If you think that immigrant bashing is practically becoming an art form in America, you may want to stop by UCLA and inspect the literal evidence. The targets are hanging on display at the university's Fowler Museum, life-size pinatas of half-human, half-rabbit creatures that practically dare you to pick up a stick and take a hard whack at them.
They belong to "Green, Go!" an exuberant yet unsettling installation by Maria Elena Castro that the Fowler commissioned for its exhibition "Caras vemos, corazones no sabemos/Faces Seen, Hearts Unknown: The Human Landscape of Mexican Migration," running through Dec. 28.
Consisting of about 80 works by 40 artists, "Caras vemos" takes its title from a Mexican folk saying that refers to the way we look at people's exteriors without perceiving their thoughts or feelings.
That's the way many Americans tend to look at the millions of immigrants from Mexico and Central America who've flooded across the Southwest U.S. border in recent years, says John Pohl, the museum's curator of the arts of the Americas. "We see these people on the streets and all over the U.S.," Pohl says, but "people tend to not really understand who they are."
"Caras vemos" attempts to shift that perspective with works that are variously humorous, satirical, folkloric, aggressively political or, like "Green, Go!," all these things at once. Castro, 34, who was raised in a Spanish-speaking Mexican American household in Riverside, says that her piece was heavily inspired by her father, who was born in the United States but raised in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. Described by his daughter as a "happy, loud" man who loved Sinaloan banda music and helped construct papier-mache figures for Easter week parades, he took equal pride in being both Mexican and American.
But despite its festive surfaces, there's a dark undertone to "Green, Go!" (a pun on the word gringo, which itself is wordplay on the phrase "Green, go!" that was shouted by Mexicans at green-uniformed U.S. troops during the countries' 19th century wars). The papier-mache rabbit-humans, swathed in traditional Mexican thrift-store fabrics, appear to be menaced by a gaggle of shiny green, robotic-like extraterrestrials. At the back of the installation, presiding over the uproar, stands a pastiche of the Statue of Liberty and the Virgin of Guadalupe.
