Califas: Art of the US-Mexico Borderlands

Michael Dear and Ronald Rael

AUGUST 1, 2018

“Know that to the right hand of the Indies was an island called California, very near to the region of the Terrestrial Paradise, which was populated by black women, without there being any men among them, that almost like the Amazons was their style of living … There ruled on that island, called California, a queen great of body, very beautiful for her race, at a flourishing age, desirous in her thoughts of achieving great things, valiant in strength, cunning in her brave heart, more than any other who had ruled that kingdom before her … Queen Califia.”

– Garci Ordóñez de Montalvo, from Las sergas del muy esforzado caballero Esplandián, hijo del excelente rey Amadís de Gaula, a novel published in Spain, 1526.[1]

After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo brought an end to the 1846-48 war between Mexico and the US, the binational survey teams who measured and marked the new international boundary – engineers, soldiers, scientists and artists – brought into being a new world. They had surveyed an almost 2,000-mile boundary and erected monuments marking the division between the two nations. Their narratives and artworks produced a ‘mental map’ of lives and landscapes in the ‘borderlands,’ a place that had hitherto not existed.

There were plenty of myths and legends about California before the 1848 line was established. The centuries-old novel quoted above is often credited as the source of the name ‘California.’ More recently, the name ‘Califas’ has been adopted by Chicanos in order to emphasize the pre-1848 history of the State.[2]

Such origin myths are important in our thinking about the US-Mexico borderlands because they invoke histories, memories and identities that existed long before the 1848 boundary line was created. In addition, they provide reason to broaden our perspectives on the current border region between California and Mexico. There are young people on both sides of the border today who have lived most of their lives in the shadows of walls. For them, the wall is the norm, a permanent feature of borderland life. But it was not always so. In this exhibition, we adopt the term ‘Califas’ to remind everyone of wider associations – of a borderland before walls, where people understood the border very differently, and when the border served as a line of connection not separation. It is this different way of seeing that we aim to recover through this exhibition.

The US-Mexico border is once again at the forefront of national and local politics.

One of the most important demographic shifts in the US over the past century has been the rise in the population of Latino (especially Mexican) origin. Since the 1990s, political and public debates have especially focused on the rise of undocumented migration into the US from countries around the world. The attacks of 9/11 elevated border security to a national obsession, manifested most dramatically by the construction of 650 miles of fortifications along the land portion of the US-Mexico boundary.

Today, the introduction of draconian enforcement actions, including deportations and raids on workplace and home by the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), have created intense fear and insecurity among many long-time residents in the US. For example, the threat to deport 800,000 DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) children and young adults has caused a backlash in cities and towns that have declared themselves ‘sanctuaries’ in an effort to protect their communities.

The Bay Area, including San Francisco, San Jose, and East Bay cities such as Oakland, Berkeley, and Richmond, is a major epicenter of the nation-wide crisis in immigration. The State of California has resisted the imposition of laws and directives that it considers are counter to Californian values and beliefs, and several Bay Area politicians have taken high-profile stands against what they consider as harmful intervention by federal government agencies. Many large and small cities across the US have witnessed large demonstrations in favor of protecting immigrant populations.

Artists, too, have joined these protests, producing works that strongly condemn what they perceive as hateful laws, excessive policing, and the punitive incarceration and deportation of immigrants. They have also imagined alternative futures more in keeping with the centuries-old tradition of the US as haven for the world’s oppressed.

This exhibition engages directly with these momentous challenges. The featured artworks are devoted to considering how contemporary artists are re-imagining the US-Mexico borderlands. Our special focus is on California and the San Francisco Bay Area, places that once were part of Mexico (known then as Alta California), traces of which still exist in place-names, languages, and the minds of most Californians.

The principal themes in our exhibition are:

Remembering, which examines the deep origins and present realities of migrant memory;
Dividing, the consequences of separating linked border communities and fortifying the US-Mexico boundary line;
Identity, the production of hybrid cultures in the border lands;
Resistance, the forms of political practice engaged by people responding to injustice, poverty, discrimination and inequality; and
Visioning, imagining opportunities and creating solutions to advance the borderlands and its peoples.

