Just then, a merry burst of norteño music blasts out of a nearby store. Within an instant, the middle-aged man sitting a few tables over rises to his feet. He is wearing a black shirt featuring dollar bills cascading over a rooster outlined in glitter. EL DINERO NO HACE AL GALLO, it says: Money doesn’t make the cock. Keeping time to the syncopated beats, he swivels his hips and claps his hands. Three teenage girls holding fistfuls of balloons stop to watch. Smiling to himself, the man lifts his face and pumps his arms as he struts about in circles. More passersby pause to watch in amusement. Across the street, a young man wearing a red leather jacket and sneakers joins the dance too. The music puts pep into everybody’s step as they cross the bridge into what used to be the same nation.
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, Susan and I ride the aptly named Military Highway out of Brownsville, searching for more wall. It is not a contiguous structure: throughout the 1,954-mile border, the wall starts and stops without any perceivable pattern. Its height varies from place to place too, as does its price tag. The 18-foot wall that soars above the 3,500-foot peak of Otay Mountain in San Diego cost approximately $16 million a mile, while the 9-foot wall at the Tecate port of entry ran about $4 million. The “floating fence” that cuts across the dunes of Yuma, Arizona, can be mechanically lifted and repositioned whenever the sand starts to bury it. Some parts of the wall have been fashioned out of landing plates left over from the Vietnam War; others consist of 6-foot Normandy-style “X”-crosses that deter only vehicles. One wall resembles a gate from a nineteenth-century insane asylum, complete with terrifyingly large bolts and locks.
Those, at least, are the images captured in French photographer Maurice Sherif’s 2012 book, The American Wall. He started stalking the wall from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico in 2006, shooting sections at midday with a large-format camera. Yet the ninety-six black-and-white images that appear in his double-volume art book are already obsolete, he told me over the phone. Many stretches of the wall are being torn down and replaced by a construction that is taller and more uniform in structure. “Psychologically, when you have one wall that is all the same, it has a real personality. It is much more intimidating,” he explained.
Intimidating isn’t how I would describe what I’ve seen thus far, but then—this journey has just begun. I am about to ask Susan’s thoughts on the matter when she thrusts out her forefinger. “There it is!” she calls out.
I pull into a gravel thoroughfare across the street from a Valley Fireworks stand boasting BUY 1 GET 5 FREE! We climb up the hill where a sweep of wall begins, and I try to view it through a solely aesthetic lens. Granted, I am neither a visual artist nor an architect, but using the other walls this world has erected as points of comparison, it seems we got a boring one here in Texas. It is not austere, like the Berlin Wall, or imposing, like the Great Wall, or frightening, like the West Bank Wall. It isn’t even big (like everything else in this state). It is just a row of scalable pylons, rusting stupidly in the sun.
“So, uh, where is Mexico?” I ask Susan.
We gaze into the vibrant green valley that stretches out before us, but the Rio Grande is nowhere in sight. According to the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo—the 1848 treatise that ended the Mexican War and let the United States buy large portions of present-day California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming for $15 million—the Rio Grande is the official borderline between Texas and Mexico. But because the river wends and floods, construction crews had to build the wall up to several miles away from it, cutting off scores of ranchers and farmers from their property and creating the seemingly nationless land before us. Not three minutes have passed when a Border Patrol vehicle rolls up and an agent sticks his head out. We ask which way to Mexico.
“The river is up ahead, but you shouldn’t go down there,” he warns. “It’s dangerous. Anything can happen.”
“Oh, but you’ll protect us,” Susan says with a smile.
He half-grins back. About thirty years old, he is your classic buzz-cut, boots-shined, yes-sir, no-ma’am agent. I ask if he’ll give us a lift to the river. He shakes his head no and moves on.
Maybe five miles down the road, we see another section near a cornfield and park. As we approach on foot, Susan notices a box perched on a steel post. Assuming it is a camera, we wave. Sixty seconds later, a Border Patrol vehicle appears in the distance, dragging half a dozen tires behind it. Susan explains they are combing the dirt road so they can better see footprints. Thick dust billows behind the vehicle—so much that, once the driver determines we are gringas with notebooks rather than smugglers with backpacks, he turns around and retreats in the opposite direction. A second vehicle arrives minutes later.
