Why I Paint What I Paint

This is NOT a portrait (retrato) of an immigrant.  This is a portrait of 16 year old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez.  He was in Nogales near the wall that separates the United States and Mexico.  The Huffington Post says, "An autopsy report indicates a Mexican Teen who apparently was shot to death by a U.S. Border Patrol agent in October was struck by at least eight bullets, all but one hitting him in the back".  He and other youths were throwing rocks at the Border Patrol.   An anonymous source commented that  "Border Agents are generally allowed to use lethal force against rock throwers".

People With No Names: The Undocumented # 115

                                   I came to put food in my mouth.....I put food in your mouth.

Why I Paint What I Paint

This is an 8"x10" red iron oxide and chalk on canvas of a young boy who I encountered in a  Nogales, Mexico apartment for recently deported women and children.  This morning I was walking and listening to a radio story about Afghanistan.  As the United States is winding down their presence in that country, the military spokesman said that they have learned about "bottom up diplomacy".  He went on to define "bottom up diplomacy" as things like building schools and taking the time to meet and talk to village elders in remote places.  He talked about approaching people in "their way...slowly", and he said that "to change hearts and minds" takes time. I want to be a nation and a person who practices "bottom up diplomacy".

People With No Names: The Undocumented # 114

This is acrylic on canvas 12" x 30".  A little over a week ago it was Holy Thursday when priests all over the world washed people's feet in a re-enactment of The Last Supper.  In fact,  our new pope washed feet at a juvenile detention center in Rome and EVEN the feet of several women!  I started thinking about all of the immigrants walking up to the United States and that verse from Isaiah, (that is repeated in Romans), "How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news...".  Here in the Sonoran Desert,  people actually have to walk over rugged mountain terrain to enter the U.S. What 'good news' can they possibly be bringing to us?  Well it turns out there is a 'Barrio Effect' that immigrants bring with them.  It is an actual, medically documented fact that people who live in poor Latino neighborhoods are healthier than our own homegrown poor people.  Infant mortality rate is lower, neighborhoods really matter, they have access to traditional foods (which are prepared from scratch), extended family members live nearby or with each other.  There is ethnic and racial pride.  As was expressed in the Broadway musical "Porgy and Bess", "I've got plenty of nothing, and nothings plenty for me".  Ethnic enclaves share struggles, and that social life actually causes biological changes in the body and lowers stress.  In our terrifically independent lives, our newest societal members, maybe, have something to teach us.  We may be 'connected' by our abundance of social media, but we sure aren't preparing meals, touching, talking and living together.

People With No Names: The Undocumented: # 113

This 11" x 14" oil on canvas "Ce n'est pas un animaux".  (Please see, "ce n'est pas un pipe" by Magritte, surrealism)  On Sunday March 24, 2013 there was a front page article about immigrants being held in solitary confinement.  The U.S. has come under sharp criticism at home and abroad for relying on solitary confinement in its prisons more than any other democratic nation in the world.  This practice is particularly "startling because these detainees are being held on civil, not criminal charges.  As such, they are not supposed to be punished: they are simply confined to ensure that they appear for administrative hearings." At the bottom of the article is a picture of a chain link 6' x6' cell "where immigrant detainees may get an hour to pace". 

People With No Names: The Undocumented #112

This 11" x 14" oil on canvas is easy to title...It is "Pool Girl".  This young man is one of many undocumented kids crossing the U.S. border alone in increasing numbers.  Illegal immigration may be down, but the number of children coming across the border into the U.S. ON THEIR OWN is soaring...
            -Terry Green Sterling
                The Daily Beast, March 24, 2013

People With No Names: The Undocumented #111

This 6' by 4' oil on unstretched canvas is of two women recently deported from the United States.  I realize that I made the hand (on the woman in the back) too small...especially when you consider the amount of work she probably does with that hand!  They are both separated from their families who live and work in the United States,  a United States that is growing and changing. The "we" of "we hold these truths to be self evident" is always growing and changing. It now includes people of both genders, people of every ethnicity, and... as always...people from other lands. Who is the "we" today?  The "we" includes 11 million people from Central America and Mexico who are deemed 'unlawfully here' by the people in power today.  Tomorrow, the power may shift and the "we",  like any living organism,  need to grow and change or we will begin to die.  What to do with 11 million immigrants who are working and paying taxes in the United States of America?  At great cost to taxpayers, we criminalize, expel and build walls to 'attempt' to keep them out of "our" country.  It would be cheaper (not to mention kinder and more effective) to enfranchise and welcome people.  I was touched today, to hear that the country of Jordan is continuing to welcome Syrian refugees.  It is a strain on their water supply and economy...(and they are asking the international community to come alongside them)...BUT it is fundamentally WHO the Jordanian people are, to be a people of 'hospitality' and as such they must welcome refugees. 

