Food, Migration & Aesthetics: On Latinx Street Vendors and The Critical Intimacy of Audrey Rodriguez
Audrey Rodriguez, Still Life with Churros on a Subway Platform (2022). Oil on linen. 36 x 48 in.
*Editors’ note: This essay was made possible thanks to a TLP’s Public Humanities fellowship program. To see the full list of summer 2023 fellow, click here.
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“Wait… / I am lit up on a shelf? / She’s not eating me, / She’s painting me / The demand calls for it.”
In her poem “Exodus and Consumption,” painter Audrey Rodríguez traces a mango’s movement from its original Tapachulan soil. The fruit is “sun-kissed and watered” for five years, “thrown into a basket by tiny hands / Taken for a hot bath” before being sent to the U.S./Mexico border for agricultural inspection. “Kill the invasive Mexican fruit flies / The demand calls for it,” Rodríguez writes. In the last stanza, the mango arrives in the hands of a woman in a New York subway station peeling, slicing, and covering the fruit’s skin with limón y picante. “I am chosen, bought / Looks like my time has come / And I am ready.” More than hearing a story of migration, globalization, and labor, the mango’s confusion to being positioned as a subject of art offers one entry to consider the careful, creative, and detailed attention Rodríguez pays to food and the everyday life of Latinx street vendors in her artworks.
During our conversation in her studio at the New York Academy of Art, Rodríguez described the trajectory of her artistic journey as one of “finding a sense of home through food.” Trained in the traditions of still life and nineteenth-century French realism, her practice encompasses drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, and poetry. Rodríguez paints from the hundreds of photographs she personally takes and compiles. Sculptures made with polymer clay, epoxy resin, styrene, and other materials function as sets from which to experiment with scale, color, and light. “I take my time with lighting at the very beginning to capture that feeling,” explains Rodríguez. This connection between being a set designer and painting still life is a strategy that enables her to visually capture and materialize the thick details of minor scenes. A tray that sits atop a cabinet in her studio once held churros being sold by a woman in the subway station. Rodríguez purchased both. The smell of cinnamon sugar surrounded her as she completed Still Life with Churros. In Rodríguez’s words and practices, I hear a deep and loving affinity for the everyday—its composition, density, sensorium, and potentiality. She models a creative method that stretches the parameters of what still life can be and creates pieces that are rich and intimate. What I find particularly striking is how Rodríguez’s research and poetry—coupled with her technique of gathering photographs and objects to paint with and from—are a model of what queer diaspora studies scholar Gayatri Gopinath terms a “queer curatorial project,” one that “entails an obligation to ‘care for’ and ‘care about.’” There is a critical intimacy in Rodríguez’s pursuits that make it apparent that the subjects and objects in her works are treasured interlocutors. Rodríguez’s personal movement from the coast of South Texas to New York along with what I see to be an archival and poetic sensibility allow her to create pieces that are not limited by their geographic and cultural specificity; rather, they invite us to be embraced by smells, tastes, places, sounds, and memories that activate a range of feelings—happiness, grief, loss, comfort, and belonging in a world structured by forced migration, displacement, and dispossession.
In honor of International Workers Day this year, The Latinx Project featured Rodríguez’s piece Corona Plaza on social media. At the center of the oil painting stands a little girl wearing a red winter jacket. A pink mask covers her mouth and nose; her eyes meet ours directly and bring to mind the many mothers with children by their side attempting to make a life in the subway. Behind the little girl is a table of aguas frescas, elotes, and four street vendors. Rodríguez reflects, “Maybe I see a bit of myself in her. I’ve seen myself there. I’ve been you.” This moment of proximity and identification illuminates how her paintings display a record of ordinary life that sutures the personal and the collective, a record that invites a mode of intimate recognition, attachment, and relation. I read many stories in Corona Plaza: a critique of the uneven and fatal distribution of sickness, precarity, and abandonment intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic; strategies of placemaking and entrepreneurial labor rooted in community and shared survival; care and the shape of kinship and childhood against the state’s attempt to disrupt and sever ties. What forms of livability and movement are possible in places where migrants who are at once hypervisibilized and invisibilized become targets for cruelty and capture? In 2020, Rodríguez attended a rally against New York’s vicious and ongoing attempt to regulate street vendor permits and constrain their capacity to make do and survive. A yellow cap with the slogan “Vendor Power” etched onto its center hangs in her studio. This is one event among many of working-class, immigrant communities assembling to defend their right to care for each other and make a living. Rodríguez’s paintings account for a community who, in addition to sustaining life together, organize strategically against the entwined violence of policing, surveillance, destruction, and racial capitalism through protest, political education, care, and mutual aid. Her paintings lay bare the work of living under and against the engineered constraint, exhaustion, attrition, and vulnerability that precarious communities are made to endure.
Audrey Rodriguez, Corona Plaza (2021). Oil on Canvas. 36 × 24 in | 91.4 × 61 cm.
What does it mean to encounter Latinx street vendors inside a gallery? To approach these lives and objects as critical positions from which to sense and say something about the world? To regard a mango covered in limón y picante as an aesthetic object that tells a theory of migrancy and a critique of the insidious, white supremacist logics and practices of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Bracero Program, and Operation Gatekeeper? At the heart of Rodríguez’s work is food and the people who contend with cruel landscapes and build beautiful, joyous lives despite them. Rodríguez teaches me that still life is a genre capable of portraying how histories of violence and a desire and rehearsal for something and somewhere else unfold daily. Her paintings make a critical intervention in scholarly and political discussions of food, migration, aesthetics, and politics as well as illustrate historical and contemporary movements of migratory communities insisting on their right to make a life, to gather and dance under and against a brutal order. “This is a subject that, for whatever reason, calls to me. It’s something I have to paint.”
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Notes
Camacho, Alicia Schmidt. Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. NYU Press, 2008
Gopinath, Gayatri. Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora. Duke University Press, 2018
Guerguerian, Amba. “Work Within the System? Plaza Tonatiuh Organizers Seek Legal Status.” The Indypendent, May 11, 2023, https://indypendent.org/2023/05/work-within-the-system-plaza-tonatiuh-organizers-seek-legal-status/
Leland, John. "Politics, Police, Pozole: The Battle for Sunset Park." New York Times, May 14, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/14/nyregion/sunset-park-street-vendors-protest.html
Muñoz, Lorena. "Selling nostalgia: The emotional labor of immigrant Latina vendors in Los Angeles." Food and Foodways 25 no. 4 (2017): pp. 283-299
Reese, Ashanté and Joshua Sbicca. "Food and Carcerality: From confinement to abolition." Food and Foodways 30 no. 1-2 (2022): pp. 1-15
Audrey Rodríguez is a painter born and raised in Brownsville, TX who now resides in New York. She is a recipient of the 2023 Chubb Post-Graduate Fellowship at the New York Academy of Art. Rodríguez’s solo show titled “Taste of Home” was recently exhibited at McLennon Pen Co. Gallery in Austin, TX. Her piece Corona Plaza (2021) was on display at the Museum of the City of New York for “Food in New York: Bigger than the Plate,” an exhibit curated by Monxo Lopez.
Orlando Ochoa, Jr. is a PhD student in the Department of American Studies and a Graduate Assistant for The Latinx Project. He is the recipient of the 2023 Public Humanities Fellowship. Orlando was born and raised in San Juan, TX.