America's Most Wanted #8

NAFTA.  You've heard of it but you are not sure what it is.  Me either.  In the 1990s the "North American Free Trade Agreement" opened the borders of all of North America to the flow of products and money.  That sounds good doesn't it?  It was good... if you were the wealthy of the North American continent.  Not so good, if you were a small farmer whose family had been making a decent living on a family farm for generations...and that farm stood in the way of a huge agri-business gobbling up your land to set up a huge mechanized farm to bring cheap produce to a Wal-mart  or Super-Target near you.  Or say your little family farm was sitting on a stockpile of precious minerals....those could be mined for millions to improve the lives of "first-world" folks even further.  So, you have been kicked off your land...you have got to find a place where there is work and money to feed your family.....

America's Most Wanted #1

Okay, I am starting a new series of immigrant paintings.  They will all be oil on stretched canvas, 11"x14".  I am calling it "America's Most Wanted" as a sort of double entendre...i.e. we want work done in our country AND we want to find and deport workers.  We legally permit big American corporations and banks to plunder Central and South America (see NAFTA and The Profits of Extermination by Francisco Ramirez Cuellar),  thus shoving people off their land where they have made a living for generations AND we want to do a squeeze play at our borders as these displaced people try to make a run to second base (yes, I just used a baseball analogy).  People are forced to migrate northward to find work;  People are then arrested and criminalized for trying to feed their families.   People are arrested and criminalized for trying to do work that Native born Americans will NEVER do.  People are arrested and criminalized for being modern day  "Les Miserables".

People With No Names - The Undocumented #35

This is a Department Store in Nogales, (I think we were still on the U.S. side) and I thought it was a cheery pink store with a fairy tale name. It was only afterward, as I read more and more about NAFTA and immigration policies that I realized how very apropos it is to think in terms of Mexico as the mistreated step-sister. Cinderella is the one who does all the cleaning, and fetching, and is kept out of sight. She is not considered a legitimate part of the family and has no one to advocate for her. She certainly CANNOT go to the ball.