Latinx Artists Shaping Immigrant Narratives in Nevada
Installation view, Hija/e/o/x(s) de Su—, 2023, Scrambled Eggs, Reno, NV. Photo by Erika Abad.
In late August, I met with the Nevada Museum of Art staff to discuss teaching and research potential with the institution’s resources. They recommended I visit The Journey, an exhibition curated by Vivian Zavataro featuring new and retrospective works from LA-based Chilean artist, Guillermo Bert. The show features 3D-printed sculptural figures that speak to the invisible, often underappreciated, essential laborers we all relied on during quarantine in conversation with the recovery of Indigenous textile practices and narratives. Bert’s show pays homage to immigrants’ struggles, Indigenous narratives, and creative practices, calling attention to the resilience, grit, and determination of historically marginalized communities in the US and his home country, Chile.
The exhibition’s catalog features scholarly essays written by art writer and creative coach Tressa Berman and transdisciplinary scholar Ximena Keogh Serrano. It also features photos and poems written by Bert himself as well as an interview conducted by Zavataro. Reading on Bert’s approach to medium, bicultural identity, and contemporary im/migration themes in conversation with the colonial and racist legacies of museums reminded me of the intellectual and political themes that compelled me to stay in Nevada in the first place. Serrano positions Bert’s work as a necessary intervention in museum studies’ colonial history, and Berman reviews Bert’s critical attention to im/migration, the transience of form, contact and human conditions through the variety of media with which he works. Although Bert’s migration from Chile to Los Angeles differs from the immigrant and children immigrant narratives told by students and colleagues in Southern Nevada, Berman and Serrano’s essays, along with his interview with the exhibition’s curator, provide a foundation from which to explore what mixed media art can contribute to narrating Latinx immigrant journeys.
As a child of immigrants who has worked with youth from mixed-status families across Chicago, IL, the Pacific Northwest, and now the Vegas Valley in Nevada, following Nevada Latinx artists across the state complements the political and ethical goals I’ve upheld in the classroom. After years of befriending and working with Latinx artists based in Nevada, The Journey provides a critical lens through which to examine Cesar Piedra and Geovany Uranda’s Hija/e/o/x(s) de Su—, a grassroots Latinx-artist-dominant show that expands on the transnational and transient themes Latinx artists across Nevada integrate into their creative practice.
Guillermo Bert, The Warriors, 2023. Image courtesy of the Nevada Museum of Art.
Over the years, Vegas Valley community members have invited me to participate in their events and engage with their work. Like themes explored in The Journey, they similarly balance the reclamation of ancestral legacies by incorporating Indigenous iconography in conversation with aestheticized references to their everyday lives. Most recently, Scrambled Eggs collective members Cesar Piedra and Geovany Uranda curated the art exhibition Hija/e/o/x(s) de Su—. Like Bert’s The Journey, the artists featured in Hija/e/o/x(s) de Su— rely on symbols of their bicultural, immigrant, diasporic lives to provide nuanced contemporary narratives regarding twenty-first century Latinx artists living and working across Nevada.
Ruby Barrientos, Hijo de su Bukele, 2023 Image courtesy of the artist. Photo by Erika Abad.
Covered by Nevada-based outlets like Las Vegas Weekly and Desert Companion, Uranda and Piedra’s Hija/e/o/x(s) de Su— offers a glimpse into the three-year journey that these young artists took to highlight and promote local, working-class artists of color. Hija/e/o/x(s) de Su— is Scrambled Eggs’ first show composed solely of Latinx artists. The end result is a focused exploration on the tensions of their queer, bicultural existence.
For this exhibition, Uranda and Piedra brought together artists currently working from or with ties to the state of Nevada. Some of the artists in the show created pieces the curators categorized as altars, including works like Ruby Barrientos’ Hijo de su Bukele, which layers generations of state violence via a central sculpture, what she calls “a deity of truth.” After taking in the gold spray paint staining the figure’s head along with the green, orange, and yellow words tagged at its base, I thought of the role of spray paint in Latinx resistance to gentrification, but inverted in this case, contrasting the contemporary medium of expression on a figure that speaks to Indigenous history.
To ensure I was on track with my analysis, I reached out to Barrientos who explained, “The tagging all over the piece reveals all the truths of the current administration, and symbolizes the defacement that colonialism and administrations born from colonialism have had on the people of the country. The ruin still stands to tell the truths, to remind people of what was once before still stands, and to question authority, to question what these so-called politicians do for them. Is it really for them? To see the corruption.”¹ By first engaging with the altar in the designed altar room at the Holland Project, Barrientos’s altar’s central positioning functions as a foundational conversation point around what many children of the Americas negotiate, especially when we have access to our communities' histories. The altar honors what survived the waves of colonialism and external intervention while respecting our own survival-based adaptability under shifting political climates.
