Power and Place in the Work of Border Artists
A borderlands historian reflects on the work of local artists to understand how their art activates remembrance in a place where the educational system, media, popular culture, and the political system work vigorously to suppress memories and history.
While memory creates a place for the past to exist, border artists use the past to challenge and understand the present. Their art and its ability to activate memory is made even more powerful through the coming together of visual images within a place with deep historical and contemporary meanings. The U.S.-Mexico border is more than a space, more than a geographical location. It is a place with layers of history and with a multitude of meanings.
The U.S.-Mexico border has long been a lightning rod for controversy around issues of identity, national sovereignty, migration, and border security. Although El Paso and Ciudad Juárez share history, familial ties, culture, and economics, the border is a contested region. La frontera of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez is more than a space where the two nations come together. It is a space with extraordinary meaning; it is a place that is beloved by some and feared by others. It is a place that politicians use to draw voters. It is home to over 2.7 million people, the second largest metroplex along the U.S.-Mexico border. And, as importantly, la frontera is a place of art and creativity.
A border wall divides the two cities. Driving along the Border Highway, one can see Border Patrol vehicles and, more recently, State Police and National Guard. The Texas governor orders increasing lengths of barbed wire to be placed along the Rio Grande, which divides the two nations. The atmosphere of militarization is palpable. The power of these artists’ work is rooted in the ways in which they challenge this process of dehumanization, to create new connections over time, and to help us look to the future.
The significance of art and place made itself evident to me one morning in February 2023, when I noticed a new mural going up as I drove into the Segundo Barrio in El Paso, Texas, one of the most historic Mexican immigrant neighborhoods in the United States. There on the corner of S. Stanton and E. 3rd Street on the walls of a tenement building was an image I was familiar with—a bracero being sprayed in the face with DDT, a pesticide banned by the United States in 1972 for its harmful effects on humans and animals. The mural by Victor “Mask” Casas evokes the little-known history of the millions of men, braceros, recruited by the United States as temporary laborers between 1942 and 1964. The original image of the man sprayed with DDT, captured in 1956 by documentary photographer Leonard Nadel, speaks to the humiliation endured by the men who were told to strip down, wait in line, and suffer the degrading inspection process to enter the United States. To the right of the bracero is the image of stereotypical “pioneers.” A white man holds his rifle in front of him as he stares into the distance while a woman, presumably his wife, holds on to his arm. In the mural, we see a glimpse of a man on horseback. This scene, based on a well-known 1938 painting by Tom C. Lea III, comes from a mural in the El Paso Federal Courthouse, titled “Pass of the North.” Above the Lea mural is a quote that reads “O Pass of the North/ Now the Old Giants are Gone/ We Little Men Live Where Heroes/ Once Walked the Inviolate Earth.”
What happens when Casas combines images from the Nadel photos with the Lea painting? What even deeper meaning does the mural embody through its location on the exterior walls of a historic tenement? We discover an ancestral history that has been silenced over the last two centuries. The history of settler colonialism, as represented by Lea’s pioneers, and of oppression and exploitation of Mexican workers, as documented by Nadel, come together in Casas’ mural to conjure memories, and suggest a relationship between the two historical periods. Its location on a tenement building in the Segundo Barrio creates yet another connection. Generations of Mexican immigrants have created their lives in that barrio, raising families, working to build the economy of El Paso, and like the braceros, working hard, willing to make sacrifices para sacar sus familias pa’ delante.
On the U.S. side of the U.S.-Mexican border, racist and discriminatory educational policies have invisibilized Mexican and Mexican American history. According to the master narrative, the most touted history of El Paso del Norte dates only to the early 19th century when white men entered northern Mexico in search of opportunity followed by a period of the “Old West” featuring gunslingers. There are references to Spanish conquistadores throughout the city, of course, but the millennia-long history of Indigenous people and the centuries of settlement by Mexicans are cast aside.
