Pacific Standard Time Spotlights the

Arts and Crafts Made along the U.S.-

Mexico Border

ARTSY EDITORIAL

BY MAXWELL WILLIAMS SEP 13TH, 2017 5:48 PM

Armando Muñoz Garcia, Tijuana III Millenio, 2016. Photo by Jim Platel. Courtesy of the Craft and Folk Art Museum.

The Mexico-U.S. border is one of the most politicized borders in the world—

but that’s been the case for almost 170 years, ever since the end of the U.S.-

Mexican War/Guerra de Estados Unidos-México in 1848.

It is a place of nature and of abjection, of trade and of transgressions, or

arrivals and departures. This is the way borders often are—the locations in

between, in limbo. But beyond all the poetry of borders, they are just places,

this one with six Mexican states on one side, and four U.S. states on the

other. No more and no less.

A new show, “The US-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility,”

the Craft & Folk Art Museum (CAFAM)’s contribution to “Pacific Standard

Time: LA/LA”—a citywide examination of Latinx art and art from Latin

America—takes a broad look at how art and design relate to, and use, the

border’s geography and dense history.

Co-curated by retired Museum of Arts and Design chief curator Lowery

Stokes Sims and Mexico City-based curator Ana Elena Mallet, the show is

sober to the realities of those living in this fraught territory, but not

necessarily pessimistic.

“There’s a lot of work now that talks about the tragedies on the border, but

we’re really talking about what the border is as a hybrid identity space, and

how people are coping with the politics of living there, both in terms of daily

life, but also in terms of more conceptual ways of dealing with this cross-the-

lines existence,” says Sims, who adds that she and Mallet looked to the El

Paso-Juárez Transborder Biennial held in 2015 as a model.

Margarita Cabrera in collaboration with Maria Lopez, Space in Between - Saguaro (Maria

Lopez), 2010. Courtesy of the artist and Talley Dunn Gallery, Dallas.

Einar & James de la Torre, San Ysidro, 2014. Courtesy of the Craft and Folk Art Museum.

The show speaks to the story of the border from both sides, as told by artists,

architects, and designers who have made the border a concern in their work,

both directly and indirectly.

Visitors to CAFAM are greeted by a scaled-down version of Armando

Muñoz García’s Tijuana III Millennium—better known as La Mona or “the

doll”—the woman who looms over Tijuana, built by the self-taught sculptor

for the 1989 centennial of Tijuana.

Behind the sculpture are cases filled with conceptual jewelry, like Haydeé

Alonso’s Ni Una Más, a rubber neckpiece that is meant to feel suffocating, a

reference to the maquiladora factory girls caught in the violence of Juárez—

sometimes found sexually assaulted and strangled. (Maquiladora are the

U.S.-owned, Mexican factories that exploit lower wages in the country, as

well as the free trade agreement NAFTA.)

On the second floor, hanging from the ceiling, two pairs of pants feature the

words “MIGRA” and “NO ICE” affixed to the waist areas. These are the

work of Hector Dionicio Mendoza, an artist who immigrated to America in

the early 1980s at the height of punk music, and the pants look very much

like artifacts of East L.A. Chicano punk history.

The words refer to the raids from immigration officers that Mendoza’s family

experienced in 1999 when living in the Salinas Valley of Central California,

and are meant to function as armor against social injustice and labor abuse.

Consuelo Jiménez Underwood, Home of the Brave, 2013. Photo by Bill Apton. Courtesy of the artist.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, Tanya Aguiñiga’s Tierra (2014) contains soil the

artist took from biographical sites—from under the bridge where her mentor

committed suicide, from her grandmother’s house, from the beach where she

experimented with drugs and had her first kiss, and from the ground along the

U.S.-Mexican border that she crosses on a regular basis as a member of

BAW/TAF (the Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo).

Aguiñiga has lined nylon and vinyl tubes with the soil, creating a “woven

rug” floor piece that also includes notable phrases relating to the locations

(“HE JUMPED”; “PINK SMOKE”; “PADDED DRUGS”). These are

Aguiñiga’s bittersweet memories of the personal events that took place along

the border.

On the third floor, Ana Serrano’s striking, earnest Cartonlandia (2007) is the

clear centerpiece: a human-tall mass of cardboard boxes painted to depict the

daily lives of hill-dwellers, like those who live on the outskirts of towns like

Tijuana or L.A. It pulsates with energy. Life is vibrant in the hills, Serrano’s

paint suggests. And the doors are sometimes open, sometimes closed.

Ana Serrano, Cartonlandia, 2007. Photo by Julie Klima. Courtesy of Cástulo de la Rocha and

Zoila D. Escobar.

Julio Cesar Morales, Undocumented Interventions #1, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco.

Meanwhile, Rael San Fratello (a studio made up of artist-architect-designers

Virginia San Fratello and Ronald Rael) reimagines the imposing border fence

as a place of possibility. They have made prints and snow-globe-sized

miniature sculptures that act as proposals to turn the border into a community

center of sorts—a bike path, a volleyball court, a teeter-totter, a confessional.

Though these miniatures were made in 2013–14 as a response to the Secure

Fence Act that Congress passed in 2006 (for the building of a double-layer

fence across the border), they feel more urgent in the face of a U.S.

presidential administration touting a 55-foot-high border wall and taking a

hardline approach to immigration.

Beyond artists who look directly at the border in their work, artisans who

make crafts in the borderlands are also represented. L.A.-born artist Pilar

Agüero-Esparza, who presents Mexican huarache sandals in the shape of

swimming flippers or in popping colors, and Texas-born artist Adrian

Esparza, who has deconstructed a colorful serape blanket into an elaborate

geometrical hanging on the wall, both recognize the traditions of production

that take place along the border.

Signs speckle the whole exhibition, alluding to different issues surrounding

this often loaded territory and that surface throughout the work on display—

“I FEEL DOUBLE/ME SIENTO DOBLE” points to a Mexican-American

double consciousness, while “BELIE THE REALITY OF LIFE/CREA LA

REALIDAD DE LA VIDA” evokes the stereotypes that plague this region.

Sims says these loose categories emerged naturally as the works came

together.

Pablo López Luz, San Diego County - Tijuana IX, Frontera USA-Mexico, 2015. Courtesy of the

artist.

Teresa Margolles, Ajuste de cuentas 15, 2007. Courtesy of Museo de Arte Moderno – INBA, Mexico D.F.

“We allowed the architects and the designers and the craftspeople to identify

and help us figure out what the main themes were,” says Sims. “We’re

looking at the border as a site of imagination, imagining what a border

identity might be. And also critiquing the notion of the wall through

proposals to make it infrastructure and create avenues of communication for

families that remain separated by the fence.”

She hits at the real lesson here, which is that the U.S.-Mexico border is its

own ecosystem, fed by millions of people and their stories. With so many

different people in such a vast expanse of land, there is an immeasurable

variety of ways to understand life along the border.

It’s been that way for a long time, and will continue that way for the

unforeseen future. The challenge is to emphasize humanity within that often

contentious and always multifarious landscape—the work in “The US-

Mexico Border” succeeds in finding and paying homage to that humanity.

—Maxwell Williams