People With No Names: The Undocumented # 110

 

I am reading the Isabel Allende book about the history of Haiti,  "Island Beneath the Sea",  and was struck by the white plantation owners saying that "the black slaves have never accepted their fate".  It got me to thinking about the idea of "accepting your fate".  Today, the President of the United States nominated a new Secretary of Labor,  one Thomas Perez who NEVER accepted his fate.  He is the son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic (next door to Haiti) and put himself through college collecting garbage and working in a warehouse.  The president described him as a tireless advocate for the 'American Dream'.  Then, in case we needed a refresher, the president spelled it out...he said, "It doesn't matter who you are, where you come from, what your last name is;  if you are willing to work hard you can get in on the 'American Dream'.  It seems like a prerequisite would be...DON'T accept your fate!  This is an 11" x 14" oil on stretched canvas of a recent deportee from the United States.

People With No Names, The Undocumented: 109

This 11" x 14" oil on canvas is of a young man who was recently deported from the United States.  I keep thinking that we are not paying attention to history as it is unfolding.  We see so clearly that we should have done more as Jews were being rounded up in Europe during WWII...we should have helped in Rwanda.  We should have the attitude of a character in a book that I am reading (The Postmistress by Sarah Blake) as she realizes what is happening in Europe in the winter of 1941.  "Whatever is coming does NOT just come, as you say.  It's helped by people willfully looking away.  People who develop the habit of swallowing lies rather than the truth.  The minute you start thinking something else, then you stopped paying attention---and paying attention is all we've got."

People With No Names, The Undocumented: 108

This 20" x 30" oil on canvas depicts one of the growing number of immigrant women in the deportee dining room in Nogales, Mexico.  She has tried to run to higher ground (the north)...she was not successful this time...but she will probably keep trying because life depends on it.  Today I heard a discussion of the salvific power of myth and folklore in people groups.  Specifically,  when people pass on descriptions of what happens and what to do in the event of natural disasters, they are passing on life saving information.  In the case of a tsunami,  certain coastal dwelling people groups know that when the sea rushes out,  run for higher ground.  If you are tempted to remain, or even spend time inspecting the new landscape, you will perish.  In 'economic tsunamis',  when jobs, land and food are swept away,  people need to get to safe ground.

People With No Names: The Undocumented #107

This 18' x 36" oil on canvas depicts a woman at the Nogales deportee center who had on at least four layers of clothing.  It is cold in the shelter because there are only three sides enclosed.  I got to wondering if maybe she had on even more layers than I could see...and then I thought what a great metaphor the clothing layers are.  All of us, every single person on the planet is composed of so many layers...some that we can see and identify, some that we cannot.

People With No Names, The Undocumented: #106

This is an 11" x 14" oil on stretched canvas of a woman in the deportee center in Nogales, Mexico.  She has small children in the United States.  She came to Mexico to see an ailing relative,  and now due to enhanced border security, cannot get back to her husband and children in the United States.  I remember that when my children were little I used to viscerally yearn for them when/if I had to be apart from them for any reason.  To hold that yearning in my body...and not to know when/if it could ever be assuaged...well I don't know if I could keep going.

People With No Names: The Undocumented #105

This 11"x14" oil on canvas depicts a recent deportee from the U.S. looking back.  Is she looking at family that she has had to leave on the U.S. side of the border?  Does she have a husband and children from which she has been forcibly separated? Our president, in his recent inaugural speech, stated that, "Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as the land of opportunity. "  He mentioned the societal progress that has issued from Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall...and I hope also comes forth from the Sonoran Desert in Arizona.

People With No Names: The Undocumented #104

This 11"x14" oil on canvas is of an immigrant woman in the Nogales, Mexico deportee center.  Her hand over her mouth reminds me that many people in the world, (especially women),  do not have voices...many people in the world are still not 'heard from'.  Their lives, and deaths, go unnoticed and unmarked.  In that vein, the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei has a huge installation at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. right now.  The installation is comprised of all the mangled rebar that was salvaged when a shoddily-built children's school collapsed during an earthquake in 2008.   'Wenchuan Steel Rebar (2008-2012)' is a powerful indictment of the Chinese government and a monumental reminder of the many young people who died during the earthquake.  Along with the installation, Ai Weiwei had people read and record each and every name of every child who was killed when the school collapsed. He was arrested and detained during the making of the piece, but his assistants continued to construct the piece. He says that his art flows from the search for the rights of individuals.  He says that the rebar stands for the spine,  and the fact that we are 'spineless' if we don't stand up against human rights violations.  Amen.

