Notes from Maria Teresa Fernandez

Since viewing Maria Teresa Fernandez's photo exhibit, Cerca de la Cerca, we've been trading e-mails, she has shared some of her thoughts on her work and her experiences.

Fernandez grew up in San Luis Potsi, Mexico, but now lives in San Diego, where the border fence looms large for her. She has photographed it from both sides, and documented its transformation from a single fence to a heavily guarded, well-lit dual walls. She immigrated to San Diego with her family in 1991, and from that date, she has never ceased to tell her children that they must value the huge opportunity that they had and to try to keep the best of both worlds in their lives.

Fernandez has studies Art History as well as photography and has shown her work in Oaxaca., Gudalajara, Mexicali, Tijuana, San Diego, L.A., and New York, among others.

In the small town that she grew up in, Fenandez was aware of the natural borders of the surrounding desert and imposing mountains, yet was always aware of how people's imaginations went far beyond these geographical limits. In the same way, when she encountered the man-made border that divides the U.S. from Mexico, she saw how it traverses across the lives of people living on the border, and was intrigued with how inhabitants have turned the southern side into a canvass upon which they can paint their hopes, dreams, despairs and angers.

For Fernandez, photography gives her a way to describe through light and color, and she began to photograph the border fence in 2000, inspired by the necessarily creative way of life of Tijuana inhabitants. She photographed houses made of materials discarded by North Americans and maquiladoras, and discovered homes made of refrigerator doors, garage doors, aluminum siding, old cartons, tires, packaging, and whatever else could be salvaged to create walls and roofs.

Fernandez began this project in black and white, which resulted in very dramatic artistic shots, but she soon realized that she needed to work in color, if she wanted to show the depth of color, the variety of textures and the subtle differences from one material to the next in the construction materials of the houses. She also decided to work in color when she began documenting the artist works being constructed on the border wall, as well as to distinguish between the different paints peeling off the fence and the general disintegration of the wall: the corrosion, the oxidation, the yellowing color that is, to Fernandez, the very color of Tijuana earth that, at some points, covered the fence. In these places, the fence seemed to become a part of the earth, mixed in with the land as if it were only a simple scar.

This has changed in the past years as U.S. national security has increased, but Fernandez has continued her work documenting the the reconstruction and installation of a new wall across the Tijuana-San Diego border. "This double fence is a profanity to the countryside, it has changed the way people think: without respect to nature of the most difficult and dangerous goal of would-be immigrants. In a certain manner, the fence has been successful. Each day I encounter people who wish to cross, not only those from the south, but those who have been deported for their efforts to cross. I always feel a great affinity to each person. I share what they feel and it makes me very sad that I have no power to do anything for them. In seeing them close to the fence, shadowed by it, waiting for the opportune moment to cross, I think on each individual history, and what they have left behind in their town or city.

"Migration is a natural phenomena, and it has been converted into a huge problem in many countries in the world. We need to understand the situation and the powerful countries need to give a hand to those that need it: everybody needs to help out everybody.

"And this is how nine years of following both projects have gone, always giving me more information to continue with them. Both projects grow and develop, reproducing and I hope that over all of the fence, I am able to document its fall and to watch it die."
--Michelle












Playa de Tijuana

BorderOUT

BorderOUT, a collaborative of queer immigrant artists, performed at SOMArts as part of the National Queer Arts Festival. Collectively, the serise of individual performances challenged the constraints of the traditions and cultures that these immigrants carried into the US. While some of the performances were original works and others were traditional, each of them questioned both how to break open the restraints of the original culture while honoring it, and remake the traditions into something new.

Maria Machetes, a singer from Uruapan, Mexico, sang Los Mandados, a ranchera famously sung by Vicent Fernandez. Los Mandados tells the story of a Mexican migrant that keeps attempting to cross the border, getting caught by la migra and sent back to Mexico. The song honors many of the famous crossing points and paired cities that straddle the border and the tenacious spirit of the migrant.

Machetes sang a cappella, in front of a screening of an International Workers' Day protest march that took place earlier this year in San Francisco. The march brought the lyrics, which ran in English translation along the bottom of the screen, to life by humanizing the people that attempt to cross the border and the workers that do make it across.

Machetes used the sheer range of her voice to imbue Los Mandados with the desperate struggle metered by tenacious hope of migrants.

While Machetes kept her performance to the border crossing, other artists played more with the intangible borders of culture, gender and sexual identity.

