Tag Archives: immigration

Are Some Immigrants Better Than Others?

In this three panel painting, Wet Foot Dry Foot Dancer, I wanted to revisit the immigration exception that privileges Cubans seeking asylum in the USA. Just this week, the captain of Cuba’s soccer team defected to the USA, but is unlikely to end up inside one of the inhumane detention camps that caused the deaths of five children last year.

Wet Foot Dry Foot Dancer from Migrations series

I don’t use the term asylum loosely when referring to Yasmani Lopez’s defection. While many will look at Cuba’s dire economic status to explain why 54,000 Cubans sought and obtained permanent residency, anyone willing to look past the Castro charm with public relations and revolutionary branding (frankly, I fail to see what is so revolutionary about a dictatorship), will recognize that Cuban citizens are still persecuted for their dissent.

Dancing Splashdown from Migrations series

Don’t take my word for it…just Google Tania Bruguera and read about how the Cuban government has detained, interrogated, jailed, and unlawfully seized her passport numerous times, simply for speaking, or inviting others to speak as part of her artwork.

Border Crossing (Touch 13) from Migrations series

My point, however, is that refugees and immigrants are desperate in their search for freedom, and in their search for a sustainable life. I had a student from Eritrea who routinely went without any food whatsoever for 3-5 days. Week in week out. That was (and continues to be the norm) in a land wracked by famine. When his family won the immigration lottery and was given entry to the USA, he was shocked. He was shocked when he went to school and saw that ALL the children ate lunch. Every. Single. Day. He couldn’t wrap his head around it. I can’t either. How is that kind of crushing suffering not considered an oppression?

I am super and forever grateful to have been granted asylum in the USA. To be a citizen. But this privilege doesn’t blind me to the fact that dehumanizing poverty is every bit as oppressive as a communist dictatorship like Cuba. I don’t think you can put a value of one kind of suffering over another, to say, one kind of immigrant is better than another.

New in the Migrations series

This is Border Crossing (Touch 4), Mixed media on stretched polyester film, a modest
22″h x 30″w.

This series embraces the fluid space between the past and the present, between a homeland lost and a homeland gained. Here each wave meets at my heart with a gesture of embrace. The translucency of the polyester film points to a space between actual and conceptual representations. The viewer can see the recycled wood stretchers, sometimes the wire, and construct in their minds how the image comes to be. Viewing becomes a surrogate to the creative act.

It’s a self-portrait based on personal memories, but these memories are more than mine, they belong to all of us. At the core of the Migration series, itself part of the Triumphs project, is the exploration of archetypes. And that rich treasure house of primal imagery is hardwired into all our bodies, yours and mine.

 

New in the Migrations series

This is  Border Crossing (Touch 5), 24″h x 36″w from the Migrations series, in which I explore the archetype of the Hanged Man, with all its tropes of sacrifice, suspension,  and new perceptions.  Migrations are not just the physical ones– we leave one country for another. Or metaphysical– we transition from life to death. Migrations can be the internal journeys our minds make as we scrub the landscapes of our memory.

My family and I were sent to an internment camp for political dissidents when I was a young child. My childhood crush, Toni, would entertain us younger kids in the camp by dancing with a skeleton. He was full of life, and comic passion as he danced with that skeleton! As a political refugee, the loss of my homeland is a bittersweet caress, and his dance a symbol that haunts me still. It represents the resilience and joie de vivre of the human spirit.