"Radical Lines and Utopias: The Partido Liberal Mexicano’s Revolutionary Art at the U.S.-Mexico Border," Rosalía Romero
This paper examines artworks in Regeneración, the newspaper of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), which printed illustrations of the U.S.-Mexico border as a site for revolution and anarchist utopia. PLM artists depicted battle scenes and victory marches, as well as utilized a range of visual markers to define the international boundary line. Moreover, Regeneración artworks circulated broadly in a transborder print sphere: beyond the U.S. and Mexico, anarchist newspapers elsewhere in the Americas reprinted these artworks, revealing networks of solidarity and practices of image reproduction.
“Performing the Boundaries of Inclusion and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” Rebecca Schreiber
This paper focuses on two video art projects -- Ear of the Pollo (2006) and Oracle (2015) – that brought attention to the performances of anti-immigrant militia groups. I argue that these artworks position viewers as witnesses to how both anti-immigrant militia groups and state agents act in accordance with official (and unofficial) state policies to perpetrate violence against Mexican and Central American migrants/refugees. The distinct aesthetic and political strategies taken up by these artists can be differentiated by the time periods when they were produced, which also contributed to changes in how anti-immigrant activists represented themselves for a broader audience.
Respondent: Camilla Fojas, University of Virginia