rare for a documentary film, which would normally record the situation from an outside perspective. These filmmakers put the cameras literally into the hands of the workers so they could make the film their own and so the “film's voice will be truly that of its subjects.”47 Even though the film is credited to Funari and De La

Torre, the names of the women are credited as well and the filmmakers articulate how essential their role was in the completion of the film.

This active effort to portray the actual women that work in the maquiladoras differs greatly from Cabrera’s The Craft of Resistance. The artist created what she called

“a makeshift factory in her Artpace studio”48 However, the details of Cabrera’s maquiladora are unspecified and those that are made clear and not true to the reality of a maquila setting. Artpace San Antonio’s description of her exhibition on their website states that Cabrera’s “factory setup parallels the interior of maquiladoras found in Mexico with its fluorescent lighting and long makeshift tables. The workplace is divided into twelve schematic cubicles that guide volunteers through each step of the fabrication process.”49 Florescent lighting and long tables are not specific to maquiladora factories.

45 “Maquilapolis: City of Factories,” YouTube, published April 3, 2013, accessed January 25, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDIEW09MQNQ. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Emily Morrison, ArtPace Curatorial Assistant, “The Craft of Resistance,” Margarita Cabrera, http://www.margaritacabrera.com/the-craft-of-resistance/ 49 “The Craft of Resistance: About the Exhibition,” ArtPace San Antonio, accessed January 25, 2015, http://artpace.org/works/iair/iair_spring_2008/the-craft-of-resistance.

Clark 32 These two elements could also be describing a school, library, or office space. The twelve cubicles in which specific construction steps took place seem like they may represent a more realistic model of a maquiladora. Unfortunately, neither Cabrera nor Artpace provide any further details about the steps taken at each station and how the volunteers moved throughout the maquila while they constructed the butterflies.

Once the butterflies were completed, they were transported to a private home and were accessible only through photographs or reproductions from within the house.

Cabrera chose to turn against the traditional pattern of making art in private studios and displaying it in public galleries so that she could emphasize how the products made in maquiladoras are so quickly returned to private American households and subsequently she “emphasized the gap between consumption and production in the post-NAFTA environment.”50 So many American consumers buy a cheap product and bring it into their homes without thinking of the possibility of its unjust origins. With Cabrera’s transportation of her art into a middle class American home, one revisits the struggles of

DeCora’s art, which was “regarded with nostalgia and placed within the sentimental economy of the middle-class home.”51 In the maquila economy there has been a renaissance of certain goods retreating into the privacy of the home. For DeCora, the challenge was to bring her work out from the shadows of domesticity and for Cabrera, her work is done to highlight the injustice of hiding Mexican made commodities within the shadows of a middle class home when the atrocities of how they were made should be public knowledge. This interesting reversal of where Cabrera wants her art to exist

50 Bonansinga, Curating at the Edge, 130. 51 Simonsen, Making Home Work, 184.

Clark 33 provides a successful inquiry into consumption within neoliberalism on the border but within her piece it shifts the focus back to the construction of the sculpture.

The process of moving Cabrera’s completed piece to a private space turned the attention of the project to the construction of the butterflies and the process of making them as opposed to the final display. By centering on the creation process, the maquiladora setting became important. However, Cabrera did not include any actual maquiladora workers in her project and did not clarify the qualities that made her mock maquiladora mirror a real one. Obviously it may have been hard for the artist to get actual workers from maquiladoras to participate in her piece. Being a volunteer for a large-scale sculpture project happening in San Antonio, a city that is not on the border, is not a priority for these women workers and it may have been difficult for Cabrera to have made them aware of it. However, for her piece Cotton Circles (2011), FLOREZCA

“successfully secured a visa for artisan Luisa Monica Nambo Torres to visit Fresno and guide local participants in the traditional weaving technique of her hometown of Santa

Maria de Huazolotitlan.”52 For Cotton Circles, Cabrera made a specific effort to bring an indigenous individual, Nambo Torres, to the United States in order to have her present her native craft first hand. A similar effort could have been made to have Purépecha artisans from Santa Clara del Cobre present on cobre martillado or have maquiladora workers be present in the mock factory to provide a first person perspective.

By excluding these key players in her sculpture workshop, she fails to fully recognize the everyday survivance of these women workers and does not bring the injustices of global neoliberalism to light. The media and government on the border often try to keep the insertion of femicide in the daily lives of these maquiladora workers quiet

Clark 34 but “connecting feminicide to the maquiladora industry proved to be a compelling narrative, especially since the murders of poor and dark women began in 1993, a year after NAFTA…the treaty that solidified the project of neoliberalism and economic globalization in this part of the world.”53 The mass rape and murder of women on the border spiked following the passing of NAFTA so not only was the treaty a catalyst for the maquila industry but also for violence against the workers that would support such an economy. In this sense, feminicide cannot be separated from neoliberalism. Cabrera’s oversimplification of such a space neglects to realize this violent connotation, which is necessary to understanding the maquiladoras that are part of the neoliberal border economy. Just like the media and politicians on the border, Cabrera ends up shadowing the realities of femicide that occur as part of the maquiladora system and in this sense, her exclusion causes her project to become a mirror of the neoliberal reality of the border economy.

