| Abstrakt: |
Against a backdrop of other murals marking national territories and Manifest Destiny—notably, William Leutze’s stereochrome Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way completed for the U.S. Capitol during the Civil War, with its iconic depiction of a mostly monochrome van of westward migrants on their way over mountains to California’s Golden Gate—this article focuses on the way artists Judy Baca and Ana Teresa Fernández have both deconstructed physical and symbolic walls to open up a view of migrations across the U.S.–Mexico border as natural. The essay examines how each artist’s work gets to the same end vision but through different starting points in relation to history. Baca—in her ongoing History of California (a.k.a., the Great Wall of Los Angeles), and in her mural La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra, California—has brought repressed or erased history and people to light, and she explicitly envisions the border wall as unnatural. By contrast, Fernández optically erases the border wall at Tijuana / San Ysidro / the Pacific and other places along la frontera, employing Martha Stewart paint to create chinks and gashes in the wall’s ideological veneer, brushing blue onto corroding iron to, she says, pull “down the sky to kiss the ground again.” Baca represents what has been erased while Fernández erases what has been represented, but both do so to reconnect a California landscape that has been bifurcated by the border wall. Considered in relation to the history and historiography of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands—and in particular to work on the physical manifestation of the border through markers, monuments, fences and walls designed to split lands and peoples—this article considers these artists’ work as powerful demurrals, defiant visual protests and imaginaries that affirm inclusion, empathy, and human and ecological connections across the border between Alta and Baja California. |
