Margarita Cabrera

PLUS MAGAZINE: In Secuelas: cuerpo, tierra, y mar, you explore the intersections of migration, displacement, and capitalism. How do you balance the personal and the political when engaging with such expansive and deeply rooted themes?

MARGARITA CABRERA: As an immigrant from Mexico, I have lived for more than thirty years in the borderlands of El Paso, TX, and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, MX.  Having moved from one social-cultural context to another from a young age, hybridity is part of my personal everyday experience.  The border city of El Paso is a major port of entry from Mexico to the US.  I grew up seeing massive movements of people, families, cars, cultural goods, and services.  Over the years, I learned to find strength and creativity in this const influx of people and objects, which makes me question my understanding of place—where we are presently. And how we measure distance, where we come from, and where we are going.  Over the years, I have made immigration histories a central theme in my artistic production and think about ideas of identity, labor, displacement, collapse, community, and repair.

P: The copper butterflies in Craft of Resistance carry the weight of both Mexican and U.S. economies. How do you view the symbolism of currency as a reflection of power dynamics in border relations, and what led you to use the monarch butterfly in particular for this piece?

MC: The monarch butterfly is a universal metaphor for migration. These tiny insects migrate annually and travel thousands of miles south from breeding grounds in Canada and the United States to wait out the winter in various hibernation sites, like the ones I witnessed in Angangueo, Michoacan. Individual monarchs die before returning to their origins, but by breeding in milkweed habitats along their journey, the fourth or fifth generation returns.

Through this work, I juxtapose the monarch metamorphosis with that of Mexican traditions, history, and culture because of the “maquiladora” based economy lining up the US/MX border.  Maquiladoras are Mexican labor factories that make products of the US.

Before beginning the project for my Artpace Residency, which was a makeshift factory in the studio, I traveled to Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacan, MX, to research traditional copper craft-making techniques.

Upon my arrival at Artpace, I created my version of a “maquiladora,” and with a team of volunteers, we began to work on the assembly-line production of small but thousands of copper monarch butterfly sculptures.  The mass production factory setup paralleled the interior of maquiladoras found in Mexico with fluorescent lighting and long makeshift tables. We divided the space into twelve schematic cubicles that directed the volunteers through each step of the fabrication process.

After we welded the butterflies, the pieces were packaged and exported to a private home in San Antonio, which has the second part of my project—the installation of thousands of butterflies on walls, chairs, tables, and appliances.   The presentation of the insects in an area separate from the gallery symbolizes the disparity between the production of goods in maquiladoras and the place of consumption of Mexican-made products in the US.   The swarm represents the transformation of the Mexican economy and the flight of the younger from rural to urban centers on both sides of the border.

Hundreds of life-size copper sculptures are installed in the interior of the gallery space in a beautiful plague-like flock formation. Each side of the butterfly’s wings is printed with the monarch butterfly design on the top side and the symbol of the American pennies on the underside, representing the influence of American currency on the cultural and economic climate of Mexico.

There are hundreds of butterflies on the wall at Jane Lombard gallery displayed across like a swarm of migrating butterflies.

P: El Vaivén del Mar is a striking installation that navigates the complexities of history and current global policies. Could you share how the use of border officer uniforms in the ship sculpture reframes the narrative of colonial exploitation?

MC: The main theme of the central soft-sculptural installation at Jane Lombard Gallery, El Vaiven del Mar, centers on the repercussions of colonial imperial impacts shaping immigration today.

The sailboat navigating the Mediterranean Sea is sewn together with colorful Spanish flamenco dress ruffles and US Border Patrol Uniform fabric.   Water is a sacred, live, emotionally intelligent matter—a site of memory accumulation and spiritual cleansing.  This piece considers the ocean just like our deserts—which have become vehicles of colonization and forced immigration, uprooting vulnerable communities to benefit past and present white imperial colonial powers.

The colonial sailboat sewn with US border patrol fabric cutting through the Mediterranean Ocean represents settler colonialism founded on the extraction of natural resources and people labor to benefit white imperial powers represented by Spanish leisure flamenco dresses.  The uniform fabric positions the United States as the first country historically founded on the decentralization and dehumanization of Indigenous and immigrant communities, contributing to local and global genocide—eliminating original populations to establish allied sovereignty.

Lastly, El Vaiven del Mar is visually presented as both ocean and island with hard and soft edges–transcending boundaries while simultaneously creating new ones.  Here, the works’ flexible borders respond to the realities of Nationalism as a historically imperial boundary-making exercise that is historically malleable enough to allow the movement of labor immigrant economies but becomes hard as metal when they want to keep immigrants out, as we see with the use of contemporary US/MX border walls.

The history of immigration is the history of labor movements used by states to mobilize people and labor forces.