Although Barrientos grew up in a household that didn’t use the phrase ‘Hija/o de su—,” she inserted El Salvador’s President Bukele into the altar’s title to bring attention to his recent controversial policies that attempt to cut down on gang violence in El Salvador. Barrientos’s altar highlights the Bukele regime’s brutality in the name of undermining gang violence through crumpled pictures layered and surrounding the base of the central sculpture, memorializing lives lost or those incarcerated due to gang violence. When I asked Barrientos about the icon's significance in the middle of her sculpture, she wrote, “The icon doesn't have a specific name. A lot of my work draws inspiration from my Salvadoran culture and [Maya] roots. I see it as a deity of truth.”²
Although she is physically far from her family’s country of origin, Barrientos carries El Salvador’s political struggles with her. In Hijo de su Bukele, the gold spray paint staining the principal figure’s face signals the defamation of truth, all stacked under images of police brutality. Through this stacking, Barrientos reminds the viewer of the colonial stains of seeking gold and glory that remain ever present in the Americas. Barrientos’ mixed-media sculpture acknowledges that Western-influenced governments across the Americas treat individuals as expendable, as though their entire worth rests with what their government deems valuable.
Contemplating similar issues, in The Journey, Bert uplifts those who society underemphasizes by touching on the experience of immigrants. In an interview with the exhibition’s curator, Vivian Zavataro, Bert explains that he aims to “create awareness around the value of the immigrant,” further arguing that “if the American system did not have the safety net of immigrant workers, the entire system would essentially collapse.”³ Art writer Tressa Berman speaks to these themes in Bert’s work with critical attention to “the very effect of the integration of world systems of production.”⁴
In the Vegas Valley, COVID quarantine and its aftereffects are daily reminders of worker expendability. In my experience transitioning from teaching at the University of Nevada Las Vegas to Nevada State University, I have engaged with the current generation of undocumented youth, DACA-mented folks, and children of immigrants grappling with what often feels like the catch-22 of overcoming and resisting that expendability. That sense of dispensability in our society also took a toll on their intergenerational family members and the social dynamics of their expanded communities.
Lauren Cardenas, #howtobuildawallintheUS, 2022
When I visited the show in Reno, NV, I took a copy of the newspaper with the border wall printed. Piedra offered to photograph me holding the newspaper print on the wall. Image courtesy of the author.
In the same way that Bert’s show balances making U.S. immigrant struggles visible in conversation with the global economy’s toll on Indigenous communities, artists in Hija/e/o/x(s) de Su— were equally intentional about incorporating works that discussed the U.S.-Mexico border. Lauren Cardenas’s #howtobuildawallintheUS, for example, relies on photographic images of the border wall. By instructing the viewer to take a photo with the newspaper print of the border wall, Cardenas’s piece becomes interactive, compelling visitors to consider how many immigrants from the Americas carry the border with them internally. Artists like Cardenas produce works that remind us of how border politics affect us––no matter where we are or where we land. As much as they may affect us, we also carry the potential for intimacy and solidarity, which her photograph Se adentra en su paraíso perdido highlights.
As much as curators Piedra and Uranda resist a totalizing answer for these concerns, tensions emerge among a rising generation of Nevada-based Latinx artists and the diversity of their narratives, which drove Bert to produce his Tumbleweeds series. In his interview with Zavataro, Bert explains: “Back in 2018, when I was working on a new concept, I came up with the metaphor of immigrants as tumbleweeds... I was noticing (tumbleweeds) everywhere (while driving on the freeway). In a way, to me, they were like the immigrants, they are everywhere, but you do not necessarily see them unless you are really focused on thinking about them.”⁵ In Bert’s Tumbleweeds series, these forms demand our attention, the figures’ colors contrasting with the grays and whites of the dried-out desert flora.
Through their work with the Scrambled Eggs collective, these artists are fostering relationships with growing Latinx communities in Nevada by allowing them to see themselves reflected in visual art spaces. In an interview with Vivian Zavataro, Bert hopes that “when they see themselves represented in…a museum…they may no longer feel foreign or unwelcomed in these spaces.”⁶ These sentiments echo the political and communal vision Scrambled Eggs has exercised since they came together in 2020, having observed the collaborative efforts of other Vegas artists and curators like Justin Favela and Dr. Emmanuel Ortega.
