by Maurice Rafael Magaña
This blog entry considers how young people archive and make visible the historical, geopolitical, and socioeconomic entanglements of transborder Indigenous communities through the production of murals and their circulation on social media. In the process, artists and social media users create decolonial antiracist counterpublics that challenge tropes of “the bad/good immigrant” and reject antiblack racism as the cost of US belonging.
Portrayals of racialized youth disproportionately focus on tropes of urban criminality, pathology, and deviance. When these problematic depictions converge with those about migrants, especially those from Latin America, the result is dangerous rhetoric that dehumanizes, criminalizes and is used to justify state and vigilante violence against vulnerable communities. These offenses include well-documented human rights abuses committed by the United States government such as ripping families apart, caging babies and children, forced sterilizations, killing unarmed teenagers, and incarcerating people in COVID-invested jails. Responses from those sympathetic to migrants, on the other hand, often focus on simplistic narratives of the “good immigrant,” highlighting their economic contributions or lower rates of crime. When speaking of undocumented youth, even well-meaning supporters often reproduce narratives that blame migrant parents and exalt the “Americanness” of young people raised in the U.S.
What these depictions share in common is a profound lack of voice and agency for migrants themselves, a basic premise that migration is not a human right but a privilege based on merit, and an astounding ignorance of the geopolitical context of migration. As an anthropologist, my research examines how young members of transborder communities in Mexico and the U.S. challenge these problematic depictions through art and activism. One powerful way they do so is through murals that depict migrants and their communities as dignified and complex. While the mobility of these artists and their communities has been severely limited by the entrenchment of racialized regimes of citizenship, borders, and containment in recent years, their murals continue to shape the contours of urban space in the U.S. Photographs of them circulate globally on social media.
“South Central Dreams” by Tlacolulokos. Photo Credit: The artists, 2016
The mural “South Central Dreams” (SCD) is a compelling example of how murals can transform space, create counter-publics, and archive community histories. The mural was painted in South Central Los Angeles by a collective of Indigenous (Zapotec and Mayan) artists from Oaxaca, Mexico who call themselves Tlacolulokos. Zapotecs (and Mexicans more broadly) have been making their homes in significant numbers in South Central, which has long been considered the heart of Black Los Angeles, since the 1970s. The rich histories of multiracial community formation that take place in such neighborhoods push the boundaries of how we understand, talk about, and mobilize race, indigeneity, migration, and belonging. Murals like SCD archive these histories and make Indigenous Mexicans and migrants visible in public space where such bodies are highly surveilled and policed.
The symbolism deployed in “South Central Dreams” indexes decades of cultural and political exchange across borders and difference. The Black Panther and Black Power tattoo on the woman’s forearm, for example, are clear references to the rich history of African American settlement and political organizing in the area. The young women also has a tattoo bearing the acronym ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards), which is a common refrain among anarchists, punks, and antifascists globally. When put in dialogue with the other symbols in the mural, as well as the mural’s location, this can be understood as a gesture to the long history of rebellion and resistance against racialized police violence in Los Angeles, which date back to the first murder of a Black person by LAPD in South Central in 1927. South Central was also the site of the Watts rebellion in 1965 and the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. Both were triggered by particular acts of police violence but were in actuality the result of accumulated rage and despair over generations of antiblack state and vigilante violence, economic and social disinvestment, and political abandonment. SCD honors the legacy of Black struggle in South Central and signals the global circulation of an anarcho-punk-inspired antiauthoritarian and antifascist political culture.
“El Sueño” mural by Lapiztola at SPARC. Photo Credit: The artists, 2015
Murals by Mexican artists in the United States also counter the visibility paradox for immigrants and racialized youth whereby they are made invisible in terms of not seeing themselves represented in affirming ways in the media, politics, and society in general, while simultaneously being hypercriminalized. South Central Dreams is one of dozens of murals painted in Los Angeles neighborhoods by Mexican artists, including several by another Oaxacan collective called Lapiztola. Both Tlacolulokos and Lapiztola are based in Oaxaca and traveled to the United States to paint murals in the diverse neighborhoods where the Oaxacan diaspora live and work. In addition to countering dominant regimes of visibility and U.S. whiteness, they challenge the racialized geographies found throughout Latin America and reproduced in Latinxs spaces in the U.S. whereby mestizos and whites dominate the public sphere.
Instagram post by Los Angeles-based member of the Oaxacan diaspora. Photo Credit: Screenshot used with permission from user (Daniel), 2016
The murals also exist digitally on social media and other online platforms where digital photographs and conversations about them circulate. Social media becomes a site for the articulation of transborder community and identity formation as users plot transborder locales by placing the names of LA neighborhoods like South Central together with the names of specific Zapotec pueblos with a large presence in Los Angeles (#Zoogocho, #Tlacolula). Through the savvy use of hashtags, South Central becomes #SurCentro but does not erase #SouthCentral, instead they are placed together to signal dynamic place-making. These hashtags are combined with shout-outs to Black social movements (#BlackPanthers #BLM), and hip-hop culture (#BlackLove #BrownPride) signaling the relational formations of race that structure Indigenous Oaxacans’ experience in Los Angeles.
Through murals and use of social media, members of transborder communities challenge ideas of who belongs and who has the right to be seen in public. South Central Dreams in particular refuses antiblackness and assimilation as the cost of U.S. belonging for Mexican migrants by giving form to solidarity and mutual recognition between Black and Brown people. These murals do not offer simple or triumphant narratives of migration or of migrants. Instead, they call attention to the social toll that generations of migration has taken on the fabric of communities, while also paying homage to the dignity and creativity found in migrant communities across borders.
About the author
Maurice Rafael Magaña is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the cultural politics of youth organizing, transnational migration, urban space, and social movements in Mexico and the United States. His research provides a transnational perspective on historic marginalization, racialization, youth political culture and the role of art in activism. Maurice’s first book, titled Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico, is scheduled to be published by University of California Press in Fall 2020. You can find him at mauricermagana.com, academia.edu, or follow him on Twitter @ProfeMauMagana