Casas’ mural challenges this narrative by focusing instead on Mexican men crossing the border into the United States in the mid-20th century in order to work. The Bracero Program (1942-1964), the largest movement of temporary workers into the United States in U.S. history, is not taught in K-12 and only superficially mentioned in higher education classes. Yet, the image of the “pioneer” is all too familiar, portrayed in art, textbooks, and popular culture. Casas’ mural confronts this exclusion, asking us to remember what happened after the arrival of the “pioneers” and to recollect the stories that are alive in our own families. By contextualizing the work of artists in relation to the U.S.-Mexico border, and in some cases, in specific locations in El Paso and Juárez, we can see the layers of meaning behind each work of art. It was seeing this mural go up in the Segundo with images that there so familiar but that I had never seen placed alongside each other that inspired this new way for me to understand the power of border art.
“I’d love for them to have the power to come back home.”
--Victor “Mask” Casas
Victor “Mask” Casas in a self-taught artist, an Iraq war vet, and a prolific muralist. He grew up in the Segundo Barrio. In 2021, Casas along with Marco Sánchez created the mural “Repatriate our Veterans,” on a busy street bordering the local military base, Fort Bliss. Having served three tours of Iraq over eight years, he says that the creating a mural that is both honoring the veterans who have been deported and is a call to action to bring them back “just hits home.” Casas continues, “I’d love for them to have the power to come back home. They served their country.” A 2021 documentary “American Exile” estimates that the United States has deported 94,000 veterans, many of them combat veterans who returned from war with physical and emotional wounds. It is the long-term effects of combat, such as PTSD, that often lead veterans to turn to drugs to cope. Deportation removes the possibility of receiving treatment from the VA. While violent offenses like murder have long been a reason for deportation, the Clinton Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 widened the scope of offenses and removed judicial discretion, leading to the government deporting veterans for a variety of offenses. The 2021 Biden executive order, Immigrant Military Members and Veterans Initiative, allowed some veterans to return, but there are still thousands of deported veterans in Mexico and their allies continue to fight to bring them home. “Repatriate our Veterans” makes a powerful statement, reinforced by its location long associated with the military and a street frequented by countless soldiers.
Another Casas mural, located in Sunland Park, New Mexico, just minutes from El Paso, portrays the migration of humans and animals, including butterflies, bats, and hummingbirds. Casas says, “To me, there's a clear message that it's very natural to live and migrate.” Indeed, human history is the history of migration. Casas painted the mural, created in honor of National Endangered Species Day in 2021, on the exterior wall of Carlos Bakery. It is compelling both in its message that migration is natural but also in its location in Sunland Park.
Sunland Park is a small border city located on the New Mexico-Chihuahua border at the foot of Mount Cristo Rey. Named after the 29-foot-tall limestone sculpture of Christ with his arms outstretched, the peak is part of the Juárez Mountains. It divides New Mexico from Chihuahua and represents a popular yet dangerous route for migrants crossing into the El Paso area. In 2021, the New York Times reported that two groups climb Mount Cristo Rey: faithful Catholics who each year make a pilgrimage to its summits and “migrants from around the globe trying to enter the United States undetected, for here there is no border wall.”
Ironically, on Memorial Day 2019, a “border wall” was built on private property near Sunland Park. A Go Fund me campaign for “We Build the Wall” raised $25 million for a wall that is a half mile long and cost $6-8 million to build. In 2020, prosecutors accused the organizers of taking thousands of dollars for their personal use. Of the four founders of this group, two pled guilty to wire fraud in 2022. One was convicted of wire fraud conspiracy, falsifying records, and conspiring to launder money. One was pardoned by then President Trump. The wall is not actually on the border and has no real function other than to remind people of Trump’s promise to build a wall. It is within that context of hope embodied by Christ with his arms outstretched and threats represented by the fake border wall, that Casas’ mural about migration exists.
The mural’s profound message—migration is natural—contrasts with the brutal reality that Sunland Park has seen increasing numbers of migrant deaths in recent years as it becomes more difficult to cross the border. In 2017, the federal government built a border wall in Sunland Park, making the act of crossing more difficult while at the same time, migrants wanting to cross the border are pushed into more dangerous terrain outside Sunland Park. With summers that are increasingly brutal with temperatures consistently above 100 degrees, the media reports migrant deaths weekly. Government policy, both federal and state, has pushed migrants from across the globe into crossing the border through this place in New Mexico. For example, Texas governor Greg Abbot has employed the National Guard in El Paso, following the Border Patrol’s long-executed “Prevention through Deterrence” policy that consciously seeks to push migrants into increasingly dangerous places. As a result, migrant deaths have increased greatly. In 2015, authorities reported two migrant deaths in New Mexico. In 2023, there were at least 109, mostly around Sunland Park. In the context of increasing violence against migrants in the area around Sunland Park, Casas’ work reminds us of the humanity of those coming to the border.
