LxsDos: Ingenious + Indigenous
A Mexican-American lawyer and human rights activist examines symbolism and meaning in two works of public art that reflect the struggles of life and maleffects of migration policies on the borderlands.
I know (now) that protests are not the most effective ways to convince those in power to, as my mom would say, hacer conciencia (be conscientious, think of others, change).
To the contrary, protests—whether they are in the form of a march, press conference, public comments, social media, or a mural in the middle of the Rio Grande’s embankment or in our barrios—are often seen by those in power as a reason to double-down.
No.
The beauty of protests lies in their ability to change the way people see themselves, their struggles, their worth, and their own power.
The work of LxsDos, protests injustice by placing the working class people of our border at the center, celebrating them as ingenious protagonists. The ingenuity of the people, el pueblo, is manifested in their ability to survive harsh working conditions and inhumane and hypocritical immigration policies and practices—all laden with the belief that the working class people of/at our border are exploitable, dispensable and easily replaceable. The work of LxsDos defies these beliefs.
The protagonists featured in LxsDos’ murals are both ingenious and boldly indigenous. They have beautiful dark, brown skin both from their indigenous and mestizo ancestry and from working under the relentless sun. Their indigenous features and stoic defiance exude this truth: their very existence is an act of resistance.
There is no denying that placing Black, Brown, and Yellow skin on a beautiful, “larger than life” art piece is a form of protest, particularly now and particularly along the Mexico/Texas border. The two LxsDos murals that I will be referring to are “Operation Hold the Line” and “Pasele, Pasele“.
Operation Hold the Line
The Operation Hold the Line is a mural of a woman laying down on her side, cradling a child. Her skin is the color of the earth and her body stretches along both sides of the border. She is the desert, the desert is she. She is covered by inhumane immigration policies dating back to 1993, when Customs and Border Patrol (CPB) implemented Operation Hold the Line. Her shirt shows the desert at its most fertile when its vegetation can shield both migrants and Border Patrol agents. Her pants show a caravan of families and also skulls, because the desert has become a shallow graveyard for thousands of immigrants who have not survived the dangerous journey to the “American Dream.”
The Border Patrol’s white and green suburban is flanked by a CBP agent wearing a green uniform and a jaguar mask, symbolizing the agent’s own Latinx/immigrant ancestry and duality. Indeed, along the southern U.S. border and certainly in El Paso, federal law enforcement is one of the best paying employment opportunities for Latinx youth, many of whom come from working class families, speak some Spanish, and accept the nickname of “Dream Crushers.”
Recruitment starts early in the law enforcement classes taught in over 900 high schools in Texas. Three of these schools are in El Paso County and featured in the documentary “At the ready”, directed by Maisie Crow. Operation Hold the Line was established in 1993 in El Paso by then Sector Chief Sylvestre Reyes, a native El Pasoan of Mexican descent. Reyes ordered his officers to form a human and vehicle blockade along the border, placing four hundred agents and vehicles every 100 yards from one side of El Paso to the other. Apprehensions dropped by 72%, prompting the federal government to invest and focus on “intercepting and preventing illegal entries at the border” instead of finding and deporting immigrants who had already crossed the border. As the surveillance and militarization of the U.S.- Mexico border grew, so did the number of immigrants who died from drowning, heat exhaustion, hypothermia, and injuries in the dangerous terrain into which they were pushed as they tried to avoid CBP. From 1998 to 2022, more than 8,000 immigrants died along the U.S. Mexico border.
As if this wasn’t enough, in March of 2021, Texas State Governor Greg Abbott launched Operation Lone Star, using over $4 billion in state funds and the Department of Public Safety and Texas National Guard to arrest and detain immigrants, most of them asylum seekers from Venezuela, on trespassing charges. In July 2023, Governor Abbott ordered the placement of orange river buoys with serrated saw blades on the Rio Grande and concertina wire to prevent immigrants from reaching U.S. soil to surrender to CBP agents as part of the asylum process.
Texas, the state with the highest number and percentage of Hispanics in the construction industry (61 percent), has just prohibited local rules that mandated water breaks for construction – this during the hottest summer on record. Again, for those in power, BIPOC are disposable whether they are on their way here or on the job.
Meanwhile, across the border in Cd. Juarez, Central and South American immigrants struggle to survive harassment by the cartels and law enforcement. On March 27, 2023, forty immigrants died in a fire at a federal detention center while law enforcement officers did nothing to save them. Prior to the fire, the mayor of Juarez had asked the public to stop giving the migrants food and money so that they would be motivated to work and ordered police to arrest the migrants.
While these efforts have been aimed at pushing immigrants south, the U.S. has failed to address what is pushing immigrants north. As Ramon Cardenas explains, “This mural also makes reference to the effects of imperialism—meaning the effects of decades of US foreign policies, sanctions and interventions in Latin America and the Global South in favor of a free economy—that are showing up at our door in the form of caravans of hundreds of thousands of people who have been forced to leave their homes due to extreme poverty, climate change, corrupt governments, drug and human trafficking.”
Pásele, Pásele
This mural is based on a vendor who used to sell her merchandise on the Santa Fe International Bridge. She and other vendors used to benefit from the long passenger vehicle lines heading north into El Paso at the various ports of entry. LxsDos interviewed her and other street vendors who have recently been displaced from the bridge by Mexican officials and are only allowed to sell further south on Avenida Juárez, making them more vulnerable to gang and cartel quotas, and being mugged because they rely on a cash economy. In addition, such restrictions make it harder to earn a living as it pushes them away from buyers.
The street vendors are just like any other person who isn’t born into a trust fund and has to work—they hope their work can provide for the “now” and the “later.”
The “now” probably consists of having: a consistent schedule and paycheck; work and life balance; the ability to afford a safe and healthy home, reliable transportation, daycare, healthcare, food, and recreation; access to regular bathroom and lunch breaks; little to no exposure to work hazards, like pollution and close proximity to vehicles, harassment, cartel threats. The “later” probably consists of having: the ability to retire at a reasonable age; a retirement or a pension plan; a home that is paid off; children who have better opportunities than you did; a body that hasn’t been completely broken by your work. Street vendors in Cd. Juarez lack all of these things and yet, rather than facilitate what is honest, hard work, the government has chosen to make their work even harder.
Despite that, the vendors still muster the enthusiasm required to deal with sales and constant rejection. Their ingenuity is showcased in the ways their bodies function as a mobile store, piling for instance, hats on top of hats on top of their heads. The source of this resilience is tucked away in the pockets of the woman’s shirt in the form of people—her people —including those yet to be born, those who depend on her to survive, and her ancestors, symbolized by the indigenous masks she carries.
Veronica “Vero” Carbajal is a fourth generation fronteriza raised in both El Paso and Cd. Juárez. She has devoted her life to social justice. As a community lawyer for 19 years she has represented hundreds of low-income Texans who have been displaced by or threatened by displacement for public projects; and those impacted by pollution, real estate fraud.
Ramon Cardenas is the inaugural Assistant Curator of Practice at the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center of the Visual Arts at the The University of Texas at El Paso. He is a Filipino-American curator, visual artist, muralist, and printmaker, and is one half of the artistic collaboration LxsDos, with his wife Christian Pardo Cardenas.
