People With No Names - The Undocumented #68

This is another version of the couple in the freezing cold deportee center in Nogales, Mexico. It is 12" x 24" oil on canvas. I was recently visiting my daughter's college campus for 'Parents Weekend', and as I was wandering around her beautiful campus I came upon an amazing sight...a REAL CHUNK OF THE BERLIN WALL! I exclaimed, and my daughter confirmed that, "Yep, it is the real thing...an amazing piece of history". Recently, in my immigration studies, I read about the jubilation that went through the Western world when the "symbol of separation between the material abundance of the West and the economic scarcity of the East" was torn down. The Berlin Wall "represented the dividing line between freedom and slavery, opportunity and oppression, prosperity and poverty...Ironically, as the great wall of separation was coming down in Europe, an even greater and more dangerous wall of separation was being fortified along the 1,952-mile border between the United States and Mexico...it is a wall of separation between the citizens of the United States and the poor of Latin America. As doors were opening to those who escaped the tyrannies of communism, doors were closing to those who were trying to escape the tyrannies of the unjust economic, political, and social structures of their own countries." p.13 Border of Death, Valley of Life