Art Seeks to Re-Create Border-Crossing Fears

It’s not every art exhibit that has the patrons become part of a simulation, especially a simulation of trepidation.

San Diego artists Richard Lou, 32, and Robert Sanchez, 38, want to convey the vulnerability that they say afflicts every undocumented worker crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

Their exhibit--called installation art because the gallery is part of the work--opened last week at Palomar College in San Marcos. Entitled “Suspended Text: A Border Matrix,” it invites gallery patrons to become part of the artwork by actually lying on a cart on their backs and moving within the exhibit.

Most of the dimly lit room is covered by a web of wire suspended three feet above the ground. Visitors take to the carts and ride underneath the wire, reading articles and letters to the editor from local newspapers--which are suspended by the wire--dealing with the border and undocumented workers.

On one end of the exhibit, visitors can look down at those traveling beneath the wires on their backs, just as, say the artists, the Border Patrol and others look down at migrants.

Lou and Sanchez hope to give gallery visitors a sense of the experience of crossing the border and ask them to question newspapers as a source of information on border issues.

“People have to be aware of who our information and image makers are in this society and they have to stop being passive as far as consuming information and images,” Sanchez said.

Sanchez and Lou, both teachers at San Diego Mesa College, feel that the San Diego media have portrayed the undocumented worker not as a person, but as a statistic with no human characteristics.

They charge that reporters often fail to interview undocumented workers when writing stories about them, and pictures of undocumented workers often do not have captions which give their names, unless they have been accused of a crime.

Three of the gallery’s walls are dominated by identical enlarged silhouettes of a group of migrants on the border. The original picture was used in a series of articles by a local newspaper.

The use of the silhouettes by the newspaper “is just like propping them out in space or putting them in the landscape,” Sanchez said. “It’s very depersonalized in terms of portraying a group of human beings who are just as complex and just as individualized as any others.”

“It’s really scary to think that the public is making long-lasting decisions based just on two points of view (the Copley Newspaper Co. and the Los Angeles Times),” said Lou, who was born in San Diego and received his master of fine arts degree from Clemson University in South Carolina.

“They reflect the views of the people who have the most to gain,” Lou said, referring to the “corporate and industrial people.”

“This show is not about aesthetic issues, although we are trained as artists and use aesthetics as a vehicle. We look at this as being about our family and culture,” Lou said.

Lou said people in the U.S. need to understand that there is an inevitable link between the economic and social well-being of Mexico and that of Southern California.

“We want people to start becoming part of the debate and dialogue between the U.S. and Mexico because they have something at stake and they need to realize this,” Lou said.

Sanchez, who did graduate work at Cornell University and the University of New Mexico, recently finished an exhibit at the University of Tecate.

“We feel personally obligated to give back to our culture through our art,” Sanchez said.

Aside from a common heritage and a desire to go beyond art for art’s sake, Lou and Sanchez share a sense of displacement from their own Latino culture.

Sanchez, who was born in Austin, Tex., spent most of his pre-high school life moving from Navy town to Navy town with his sailor father.

“I felt more separated than other Chicanos that grew up on the West Coast or the Southwest,” Sanchez said.

The more time he spent away from his hometown, the more alienated from the Latino culture he felt, Sanchez said.

“I always felt so good about being back there when we visited, and being more in touch with my own language. . . . There was always a sense of desire of wanting to get back in touch with that,” Sanchez said.

Lou, whose father is Chinese and mother is Latino, lived in Tijuana and attended Harborside Elementary school in Chula Vista, and felt disenfranchised on both sides of the border.

“The sense of never really fitting in was a slight source of alienation,” Lou said.

“Being in Mexico, it was always a sort of ‘Who is this? He doesn’t look quite the same.’ And, of course, on the other side there was an automatic sense of rejection,” Lou said.

The branding of undocumented workers as “criminals” by those who support activities such as Light Up the Border “really legitimizes the horrible things that we are capable of doing to a human being,” Lou said.

While San Diego artists have used their works to address issues of the border for many years, this is the first time such an exhibit has been shown at a gallery in North County.

Louise Kirtland Boehm, director of the Boehm Gallery at Palomar College, said the lack of gallery space has been the primary barrier to artists wanting to show their work in North County.

“I wouldn’t say that the community hasn’t been receptive to this kind of art. It’s just that there really aren’t the galleries available” and it has taken this long for an opening to become available at Palomar College, Boehm said.