Looking Both Ways Across the Border

The border is a line between two cultures, drawn by history and by politics, and the one between the United States and Mexico is often an uneasy one. “There are millions of people living along that border,” says Karen Rapp, associate director of the Sweeney Art Gallery at UC Riverside. “And they tend to be marginalized by most Americans and by people from Mexico City.” Rapp organized “Lines of Sight: Views of the U.S./Mexican Border,” opening March 27, because, she says, “artists are saying we need to recognize these people and their lives.”

Prompted by the fact that several university departments coordinated a border studies program for the academic year, the gallery and its board decided to do something along the same theme. Josh Kun, professor of English at the university, had seen some photographs by Julian Cardona that seemed right for this project.

“This was the photograph that really struck me,” says Rapp, as she points to one of Cardona’s large color prints. It depicts a fresh-faced young assembly worker, 14, who has been caught in a moment of gazing over her workspace and into the distance. “She looks rather wistful, really.”

What might she be thinking? What might she be dreaming? And will these things ever be possible? The poignancy is that with her limited education and limited income (earning perhaps $1.50 an hour), the horizon is limited.

Gradually, the gallery found several other artists to add to the show--photographer Yvonne Venegas, painter Ricardo Duffy and multimedia veteran Ruben Ortiz Torres, who weighs in with sculpture and video pieces. Kun, who also DJs at Club Sugar in Santa Monica once a month, contributes a sound collage, “The Aural Border,” a splice of Mexican pop and electronic music with bits of radio and Perry Como singing a creamy version of “South of the Border.”

In his catalog essay, Kun writes that the 1990s saw the greatest militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border since the creation of the border in 1848. (The main border surveillance station, the headquarters of U. S. Customs Service Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence, is based in Riverside.) At the same time, trade agreements have made the Mexican side of the border a haven for the maquiladoras, the manufacturing plants of international companies, seeking cheap labor.

For Rapp, Duffy’s works help “to anchor the show in some of that history.” His prints and paintings use images from north and south of the border--from a Coca-Cola bottle to a crucifix, from the Marlboro man to homeless people--with all the implications of power and oppression those juxtapositions create.

One of the artist’s favorite images, appearing in several works, is adapted from a road sign on U.S. freeways near the border--a depiction of a family (father, mother and child) holding hands and fleeing, meant to warn drivers of pedestrians--illegal immigrants--running across the highway. For Duffy, it has other meanings as well. “It could be me, it could be my family running for a better life in their own world,” says Duffy, a Chicano born in Los Angeles County and now living in Orange County.

As someone concerned with current events, he addresses what he perceives as ongoing racism that started with the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in the Western Hemisphere. In “Curtain Raiser” (1997), a Border Patrol car, driven by Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, has three Native Americans in the back seat. The car’s hood ornament is a conquistador, his sword point emitting a pool of blood.

In the foreground, a snarling jaguar threatens to leap off the canvas. “That’s my alter ego, in defiance,” Duffy says. The shadows of the road-sign running family are superimposed across the jaguar’s body, while a green card, dated 1492, the year of Columbus’ landing in the New World, is on the ground.

Meanwhile, multimedia artist Torres sees borderland mixings in a comical, if surreal, light in his videos and sculpture. “Alien Toy,” from 1997, is an eight-minute video collage that features a customized pickup truck, which flips off its top and sides and spins them around (an actual truck made by San Ysidro car customizer Salvador Munoz), interspersed with pictures of E.T.-like aliens and Border Patrol logos.

Newly completed are “Transgenic Crops”--a sculpture of mutant ears of corn--and “Esoteric Buddha in Secondary Inspection,” which is a video showing toys and dolls taken apart and coming together in new configurations, as well as a sculpture of a composite creature watching the video.

Cardona presents two different sets of photographs to show his version of the border story. One set, in glowing color, shows the clean and orderly employees and interiors of the offices and factory floors of several maquiladoras. Here, suited businessmen gather and give a comradely smile for a group photo; there, women workers tend their assembly work. Indeed, Cardona was allowed in because he was hired to do commercial photography for the companies.

Says Rapp, “The story is that he would take a picture and quickly turn and take an unofficial photograph, and [these are] the result of that.”

The other set, in gritty black-and-white, shows the ongoing search for some of the 260 women who have disappeared from Juarez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, since 1993. Some worked for the maquiladoras, and conspiracy theories abound, says Rapp--for example, that the local police may be involved or that some Texan is sneaking across the border to kill these women.

What is clear from the two sets of photographs, however, is the contrast between the spick-and-span workplace and the lives of the workers.

The black-and-white shots document the ramshackle housing that the workers return to at night, and the grieving friends and relatives of the missing. One shows a woman walking the desert in search of her daughter’s body and carrying a 11/2-liter bottle of water for her day’s trek; another is a close-up of half a dozen grieving women, the sisters and friends of another missing woman, Sagrario Gonzalez.

Venegas’ photographs, by contrast, focus on the domestic lives of affluent Latinos who live in Tijuana and San Diego--it’s a cushy float through New Year’s celebrations, birthday parties, white-carpeted houses and children’s rooms stocked with toys.

While the subjects are respectfully treated, Rapp senses “an ambivalence” in these pictures.

Venegas, reached by phone in San Diego on her way to Tijuana, confirms this. Born in Long Beach, she grew up in Tijuana, then moved to New York City in 1998 to study photography at the International Center of Photography. She returns to the San Diego-Tijuana border area two or three times a year to visit and take pictures.

“The title of my series ‘The Most Beautiful Brides of Baja, California,’” she explains, “is taken from the words at the entrance of my father’s studio--’through this door come the most beautiful brides of Baja.’” Venegas’ father is a noted professional wedding photographer.

She says the series is a reaction to her father’s commercial work. “I’m trying to challenge it somehow,” she adds.

“The image he used to give us was always based on what other people thought, very superficial--he wanted to pretend that life was like his pictures. He was selling the perfect moment of a marriage--the wedding day.”

Venegas doesn’t have any wedding photos among the two dozen displayed at UC Riverside, but many are celebratory. In one of a lively dinner party, svelte young women are dressed in strapless gowns and handsome young men suited up in fashionable black, with everyone chatting up someone else. In “Briana and Barbie” a Tijuana youngster shows off her blond, blue-eyed Barbie, proudly holding it up against her shoulder.

“We’re trained to become Barbie,” Venegas says. “Yes, yes especially the girls in Tijuana--we’re very close to the United States and our models are American models. There’s this thing where all the girls have long glossy hair and some of them even make their hair blond.”

She admits she has her own fascination for this sleek, put-together look the women in her photographs have.

“I love the soap opera look,” she says.

Then adds quickly, “Of course, I don’t want to live it!”

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“LINES OF SIGHT: VIEWS OF THE U.S./MEXICAN BORDER,” Sweeney Art Gallery, UC Riverside, 3701 Canyon Crest Drive, Riverside. Dates: Ends May 12. Wednesdays-Fridays, 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, noon-4 p.m. Admission: Free. Phone: (909) 787-3755.

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Scarlet Cheng is a frequent contributor to Calendar.