“Just don’t go south of the levee,” the agent says after hearing our spiel. “It’s quiet during the day, but at night, there’s a lot of activity.”
“Does the wall help?” I ask.
“It’s a good filter, so we know where they go through,” he says. “But if there’s a will, there’s a way. Nothing is ever going to stop them from coming. The wall just filters them through.”
On our walk back to the car, Susan notices shriveled corncobs on the side of the dirt road. Upon closer inspection, we see they have been neatly eaten and discarded. A noticeable trail has been pressed through the cornfield, and when we step into it, we see a flip-flop. As Susan focuses her lens, I realize we are surrounded by iron and green. The mesquite that borders the cornfield is so tall and thick, it has fused a barricade of its own. Now that the Border Patrol has departed, we are all alone. For the second time in two days, I feel ill at ease, and the only reason I can fathom is that I am standing in the shadows of walls.
I think back to my phone conversation with Sherif. Not one of The American Wall’s pictures has a human being inside its frame. When I asked why, he replied, “When I was on the Mexican side, I heard people living. When I was on the American side, I heard only silence. Not the silence of contemplation, but the silence of alienation, the silence of division, the silence of isolationism.”
I look again around the lonesome field before continuing on to the car. Susan exposes a final image before following.
AMONG THE MANY ARTISTS who have answered the wall’s siren call is photographer Stefan Falke, who grew up fewer than 250 miles away from the Berlin Wall (and partied atop it soon after its fall). He was astonished when the United States started expanding its own wall. In 2008, he flew to Tijuana to see it, right when the city was besieged by narco-violence. Though he couldn’t have asked for a flashier news story, he ultimately decided to turn his camera lens elsewhere. “When we only read and see the violent side of places for ten years, we lose the value of the people who live there,” he told me during a Skype interview. “Crime stories, those represent the problem. I wanted to work on the solution.”
He wound up making portraits of the artists of the borderlands: painters, sculptors, musicians, writers, performance artists, and even a few curators. Then he built a website, www.borderartists.com, to feature them all—180 at last count—in an attempt to connect the border with itself. “People need a way to express themselves when life gets difficult, and art expresses hope. It takes us out of the current situation, even if it’s just for a second,” he said.
Yet only a small percentage of the artists Falke has met—maybe one-third, he guessed—overtly engage with the border in their work. “The younger ones in particular refuse to buy into it,” he said.
Mark has noticed this at his gallery in Brownsville, too. “I try to find artists who are political, but it is as rare as hen’s teeth,” he told me the night before we parted.
He could name only a handful of Texas artists who infuse border politics into their work. There’s Angel Cabrales, an El Pasoan sculptor who satirizes the border’s militarization by building arsenals of personal drones and Patriot missile launchers and staging performances at the wall. The Edinburg artist Paul Valadez designed certificates of achievement for border crossers for
one of Mark’s “Art against the Wall” exhibitions. David Freeman of McAllen has a piñata series that includes not only Border Patrol agents but immigrants in inner tubes, drones, a stretch of wall, and La Virgen de Guadalupe as well. San Antonian Bill FitzGibbons’s recent opening at the International Museum of Art and Science starred modern dancers from McAllen and Reynosa performing together at a replica of the border wall decorated with flashing LED lights and ladders.
Mark ticked off a few more examples before sighing. “But everyone else might as well be painting in Denton. They just take it for granted, the stories.”
Hardly any of the artists he mentioned were women. When I pointed this out, Susan called the border a gendered space. “Who inhabits it?” she asks. “The Border Patrol, and they are largely male. The people who cross, and they are largely male. In my work here, I have been chased by helicopters. I have had guns pointed at me. It’s an intimidating place to be. A woman’s body is a form of protest out here.”
Since the most celebrated artist of the borderlands is my good friend Santa Barraza, I arrange a meeting in Kingsville to ask her opinion. She arrives at our favorite diner, El Tepatio, wearing a huipile over jeans. We order tacos and, after toasting tall glasses of horchata, I ask what recurring themes she notices in her students’ work. As a professor at Texas A&M Kingsville (TAMUK), she has taught an entire generation of artists.