People With No Names: The Undocumented 103

Listening to an interview with the writer Barry Lopez today while painting.  He said that everyone has a need to have meaning in the world.  We need others to say,  "Your existence has meaning, your effort matters in the world".  This is an 8" x 12" oil on canvas of an immigrant at the deportee center
in Nogales.

People With No Names: The Undocumented 102

This was a FULL PAGE AD in the New York Times yesterday!  Brought to us by Yoko Ono.  Still a good idea.  This will probably not come from guns, walls and prisons.

People With No Names: The Undocumented 101

Here it is, the front page of the New York Times on Jan. 1!!!  So this is big news in the United States where there is widespread fear that immigrants will "take our jobs and be a disproportionate drain on our resources".  And the article goes on to say that , "The decline in birthrates was steepest among Mexican-American women who immigrated from Mexico, at 25.7 percent.  This has reversed a trend in which immigrant mothers accounted for a rising share of births in the United States."  It turns out that while Latinos were immigrating physically,  ideas about family size, education and career were immigrating into their family structure.  "In Denver, Olga Gonzales, the daughter of Mexican immigrants,  teaches a family planning class in Spanish to Mexican immigrants.  She tells her students that as a teenager in the 1980s, she decided to take the long view on life:  "I chose to do the college route first and establish my career and then think about babies later"  Now 40, Ms. Gonzales has a master's degree in nonprofit management, two children and a solid foothold in the professional middle-class. (Her father, one of six children, never finished fifth grade back in Guanajuanto, Mexico, before he had to go to work.)"  William H. Frey,  a sociologist and demographer at the Brookings Institute says that "the decrease has signaled much about the aspirations of young Latinos to become full and permanent members of the upwardly mobile middle class, despite the challenges posed by the struggling economy."  So,  those who see newcomers as threats...might want to revise their thinking.   Those who have seen only a particular demographic as assets...might want to revise their thinking. There is a precedent for 'open-mindedness and capacity for growth'... one hundred and fifty years ago TODAY Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation!  After Jan. 1,  1863,  Lincoln began to think seriously of the United States as a bi-racial society.  The work continues with our treatment of our most recent immigrants.  President Lincoln said,  "The dogmas of the quiet past,  are inadequate to the stormy present" and "we must dis enthrall our selves,  and then we shall save our country."  Amen. 

People With No Names: The Undocumented # 100

These children are EVERYONE'S children.  Parents and grandparents waited for them to be born,  to be among us.  These children are everyone's children.

People With No Names: The Undocumented #99

In this season of Advent...of waiting...of hoping, of COMING.... I had the privilege to paint this scene depicting Juan Diego (an indigenous American) presenting an image of the Virgin of Guadelupe (Mary coming to the Americas in the form of an indigenous woman).  This apparition is said to have occurred only ten years after the conquest of Mexico by Spain.  Notice how Juan Diego is looking toward the lighter skinned, crowned woman to the right (possibly representing Spain and the European Crown)  and the Virgin gazes at the darker skinned indigenous person on the left.  Taken as a whole, this image seems to tell the story of Guadelupe's raison d'etre...namely to blend cultures racially and religiously, the first 'mestiza' or 'the first Mexican' bringing together people of distinct cultural heritages, while at the same time affirming their distinctness.  Still, today we live in a time of waiting...we have dark-skinned Americans among us who are 'coming' and 'waiting'.  They are experts at HOPING and waiting.

People With No Names: The Undocumented #98

This is day two-  (my version of Mary visiting Elizabeth as done by the Italian Renaissance artist Pontormo).  I am painting on big pieces of corrugated metal that I am getting from a recycle place.  It is a sturdy, big, cheap canvas substitute.  Today in my reading,  I learned of a thing called "Hobson's Choice".  It is a situation where you don't REALLY have a choice...it is 'the thing that is offered' or nothing.  In the case of Mary, we are told that she 'took the offer' to be God's choice and said, "Be it done to me according to your will".  It was the epitome of grace and assent...the ultimate yes.  Often immigrants are offered the same Hobson's Choice.  They can assent to a new reality, 'go' to a new place,  move toward a new life or....well,  there is no 'or'.  So they take the Hobson's Choice and do what must be done.