Colombian Soul performed a folkloric scene in which the men and women have clearly defined roles and dress. In the BorderOUT rendition though, some men dressed as women and played the female roles and women as men, playing their roles. It gave the sense that the individuals chose the roles that they would like to play. By doing this, Colombian Soul clearly challenged traditional gender roles even while performing traditionally.

Las Krudas Cubensi do in real life what Colombian Soul did onstage. These female hiphop artists could hardly find an audience in the male-dominated Cuban music scene but have a strong following here. The trio have taken many of the staple traditions of rap, hophop and reaggaeton and made them their own. One of the most successful acts of the nights, Las Krudas brought the audience to its feet with their infectious energy.

--Michelle

For the Mesa Eleven

Beginning on February 2, 2009, when a woman found a bone sticking out of the ground on a mesa in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the remains of women keep being found. As of yet, no one has come to any answers about how many women were killed, why these women were killed and how they came to be buried in the desert.

Mica Valdez, an Oakland based writer, remembers the women with her poem, ¨Take these Flowers.¨

half circle brick wall Albuquerque sky

red headbands tied around foreheads

color of life

childhood teddy bears gold

cardboard framed photos

with marker

plastic pink flowers shake

sand

stinging wet eyes

tears fall

down lined red-earth cheeks

a father wearing flannel long sleeve mourns

behind black mirrors

smoking copal rises

from lacquer stone

boy blows conch toward Las Sandias

names are called out

Michelle Valdez

Cinnamon Elk

eleven lost Indias

found in the desert Mesa

prayer songs and petals lift up and around

Recibe estas flores

Con gusto y anhelo

que son escalones

que llegan al cielo

Jumping Fences

Papo Colo spent a year jumping fences and photographing his transgressions. Galeria de la Raza and Exit Art (of NYC) bring his lyrical and photography exhibition, Jumping the Fences, to San Francisco.

In jumping fences, Colo brings out the dualities of borders and fences. Fences are ubiquitous, whether in rural or urban locations, to the point that we hardly think on them. In Jumping the Fences, though, the nature of them becomes clear, that they keep out and keep in; protect and isolate; divide and unify. Jumping a fence is a transgression, one made all the more clear by Colo, who masks himself in each of his jumps. With his face hidden, he becomes anonymous, one of any number of people who don´t belong climbing over a fence, who, by doing so, undermines why the fence is there: the mark off property, to keep people out according to the discretion of the owner.

Even though each photo captures essentially the same image: a masked man climbing over a fence, the images are all drastically different in lighting, background, setting. They capture different phases of climbing and jumping, from hoisting himself up, hauling himself over, to jumping off, vaulting over, climbing up or descending. The foist is the same, each works to undermine the point of these fences, subverting their authority to say, ¨keep out.¨

In each image, from a myriad of locations around the world, the fence or wall is always angular, a rectangular form in contrast to which Colo´s body bends and morphs from one position to another. The malleable, movable body over the inertia of the walls revels in its empowerment in these photographs. There is not much the walls can do to stop anyone from climbing them.

This empowerment is exactly what Colo catches in the poetry paired with the images and action of jumping fences. It is not poetry that clamors to get over or despairs at being locked down on one side, but is full of possibility, and the discovery of freedom and potential in himself.

March 07:

To jump is to understand the impossible
maintaing myself in nothingness
the space that you break
is the air you pass through
in that instant you understand freedom

Colo´s project had him jumping fences around the world, passing through borders and always unlimiting himself by penetrating boundaries and his poetry reflects the potential imbued in movement and transgression: ¨me and my body jumping/inside any freedom possible¨(Feb 07). Colo surmounts staid impossibility with the possibility of movement.

Papo Colo, Jumping the Fences at Galeria de la Raza, 2857 24th St, San Francisco, Ca 94110 April 18, 2009 through May 31, 2009

Cerca de la Cerca

In Cerca de la Cerca, the border fence that divides Mexico and the United States is at the center. Maria Teresa Fernandez, a Mexican photographer now living in San Diego, photographed the fence over. Through her work, the function of the fence in people's lives becomes clear: its a obstacle to overcome to those for whom the American Dream pulls at; an ever more fortified barrier to stanch the flow of people coming in; a divider of people.

At UCSC, Cerca de la Cerca exhibition covers the walls of two rooms. Fernandez has been careful to capture all aspects of the fence, and organized the exhibition accordingly.

