Infinite Dream Circuits
Making immigration visible.
This past Friday Dannielle and I attended a poetry reading and collaborative performance celebrating the publication of the Mexican poet Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola’s book “The Telaraña Circuit” (published by Tender Buttons Press) in an event where she performed with the artist Guadalupe Maravilla, organized by the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. As we waited outside in the church’s patio for the doors to open I observed that the gathered crowd was clearly a sampling of the downtown literary intelligentsia, with many individuals appearing to be Mexican academics or writers, giving me the feeling that we were more in Coyoacán than in the East Village.
The space was organized in a theater-in-the round format, with a number of objects (a keyboard synthesizer, a hammock, a series of rocks, roses with long stems, a gong, and other elements that Maravilla uses for his renowned sound baths). The layout of the objects throughout the dim-lit space gave us all a preview of what to expect, as Hinojosa led us with the hypnotic force of her reading and the goldsmith-like quality of her elegantly constructed phrases, after which Maravilla started activating one by one of the elements in the room. The performance proceeded in a dream-like pace, with Maravilla’s peculiar treatment and use of every object producing unexpected sensations (for example using roses as tabuhs, or stick beaters, to bang the gong over and over again until they lost all their petals).
At some point, Maravilla pointed at seemingly randomly selected audience members to come to the center to be a designated planet in our solar system, slowly walking/rotating around an also designated sun (a man with long blond hair, which I found somewhat hilarious).
But what was most unexpected to me was that at the end of that section and the performance, both Maravilla and Hinojosa cleared the stage and proceeded to sit within the audience while an unidentified man came to the center and sat at the microphone, and then proceeded to talk about the current migrant crisis in New York City.
That man, we later learned (and he said at the end of his speech, “I am sorry, I just realized that I didn’t introduce myself”, but not doing so gave his speech a wonderful extension to the performance we had just witnessed) was Juan Carlos Ruiz, Pastor at the Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. A Mexican priest originally from San Luis Potosí, Ruiz has been working with Maravilla since the start of the Covid pandemic in the spring of 2020, at a point during which we in New York City were losing about 900 people per day. Maravilla delivered food and volunteered in many other ways to help the church serve its constituents and the neighborhood. More recently, when the migrant crisis started in New York last year, Maravilla started assisting the church in their soup kitchen and offering sound baths to thousands of immigrants in city shelters. Their extraordinary work, both providing physical and spiritual sustenance for these immigrants, is both monumental and essential. Both Maravilla and Ruiz made the audience aware of the gravity of the crisis and the importance for all of us to become involved in supporting these migrants in whatever way we can.
If you ride the NYC subway regularly like me, you certainly must be aware of the severity of the migrant issue by seeing the noticeable increment of mostly Mexican immigrants selling gum and candy— just as one would see in the Mexico City subway—some of them with their kids in tow, which is heartbreaking. But even with the giant influx that we are witnessing, the majority of New Yorkers can and do look away in the same way that we are trained to ignore the other economic inequities in the city. Mexican immigration in New York has been growing over the years, it now being the largest Latinx group after Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. Yet most people do not consciously see the Mexican woman working at the deli flower stand, or the one that assists in the laundromat, nor, of course, the thousands of food delivery boys and Poblano workers in the kitchens of all of New York’s restaurants. In recent months, however, indifference has turned into public protests thanks to the political theater of cruelty of the governors of Texas and Florida who started busing immigrants to New York as well as the end of the Title 42 Immigration Policy (which was an artificial way to postpone action on challenges in the US/Mexico border) which have exacerbated the crisis. We are now seeing images that I never had thought I would see in a progressive city like ours, with some of its residents protesting the temporary placing of migrants in a school gym in Brooklyn. This a few miles away from the Statue of Liberty—another thing we New Yorkers have stopped seeing— standing over the etched words by Emma Lazarus: “Give me your tired, your poor, /Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, /The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”
The event at St. Mark’s Poetry Project was particularly striking to me not just because it drew attention to that crisis but mostly because this past weekend was art fair week, with Frieze and many other alternative fairs taking place. Many dealers, collectors and arts professionals descended in New York then to attend the fairs and enter into conversations in person and in social media about which work is hot and which is not, what sells and doesn’t sell. The migrant crisis was nowhere to be thought of, or, like most other important social issues that affect our world, was perhaps portrayed in an artwork at a booth that would be purchased by a collector. In other words — and I am really not trying to be cynical here—social issues in this context appear to be important inasmuch as they can become the source material for a video or a sculpture.
And here is a conundrum that many of us artists who are touched or moved by a particular kind of topic confront: how to respond to a crisis like this in an honest and sincere way, enduring, at times, the dismissive view of some —such as an important curator that I know who said to me that artists that jump on topics like these are “opportunistic”. Even if that might be true in some cases, given that we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t, it should be understood that artists many times also act to these issues because of sincere concern and desire to raise awareness.
