People With No Names, The Undocumented: #123

These are two 6" x 12" oil on canvas panels side by side.  Depicted are two women waiting to be fed in a deportee dining room run by the Jesuit ministry The Kino Border Initiative. Today, the Advent scripture readings include the story of Jesus feeding the multitudes with seven loaves and a few small fish.  Every single day this miracle of feeding the multitude, with compassion, happens just steps from the walled border between Mexico and the U.S.

People With No Names - The Undocumented #60

This oil on masonite  12" x 12" depicts a deportee helping with the preparation of the second of two meals per day that the 'Comedor' provides. He and others are cutting up buckets and buckets of donated eggplant. He and others are skinning it and then chopping it up into cubes.   As we were helping,  I confess that I was thinking, "I don't really like eggplant".   Then I caught myself and remembered that we were gonna feed a lot of people with FOOD...and when you don't have anything, ANYTHING is good. I don't know where it came from, but it was a LOT of eggplant.

People With No Names - The Undocumented #51

This oil on cardboard is 9"x18". The paintings shows three deportees who are cheerfully washing the dishes after one of the twice a day meals that are served at the "Comedor". The man in the front is scrubbing out a big pot. It reminded me that America is often referred to as a big 'melting pot'...and I just wondered how we decide that our pot is full...and we don't want anyone else in our pot.

People With No Names - The Undocumented #17

This is Caesar, hand clipping each of the 30 Italian Cypress bushes around the perimeter of a property so that the skinny shrubs will fatten up. (Everything fattens up in America, right?) Again he is up on the ladder. In our life journey we all want to climb up, BUT ESPECIALLY we want our kids to climb up. Who doesn't want to boost his/her kids up on his shoulders to give him a bigger view of the world. It is a mini glimpse of the future. Ladders, shoulders, and feet are the only means at hand. Immigrants are certainly not flying up here on airplanes...although we DO deport many of them on airplanes (see the photo on page 8A of the Sept 10, 2010 USA TODAY), which always strikes me as funny, because even though they are shackled, they REALLY get an up close glimpse of what an incredibly muy rico country this is! And then they are probably doubly motivated to try again, just for an opportunity to climb the ladder, to boost their kids up on their shoulders.

Works In Progress #2.

This is a preliminary sketch for a painting of a young woman, pregnant, deported, doing the dishes in a refugee center. She is a modern day Mary, the mother of Jesus. Father Gregory Boyle says, "to embrace the strategy of Jesus is to be engaged in downward mobility".