The notion of border art refers to artworks that are concerned with border-related topics, produced not only by artists living at or near a border but also by those living elsewhere who demonstrate a concern with border-related themes. The national or racial and ethnic origin of the artists does not disqualify artists from producing border art. When we speak of the borderlands we are referring to a geographical area that extends beyond the international boundary itself – that is, the border or the line (la línea) – to include places experiencing the diaspora of cultures. In our case, this is appropriate because peoples of Mexican and Latino origin have by now extended throughout California and the US, and border-related matters have become concerns of many nations and peoples on a global scale.

Origins of Border Art

In the centuries before the US and Mexico existed, the vast continent of North and Central America was occupied by empires of indigenous peoples. Strong connections existed since prehistoric times across what was to become the US-Mexico border, and north-south connections were the principal axes for trade, migration, conflict and culture. In Mesoamerica, for instance, great cities and empires extended throughout the Yucatan and central and southern Mexico into Central America. These were connected by trade to the Pueblo cultures of the US Southwest, which reached a pinnacle of cultural brilliance during the late-ninth and early-tenth centuries. The whole continent was an integrated landscape of exchange and contact.[3]

The first great works of art after 1848 were the survey maps authorized by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, executed by several joint boundary survey commissions established by Mexico and the US. They are masterpieces of the pen executed by individual artists who stamped their personalities onto cartographic representations of immensely varied topographies. On the Tijuana map, an arc of coastal mountains and estuary is interrupted by a solitary settlement called ‘Rancho de la Tía Juana.’ The survey teams were accompanied by scientists who recorded indigenous populations, flora, fauna, and natural resources, as by artists who prepared an extensive pictorial archive often of great charm and beauty.^[4]

The development of twentieth-century art and culture in the US Southwest was affected by geographical isolation, which acted as a stimulus to creativity and cultures that were opposed to established tastemakers from elsewhere.[5] During the 1960s, communities of Chicano artists rose to prominence in California. Motivated by civil and human rights activism, Chicano artists began constructing an identity and history distinct from mainstream Anglo-American traditions. They turned for inspiration instead to Aztlan, the mythical homeland of the Aztecs, imagined to have existed somewhere in the US Southwest.

The earliest forms of a Chicano cultural project were oppositional. Lacking resources and institutional support, Chicano artists adopted a kind of do-it-yourself approach to art and cultural production, described by Tomas Ybarra-Frausto as rasquachismo. It was frequently accompanied by a blunt rejection of conventional cultural institutions and practices. Musician Gabriel Tenoro captured the sentiment this way: “We’re saying we don’t need to fit in. … We make our own space.”[6]

The roots of a distinctive ‘border art’ are usually traced to Chicano origins.[7] From 1968 to 1980, border art in southern California emerged primarily through struggles to establish a Chicano People’s Park and a Centro Cultural in San Diego. Between 1984 and 1992, a collective known as the Border Art Workshop, or Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF) was created by artists from both sides of the border, counting Guillermo Gómez-Peña among its founders. Whereas the earlier Centro Cultural was oriented to Mexican and Native American sources, BAW/TAF devoted its energies to a hybrid art of the present. From the outset, this new alliance was politically self-conscious – critical of the old order, clear about the border as a place of cultural confluence, and confident in imagining a day when the international boundary line would be erased.[8]

This ‘outsider’ perspective was quickly embraced by feminist Chicana artists and writers, most notably Gloria Anzaldúa and Amalia Mesa-Bains. In her evocation of the “new mestiza,” Anzaldúa famously described the US-Mexico border as “una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.”[9] Mesa-Bains adopted the term domesticana to distinguish a Chicana rasquache in developing her unique sensibilities on the place of memory and spiritual geographies in Chicana art.[10]

After 1992, growing interest in the borderlands led to the inSITE initiative, which began as an experiment in staging art simultaneously in San Diego and Tijuana. Reflecting the ambitions of its national and international backers, inSITE organizers insisted that their project was not about the border or sponsoring border art, even though many border-based artists addressing local issues were involved. Later inSITE exhibitions became more international in orientation and participation, losing much of the organization’s connection with local artists and audiences. This separation may have been instrumental in energizing the creativity that characterized border art during subsequent decades. Further north, in Los Angeles, many grass-roots organizations (such as Self-Help Graphics) were already laying foundations for Chicano and border-oriented art.