“Ser visibles es una forma de resistencia.”
--Perras Bravas
Perras Bravas, a women’s art collective founded in Ciudad Juárez in 2018, strives to make women’s experiences, feelings, and desires visible in urban public spaces. To be visible is to resist misogyny and violence against women. The identities of Perras Bravas are anonymous, and their numbers fluctuate, but their commitment to empowering women remains constant. They are dedicated to making visible “el arte de mujeres por y para mujeres en el espacio público.” Emerging after a gathering sponsored by their sister organization, Morras Pintando Muros, for over five years, the collective has offered workshops on muralism, graffiti, paste-up, and stenciling geared towards empowering women and girls.
The social and political context of their work is significant. In the early 2000s, Juárez gained international notoriety for the increasing numbers of femicides, with Amnesty International reporting 370 women and girls killed in Juárez and Ciudad Chihuahua between 1993 and 2005. In 2002, a group of women formed Ni Una Mas to bring international awareness of the killings and to call people to action against femicide. Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa A.C., an NGO founded in 2001 by mothers and friends of killed and disappeared young women, also fights to increase awareness despite the threats of violence, and even assassination attempts, against its co-founder. As reporter Denise Ahumada wrote in 2022, protests have not been enough. "Tomar las calles y alzar la voz para manifestarse en fechas o conmemoraciones ha sido insuficiente, por lo que el arte urbano, como el Paste Up, se ha convertido en una herramienta utilizada por colectivas como Bravas para hacer el reclamo presente y visible.” That is precisely what this collective of “morras artistas fronterizas” does by placing their consciously political work in public spaces. Using stencils, paste up, graffiti, and murals the collective frames their work as “interventions,” group actions intended to make a change.
In 2021, Perras Bravas facilitated a series of workshops that resulted in “Desérticas,” a mural featuring women’s faces amid desert plants. Both women and plants are survivors in a hostile environment. The mural was the creation of both the members of the collective and community participants in a series of workshops at La Promesa, located in the southwestern section of Juárez. La Promesa, also organized as an art collective and art space, works towards the prevention of domestic violence as well as creating jobs, and empowering women, youth, and children.
Working in this area of Juárez tells us a great deal about commitment of Perras Bravas to work with vulnerable populations. Along with the central part of the city, southwestern Juárez is known for its poverty and violence. Its residents describe living there with the lack of basic services, including electricity, water, garbage collection, pavement, and public transportation. Professor of urban planning María Teresa Vázquez at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez writes that the sale of permits to build homes in areas without adequate services has increased social problems, especially in southwest Juárez. Taking art outside of venues that are inaccessible to residents of areas like the southwestern part of the city, and furthermore, encouraging women to be the creators of their own art, Perras Bravas challenges the status quo, creating a new paradigm of visibility and power for women and girls in impoverished barrios.
In 2023, Perras Bravas hosted a paste up workshop to demand justice for 26-year-old Isabel Cabanillas de la Torre, an artist and women’s rights activist, who was murdered in 2020. Cabanillas’ friends reported her missing in January 2020 when she did not return home. She was found murdered, two gunshots in her body and next to her bicycle. Cabanillas was active with numerous groups, including Mesa de Mujeres, an organization working against domestic violence, and Hijas de su Maquilera Madre, an anti-capitalist women’s collective that works against femicide, forced disappearances, and trafficking. Harkening back to Perras Bravas’ Desérticas, the timeline created by Mesa de Mujeres is titled “Memoria en el Desierto.” While women often disappear in Juárez’s urban spaces, their bodies often appear in the desert. The desert in these cases becomes another place of multiple meanings. It is where lifeless bodies of kidnapped, tortured, and murdered women are hidden out of the view of urban crowds, but it is also a place of strong and resilient women. In a 2021 article for Diario de Juárez, journalist Hérika Martínez Prado summed up the theme of Desérticas as portraying “la fuerza de las mujeres que han resistido a lo largo de los años, floreciendo en un entorno hostil propio de un desierto.”