The first groupings of untitled photographs capture the fence alone: first as a long corroded metal fence that extends into the Pacific ocean, a close up of the corrosion of the fence and through a hole in it, a landscape of San Diego to the other side, and then a series of images in which it is unclear from which side we look over or through or at the fence from, but in each, the texture and colors of metal striping away are tangible.

With the introduction of heightened surveillance to reduce border crossings with Operation Gatekeeper in 1994, migrants have been forced to cross the border through the harsh desert to the east and many more people die in their attempt. In response, along the Mexican side of the border fence, alters crop up like nightmarish blooms. The alters are made in the tradition of Dia de los Muertos alters, yet these are replenished year round. They yearn for the missing and gone, or list the dead found and never identified, they commemorate those who have died and seem to beg the fence itself for relief. In these alters, the struggle, the tragedy, the hope and desperation and powerlessness literally hang off the fence in alters colored like celebration. These photographs explode with brilliant colors and are full of roses, marigolds, giant tissue paper flowers and wreaths.

Murals intersperse the alters along the southern side of the border fence. This art encourages people across, with statements like, "Bienvenidos al sueno americana" or painted silhouettes of men climbing over, even while others make a clear statement to the death threat the new wall is to those who would cross over. Painted blood seeps across a landscape in one mural; in another, Death stands at a gate between the US and Mexico.

It appears that people live right up alongside the border fence in Mexico: it is a barrier to turn into a weeping wall, a protest wall, a wall to hang your hopes and anger and desperation on, yes, but Fernandez has also presented images of trash blown up in piles along the wall and towns that abruptly stop in the presence of the wall. The collection of images from the Mexican side of the border reveal a vitality that is hemmed in only physically by the fence.

In contrast, the images of the U.S. side of the border fence are spare. Urban development can be seen in the distance, but they stop well north of the fence. The hilly, arid terrain stops shy of the second barrier fence by a dirt road that runs along the fence. In one photograph, the double fence, outfitted with spotlights and lookout towers, seem to race along the curving landscape.

After establishing the lay of the land, Fernandez introduces the people that live on and near the border and reveals the delicate nature of the relationships that often straddle the border. Before Friendship Park (in San Diego, a point where people could visit across the border fence) was closed down, Fernandez photographed a series of meetings. In one, family and friends picnic, but they sit separated by the fence, and talk through slats. In another, a father and daughter visit their family, who are obscured by the fence. People kiss, children are lifted through, adults reach their hands through to touch the people on the other side. In this series, the sacrifices that people make to cross the border reveal the intensity of the desire to try and make a better life.

Against this, Fernandez posits the U.S. Military personnel patrolling the border. The men are completely outfited with goggles, helmets vests and guns as they work to shore up the permeability of the fence. At work, these men give U.S. policy an unforgiving and inflexible face, especially when the next grouping of images are of people climbing over the fence. One man uses and alter as a ladder and carries little else but the ragged shirt and pants he wears. He is no threat to the Border Patrol.

With Cerca de la Cerca, Fernandez highlights the permeability and mortality of the fence by focusing on the corroded holes and barnacles growing on it and then mirroring this disintegration in the photographs of Mexican murals depicting men tearing down the fence. She creates compassion and humanity on the Mexican side of the fence, while making out the US side to be desolate, a effect heightened by the brilliant colors of the fence art against the drab military colors of both the uniforms and land of the US.

Alejandro Murguia

Alejendro Murgia is a master storyteller. An invited speaker at May´s Lunada, Murgia hid out in a far corner of the galeria until he was called onstage.

He walked to the front carrying stacks of papers and a thick book, then put them down, saying, "But I´m not going to do that; I'm going to see what's in the jukebox," meaning, see what bubbles up in his memory.

He kept his audience completely enchanted and engaged throughout his performance by staying unpredictable--following a war story with love poetry, singing verses or adding a percusive beat to his poetry. It shouldn't be suprising how easily Murguia captivated his audience--from teaching Raza studies at SF State, he has a committed following, and the audience was filled with many of his students. Murguia has a rich history from which to draw from as well. California born and Mexico City raised, the chicano writer helped define the begining of the Chicano movement in the 1970s. He volunteered during the Nicaraguan Revolution in 1979 and was a founder and original director of the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts. Through it all, he has been writing, so you see, when he says, lets see what's in the jukebox, there's a lot there to be pulled up.

