For Some Immigrant Artists, This Is No Time to Retreat

New York Times

16-05-2025

Ruddy Mejia was sitting in a compact studio in the South Bronx, putting the finishing touches on a set of small, brightly colored brass foil plates embossed with images of body parts.
His take on popular Mexican religious charms, or 'milagros,' they draw from a tradition of toiling for hours to indent an image — a heart, leg or other body part that needs healing — into a plate of metal.
They are about sacrificing 'time, and your hands, in order to ask for a little prayer of help from beyond,' said Mejia, one of the 34 artists, all but one of whom are Latino immigrants or children of immigrants, in a new exhibition, '¡Te Amo Porque S.O.S. Pueblo!,' at the BronxArtSpace.
The exhibition is intended as a celebration of immigrants in a time of crackdowns and deportations. It is also a form of outreach, offering access to legal resources and advocacy groups, and a chance to connect with other immigrant artists in the South Bronx, where the population is majority Latino and nearly one-third foreign-born.
'Emotions are running very high,' Mejia, 36, said. 'There's a lot of fear. I wanted to create something that resembles what that feels like.'
The exhibition is organized by Blanka Amezkua, Marco Saavedra and Maria Ponce Sevilla, artists and advocates who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border as undocumented minors decades ago (and have since been granted citizenship or asylum). The title of the exhibition, '¡Te Amo Porque S.O.S. Pueblo!,' means 'I love you because you are my people' and riffs on a poem by the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti (1920-2009) — the Spanish tweaked to indicate a state of emergency in immigrant communities.
'This is a celebration of all those who transform this world through their honest labor,' said Amezkua, the originator of the show and, according to many in the exhibition, a godmother figure to immigrant artists in the South Bronx. 'We should be celebrating despite everything that's going on,' she added. 'For this moment, we just want to say: We love you.'
Amezkua, an artist who explores the Mexican art of papel picado ('punched paper' in Spanish), is known as a community leader, pulling artists into her orbit and then mentoring them. Several artists in the exhibition have shown work at Amezkua's artist-run space, Alexander Avenue Apartment 3A, which she managed for eight years out of her third-floor walk-up in Mott Haven, the Bronx.
Amezkua first crossed the border pretending to be asleep in the back of an uncle's car at the age of about 4, following her parents, who were cotton farmers, to South Central Los Angeles. After returning to Mexico at 10, which separated her from her parents for five years, and making another clandestine crossing to reunite with them as a teenager, Amezkua found a way to a painting degree at California State University, Fresno, and ultimately a life in art.
Many of the artists and organizers of the BronxArtSpace show have similar stories— of traumatic family separations, parents working tough jobs and living in crowded apartments shared with other families, growing up undocumented and fearing a knock on the door. But this exhibition is not a 'trauma bomb,' a trope that one of the show's artists, Leslie Lopez, said she was not interested in incorporating into her art.
Instead, the show offers a respite from fear, said Sevilla, one of the show's organizers, and is 'a way of saying that no matter what, no matter who's in power, and despite the fear and hate-mongering, people are going to produce beauty and people are going to want to show that.'
The artworks at BronxArtSpace include Erika Harrsch's 'United States of North America' passport project, imagining open borders from Mexico through Canada and symbolized by a monarch butterfly (a free migrant between these territories), as well as the textile works of Colectivo Voces, a group of New York-based Indigenous women from the Mexican state of Guerrero who meet to embroider, crochet and speak in their Mixtec dialect.
Assembled together, the artworks in '¡Te Amo …' provide a snapshot of a community whose artistic practices offer something of a lifeline.
'We were joking that as undocumented people we're so stereotyped by the work of our hands, this exploitative labor,' said Saavedra, another of the show's organizers.
'Maybe in response to that,' he continued, 'we need to create because we're not just waiters and construction workers and busboys and nannies and caretakers — which we are, and disproportionately so — but we're also tattoo artists and muralists and embroiderers and photographers.'
While the show is not a noisy, political one, some of the artworks make subtle references to violence on either side of the border. Rigo Flores, 36, has contributed two intricate embroideries that channel his mother's tradition of embroidering tortilla warmers. One of them is a delicately stitched portrait of Antonio Tizapa, the father of one of the 43 students who disappeared in Guerrero (Flores's home state in Mexico) in 2014; they were found to have been kidnapped and massacred by the local police and military in collusion with drug traffickers.
Inspired by Tizapa's fight for justice, Flores has portrayed his subject with verdant green plants and adorned his skin with sequins. He wanted to transport Tizapa to a peaceful environment, he said, as well as to humanize immigrants.
Patricia Espinosa, 54, has created a set of wings with tissue paper, barbed wire, and the zip ties that are often used to handcuff people in mass arrests. At the center of the work, she has offered some words that she hopes will lift people's spirits: 'Nunca olvides que tienes alas,' or 'Never forget you have wings.'
Espinosa said that more and more, she has been contemplating a permanent return to Mexico, even as she feels an urgency to help those in her community who are the most vulnerable. After entering the United States on a student visa to pursue a degree at Parsons School of Design, which led to jobs at MoMA and the United Nations, Espinosa spoke rapturously of the opportunities she had been given in this country, and the gratitude she felt. Now, her outlook is different.
'As much as I drink my lemon balm tea and stay calm, and say I'm not going to read as much, I cannot take the daily influx of anxiety-inducing news anymore,' she said. 'I just want to help get our motivation, our spirits up. That's the only thing I can do.'
Planned before the 2024 election, the exhibition has grown in scale and funding as events have unfolded since President Trump's re-election, picking up support from the Ford Foundation and the Bronx Council on the Arts, among many others.
'We are all affected by this crisis,' said Libertad Guerra, executive director of the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center on the Lower East Side, which also provided funding for the exhibition as part of a multiyear effort to document the contributions of Latino people to New York.
While the exhibition comes at an excruciating moment for the immigrant artist community of the South Bronx, the opening, on April 25, was anything but somber. Preparations had been made for the worst-case scenario, and legal support was on hand should the authorities show up. Still, custom prints were raffled off, and revelers danced.
'This show is dedicated to all the people that crossed that border,' Amezkua said to the exuberant crowd. 'We carry that border with us, and many of us came here as minors without our consent. We came together to create a safe space for us to celebrate all the things that we offer to this world.'
She paused and added, 'And this is just the beginning, because we're not going anywhere.'