Ruby City’s Studio Gallery is located in a small building across from the towering Ruby City Museum in San Antonio, Texas. The smaller space for the current show “Studio Synthesis & Subversion Redux,” expanding on an earlier exhibit of work by Chicano artists, allows the curators to blend and present artwork in a collective manner. Janelle Esparza’s “The Family Room” is an impressive opening statement to the exhibit. On a large wall facing the entrance, Esparza presents her woven cotton textiles surrounded by found objects her family once used to harvest cotton.
Curators Eylse Gonzales of Ruby City and Mia Lopez of the McNay Art Museum noted that the Esparaza “materials are then arranged to create formal, abstracted images or association that the artist likens to paragraphs or lyrical writing, collectively representing people, her memories, and her family’s histories and events.”
Esparza traced three generations of ancestors on her maternal grandmother’s side to cotton farming. Their work as cotton pickers inspired her to weave textiles and reconstruct found objects to tell her ancestral story of hard work, isolation, and exploitation. Her weaving is not traditional. She often refers to her creative process as experimental and conceptual. Esparza uses organic cotton throughout and “weaves compositions that recall the South Texas landscape with earth tones and textured color fields.”
Esparza gives deep thought to the narrative she wishes to tell. Her memories are filled with stories connected to her family history and the family’s relationships with cotton. Each of her weavings has a borderland narrative behind it. She draws on the stories her father and grandparents told her when she was a young girl. Writing about an earlier exhibit, Glasstire magazine author Lauren Moya Ford commended Esparza for her commitment to finding the “hidden histories of Mexican American, Tejano, and Indigenous narratives in her home region of South Texas.”
South Texas is full of rich stories of Spanish-Mexican settlement, conflict over land, and modern development. Jenelle Esparza’s ability to use art to convey some of these narratives allows the observer to reflect on the diverse social and economic contributions to Borderland history.
The conceptual framework for the “Studio Synthesis & Subversion Redux” exhibit was completed in 2019 before the inauguration of the new US presidential administration. Over the past month, the Trump administration has placed immigration front and center. There are daily accounts of despair and confusion related to immigration roundups and deportation. On the US domestic front, immigration and the economy have become central political topics of the new year. Texas is a Latino majority state, and it has a sizable immigrant population. In his artwork, “The Dust Moistened and Slid Over Their Faces Like a Bridal Veil,” Borderland artist José Villalobos explores troubling Mexican immigration accounts from the past.
Villalobos’s photograph, “The Burn was Like the One Carmelita Torres Suffered When Crossing the Border of Cidad Juarez and El Paso,” presents a dark narrative in immigration history. In 1917, American health officials in El Paso, Texas stopped Carmelita Torres, a 17 year old maid from Ciudad Juarez, to force her to submit to a gasoline spray bath as part of the new procedures to disinfect immigrants crossing into the United States. Ms. Torres was a day worker who cleaned homes by day and returned to her home in Juarez in the evenings. Her refusal to submit to the dehumanizing treatment sparked a protest of thousands of Mexicans at the El Paso border. The riots temporarily shut down the border, but the “cleaning” campaign continued for decades.
Vox writer Ranjani Chakraborty exposed the past use of toxic chemicals in the Borderlands and later by the German Nazis in a 2019 essay, “The Dark History of ‘gasoline baths’ at the Border.” Chakraborty noted that in the 1940s border officials used the poisonous gas Zyklon B for fumigations of migrant workers in the Bracero Program. Originally created for insect pest control, Zyklon B was used to delouse clothing and to fumigate ships, warehouses, and trains. The product gained notoriety for its use by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. Starting in early 1942, the Nazis employed Zyklon B as their preferred method for mass murder in extermination camps.
The Joan Mitchell Foundation awarded José Villalobos a Center Residency in 2022 and noted that his work “reconciles the identity challenges in his life, caught in between traditional Mexican customs and American mores, as well as growing up with religious ideals that contrast with being gay.” In his artistic practice and in his art for this exhibit, particularly “The Reflection of Machismo” composed of mirror aluminum composite panels, Villalobos explores traditionally “masculine objects” and presents them with less virility.
Curators Gonzales and Lopez explained that the installation by Barbara Miñarro, a Monterrey, Mexico native, reflects the artist’s DACA status which is directly impacted by the challenging and ever-changing nature of federal immigration policies. The DACA Program granted deportation protection and the ability to work legally in the United States to young people brought into the country as children by their undocumented parents.
The new Trump administration promises to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants and places the previous DACA protection promises under a dark cloud. Miñarro’s art wall, “Entre Tú y Yo,” has the same dimensions as a section of the wall being built along the border. Her art wall construction of reclaimed clothing, fabric scraps, poly-fill, and rope is floppy and plush, incapable of acting as a barrier. Yet Miñarro intended for the structure to be “representative of the physical and political barriers that continue to separate family and friends.”
Miñarro’s border wall is constructed of 100 “bricks” crafted from textiles sourced from individuals on both sides of the border. Her other art piece in the exhibit, “We Are Staying Put,” presents colors and shapes that “mimic limbs and flesh.” Gonzales and Lopez remind us that “although optimism and inclusiveness remain worthwhile endeavors, the artists in the exhibition are manifesting new strategies not just for survival but for innovation, defiance, and metamorphosis.”
