“We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us”: Images from the history of artists’ engagement with the U.S.-Mexico frontera
By Edward J. McCaughan
“We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us” has long been a rallying cry of the
Mexican/Chicano immigrant rights movements in the United States. The statement immediately historicizes the movements’ demands, asserting claims to territory, citizenship rights, and cultural legacy that predate the current boundary between Mexico and the United
States.
Melanie Cervantes/Dignidad Rebelde. Screen print. 2016.
One historical anecdote illustrates the concept. When Mexico lost more than half of its territory to the United States at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, the Mexican village of Doña Ana suddenly found itself part of the U.S., in what is now the state of New
Mexico. Some of the residents, determined to remain part of Mexico, moved several miles south of the new border and founded the town of Mesilla. A short five years later, the Gadsden
Purchase resulted in the border being moved yet further south, and the residents of Mesilla found themselves once again within the boundaries of the expansionist United States. The border crossed them twice.
The recently annexed village of Mesilla, New Mexico, 1854, as rendered by Carl Schuchard.
In the 170 years since, generations of artists have returned to the themes of the border and the impact of its inconsistent and often arbitrary enforcement on the lives of Mexicans compelled by history to test its capriciousness. A brief look at art produced in different eras reveals how the work of social movements, as well as shifts in U.S. immigration and border policy, influenced the content and tone of the images created. I offer examples from the
1930s-50s, the 1970s-80s, and the present.
The Great Depression and the Bracero Program
As is well known, between the 1930s and the 1950s, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans experienced the inhumane vicissitudes of U.S. immigration policies aimed at alternately shrinking and enlarging the labor pool to meet the needs of an economy that contracted dramatically during the Great Depression and then accelerated during and following World War
II. Upwards of two million Mexicans and Mexican Americans, many of them U.S. citizens, were deported in the 1930s and 40s. Deportations continued even as the U.S. ran the Bracero “guest worker” Program from 1942 to 1964, during which time more than four million Mexican workers were contracted to work the agricultural fields of the United States.
Art work created at the time in response to these developments tended to express humanitarian concerns about the plight of Mexicans affected by these policies. The artists were largely allies rather than immigrants themselves. Diego Rivera, for example, created a watercolor in 1931 depicting Mexicans recently deported to Torreon, Coahuila, about 200 miles south of Texas border. And in 1948 Woody Guthrie first wrote the poem that would become the classic song, Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu- duTWccyI ) , once put to music by Martin Hoffman, immortalizing the people who died in a plane crash in Southern California while being repatriated to Mexico. The crops are all in and the peaches are rott'ning, The oranges piled in their creosote dumps; They're flying 'em back to the Mexican border To pay all their money to wade back again
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita, Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria; You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane, All they will call you will be "deportees"
Diego Rivera, Repatriados en Torreón, water color, 1931.
Photographer Leonard Nadel was commissioned by the progressive Fund for the
Republic to document the Bracero Program. Just north of the Texas-Mexico border, Nadel captured the inhumane treatment of Mexicans who were contracted to work for U.S. agribusiness even as other Mexican laborers were being deported. Nadel described with words the horrors he also captured on camera: "Much in the same manner and feeling used in handling livestock, upon crossing over the bridge from Mexico at Hidalgo, Texas, the men were herded into groups of 100 through a makeshift booth [and] sprayed with DDT."
Leonard Nadel, photograph, 1956 Singer-songwriter Phil Ochs recorded an ode to the braceros in 1966 just as the program was ended (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrmNDZNmxIk ):
Come labor for your mother, for your father and your brother For your sisters and your lover, bracero Come pick the fruits of yellow, break the flowers from the berries Purple grapes will fill your bellies, bracero
The Chicano and Immigrant Rights Movements Produce New Artistic Voices
By the 1970s, the Chicano Movement was in full swing. Immigrant rights, indigenous rights, and militant assertions by Mexican Americans to their historic claims on territory, citizenship, and cultural legacies profoundly changed the artistic images of the border. Chicana and Chicano artists now spoke for themselves, no longer so reliant on allied artists to produce well-meaning but inevitably distanced statements of solidarity.
Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyH913Q29g0 ) by songwriters Daniel Valdéz, Sylvia Galan, and Pedro Contreras, captured the ethnic pride and labor militancy of this new generation of Chicanos.
Up to California from Mexico you come to the Sacramento Valley, to toil in the sun Your wife and seven children, they’re working every one And what will you be giving to your brown-eyed children of the sun?
Your face is lined and wrinkled and your age is forty-one Your back is bent from picking, like your dying time has come Your children’s eyes are smiling, their lives have just begun And what will you be giving to your brown-eyed children of the sun?