Dulce Pinzón is the first Mexican artist I think about when thinking about those who have made works that give visibility to immigrants. Her project The Real Story of The Superheroes, produced between 2005-2010, consists in a series of photographs where she collaborated with a number of Mexican immigrants who perform menial jobs in New York to survive and support their families back in Mexico. In a text she wrote about the project in 2007, Pinzón explains, “The Real Story of the Superheroes pays homage to these brave and determined individuals that somehow manage, without the help of any supernatural powers, to withstand extreme conditions in order to help their families and communities survive and prosper.” The photographs are compelling to me because they are a reminder that when we are thrown into a world of danger and the unexpected we often turn to the very human hope that a supernatural force might protect us— in the case of Mexican immigrants, it is Catholic faith. But the secular version of that supernatural power might be the superhero from the movies and the comic strips. And Pinzón’s work is a visual parable that portrays those immigrants in the work they do and that they likely do not recognize themselves as heroic.
I was thinking about these issues of visibility in 2018, when in collaboration with the International Studio and Curatorial Program and El Museo de los Sures in Williamsburg working with Dreamers.
Just to review and for context: shortly after the start of the Trump presidency that initiated with a Muslim travel ban, it later continued with the attempt to stop the expansion and seek the end of the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program created during the Obama administration— a program that sought to protect undocumented individuals who had been brought to the United States as children through no fault of their own and who were for any intents and purposes American Citizens. The Trump administration wanted to send these individuals (which are close to 700,000 in some estimates) back to their countries of birth, many of which had never visited nor speak its language.
The project we did at Los Sures, titled La Austral, S.A. de C.V., was what we termed a “storytelling dispensary” or “storytelling spa”— a drop-in oral library of sorts where visitors would pick from a menu of stories that an attendant would narrate. The program was constructed by offering a free course for Dreamers that would evolve into a public phase in the form of a paid fellowship. Throughout the fall of 2017 the participants trained in the tools of storytelling and soon used them to tell their own stories, which almost inevitably became narratives of their life growing up in their home countries (mostly in Latin America).
La Austral offered storytelling games, conversation pieces, shorter and longer stories for visitors to pick from for us to perform. When we launched La Austral in 2018 we devised a speakeasy-like back room, with red lights, where we could perform one of our favorite stories, The Infinite Dream of Pao Yu, a Chinese infinite story (a favorite of Borges) drawn from the 18th Century book by Tsao Hsue-Kin, "The Dream of the Red Chamber", where the main character dreams that he is in the garden of his own house, where his maidservants find him and do not recognize him, saying that their master is Pao Yu. He then starts looking for his own dreamt self through the garden, only to find himself sleeping in a room, then seeing himself waking up and narrating his dreaming of not being recognized and looking for and finding the other Pao Yu. As they find each other and embrace, the dreamt one leaves and the real Pao Yu starts narrating the strange dream of him looking for another Pao Yu, and so on ad infinitum.
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My grandfather, Ignacio Helguera, emigrated to the United States in 1904, entering Ellis Island at about 15 years old, nearly the same age that my daughter is now. He boarded in Veracruz and settled in the Upper West Side to live with an uncle (I was able a few years back to retrieve his arrival paperwork as well as the photograph of the ship in which he arrived). He immigrated during a decade when the United States received around 9 million immigrants from all over the world. The beginning of the Mexican Revolution must have kept him in the US. However, he took the unusual decision to return for good, 20 years later, to Mexico to start a family. Had he not made that choice I would likely not have ever existed, nor would, of course, be writing these words today. I often wondered if he had ever imagined that one of his grandchildren would re-emigrate to New York and walk, one century later, the same streets he did as a young man.
While the selection of the Pao Yu story at Los Sures was not meant to literally refer to Dreamers (or at least I never thought of it that way until this moment: sometimes as artists we do not see the most obvious connections in the projects we develop ) in retrospect I now realize how the story of immigration is a never-ending, collective dream— perhaps, in the words of Lucía Hinojosa, a dream circuit where we seek to find the answer to these questions:
where (what) is place?
who (what) makes place?
who (why) are we
place?
__________
To make a donation for the church of the Good Shepherd please visit:
https://www.goodshepherdbayridge.site/support-good-shepherd.html
Other organizations that receive donations to help address the NYC immigrant crisis:
United Way of New York City Emergency Assistance & Community Needs Fund
https://secure.everyaction.com/RW8CQY4Nc0iiRYxOAfYbkA2
South Bronx Mutual Aid
https://www.instagram.com/southbronxmutualaid/?hl=en
Performers for La Austral included Joel Berrios, Juan Manuel Esquivel, Carolina Fung Feng, Gabriela Galván, Kenia R. Guillen, Heliis Martinson, Aldair Gonzalez Sanchez, and Project Manager Nora Boyd; the project was curated by Juliana Cope.