In the film Maquilapolis, two inclusive stories dominate the narrative of the film.

The first is that of Carmen Durán, a single mother to three children who has worked at various factories in her neighborhood in Tijuana. Most significantly, she worked for the

American electronics corporation Sanyo, assembling TV parts. She describes her experience in working there:

They harassed and pressured us. We were also exposed to all these chemicals… When I started working there, my nose used to bleed. I started having kidney trouble because they wouldn’t let us drink water or go to the bathroom. But I had friends there, and we stayed because we were together. I also stayed because I’m really hardheaded.54

53 Rosa-Linda Fregoso, MeXicana Encounters: MeXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 6. 54 “Maquilapolis: City of Factories,” YouTube.

Clark 35 Carmen begins to speak about the struggles that she faced at her job including inhumane treatment that eventually led to medical problems. But as she nears the end of her statement, a smile spreads across her face remembering the camaraderie with her friends and she laughs at herself for being so hardheaded and stubborn while simultaneously stating the fact that she was loyal to her job and took pride in it. This personal anecdote makes the viewer see Carmen as the real person that she is. It prepares the viewer to empathize with her as she continues to tell her story, which is valuable in spreading the reality of what happens to maquiladora workers at the border. She stayed with Sanyo for

6 years until they told the workers that production was being moved to Indonesia because the labor was now cheaper there.55 Sanyo left without paying severance to its employees so Carmen and her co-workers filed a labor claim against them, asking for them to pay the severance, as the law requires. Because the viewer sees the issue presented from the first person perspective of Carmen, he or she is more open to accepting the reality of this specific injustice that these women have faced.

These first person perspectives aid in the further understanding of specific economic injustices of neoliberalism on the border. In the film, community activist

Lupita Castañeda explains how “within globalization, a woman factory worker is like a commodity. And if that commodity is not productive, if she’s not attractive for globalization because she starts to defend her rights, then they look for that commodity elsewhere… We are just objects, objects of labor.”56 When workers like Carmen and

Lourdes began to recognize injustice within their labor system, they worked to correct it but because they are seen simply as a commodity to these corporations that own the

55 Ibid. 56 Ibid.

Clark 36 maquiladoras, operations moved to Southeast Asia. These women can begin to realize that they are seen as worthless. This is the narrative of the “crafting of the Mexican woman as a figure whose value can be extracted from her, whether it be in form of her virtue, her organs, or her efficiency on the production floor. And once ‘they,’ her murderers or her supervisors, get what they want from her, she is discarded.”57 This narrative begins to be engrained through the implementation of neoliberalism on the border which treats women as having the amount of worth equal to that of an small round piece of copper, the American penny. This worthlessness is then further supported by the staggering feminicide in the Juaréz area, which shows women that they do not even have the value to live. They are worth more dead, as some of the victims have their organs sold on the black market.58 Finally, the blame for all these atrocities is placed on the women themselves and their supposed loss of virtue. This narrative of the irrelevance of these women workers originates with and is continuously supported by the system of neoliberalism.

Cabrera made an attempt to criticize the patterns of private consumption in the neoliberal border economy and how the maquiladoras have negative effects on perceptions of value and women. But she failed to include explicit details about her maquiladora factory and did not reference the actual workers of these factories in any element of her piece. She oversimplified the working conditions they endure at work and failed to recognize the feminicide they face as they leave the factories each night. By keeping the details of the factory vague and simplifying the issues that these women face, she therefore excluded and devalued the workers themselves. Cabrera’s sculpture ends up

57 Melissa W. Wright, “The Dialectics of Still Life: Murder, Women, and Maquiladoras,” Public Culture 11(1999): 469. 58 Ibid.

Clark 37 being a mirror image of the narrative of worthlessness that surrounds women on the border. Instead of recognizing the reality of the violence committed against women or meeting her goal of challenging this devaluing pattern, instead, her project helped to continue it.

CONCLUSION:

HOW CAN WE DECOLNIZE THE BORDER?

The unique crossing and intermixing of people happening simultaneously alongside forced separation on the United States and Mexico border creates a space where decolonization must take on new forms and challenges. The colonial reign of neoliberalism has created an environment that is strained by oppression whether it is poverty, violence, or exclusion. This system contradicts itself because in its claims of individualism and egalitarianism, it serves to oppress and disenfranchise massive groups of people.