“A lot of their art is very personal,” she says, sketching designs in her refried beans with a tortilla chip. “It’s about sex, or it’s about the men in their lives. Art now is very process-based and not very idea-based. We have been trained to produce art that negates our own culture.”
“How so?”
“We’re taught to use complementary colors to subdue colors so they are not too bright. But in Mexican culture, we love color.”
Color is certainly her own signature. Her pallet includes peacock greens, flamboyant purples, and electric yellows swirled into life-size portraits, landscapes, legends, dreams, and codices. But while she is internationally acclaimed for memorializing the icons of the borderlands, she has steered clear of its newest one.
“I don’t even agree with the wall,” she says. “It shouldn’t even be there, which is maybe why I don’t deal with it in my work.”
As someone who has been chronicling the borderlands for years but has only now dragged herself over to see the 670-mile wall barreling through it, I can relate to this sentiment. For many a Chicana/o artist, to include the wall in our work is to acknowledge that our government has spent upward of $3 billion dividing our community. Some of us haven’t mustered the heart to do that yet.
MARK ESPECIALLY RECOMMENDED MEETING the oil painter Rigoberto A. Gonzalez, so I catch his exhibit at TAMUK before leaving Kingsville. Walking inside the spotlit space, my eyes fall first on a human head the dimensions of my own, hung at eye level. It appears to belong to a monk wearing a cloak, though the rest of his body is hidden. His large, bulging eyes cast skyward, as if beseeching grace. As I draw closer, however, I see the thin trickle of red oozing from his neckline. A news story springs to mind of the night La Familia bowled heads onto the dance floor of a discotheque. This head hanging before me is not of a monk at all but of a narco-victim freshly rolled out of a gunnysack.
Backing away from the image, I confront On the 17th of February of 2009 in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico—a three-paneled tableau that occupies the bulk of one wall. A crowd of life-size Mexicans gather around a mother who has collapsed to her knees in grief as her son sprawls across a street corner, a semiautomatic assault rifle at his feet. Two people hold up the mother’s arms so that she forms a Pietà-like cross above him. An apostolic dozen federales mill about in riot gear as the terrorized crowd gazes on. Every face tilts in a different direction except for those of a federale and a matronly woman, both of whom stare at a fixed spot in the distance with such wide-eyed horror that I can’t help but glance over my own shoulder—where more paintings of severed heads await.
Just then, the door swings open and Jesus de la Rosa, the curator of the exhibit and a friend of Rigoberto’s, blazes in.
“That’s me,” he says, nodding at a massive painting of six thugs caught in the limb-strewn act of kidnapping a man and woman on a dark city street. A car is approaching with its high beams on, but I sense it isn’t coming to help.
“You see how he’s covering my mouth?” he asks, pointing at the man forcing his burly replica into submission. “That’s how it has felt all of these years, like I’ve had to keep my mouth shut.”
Jesus grew up in Nuevo Progreso and for many years ran an art gallery there—until the drug war scared away the tourists. Now he teaches studio art with Santa Barraza at TAMUK. Jesus rarely visits his family in Mexico and refuses to let his children go. “It’s all about being at the wrong place at the wrong time,” he says, stroking his beard. “My father’s cousin was taken about two years ago. He was in the drug business. He said, ‘Mom, they are going to come for me,’ and that was it.”
He shows me more of Rigoberto’s work, each canvas increasingly daunting. A federale in combat boots brandishes the decapitated head of a naked woman, à la Cellini’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa. La Llorona, the wailing ghost-woman of Mexican folklore, navigates a river with her children. A tattooed punk clenches a knife and grins as he crouches beneath a man whose pants puddle about his ankles. Rigoberto works in the style of seventeenth-century Baroque painters like Caravaggio, casting gruesome realism into an almost celestial light. Many paintings include at least one figure who stares directly at the viewer. When I point this out, Jesus nods. “That is Rigo’s way of saying you are a part of what is happening, as much as you think you are not involved. You smoke one joint a week thinking you’re not hurting anything, but you don’t think about how it got into your hands. There are people who are enslaved to grow it, people who transport it, people who sell it.”