Cabanilla’s murder, a femicide, evoked protests in Juárez and Mexico City.In 2023, Perras Bravas reported on their Instagram account that they were part of a nighttime march honoring Cabanillas on the third anniversary of her murder. Accompanying the post is an image of a paste-up with the message, “Hay una herida abierta que no cierra. Sangramos rabia hasta que la justicia llegue.” In 2024, Perras Bravas continued their advocacy on behalf of the memory of Cabanillas, four years after her murder, participating in a commemorative bike ride, her beloved activity, and doing a paste-up in her memory. The “Paste Up x Isa” invited community members to paste the posters on walls during the event. The work is communal; it invites all women to participate in envisioning a new society that is neither misogynistic nor capitalistic.
“Who keeps our culture alive.”
--Marco Sánchez
Marco Sánchez is a prolific artist, working in printmaking, painting, and woodworking. Born in Ciudad Juárez and living in El Paso, he writes that his work “examines the nuances of life in this Binational region… developing a greater affinity for the region.”Sánchez is the grandson of artist Guillermo Cordero Enriquez, a Michoacan painter and printmaker. He recalls that he “wasn’t really interested in art…” until he stopped to visit his abuelito in 2007 during a visit to Zirahuén, Michoacan. “I hadn’t seen his studio or him actively working on a painting since I was five years old, when he moved from Juárez to Zirahuen. It ignited a curiosity in me to grab a paint brush and start messing around on canvas.” He does on to ask, “Who keeps our culture alive, outside the academia?” Sánchez concludes that, “It’s like our abuelitos, our aunts, our uncles, our family members. It starts with our elders. And trying to keep and maintain those roots.”
In 2024, Sánchez created the linocut, “Casualties from the Delusion of Theological Supremacy.” In it, we see a plane carrying a missile. On the ground below is a skeleton with an Israeli flag draped over its left arm. A child throws a rock at the plane. A dead man wearing a keffiyeh lays on the ground, pierced by a missile, while another missile with the Star of David is embedded in the ground near his head. A slice of watermelon is on the ground next to a skull with a stars-and-stripes hat. On the ground is written the message “Enough.” For those viewers who are versed in the Israeli genocidal actions against the Palestinians in Gaza, the imagery is clear. Enough with the murders of Palestinians.
It is reminiscent of Sánchez’s 2019 print, “Six Flags over Countless Bodies.” In this piece, we again see a dead body on the ground although this time it is huge in comparison to the other characters in the piece, like the 18th century Gulliver and the Lilliputians. Again, we see a flag although this time is the Texas flag, with its lone star. A helicopter hovers around the dead man’s feet. A group of three músicos witnesses the scene. In the lower left quadrant, a man on horse rides into the scene, his arm outstretched, pointing a gun in front of him. The two scenes are almost seven thousand miles apart yet Sánchez’s work points to the similarities between the two border regions. From national symbols like flags to the use of military imagery.
“I want to be a voice for the disappeared victims.”
--Nabil Gonzalez
Nabil Gonzalez grew up on the border in El Paso. Although her interest in art began during childhood, at 14, she became aware of the power of art and took her first art class. At 17, while visiting Ciudad Juárez, Gonzalez confronted a dangerous situation where she realized she could have become one of the disappeared women. In thinking about how to “be a voice” for the disappeared women, she concluded that art is “The only language that allows me to go beyond borders and raise questions among present day societies and encourage important conversations amongst ourselves.” Her work is grounded in memory, or put another way, in ensuring that the women are not forgotten. This includes having gathered over 400 names of who were disappeared and/or murdered between 2012 and 2016. As she writes in a 2021 artist statement, “Documenting, discussing, and revealing social issues in the border region is a part of my artistic process.”
Gonzalez’s piece, Desaparecidas, creates a poignant and profound space for us to remember missing women. We see three images. One shows a woman’s eye and eyebrow. It is upside down as if we are looking down at the woman lying on the ground with her feet away from us. Beneath is a brown circle with the woman’s name and age and year of disappearance: “Gladys Janeth Fierro. 13 años. 1993.” Finally, on the right side of the piece is another circle: “estudiante, secuestrada, torturada, violada, desaparecida, estrangulada.” Through the use of twelve words, we are told to remember this young girl’s life. She was disappeared in 1993, but we also understand that she was found because we learn she was tortured, raped, and strangled. Gladys is not simply a statistic or even just the victim of gender violence. She is a student, and a girl at the beginning of teenagerhood.