By the turn of the century, California had long since become the most populous state in the nation, and Tijuana was a city with international connections. Mexico’s emerging war on drugs was daily delivering death to the sidewalks of border towns, through which over a billion dollars-worth of cross-border trade was passing every day. The border with Mexico became the focus of angry (though often ill-informed) debate in US politics. Artists responded to this turbulence by creating art that was increasingly sophisticated, and globally aware, even as they remained grounded in border places and its peoples.

Suddenly – or so it seemed – the landscape of border art-making had shifted, and was spreading to communities beyond the boundary line.

Southern California

In 2000, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) opened a spectacle entitled Made in California: art, image, identity, 1900-2000.[11] The show occupied most of museum’s gallery spaces and featured Chicano, Mexican and Latin American artists, including such mega-stars as Diego Rivera. One year later, LACMA launched another blockbuster, The Road to Aztlan: Art from a Mythic Homeland.[12] The spirit of deep ancestral roots and historical continuity framed this exploration of art from pre-Columbian times to the present, positioning Chicano art in that heritage. Together, these two exhibitions signaled a new openness to Latino and Chicano art by a major art institution, confirming that it was aesthetically valuable and worthy of the highest level of criticism, historical analysis and scholarship. In 2004, LACMA announced a formal commitment to a Latino Arts Initiative.

The emergence of a specifically border-related art in southern California at this time was also associated with smaller institutions and grass-roots organizations. Typical of initiatives beyond major institutions was the 2002 exhibition entitled Mixed Feelings: Art and Culture in the Postborder Metropolis, which opened at the Fisher Gallery in Los Angeles. A group of artists and academics gathered to explore the state of border art and to produce original works. The curators rejected the internationalism of inSITE, and focused instead on the Tijuana-San Diego region as an integrated trans-border place called ‘Bajalta California,’ which they portrayed as a crucible for a distinctive ‘post-border’ art practice having hybridity as its principal theme.[13]

Five years later, border art from Tijuana had a spectacular ‘coming-out’ party at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. The exhibition Strange New World: Art and Design from Tijuana, had opened in 2006 at Washington DC and later at San Diego.[14] When it arrived in Santa Monica in January 2007, the galleries and sidewalks were packed with people. The atmosphere was giddy, almost ecstatic. Many padrones and madrones, whose previous ground-breaking efforts had made this evening possible, were guests of honor. It was the night when, young and old, the stars of TJ border art crossed over noisily into Los Angeles.[15]

At the grass roots, too, new energies were being poured into border art. Judy Baca’s mural, The Great Wall of LA, was a major intervention in the local art scene. And the collective ADOBE-LA (Architects and Designers on the Border Edge) was among the earliest to promote a border consciousness in a metropolis hundreds of miles from the border line.

San Francisco Bay Area

The gathering momentum in border art was not confined to southern California. In the early 1940s, the Bay Area was home to a “small but reasonably vital and sophisticated community of modern artists.”[16] One persistent division that emerged early was between artists following Diego Rivera (who had visited the Bay Area in the 1930s) and others more interested in formal innovations to mainstream conventions. In various forms, this gulf has persisted to the present day, resulting in an on-going exclusion of Mexican and Chicano art from the cultural mainstream.

During the second half of the 20^th century, the Bay Area mainstream gained national prominence through several art innovations. Especially prominent were Abstract Expressionism, Funk Art, and Pop Art. The East Bay emerged as a forceful presence on the art scene: the community-oriented Richmond Art Center had already opened in 1936; major art spaces were erected in 1969 at the Oakland Museum, and in 1970 at the UC Berkeley Art Museum; and new programs in ceramics and sculpture were launched at UC Davis and UC Berkeley.

