If we want artists to tell a complete story of migration in their work, we need to start embracing and examining the more “nostalgic” side of this process.
The Immigration is Beautiful Mural
Located near 21st Street on Park Place Wichita, Kansas is the Immigration is Beautiful mural. This historical painting is a pivotal symbol of hope and perseverance for the Mexican American, Chicano, and Hispanic communities within the city. This mural has become a political statement that advocates for the justice and equity of Latinos, particularly women and children.
According to artist Armando Minjarez and the Latin Leaders (LL), which was a group of high school students, this mural was supposed to bring unity to the community and pay homage to the many contributions made by immigrants in the city since the 1910s. Yet, in many ways, especially under the Trump Administration, it seems this superb mural has been ineffective at conveying an all-encompassing idea of migration.
The mural portrays merry images of the Statue of Liberty and two people wrapped in the US and Mexican Flags, while a hand is desperately trying to cross the border to get to join smiling children in graduation caps.
However, on the night of Wednesday, February 12th, 2014, the mural was cruelly vandalized by a group of high school students. Spray-painted in angry black letters were words like
“welfare,” “wetback” and “KKK”. Interestingly, Minjarez and his team restored the mural, never once alluding in their artwork to the racism, harassment, and hatred that Wichita's immigrants were clearly facing at the time.
The Horizontes Project, which was another Minjarez-directed enterprise, had also missed opportunities to represent migration in ways that can be helpful to the migrant community in the US today. Horizontes, a beautiful campaign, aims to bring together the Hispanic and African American communities within Northern Wichita.
This project includes the largest mural painted by a single artist in the United States. In 2017, it was awarded $100,000 by the Knight Foundation for its contribution to community engagement. Nevertheless, despite its intentions to realistically portray the migrant experience, a handful of its murals turned out to be extremely cheerful and lack the sadness that is also ingrained in the journey of the migrant
On 13th street, Stronger Together shows two little girls, one of Hispanic descent and the other African American, holding each other’s hands in a symbol of love and true sisterhood. Many people expected the mural to inspire conversations on the representation and empowerment of marginalized groups. Yet, the reality is that the mural has caused more feelings of skepticism and doubt than initially anticipated.
“The mural on 13th street was particularly difficult to get approved,” said Minjarez to the Chung Report. “The neighborhood association felt the message of the mural was too political and aggressive.”
This is not a new occurrence. In recent times, many murals that are created and geared towards people of color tend to be labeled as hostile and overly political. So, it is not exactly the initial response that the mural gets that we should pay attention to, but the story it tells and what it leaves out.
These murals do not portray the struggles of the migrant. Or display how difficult it is for migrants to be accepted in communities that have long histories of racism and bigotry. Or show how these communities have made it incredibly hard for them to get jobs. Or even imply how troublesome it is for some migrants to express themselves artistically without being criticized. Contrarily, they unintentionally create baseless stereotypes and an unfortunate dearth of sympathy towards the migrant.
On the other hand, murals that show a darker and more nostalgic side of migration have continuously incited discourse on how we can prevent misconceptions and prejudices. They look at issues like unemployment, violence, poor housing conditions, sacrifice, lament, and success to bring these ideas together into one piece that tells a complete story. This style of mural, thus evokes emotions from both migrants and non-migrants about what we can do to change the system
A curiosity and fervent desire to understand why artists idealize migration and positively personify the feelings of the migrant are what interests me, even though the latter is exposed to situations so painful and vicious as the one in Wichita. Scholars in the arts and humanities like Jutta Lorensen express that the popularization of art exhibits like the Wichita mural can be mostly attributed to the public’s interest and comfort in consuming a rose-colored idea of migration. Yet, no attention has been paid to the importance of more nostalgic and gloomy depictions of such a process in popular media. More specifically, in my opinion, there has been minimal effort to understand how these nostalgic pieces can have positive effects on the migrant being represented and hence humanize and empower them.
It is worthwhile to consider that positive “Migration Art” is unable to appeal to the migrants’ sense of individuality and tends to universalize their sentiments into one category. This type of art tells their stories as ones that are not distinct but a common narrative among all migrants. The Immigration is Beautiful mural, and the 13th Street piece are clear examples of how the migrants’ pain is dismissed, and their perspective is annihilated in the name of preserving the ideals of the American Dream.
“I develop strategies to highlight the work and narratives of POC, queer, undocumented, immigrant and women,” expressed Minjarez in an interview with Kansas Humanities. “Artists are truth tellers, exploring and translating the human condition.”
Yet, many of Wichita’s migrants have historically felt invisible and overlooked by a system and country they have otherwise immensely fallen in love with. And two of Wichita’s most popular murals completely ignore this reality by immortalizing a one-sided story that, unfortunately, widens an already apparent gap between what the migrant has endured and what the artist illustrates.