In 2021, Gonzalez exhibited a collection of works, including monotype printing, Xerox transfer, charcoal, collage, and sand, titled “Who are you?” in Decatur, Illinois.On the border, these two questions embody layers of meaning. The inquiry of “who are you?” goes well beyond the typical questions of “what is your name?” or “what do you do?”It speaks to questions of national identity, belonging, and exclusion. El Paso and Juárez, with the largest binational and bicultural workforce on the border, has a long history of inviting belonging and forcing exclusion. For example, when the Border Patrol began to dump migrants on the streets in 2018 and 2023, leading to a humanitarian crisis where women, men, and children had nowhere to sleep, no food to eat, and no one to get to their sponsors and relatives in the other parts of the United States, the local community stood up to help. Volunteers donated food and clothes. Annunciation House, founded in 1976, and staffed by volunteers has provided hospitality to thousands of migrants passing through El Paso. Historically, migrants have been welcomed to El Paso. In the context of the recent migration of people from Central and South America as well as other parts of the world, the character of this migration has expanded globally.
In “Who Are You?,” Nabil includes a print with the word “ILLEGAL” on it in large lettering beneath a smaller “Who are you?” On another page, an image of people walking towards the viewer, actually the same image repeated fourteen times, and another page with the same walking character, this time repeated three times with a darkened image walking through what looks like a hole in the paper, complete the art book. At the end is Gonzalez’s artist statement where she references immigration and immigration detention centers adding more layers of meaning to each page.
In a 2024 exhibition at La Mecha Contemporary in El Paso, Nabil exhibited “Where Are You?” This collection of works references immigration.As migrants move northward towards the US-Mexico border, in the hopes of crossing la frontera, “where are you?” is a question that families, parents, husbands, wives, and children ask their relatives during sporadic cell phone conversations. They ask themselves when they lay at night wondering where their loved ones are. If you are familiar with Gonzalez’s body of work on, the question can also harken back to the disappeared women of Juárez. In this context, mothers and families are tormented by the disappearance of their daughters as they too ask, “Where are you?” Nabil employs short, quotidian questions that through her art, become powerful inquiries into US-Mexico border life and policies.
Conclusion
The three border artists and one art collective produce masterful work that is grounded in the day-to-day realities of la frontera. Using art to question the normalcy of violence around social and political issues such as immigration and gender, they call on us to act, not simply react. A strong first step is to acknowledge the humanity of people who the media and politicians often portray as simply statistics or who blame the victim (“How was she dressed?” or “Why did they come to the border when they knew it was dangerous?”) Humanity is at the core of their art.
Having grown up on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, these artists have a deep understanding of life on the border. From Gonzalez finding herself in a precarious situation as a young woman visiting Juárez to Perras Bravas commemorating the life and feminicide of their friend and colleague, Isabel Casillas, this art is rooted in the lives of the artists; it is not an abstraction. Finally, the location of the art, from Casas’ mural on a tenement building in the Segundo Barrio to Sánchez’s portrayal of a Border Patrol helicopter hovering above a familiar desert landscape, whose noise is a constant for many Paseños, creates even a more powerful experience for the viewer by linking their art to the specific landscape of the border.
The power of place, in this case la frontera, is that it embodies history, memory, injustice and resilience. The power of art is that it can help us see the world around us in a different way. It can make connections. It can bring together people in a place intended to divide people.
Dr. Yolanda Chávez Leyva is a Chicana/fronteriza historian and writer who was born and raised on the border. She is of Rarámuri descent and honors her grandmother Canuta Ruacho. She is the Director of the Institute of Oral History and Associate Professor in the Department of History. She is also the lead historian for the first-ever Bracero Museum (funded by the Mellon Foundation) slated to open in Socorro, Texas in 2024. She has spent her life listening to and now documenting the lives of people who live on la frontera. Professor Leyva specializes in border history, public history, and Chicana history. She is co-founder of Museo Urbano, a museum of the streets that highlights fronterizo/a history by taking it where people are – from museums to the actual streets of El Paso
