Crossing borders: CECUT offers exhibition “Migración”

A man sleeps under a worn blanket wedged into a crevice in the dirt up against the border wall in Tijuana. The steep pitch of the wall careens across the frame in a sharp diagonal fall, revealing a giant cliff face just below. With this visual image, photographer David Meneses de la Paz captures the precarious situation of undocumented migrants today.



The exhibition "Migración" is presented in celebration of the 32nd Anniversary of CECUT, and in collaboration with the BBVA Bancomer Foundation and the program Tijuana Innovadora. Director General of CECUT, Pedro Ochoa Palacios inaugurated the exhibition on October 21, stressing the importance of this exhibition to mark the anniversary of the institution.



The phenomenon of migration brought together Anasella Acosta, editor of Cuartoscuro Agencia de Fotografía and Luis Robles Miaja of BBVA Bancomer, who sponsored the juried show, selecting fifty of the 300 photographs entered into the competition.

The selection of photographs stresses place and geography to tell the story of migration.



A few entries combine photographs with city maps, situating Mexican workers and families in their new homes in Los Angeles. Images of migrants descending in Oaxaca from "La Bestia" (the now infamous train that migrants board to travel north through Mexico) combine with moving portraits of individuals to evoke bittersweet emotion: the sadness of leaving and the anticipation of arrival. Other photographs document the waiting in Tijuana and the longing for Mexico upon arrival in the United States. One photograph depicts a heavily tattooed man sitting on the beach writing a letter. Another shows a woman proudly flying the Mexican flag outside her apartment window in New Rochelle, New York.

The photographs–from 2006 and 2007–also register a powerful historic moment in migration from Mexico to the United States.



By 2006, in the ten years after the establishment of NAFTA and Operation Gatekeeper, more than 4000 people had lost their lives crossing through burning deserts and remote mountainous areas to get to the United States.



In April 2006, hundreds of thousands marched in the streets of cities across the United States, protesting a draconian border bill passed by the House of Representatives in December 2005 and under debate in the Senate. One provision of the bill (not approved by the Senate) intended to crack down on human trafficking would have criminalized all humanitarian aid to migrants, leveling felony charges against anyone offering shelter, food, water or other forms of assistance to migrants in the US without documents.



The United States Congress and Senate that year approved The Secure Fence Act of 2006 which mandated the construction of 700 miles of physical barriers along the US-Mexico border. Today this new border wall spans the border in California, Arizona and West Texas just 150 feet north of the old rusting metal border fence built in 1994 as per Operation Gatekeeper.

Today more than 232 million people worldwide live outside their country of origin, according to a recent report by the United Nations. For people who live in the shadows, outsiders alienated equally from their homelands and from the official daily life of the cities in which they reside, the documentation of this phenomenon by artists and photographers may remain as the only record of their existence.



"Migración" will be on exhibit at CECUT in the central exhibition gallery until the middle of January 2015. The exhibition is free of charge.



jill.holslin@sandiegored.com