Conversely, some migrants will consider that Bruno Catalano's “Les Voyageurs” collection shows a more realistic, negative, and meaningful understanding of migration. It characterizes migration through a new lens that appreciates how intimate the journey of the migrant truly is. This collection consists of several sculptures that range in gender, age, race, and location. Catalano shows the migrant as an individual with different backgrounds that uniquely add to the migration experience. Moreover, each sculpture shows a different level of emptiness or “incompleteness,” which suggests that migrants' feelings towards migration are both subjective and individual in nature. In that sense, these sculptures appreciate the migrant in their essence and recognize that behind every piece; there is a meaningful and important story to tell.
However, the problem is that most of these sculptures are practically unknown to Americans and the migrant community at large. Therefore, scholars have assumed that these are of no importance to the migrant enterprise in the US. Emine Yeter, a MSc at Oxford University's Migration Studies Department, says that this mainly occurs because artists that tend to focus on the negative aspects of migration “were educated abroad, and are at the whim of a hierarchy that perhaps does not recognize their qualifications or deem their work relevant; particularly in a capitalist (art) market.” As a result, in the “Migration Art” genre, we see two categories between “them” and “us”, “them” being the migrants that are alienated and excluded from the community, and “us” the white Americans.
The role Catalano's sculptures play in dismantling these stereotypes are consequential because they show the migrant as a human being that shares similar religions, like Islam, or passions, like playing the guitar with others. They demonstrate that there is resemblance and potential affinity between migrants and non-migrants, and in this way unveil that instead of a “them” and “us” there could be a “we”. They also commemorate the migrant’s resilience and ability to stand even through adversity, and promote feelings of solidarity and empathy towards migrants that due to necessity, may have abandoned their family, friends, and lost material goods.
Yes, nostalgic “Migration Art” exhibits can seem sad and tragic, but underneath there is hope; the reality of the migrant’s journey is empowering. Being a migrant myself, I look at positive pieces and see nothing more than what Americans want to believe our experiences are. Pessimistic murals have allowed me to see my struggles and embrace what I have lost. They have shown me that I do not only belong here, but that I am worthy of it. I believe that these pieces acknowledge our pain, but do not dismiss the good things about our “travels.”
Truthfully, it is hard to talk about the many problems faced by migrants if all we are shown in art is the pleasing and heartened perspective of migration. We need to break away from these pieces that are optimistic and elaborate more on cheerless and cloudy depictions that convey a holistic understanding of migration.
While Minjarez’s work is amazing and necessary to study, it lacks aspects of the migration process that are too critical to leave out. Nonetheless, the Horizontes Project has recently introduced the Color Line Exhibition. As described on their website, this piece “will feature thirty (30) photo portraits, audio and video interviews of North Wichita neighborhood residents…[which are] living examples of a historic and systemic lack of access to resources necessary to grow.” I believe this exhibition will produce a variety of emotions from the viewers. Some might be negative, others more positive, but they should illustrate Wichita’s migrants’ shared grievance, which can help us initiate the conversations we so desperately need to have.
With the help of nostalgic art pieces, Wichitans and Americans all-around can view how hard the reality of the migrant is and how much they have fought to be here. Or in the words of Ban Ki-Moon, they can comprehend that “migration is an expression of the human aspiration for dignity, safety and a better future. And it is part of the social fabric, part of our very make-up as a human family."
Works Cited
Catalano, Bruno. The Author Features a Series of Sculptures, One of Which Is Officially Names Le Grand Van Gogh. Sculpture Bruno Catalano. Accessed 2021. https://brunocatalano.com/sculpture-bronze/sculpture-en-bronze-bruno-cat... e=1.
“Horizontes in Photos.” Chung Report , January 17, 2019. https://thechungreport.com/horizontes-in-photos/.
“Marginally Invisible.” Wichita State University. Accessed February 1, 2021. https://somos.wichita.edu/en/marginally-invisible/.
Minjarez, Armando, and Kylie Brown. “The Color Line.” HORIZONTES. Accessed February 1, 2021. https://www.horizontes-project.com/the-color-line/">http://www.horizontes-project.com/the-color-line/">www.horizontes-project.com/the-color-line/.
Minjarez, Armando. Immigration Is Beautiful Mural. 2014.
Yeter, Emine. “On Contemporary Art and Migration.” IMI, February 26, 2020. https://www.migrationinstitute.org/blog/on-contemporary-art-and-migration">http://www.migrationinstitute.org/blog/on-contemporary-art-and-migration">www.migrationinstitute.org/blog/on-contemporary-art-and-migration.