Host and Factory; Cuidad Juarez, Chihuahua, 1998


Our trip to Juarez in high school was meant to facilitate most generally a sense of Christian service; I can’t fully recall my own expectations, however, for going there. I grew up in a Hispanic community in Phoenix and spent a considerable amount of time in various parts of Mexico. As president then for the social action group participating in the trip, it seemed a natural thing to do. At that time in ‘98 the greatest danger in Juarez was being being one of the many females in an anonymous class of economic refugees. I suppose the Jesuits running our Catholic prep school thought it safe enough for us to go and look around. We visited a number of foundations operating along the border: a political asylum with Nigerian aliens, a women’s shelter, and a church inside the colonias on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez. The most memorable exchange, however, brought us inside a Siemen’s maquila under the guise of an economics class, studying the flow of goods across the border. Seperate from the tour but altogether poignant was a lunch hosted by a family living in the colonias. Beyond humbling the moment was further intensified through our first-hand experience of the severity of their working conditions. The manner in which they were viewed by their employers drastically explicated the adversity of their plight. I remember quite well the setting of their home as you would recall that of a close relative who although related by blood occupies a very different walk of life.

After returning to Phoenix our group worked together to reconstruct a “casa de carton,” indicative of the living conditions we encountered. While the attempt felt mild in certain ways to redirect others to the profound destitution of their situation, the effort was not far from my present concerns as an artist. My sense of form and labor in the context of art making stems from the same margins of region and trauma encountered by the individual. The notions of space and occupation performed by the body in general centralize my work. In her book, “The Body as Material Culture: A Theoretical Osteoarcheaology,” Joanna Sofaer writes, ”Furthermore, the divide between the living body as cultural and the skeletal body as natural cannot be sustained as bodies will always be both...”[1] Looking back to the maquiladores, I see a torn condition, ramified in the experience of these dual mechanisms of identity. My work as an artist in this regard seeks a material investigation activated both by ethnicity and technological imperative. Ethnicity in this sense culminates through the numerous facets of identity associated with the body. In many ways I’m curious of the role the artist plays as host to both spectator and setting in this described context. How the artwork facilitates an extension of the spectator body reveals the complex instability of identity.

1. Sofaer, Joanna R. The Body as Material Culture: A Theoretical Osteoarchaeology. New York, Cambridge University Press. 2006. Print.