At first, the people involved with Scrambled Eggs started organizing pop-up exhibits across Las Vegas, only recently showing their works in progressive galleries like the Holland Project and Nuwu Art Gallery. Before then, Scrambled Eggs curators and artists like Manny Muñoz brought creators into unoccupied spaces and smaller galleries in their ongoing efforts to promote Latinx artists and artists of color. In doing so, they are interrogating what extent we belong in these spaces. Piedra and Uranda’s curatorial efforts in Hija/e/o/x(s) de Su— aim to position Latinx and Chicanx artists currently based in Nevada within the legacy of Latinx and Chicanx art in what is now the United States.⁷ In other words, despite drawing inspiration from the legacy of University of Las Vegas alumni like Justin Favela, their grassroots efforts didn’t receive enough attention or consideration until––thanks to community members––it reached critical mass and warranted a conversation.
Young artists’ homage to predecessors like Favela becomes especially explicit in works like Daisy Sanchez’s Studded Belt from Swap Meet and Peinado. Sanchez’s paintings––produced with pastel, oil, acrylic, airbrush, and graphite on cardboard––expand on the resourcefulness of Justin Favela’s Estardas and Jay Lynn Gomez’s At the Casino (The lives they left behind for the work they do), albeit with attention to the interpersonal everyday of her own community, rather than its invisibility. While Gomez and Favela, like Bert, draw attention to the pricelessness of immigrant labor, Sanchez’s work shows us the culture born out of immigrant resilience, centered through everyday objects. In conversation with the other works in Hija/e/o/x(s) de Su—, Sanchez moves beyond invisibility and exploitation and focuses on the fullness of their lives.
Daisy Sanchez, Studded Belt from Swap Meet. Photo by Alisha Funkhouser.
Highlighting joy and the worth of everyday life can feel daunting. Since my first introduction to Latinx artists in 2018, we have reflected on trying to make sense of our work and the invisibility we aim to challenge in our overlapping work environments. Being as nomadic as tumbleweeds, moving to where it makes sense, guided so many of us across time zones, state borders, and bodies of water. In her essay in Bert’s catalog, Keogh Serrano informs the reader that tumbleweeds “can grow roots anywhere” and that they scatter their seed as they “roll across currents of air.”⁸ Sharing a similar sensibility, co-curators Uranda and Piedra brought together a diverse group of artists to demonstrate the way Latinx immigrants and their children roll across Nevada, all the while inviting us to consider how and when we scatter and root.
As someone who is a relatively new arrival to Southern Nevada, and someone who is choosing to stay to continue to write about and build courses around Nevada Latinx and other artists of color, The Journey’s art pieces and accompanying catalog complement what I’ve learned over the past five years. Both The Journey⁹ and Hija/e/o/x(s) de Su— signal how artists and curators balance conflicting ideas: celebrating Latinx immigrants’ contributions while grappling with what it means to feel like you never fully arrive and belong in what is now the United States. I am left with a few questions as I continue building assignments and courses around the invaluable contributions of these artists. How do educators and scholars continue to collaborate with artists to celebrate what we contribute to the communities in which we live? As more institutions in Nevada seek to serve their increasing Latinx population, how will coursework nurture the way we root to resist invisibility?
¹ Correspondence, via text message, with the artist. (2023)
² Conversation with Ruby Barrientos (2023)
³ Zavataro, Vivian and Guilermo Bert, (2023) “Cross-pollination: An interview between Guillermo Bert and Vivian Zavataro” in The Journey Nevada Museum of Art. (17-18)
⁴ Berman, Tressa. “Journeys” in The Journey Nevada Museum of Art.121
⁵ Ibid. 2, 17
⁶ Ibid 2, 19
⁷ Closing reception for Hija/e/o/x de Su__ will be December 7th at Nuwu Art Gallery and Activism Studios.
⁸ Keogh Serrano, Ximena. “Routes of Resistance and Memory in the Art of Guillermo Bert.” The Journey Nevada Museum of Art.152
⁹ The Journey closes February 4, 2024 at the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV.
Erika Gisela Abad, PhD, has been writing about Nevada- and Vegas based artists and their shows since 2021. Their reviews have been featured in Dry Heat, Latinx Spaces, Double Scoop and Settlers & Nomads (now Couch in the Desert). In the fall of 2022, they curated “Two Cultures, One Family - Finding Family, Building Home,” for University of Nevada Las Vegas’s Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art. They’ve been featured on Latinos Who Lunch, Seeing People Podcast, and Art People Podcast.