Among Chicanos and Latinos, the revolutionary-style politics of the countercultural fifties and sixties were transformed in the 1970s to a search for cultural heritage and roots that would reaffirm the legitimacy and value of non-Western traditions. Since the early 1960s a distinctive hub of Chicano art had been developing in San Francisco and the cities of the East Bay.[17] It was provoked by circumstances roughly paralleling those in southern California: discrimination and exclusion from the mainstream. However, different narratives emerged in northern California, where many Chicanos favored a broader, more inclusive orientation for their work, including notions of la raza (a mixed race of peoples), or Latino (including others of Spanish heritage).

Paradoxically, despite efforts directed toward a united front, dissenting Chicana voices appeared early, and often led to the establishment of separate women’s collectives. Another unique influence on Bay Area Chicanos was Oakland’s Black Panther Party, whose experiences provided lessons for Chicano activists, such as Yolanda López, and others who supported the Panther movement.

The emerging Chicano movement was concentrated in San Francisco’s Mission district, where the opening of the New Mission gallery in 1962 confirmed the neighborhood’s emerging status as the most prominent pan-Latino community in the city. This was followed by the Casa Hispana, founded in 1966 by a group of Latinos, and by the Galería de la Raza in 1970, led by Chicano artists René Yañez, Rupert García and Ralph Maradiaga. In 1974, the Mexican Museum opened, with more emphasis on cultural rather than political issues. Over the next quarter-century, the so-called ‘Mission art’ became famed for its political graphics, murals, and ofrendas (i.e. altars, used as a way of recovering lost memories and devotions).

Northern Baja California and Mexico

In the closing decades of Mexico’s 20^th century, independent art and cultural practices in northern Baja California were being energized by government investment in arts infrastructure. In Tijuana, for instance, the Centro Cultural de Tijuana (CECUT) was established with federal funding in 1982; and in Mexicali, the capital of Baja California Norte, the State government funded construction of the Centro Estatal de las Artes (CEART) in 2005. Also at this time, bi-national exhibitions began shedding new light on the colonial past of regional art traditions, including the hitherto-neglected roles of Spanish missions and religious art, as well as 18^th-century casta painting, which codified social and racial classes in Nueva Espana.[18]

At the local level, Tijuana was fast becoming a ‘poster-child’ for borderland urban revitalization, its main tourist strip studded with new restaurants, microbreweries, boutiques and art galleries. Local entrepreneurs and grass-roots community-based movements arose to reclaim cartel-damaged neighborhoods. Artwork by Tijuana artists was gaining international exposure, and cultural manifestos began celebrating Tijuana’s musical renaissance, and opposition to border walls.[19] Academics turned attention toward explaining TJ’s cultural renaissance.[20]

Meanwhile, further to the east, Mexicali was experiencing its own cultural renaissance, which included local artists such as Luis Hernandez and Ramón Tamayo. At the Mexicali CEART in 2012, an exhibition entitled Trazando la línea (Tracing the Line) explored the deep history of transborder communities along with contemporary works by Mexicali artists.[21] Neighborhood-based arts collectives were emerging, such as the Mexicali Rose Media/Arts Center led by Marco Vera.

Elsewhere, beyond Baja California, Ciudad Juárez’s cultural scene was given a boost when, in 2004, Kate Bonansinga opened the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas in El Paso, just across the line from Juárez. Convinced that the Center’s mission should adopt the “border as center” in its inquiries, she boldly set about exhibiting what she regarded as the “most innovative art of our time.”[22]

Border Art Goes Global

After 9/11, the US began construction of border fortifications that radically changed life in the borderlands. The movement of goods and people across the line was disrupted by heightened security and congestion at border ports of entry; and immigration and border patrol authorities became an obtrusive presence in everyday life. Yet paradoxically, border residents’ awareness of their special connection with people on the other side was heightened by the presence of walls and fences. They vociferously defended their transfronterizo identity, insisting upon their shared past and future with cross-border neighbors. Some even spoke of a ‘third nation’ consisting of borderland communities. In this in-between space, artists on both sides of the walls renewed efforts to imagine a ‘post-border’ world, when the walls had come tumbling down.