You marched on Easter Sunday, to the Capitol you’ve come To fight for union wages, and your fight has just begun You’re a proud man, you’re a free man, and your heritage is won And that you can be giving to your brown-eyed children of the sun!
CASA, one of the movement’s many mass organizations, produced an influential newspaper, Sin Fronteras, that asserted a utopian vision of a Mexican people and movement without borders. Classic art work in keeping with these more militant sentiments were produced by movement artists such as Rupert García and Malaquías Montoya. Both used the image of barbed wire to symbolize the border.
Rupert García, ¡Cesen Deportación!, Screen Print, 1973.
Malaquías Montoya, The Oppressor, screen print, 1989
Montoya explained his piece: “These images deal with struggle. I use the maguey plant as a symbol of strength. The plant and its power are the manifestation of the poor represented by the person looking out of the rectangular box.”
Such images of strength and resistance, inspired by the power of the movement, also influenced the work of allied artists such as Rini Templeton, who worked in solidarity with
Mexican communities on both sides of the border. Templeton studied print making with
Montoya. In one of her classic graphics, a man defiantly confronts the border’s barbed wired fence.
Rini Templeton, untitled, ink on paper, c. 1980
Yolanda López and Ester Hernández created iconic images asserting Mexicans’— specifically their indigenous ancestors’—historic presence in what became the United States through colonization, territorial expansion, and cultural oppression. At the height of the contentious debates over immigrant rights in the 1970s, López’s indigenous warrior crumpled U.S. immigration reform plans and asked the still resonant question, “Who’s the illegal alien, pilgrim?”
Yolanda López, Who’s the Illegal Alien Pilgrim? Poster, 1978.
Hernández, anticipating the Unites States’ then forthcoming bicentennial celebrations, also reminded the public of North America’s ancient indigenous presence. She imagined an artist resculpting the Statue of Liberty into Libertad, a totem celebrating Mexicans’ indigenous heritage. The new Libertad stands on a base of Aztlán, Mexico’s mythical homeland in what is now the southwestern U.S.
Ester Hernández, La Libertad, etching, 1975
Signs from the New Century
The Chicano movement also produced new theorists, such as the late Gloria Anzaldúa who brought a powerful intersectional analysis to the border. In her now classic
Borderlands/La Frontera from 1987, Anzaldúa expands the notion of borders to include those real and imagined seams or wounds between cultures, genders, and sexualities. In the first decades of the 21st century, a new generation of activist artists has brought these ideas to their work on issues of borders and immigration. One of the bravest and most innovative political forces to emerge in recent years is the UndocuQueer movement of undocumented LGBTQ immigrants, and artist Julio Salgado is one of its most prominent voices.
Julio Salgado, I Am UndocuQueer. Mural, 2013.
In 2013 Salgado installed a mural at the intersection of 24th and Bryant Streets in San
Francisco proclaiming “I am UndocuQueer!” The mural featured portraits of six undocumented
LGBTQ activists, each of whom wears a T-shirt with a personal statement about the power of this movement. Above their head in both Spanish and English appears the phrase, “La intersección de la comunidad indocumentada y LGBTQ.” Many of Salgado’s graphics combine expressions of righteous militancy and anger with ribald humor, such as the digital prints from his Fuck Your Borders series.
Julio Salgado, Fuck Your Borders, 1, digital print, 2017.
Julio Salgado, Fuck Your Borders, 2, digital print, 2017.
A final example from today’s activist artists is Favianna Rodríguez’s Migration Is
Beautiful campaign. As described on the webpage of the organization CultureStrike, the project
“began at [a] retreat in August 2012, where . . . Favianna Rodriguez led an interactive design session with artists and activists. The butterfly image and tagline quickly emerged as an approachable way to reimagine borders as permeable rather than militarized, reinvigorating a metaphor that many migrants have looked to for generations. CultureStrike quickly started commissioning artworks incorporating the butterfly and made them available for reuse and remixing.
“Just one month later, the butterfly began appearing on costumes, buses, banners, and murals in border towns and cities all across the country. Since then, the Migration is Beautiful butterfly image has appeared at mass demonstrations across the country, from Los Angeles to
Tucson, Charlotte, and Washington, DC.”
Favianna Rodríguez, Migration Is Beautiful, digital print, 2012
Favianna Rodríguez, Butterfly Crossing, poster, 2012
The evolution of immigrant rights movements has taken activist artists from the sad and tragic images of Mexican migrants produced by artists like Diego Rivera and Woody Guthrie to the defiantly celebratory, border-crossing butterflies and UndocuQueers of Favianna Rodríguez and Julio Salgado.