His voice trails off as we stare at the images surrounding us. “It is all connected.”
THE RIO GRANDE VALLEY used to seem like such a pastoral place—cowboys and snowbirds; citrus groves and taquito stands. Tíos hovering over barbecue pits, drinking Corona, while little primos ran around barefoot and tías gossiped in the kitchen. But as I drive the 100-plus miles back to the border, the windswept roads feel almost haunted.
Before rejoining Susan at the wall, I cut through the town of Harlingen, passing cinder block buildings adorned with signs reading GARZA TORTILLAS, SALINAS PHARMACY, and ROBLES LAW FIRM. A side street leads me through a labyrinth of pawnshops to the office of the local psychic. HELP WITH ALL PROBLEMS THROUGH THE POWER OF PRAYER says the sign above the barred window. CARD READING/REUNITE LOVERS: 956–264–8402. Though it’s tempting, I knock instead on the door labeled K&S POOLS & SUPPLY.
The door cracks open and Rigoberto A. Gonzalez peeks out. Given the macabre content of his artwork, I was half-expecting a tormented poet-type, turtlenecked and bedraggled. But no. His top half is professorial. He wears an Ivy cap, rimless glasses, and a neatly trimmed goatee. His bottom half is pure lounge: basketball shorts and slip-ons. He steps to the side to allow my passage, then bolts the door behind me.
“This place used to be a liquor store,” he explains, “so I have to keep it locked. People are always dropping by asking for some.”
The walls of his studio are white, the bookcases royal blue. Fat volumes of Rembrandt and El Greco crest the highest shelves, while cattle skulls occupy the lower ones. Images of the Baroque masters plaster the back wall. A jar of biscotti decks the counter. My eyes are drawn to an especially large canvas of a man hanging upside-down in the crucifix position—feet tied, arms at ninety degrees—wearing only red briefs against a black backdrop. Another news story flashes across my mind, of narcos throwing their victims off an overpass.
Rigoberto and I are the same age and grew up just 150 miles apart, he in the city of Reynosa. But while he also remembers this region being “peaceful and boring” when we were kids, he
absorbed narco culture early on.
“As a child I would play with little Hot Wheels cars, and I’d put grass in the wheels because I heard that’s how drugs were smuggled,” he says with a chuckle. “I don’t think I ever wanted to do it, but you dream about it, about the aura of power. I did not go into it directly, but if you look at my paintings, in a way I am involved.”
He walks over to a shelf and pulls down a rifle I somehow overlooked. “This is part of my background, the culture I grew up in. Reynosa always had that aura of the Wild West, the guys with the entourage and their weapons. What is happening now is a natural evolution of that cultural mentality. The border always had that darkness to it.”
“Then why does so little art reflect it?” I ask.
“The One Percent some years back, during the Cold War, realized art was a tool to be used against the people in power, so they started funding art that was nonpolitical,” he says, adjusting his glasses. “That’s why, if you put an agenda in your work, it is seen as not-art. There is no one addressing social themes today because they don’t want us to. People usually paint figures of themselves or of a nude, not really about this greater tragedy we are seeing right now.”
Rigoberto is so resolute in his contemplation of tragedy, his work has met with some local resistance. One museum director told him he’d need to create an entirely new body of work in order to be shown there, lest they “get in trouble.” He has had an easier time exhibiting work in South Dakota than here in South Texas.
“There has been reluctance because of the negativity of my stories, not to mention the proximity,” he says. “Yet you can’t suppress it. My work is about starting a dialogue and maybe about starting the healing process. Because it’s a holocaust out there.”
Recently Rigoberto has begun a new series of landscapes featuring the border wall and the people who dare cross it. He hands me a pencil sketch of the river known as the Rio Grande by its northern inhabitants and as the Río Bravo by its southern, snaking through a bend. While not as grisly as his earlier work, this series won’t necessarily be less violent. “I want to show a storm over the border,” he says.
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