Murguia began by recounting the time he spent two days hiking to Che Guevara's camp and of the huge fogata he and his friends had the night the he saw Che's desk, a moment that inspired the first poem he shared with us, "There is no Santo on my alter." In a deep, rough voice, Murguia told his poem as if in conversation with Guevara himself, says that Guevara was "right about love and revolution/ and wrong about everything else." The power of Murguia's spoken poetry is that he doesn't recite; he tells it fresh, as if the poem at that instant of telling, welled up from some deep spring within him. With "Tango Roto," Murguia added percusive beats in, using his heels, clicking his tongue, blending the sounds into his lyrical tale to give it dimension.

Recently, Murguia re-encountered Mexican postcards from the 1920s, and is working on two new works, The Violent Lense: Photo Postcards of the Mexican Revolution and A Little Bit of Mexico: A Story Told in Postcards. He brought some postcards with him to La Galeria and shared them with us, and how postcards hold a bit of history.

At times he threw the minibooks (two inch squares containing a single poem each) out into the audience and finished off with a reading from one of them, "16th and Valencia:"

I saw Jack Michelie reciting Skinny Dynamite
on the corner of 16th / Valencia
and he was angry
and the next day he was dead on the last BART train to Concord
and maybe that´s why he was angry
I met Harold Norse shuffling around in a beaten world
his pockets stuffed with poems only hipsters read
It´s a cesspool out here he sighed
before retreating to hi room in the Albion Hotel
where angels honeycomb the walls with dreams
and the rent is paid with angry poems
I heard Oscar Zeta Acosta´s brown buffalo footsteps
pounding the Valencia Corridor
and he was shouting poetry at the sick junkies
nodding with their wasted whores
in the lobby of the Hotel Royan ¨The Mission´s finest¨
and even the furniture was angry
I joined the waiters at the bus stop
the waitresses the norteños trios the flowers sellers
the blind guitarist wailing boleros at a purple sky
the shirtless vagrant vagabond ranting at a parking meter
the spray paint visionary setting fire to the word
and I knew this was the last call
We were tired of livign from the scraps of others
We were tired of dying for our own chunk of nothing
And I saw this barrio as a Freight train
a crazy Mexican bus careening out of control
a mutiny aboard a battleship
and every porthole filled with angrer
And we were going to stay angry
And we were not leavign
Not ever leaving
El corazon del corazon de La Mision
El Camino Real ends here
-Alejandro Murguia

Interview with Ana Teresa Fernandez

I sat down recently with Ana Teresa Fernandez to talk to her about her art. An excerpt of the interview follows.

MW: Have you always been artistic?
AF: It chose me, then I chose it. I started with sculpture in community college, and I liked it, and then the San Francisco Art Institute came down to San Diego, recruiting, and I went by but I didn't know to bring a portfolio or anything, I just came with snapshots of my work and they (the SF Art Inst. recruiters) looked at me like I was crazy. I paint mostly, but I returned to sculpture for Ecdisis.
MW: What inspired you to make Ecdisis?
AF: I like things that straddle, that aren't one or the other or have properties of one thing. I'm drawn to that--I don't consciously choose that. Like in Ecdisis, I used glass because its beautiful and dangerous. It could be right or it could be wrong, depending on perspective.
Like how people choose to see women, either whorish or sexy, mother or pure. Why can't we be it all? I've been working with the tango (in her painting) for a few years, painting women in this very erotic dance, and sexy dresses but doing ordinary chores. I'll keep doing it until the conflict stops for me.
MW: You spent time in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico when you were preparing to make Ecdisis. Are people there on edge all the time?
AF: You have this heightened awareness--the women tell me that they are always expecting something to happen, but you still have to live.
I lived in San Diego and I'd go to Tijuana and party over the border. I was always aware of it, but you live with it and just hope that it doesn't happen to you even though its always happening near you.
MW: How was it growing up straddling the border like that?
AF: I had friends in Tijuana, I went back and forth, I went to Tijuana to socialize. But your language merges into this weird weaving of words and expressions. Thats just a global border thing, though.
MW: Tell me about your painting.
AF: I am constantly reminded of gender. If I paint a female figure, I'm immediately thrown into women's shows, called a feminist. If men paint themselves, they're not immediately called macho, but women--she is always called feminist.

I keep humor in my work. The work takes itself seriously, the hangling of pain is serious.