People With No Names - The Undocumented #55

This 11'x14" oil on canvas depicts a father who I met at the Comedor in Nogales, Mexico. He was picked up walking across the desert at night (in below freezing temperatures), and deported. He is wrapped in a large moving van sort of blanket as he shows me a photo of his toddler daughter who lives in the U.S. with his wife. Both his wife and daughter are U.S. citizens and the small family has been living and working productively in the U.S for years. Because he was unsuccessful returning to his wife, she has been forced to move in with her mother in California. He does not know when he will see his family again.

People With No Names - The Undocumented #34

This is my nod to Dorthea Lange, the photographer who made her famous 1936 image of the "Migrant Mother". It has been 74 years since Lange put a face to the plight of migrant agricultural workers in California. Lange's image depicts the mother with her children huddled around her. In my image the Salvadorean woman is utterly alone, having left her 5 children with her parents, in order to go find work to support them all. When I did the math, I was kind of shocked to realize that in 74 years, the plight of agricultural workers has not changed much. New groups of people have simply been inserted into the machinations of the food harvesting industry.