A growing international concern with migration and wall-building intensified interest in border art. For instance, a symposium at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2014 was entitled New Walled Order: The aesthetics and politics of barriers. It focused on the global spread of walls as instruments of geopolitical strategy, and included photography by Josef Koudelka, Alexandra Novosseloff and Maurice Sherif which emphasized the stark ravages of war and partition in Israel and Palestine, the US-Mexico border, and the former Berlin Wall.[23] Then, in 2017, the Craft and Folk Art Museum of Los Angeles (CAFAM) presented an exhibition on The US-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination and Possibility. Aside from its singular dedication to border art, the exhibition was noteworthy because it was curated by Lowery Stokes Sims (based in New York City) and Ana Elena Mallet (from Mexico City), and because it featured artists drawn equally from the US and Mexico, many of whom lived far distant from the border. [24]

The global spread of interest in border art was accompanied by a proliferation of innovation in art practice in a widening range of media. For example, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer John Moore offered a remarkable photographic narrative of migrants journeying across Mexico to the US, encompassing their entire odyssey from departure, travel, crossing, and arrival, to prosecution and deportation.[25] Academy award-winning Mexican film director Alejandro Iñárritu installed a giant immersive virtual reality experience at LACMA, entitled Carne y Arena (Flesh and Sand) which replicated the migrant/refugee experience of crossing the border, including a terrifying encounter with la migra. David Taylor and Marcos Ramirez ERRE undertook an audacious land art project that installed newly-manufactured boundary monuments that marked the pre-1848 US-Mexico boundary across several US west and northwestern states. The architecture of the border wall itself became a focus of interest and controversy.[26]

Around this time, two important exhibitions opened at LACMA that revealed the deeper origins and wider connections of present-day border art. One was Painted In Mexico 1700-1790, which traced how Mexican painting was influenced by transatlantic artistic trends, especially those from Spain.[27] The second was Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915-1985, which revealed the intersections of design and architecture between California and Mexico during the 20^th century.[28] Both exhibitions highlighted continuity and connectivity in diverse cultural traditions across histories and geographies: between those of 18^th-century Spain and Nueva España (colonial Mexico); and those between 20^th-century California and Mexico. Such circuits of exchange and influence were also observed on a city-to-city level, e.g. between Los Angeles and Mexico City.[29]

By now, contemporary border artists were wired into ‘circuits’ of cultural influence and exchange extending across space and time, and across nations and cultures. While art at the California-Baja California border may have begun as a regional phenomenon, it quickly forged a binational presence and practice, and today is increasingly internationalized through global migration, digital communications, and changing economics, culture and politics.

Border Art Now

Border Art is rising to a new prominence, possessing a presence and significance that extend far beyond the limits of geopolitical boundaries. The name Califas draws attention to a deep history before the Mexico-US border existed, and to a wider geography of the Borderlands – a territory that includes all California, past and present. These revisions of conventional ways of seeing helped us understand the border as a place of historical continuity and connectivity, not solely a space of geopolitical separation.

The artworks in this exhibition highlight the shared destinies that unite peoples on both sides of the line:

They uncover the role of memory and origins that existed before the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and how such remembering continues to shape Californian and Mexican lives to the present day.

They reveal the disruptions imposed by current fortifications along the border: on everyday work, leisure, family, migration, and education, as well as the harmful human and environmental damage caused by wall-building and by militarization of the borderlands.

They show the vitality of cross-border communities as crucibles for binational cooperation and prosperity, especially the creative potential of mixing cultures.

They draw attention to the suffering endured by refugees and migrants, and threats directed at citizens and residents within the US, both of which give rise to active political resistance.

They act to reject the building of more walls, preferring instead to imagine and design solutions that protect and promote the well-being of cross-border communities.

The stories of Califas told in this exhibition are very different from conventional border narratives. They derive from artworks that warrant consideration not only for their aesthetic qualities but also for their acute relevance in today’s world. The artists have offered insightful, moving, imaginative, critical, and innovative visions that deserve our fullest attention.

ENDNOTES

[1] Quoted in Michael Dear, ‘Peopling California.’ In Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, and Irene Susan Fort (eds.) Made in California: Art, Image, Identity, 1900-2000. Los Angeles: LACMA and University of California Press, 2000, 49. Also see Erwin G. Gudde, California Place Names: The origin and Etymology of Current Geographical Names, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, 59-61.

