PUBLIC ART IN
THE AMERICAS

Introduction

Mirko Lauer:
Peru’s Fine Art
of Flag Washing

John Pitman Weber:
Out of the Studio,
Into the Streets

José Luis Soto and
Isa Campos Castañeda:
Mosaic Opening Night

Dora Andrade:
Brazilian Movement Gives Girls Dignity

María Galindo:
Bolivian Debtors
a Creative Force

Coco Fusco:
Now Playing:
Exotic People

Michael Schnorr:
Border Works
Tie Local to Global

María Esther Francia:
Uruguayan Youths
With Unruly Tastes

Slideshow:
Mosaic of the Americas

Books

Home: AMERICAS.ORG   September 2001  

Border Works Tie Local to Global

Michael Schnorr is a painter, muralist, Southwestern College art professor and founding member of the Border Art Workshop. His writing has appeared in Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education, Teaching Tolerance, Mediations, Community Murals, Das Andere Amerika and Les Dossiers de L’Art Publique. Last year the Taro Museum in Toyko awarded him a prize for his U.S.-Mexico border work.

The Border Art Workshop (TAF) shows the power of public art that begins in the local dirt, addresses both local and global concerns, and uses images, media and actions to generate national and international interest.

Formed in 1984 by the Centro Cultural de la Raza in San Diego, the TAF facilitates grassroots art projects that address issues confronted by migrants and marginal communities in the San Diego–Tijuana region. Many TAF projects have focused on Operation Gatekeeper, a seven-year-old federal effort that has tripled the number of armed U.S. Border Patrol agents in the region to 2,400 and erected a 10-foot-tall barricade stretching more than 14 miles from the Pacific Ocean. Trying to evade Gatekeeper, almost 700 migrants have died near California’s southern border, most drowning in irrigation canals or falling to exposure in the area’s deserts and parched mountains.

To focus local and international attention on Gatekeeper, the TAF has collaborated with nongovernmental organizations on both sides of the border. Since 1998, the California Rural Legal Assistance program has funded portable TAF billboards reminding Tijuana and San Diego residents of the latest tally of migrant deaths. The American Friends Service Committee worked with us to create a “No Human Being Is Illegal” graphic image for bumper stickers, T-shirts and 50-foot banners. We also work closely with Tijuana-based Casa del Migrante and Tijuana’s Human Rights Department.

Our most successful project dates back to 1997, when we began building hundreds of five-foot-high crosses, each painted with a victim’s name, age and birthplace. We installed the first crosses along a one-mile stretch of the border barricade, from Tijuana’s International Airport to the Colonia Libertad, the oldest and most famous border settlement, used for decades as a post for undocumented workers crossing into the United States. Tijuana Bishop Rafael Muñoz blessed the crosses, and locals brought flowers and candles.

Since then, we’ve displayed the project in every major city in Mexico and California, including Mexico City’s central plaza in 1999 and downtown Los Angeles during last year’s Democratic National Convention. For each installation, the number of crosses increases to reflect the latest migrant deaths. The project has generated more than 200 front-page reports in major periodicals, from the New York Times to the Mexico City daily La Jornada.

While addressing global economic realities, TAF projects are meaningful for local communities. In the Tijuana township Maclovio Rojas, for example, we run a residency program that brings international artists and researchers to work on the community’s development. (Maclovio Rojas, founded by women and autonomous from federal and local authorities, takes its name from an indigenous man from the southern state of Oaxaca who was assassinated in 1987 for organizing farmworkers in Baja California’s San Quintín Valley.)

Our six-year-old partnership with the township helps the community resist land grabs and environmentally destructive development by transnational corporations. Most recently, Tijuana and Baja California officials have been trying to seize a four-year-old cemetery on the township’s northwestern corner for a proposed industrial park and condominium development. In response, the Maclovio Rojas central committee is planning to attach our crosses to eight-foot cement posts at 10-foot intervals around the cemetery, roughly the size of three football fields. And the committee is changing the cemetery’s name to Maclovio Rojas Immigrants Memorial Park.

The top of the cemetery offers a view of the United States, seven miles to the north. It’s a reminder of why the TAF uses public art to give the global a local meaning.

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