The following is a guest post by artist Isidro Pérez García. The artist participated in the MexiCali Biennial program Land of Milk & Honey which examined complicated themes of agriculture in the Californias and beyond. Por Debajo de la Mesa: Terreno Familiar was exhibited in October 2023 as part of the borderlands program at casa la linea arte contemporáneo. The biennial team has invited Pérez García to revisit this work at the MXCL BNL LAB in Whittier, a newly created research and exhibition initiative. The solo exhibition will kick off a two-year research program titled PARA/normal Borders LAB that focuses on the borderlands as a supernatural zone.
This photo essay is written by the artist in his own words. All rights reserved by the artist.
Por Debajo de la Mesa: Terreno Familiar | Under the Table: Familiar Terrain
A cross-border weaving collaboration con tule.
By artist Isidro Pérez García
with
Don Irineo Rivera Honorato and family (maestros artesanos)
Los Invisibles de Santa Ana (Santa Ana, CA)
Colectivo ProArte (Michoacán, MX)
Plan Acalli (Xochimilco, MX)
“Por Debajo de la Mesa: Terreno Familiar” is a cross-border weaving project – including sculpture, multimedia, performance, and social practice – that uses el tejer con tule (weaving with cattails) as material and metaphor for investigating and upending regimes of migration, capitalism, land, labor, and art.
The central piece is an oversized set of table and chairs in Mexican “folk art” style. The table itself references kinship ties and how we “fit” them or not in the US, while the scale of the piece references the contemporary art aesthetic of working at monumental scale, as well as the lack of fit and the inability to use the table. At the same time, being “under the table” provides a kind of shelter and a sense of satire about the undocumented migrant situation, referring to how we are usually paid. I am myself a formerly undocumented migrant from México, now living in Santa Ana (CA), with family on both sides of the border.
I used to be an undocumented worker making office tables in a factory. Later when I became a graduate student, I was surprised to encounter furniture on my school campus that came from the same factory where I had worked. I knew that, even though I had helped make this furniture, I had never been one of the intended users of it. This is when I started making tables as part of my art practice, as a way of talking about how the world is “built” for certain bodies.
The table-chair set and related artworks were part of a year-long effort. Alongside Santa Ana-based family, I harvested tule (with permission) from an ecological reserve in Newport Beach – a very wealthy area of Orange County where many migrants work as housekeepers, yarderos, and laborers. At the same time, I also dedicated myself to learning tule weaving techniques, over Facebook, from Don Irineo and his family, master artisan weavers from Maravatío, Michoacán, México. Don Irineo was himself an undocumented migrant to the US at one point but returned to Michoacán. He never wove while he was here, and he wasn’t even aware that the tule plant grew in the US.
For two weeks in the summer of 2023, some of Don Irineo’s students were able to visit Santa Ana, and we came together as a collective of art collectives from both sides of the US-México border to begin to weave the monumental table-chair set. While our visitors from México were here, we also offered workshops and events for the community to participate in, where people were invited to weave tiny chairs to hold their cell phones, and a tularco – a woven arch made from tule which is a tradition stretching back to precolonial times.
In México, a table-chair set in this style might be one for a family kept in their home, or it might be bought by tourists. By monumentalizing this type of “folk art” furniture, the artwork echoes Robert Therrien’s 1994 work “Under the Table,” a different set of monumental table and chairs that has often been interpreted as a gesture of nostalgia. In México, 1994 was the year of both NAFTA and the Zapatista uprisings, both a disastrous and revolutionary year for campesinos. After 1994, with millions of campesinos forced off their land by NAFTA’s attack on subsistence agriculture, tables like this would be tables more and more left behind, highlighting a very different type of memory – that of displacement. In particular, the Michoacán-Southern California corridor is one of the largest migration streams in the US, which is why we use the Michoacán style of weaving for this project.
In addition, migrants’ kinships are targeted by the status of being “undocumented” in the US. Personally, with no valid visa, I was stuck in the US and unable to return to México for over twenty years. I also have siblings and other family stuck on both sides of the border, either in the US or México, who are separated from and unable to see each other because they cannot travel legally across national borders. But even when we do secure proper documents that allow us to travel, long separations have caused profound damage to our family relationships which is not easily repaired.
The table is not just a symbol, but the table does something in the world. A table serves to gather us around something. Cultural theorist Sara Ahmed says, “Perhaps to be orientated around something is what allows us to ‘hold the center,’ or even to constitute ourselves as the center of other things.” This is why it is more than a cultural but also a political and existential project to claim our own survival by making our own tables.
In this way, the table-chair set highlights the politics of mobility: who stays, who goes, and who gets to choose whether they stay or go. As economic (and climate) migrants, displacement from our homelands was not much of a choice; whether we desired to stay or go, poverty gave us no option. Who “gets” to use this type of table is very influenced by how wealth and power “flow” away from poorer countries, toward richer countries. In the art world, there are clear hierarchies of value between “center” and “margin,” “contemporary” and “traditional.” This project engages with how making makes the world and upends the supposed one-way directionality of cultural diffusion – no longer center to margin, but many centers and many directions.
The final performance for this project consisted of an offering in October at the border, in Calexico (CA), al lado del border fence, as part of the Mexicali Biennial. Tuleño, the spirit of the tule, served offerings of pulque (an ancient drink made from the fermented nectar of the maguey plant), while attendees of the event climbed onto and walked under the giant table and chairs. In the shadow of the border fence, the table and chairs made us realize that we were all both large and small in the world. And Tuleño reminded us that plants do not recognize borders, a fact in honor of which it is worth raising a vessel of pulque.