[2] Amalia Mesa-Bains, ‘Califia/Califas: A brief history of Chicana California.’ In Diana Burgess Fuller and Daniela Salvioni (eds.) Art/Women/California : Parallels and Intersections. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 123-140.

[3] This history draws on material in Michael Dear, Why Walls Won’t Work: Repairing the US-Mexico Divide. New York, Oxford University Press, 2015 (expanded paperback edition) where complete sources and citations are available.

[4] Two illuminating studies of artworks relating to the boundary survey are: Robert Hine Bartlett’s West: Drawing the Mexican Boundary. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968; and The Albuquerque Museum Drawing the Borderline: Artist-explorers of the US-Mexico Boundary Survey. Albuquerque NM: The Albuquerque Museum, 1996.

[5] Richard Cándida Smith Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry and Politics in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, 5.

[6] Gabriel Tenoro, quoted by Yvette C. Doss, ‘Choosing Chicano in the 1990s.’ In Gustavo Leclerc, Raul Villa and Michael Dear (eds.) Urban Latino Cultures: La vida latina en L.A. Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications, 1999, 156.

[7] Jo-Anne Berelowitz, ‘Border Art since 1965.’ In Michael Dear and Gustavo Leclerc (eds.) Postborder City: Cultural Spaces of Bajalta California. New York: Routledge, 2003, 143-182.

[8] Patricio Chávez and Madeleine Grynsztejn. La Frontera/The Border: Art about the Mexico/United States Border Experience. San Diego: Centro Cultural de la Raza and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 1993, 11 and 25.

[9] Gloria Anzaldúa. Borderlands: La frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987, 3.

[10] Amalia Mesa-Bains. ‘Spiritual Geographies.’ In Virginia M. Fields and Victor Zamudia-Taylor (eds.) The Road to Aztlan: Art from a Mythic Homeland. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2001, 332-341.

[11] See Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort. Made in California: art, image, identity, 1900-2000, op. cit.

[12] Fields and Zamudio-Taylor The Road to Aztlan, op. cit.

[13] ‘Bajalta’ is an amalgam of the territorial names adopted by the Spanish colonialists for Baja (Lower) and Alta (Upper) California. See Gustavo Leclerc and Michael Dear. Mixed Feelings: Art and Culture in the Postborder Metropolis / Sentimientos Contradictorios: arte y cultura en la metropolis posfronteriza, University of Southern California: Fisher Gallery, 2002. The exhibition involved a diverse group of artists, including Mark Bradford, Rita Gonzalez, Joe Lewis, Daniel Joseph Martínez, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, and Norman Yonemoto.

[14] See Rachel Teagle Strange New World: Art and Design from Tijuana / Extraño Nuevo Mundo: Arte y Diseño desde Tijuana. San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2006. It featured works by Teddy Cruz, Einar and Jamex de la Torre, Salomón Huerta, Ana Machado, Julio César Morales, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, and Yvonne Venegas (among others).

[15] One year later, LACMA opened Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano movement, featuring many contributors who were by now identified as border artists, including Margarita Cabrera, Adrian Esparza, Julio César Morales, and Rubén Ortiz-Torres. See Rita Gonzalez, Howard Fox and Chon Noriega Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano movement. Berkeley: LACMA and the University of California Press, 2008.

[16] Thomas Albright Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, 12.

[17] Cary Cordova The Heart of the Mission: Latino Art and Politics in San Francisco . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.

[18] Noteworthy exhibitions in this category include: Clara Bargillini and Michael Komanecky The Art of the Missions of Northern New Spain, 1600-1821. Mexico City: Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, 2009; and Ilona Katzew Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World. Los Angeles: LACMA and Yale University Press, 2012, which should be consulted alongside her invaluable Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

[19] José Manuel Valenzuela, Paso del Nortec: This is Tijuana! México DF: Trilce Ediciones, 2004; and Editorial Santillana, Tijuana, La Tercera Nación. Mexico D.F.: Editorial Santillana, 2005.

[20] For example, Josh Kun and Fiamma Montezemolo (eds.) Tijuana Dreaming: Life and art at the global border. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012; and Norma Iglesias Prieto, Emergencias: Los artes visuales en Tijuana. Tijuana: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes CONACULTA, 2008.