Additionally paradoxical is the attempt at protest that is currently happening on the border. Various people and groups have tried to show the atrocities that neoliberalism has brought about including the mass feminicide against maquiladora workers and the

Clark 38 blatant exclusion of indigenous groups. Artist Margarita Cabrera tried to highlight these injustices when she brought together a group of volunteers to create small copper butterflies supposedly using the techniques of the Purépecha from Santa Clara del Cobre in a mock maquiladora setting that supposedly mirrored the actual factories. She pulled together ideas of labor, indigeneity, capitalism, migration, and the border. She and her volunteers etched the design of the wings of a Monarch butterfly on to each of the twenty-five hundred tiny sculptures and pounded the formation of the American penny into the bottom, shaded side of the wings. Cabrera was trying to show her volunteers and her audience the reality of how the United States exploits cheap labor through the maquila economy and simultaneously puts the female workers into extreme danger. She attempted to show us that we value these women as much as a worthless copper penny as we take the commodities they produce into our homes and away from the public eye.

Cabrera tried to highlight the indigenous craft of a tribe little known to the north. She wanted to extend the life and value of such individualized, handcrafted work and show the stark contrast to the products that have been mass-produced on the border. However, in her attempt to show injustice, most paradoxically of all, she excluded the groups that she was trying to hold up to the light. Her attempt at protest became a mirror for the reality of neoliberal exclusion and oppression. She did not use truly indigenous techniques and she did not show the reality of a maquiladora factory. She did not name the Purépecha people and she did not name the workers of the maquiladoras. Her sculpture piece became a continuation of the colonial reality it had originally been created to attack. And here lies the paradox of protest within neoliberalism: these types of

Clark 39 attempts at resistance only mirror the reality of the neoliberal border and allow its colonial oppression to continue.

Many native scholars working actively to decolonize their communities and homelands look to resurgence as one of the main pathways to justice. Words like resurgence beginning with the prefix “re” dominate these narratives. This prefix means back or again and terms like revival, renewal, re-envisioning, and reconciliation all flood the pages of these authors’ works. However, resurgence itself has different meaning across various movements for decolonization. In Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence, Leanne Simpson clarifies that she has been careful “to not define ‘resurgence.’ It is my hope that readers will take the concepts and ideas presented in this book, return to their own communities, teachings, languages and Elders or Knowledge Holders and engage in a process where they figure out what ‘resurgence’ means to them and their collective communities.”59

Resurgence embodies the idea of going back and reviving ways of life that have been smothered by colonialism and depending on location this can manifest itself in different ways. Jeff Corntassel articulates how “if colonization is a disconnecting force, then resurgence is about reconnecting with homelands, cultures, and communities.”60 The reconnection, renewal, and revival that these scholars address becomes even more complicated on the border, which is a zone of fraught identity.

Not only is the border a space with Indigenous history, it is also dominated by two conflicting colonizing powers: the United States and Mexico. The invisible line that

59 Leanne Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence, (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2011), 25. 60 Jeff Corntassel, “Re-envisioning resurgence: Indigenous pathways to decolonization and sustainable self-determination,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society 1 (2012): 97.

Clark 40 stretches along the Rio Grande believes it has the power to divide two nations when it actually brings communities of people together into a zone of high intensity multicultural interaction. Artists thrive in such an environment and in many ways art can act as a decolonizing force. Performance art particularly, “because it is based on process, contradiction, action and connection, is closer to Indigenous ideas of art and resistance.”61

Margarita Cabrera’s The Craft of Resistance made a valid attempt to create a performance that focused on the process of constructing the butterflies that she hoped would shed light on the contradictions of the neoliberal economy of the border but her project could have done more to actively take part in decolonizing the border by explicitly including the Purépecha artisans and the maquiladora workers.

If we want to more actively employ decolonization on the border, we must engage with all communities including Indigenous ones. Native artists can “interrogate the space of empire, envisioning and performing ways out of it, [giving us] a glimpse of a decolonized contemporary reality.”62 In the creation of art on the border, it is possible to see a different space where divisions between people are no longer highlighted and free movement and interaction are brought to light. Native groups must continue their daily efforts of survivance and non-native peoples must daily interrogate their role in the exclusion of those marginalized. We all must question why we allow ourselves to exist within a paradoxical system. We must no longer believe that we are all getting an equal chance within this economy. We must continue our daily acts of resurgence and continue to highlight the paradoxes and protest the exclusive, oppressive, and violent reality that is neoliberalism on the border.

61 Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, 96. 62 Ibid, 98.

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