[21] Curated by Michael Dear, Hector Manuel Lucero and Alejandro Marquez, Trazado la línea: pasado, presente y futuro de las comunidades transfronterizas (Tracing the Line: past, present, and future of transborder communities). Mexicali: Centro Estatal de las Artes (CEART), 2012.

[22] Kate Bonansinga, Curating at the Edge: Artists respond to the US/Mexico border. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014, vii and 7. This book is an indispensable record of her tenure at the Rubin Center.

[23] The Getty symposium was curated by Peter Tokofsky and Gail Kligman.

[24] See Craft and Folk Art Museum of Los Angeles The US-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination and Possibility. Los Angeles: Craft and Folk Art Museum, 2017. Artists included Tanya Aguiñiga, Haydee Alonso, David Avalos, Judy Baca, Margarita Cabrera, Adrian Esparza, Rupert García, Julio César Morales, Viviana Paredes, Marcos Ramirez ERRE, Ana Serrano, Einar and Jamex de la Torre, and Consuelo Jiménez Underwood.

[25] John Moore. Undocumented: Immigration and the Militarization of the United States-Mexico Border. New York: powerHouse books, 2018. Two other noteworthy photography books are by Richard Misrach and Guillermo Galindo. Border Cantos. New York: Aperture, 2016; and David Taylor Monuments. Santa Fe: Radius Books, 2015.

[26] Ronald Rael Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the US-Mexico Boundary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017.

[27] Ilona Katzew (ed.) Painted In Mexico 1700-1790: Pinxit Mexici. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2017.

[28] Curated by Wendy Kaplan and Staci Steinberger. See Wendy Kaplan (ed.) Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915-1985. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art 2017.

[29] See Gustavo Leclerc ‘Tiempo de Híbridos: Migration, Hybridity and Cosmopolitics at the US-Mexico Border.’ In Craft and Folk Art Museum of Los Angeles The US-Mexico Border, op. cit. 48-54, as well as the essays in Kaplan, Found in Translation, op.cit.

[1] Amalia Mesa-Bains, ‘Califia/Califas: A brief history of Chicana California.’ In Diana Burgess Fuller and Daniela Salvioni (eds.) Art/Women/California : Parallels and Intersections. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 123-140.

[1] This history draws on material in Michael Dear, Why Walls Won’t Work: Repairing the US-Mexico Divide. New York, Oxford University Press, 2015 (expanded paperback edition) where complete sources and citations are available.

[1] Two illuminating studies of artworks relating to the boundary survey are: Robert Hine Bartlett’s West: Drawing the Mexican Boundary. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968; and The Albuquerque Museum Drawing the Borderline: Artist-explorers of the US-Mexico Boundary Survey. Albuquerque NM: The Albuquerque Museum, 1996.

[1] Richard Cándida Smith Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry and Politics in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, 5.

[1] Gabriel Tenoro, quoted by Yvette C. Doss, ‘Choosing Chicano in the 1990s.’ In Gustavo Leclerc, Raul Villa and Michael Dear (eds.) Urban Latino Cultures: La vida latina en L.A. Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications, 1999, 156.

[1] Jo-Anne Berelowitz, ‘Border Art since 1965.’ In Michael Dear and Gustavo Leclerc (eds.) Postborder City: Cultural Spaces of Bajalta California. New York: Routledge, 2003, 143-182.

[1] Patricio Chávez and Madeleine Grynsztejn. La Frontera/The Border: Art about the Mexico/United States Border Experience. San Diego: Centro Cultural de la Raza and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 1993, 11 and 25.

[1] Gloria Anzaldúa. Borderlands: La frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987, 3.

[1] Amalia Mesa-Bains. ‘Spiritual Geographies.’ In Virginia M. Fields and Victor Zamudia-Taylor (eds.) The Road to Aztlan: Art from a Mythic Homeland. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2001, 332-341.

[1] See Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort. Made in California: art, image, identity, 1900-2000, op. cit.

[1] Fields and Zamudio-Taylor The Road to Aztlan, op. cit.

[1] ‘Bajalta’ is an amalgam of the territorial names adopted by the Spanish colonialists for Baja (Lower) and Alta (Upper) California. See Gustavo Leclerc and Michael Dear. Mixed Feelings: Art and Culture in the Postborder Metropolis / Sentimientos Contradictorios: arte y cultura en la metropolis posfronteriza, University of Southern California: Fisher Gallery, 2002. The exhibition involved a diverse group of artists, including Mark Bradford, Rita Gonzalez, Joe Lewis, Daniel Joseph Martínez, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, and Norman Yonemoto.

[1] See Rachel Teagle Strange New World: Art and Design from Tijuana / Extraño Nuevo Mundo: Arte y Diseño desde Tijuana. San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2006. It featured works by Teddy Cruz, Einar and Jamex de la Torre, Salomón Huerta, Ana Machado, Julio César Morales, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, and Yvonne Venegas (among others).

[1] One year later, LACMA opened Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano movement, featuring many contributors who were by now identified as border artists, including Margarita Cabrera, Adrian Esparza, Julio César Morales, and Rubén Ortiz-Torres. See Rita Gonzalez, Howard Fox and Chon Noriega Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano movement. Berkeley: LACMA and the University of California Press, 2008.

[1] Thomas Albright Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, 12.

[1] Cary Cordova The Heart of the Mission: Latino Art and Politics in San Francisco . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.

[1] Noteworthy exhibitions in this category include: Clara Bargillini and Michael Komanecky The Art of the Missions of Northern New Spain, 1600-1821. Mexico City: Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, 2009; and Ilona Katzew Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World. Los Angeles: LACMA and Yale University Press, 2012, which should be consulted alongside her invaluable Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

[1] José Manuel Valenzuela, Paso del Nortec: This is Tijuana! México DF: Trilce Ediciones, 2004; and Editorial Santillana, Tijuana, La Tercera Nación. Mexico D.F.: Editorial Santillana, 2005.

[1] For example, Josh Kun and Fiamma Montezemolo (eds.) Tijuana Dreaming: Life and art at the global border. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012; and Norma Iglesias Prieto, Emergencias: Los artes visuales en Tijuana. Tijuana: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes CONACULTA, 2008.

[1] Curated by Michael Dear, Hector Manuel Lucero and Alejandro Marquez, Trazado la línea: pasado, presente y futuro de las comunidades transfronterizas (Tracing the Line: past, present, and future of transborder communities). Mexicali: Centro Estatal de las Artes (CEART), 2012.

[1] Kate Bonansinga, Curating at the Edge: Artists respond to the US/Mexico border. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014, vii and 7. This book is an indispensable record of her tenure at the Rubin Center.

[1] The Getty symposium was curated by Peter Tokofsky and Gail Kligman.

[1] See Craft and Folk Art Museum of Los Angeles The US-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination and Possibility. Los Angeles: Craft and Folk Art Museum, 2017. Artists included Tanya Aguiñiga, Haydee Alonso, David Avalos, Judy Baca, Margarita Cabrera, Adrian Esparza, Rupert García, Julio César Morales, Viviana Paredes, Marcos Ramirez ERRE, Ana Serrano, Einar and Jamex de la Torre, and Consuelo Jiménez Underwood.

[1] John Moore. Undocumented: Immigration and the Militarization of the United States-Mexico Border. New York: powerHouse books, 2018. Two other noteworthy photography books are by Richard Misrach and Guillermo Galindo. Border Cantos. New York: Aperture, 2016; and David Taylor Monuments. Santa Fe: Radius Books, 2015.

[1] Ronald Rael Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the US-Mexico Boundary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017.

[1] Ilona Katzew (ed.) Painted In Mexico 1700-1790: Pinxit Mexici. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2017.

[1] Curated by Wendy Kaplan and Staci Steinberger. See Wendy Kaplan (ed.) Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915-1985. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art 2017.

[1] See Gustavo Leclerc ‘Tiempo de Híbridos: Migration, Hybridity and Cosmopolitics at the US-Mexico Border.’ In Craft and Folk Art Museum of Los Angeles The US-Mexico Border, op. cit. 48-54, as well as the essays in Kaplan, Found in Translation, op.cit.