Losing Alejandro Santiago

 

Artists have an advantage when they die. Their work, particularly if they’re successful, preserves their legacy. They don’t have to rely on a loved one dragging out a family photo album to remind grandchildren of their existence. I know this and yet I’m still deeply saddened by the passing yesterday of my favorite artist, the Oaxacan painter and sculptor Alejandro Santiago.

Longtime readers of my blogs will remember my unsuccessful pilgrammage to find the depopulated village he immortalized in his Migrante project, and my elation at winning best screenplay at the Oaxacan International Film Festival because the prize was  a statue by Santiago.

On the night of the awards ceremony, I didn’t get to meet Santiago because he was still making the trip back from Mexico City where the statues were cast into bronze. But later the film festival organizers took me to his home, where I met his wife and his grandmother – who still sews and sells traditional women’s blouses at the market in Oaxaca. Most of the migrante statues that made Santiago famous are in private collections and museums around the world, but a few hundred were landscaped into the courtyard of his modest house as though they’d just climbed over his wall and taken shelter.

I could write about how Santiago’s work should be a metaphor for policy change, a protest against the ideological divide in this country concerning immigration. His sculptures could symbolize the hypocrisy of the United States —  self-proclaimed moral compass for human rights —  building a wall to keep other human beings away from our stuff.

But I don’t think that’s what Alejandro Santiago would have wanted. He would have wanted to keep it personal. That’s why his statues of migrantes are so achingly moving. Each one was inspired by a battered, imperfect, unfinished person who was willing to lose everything for the chance at a better life.

Santiago flipped the narrative. While our Congressional representatives are obsessed with painting immigrants as a threat to our security and jobs, Santiago painted the reality of immigration. Contrary to the ethnocentric assumption that Mexican immigrants come from nothing and want a handout, I have found them to be devastated at having to leave their own rich culture and become invisible in ours. They leave because of poverty, yes, but they leave behind a wealth of family, connection and heritage. They lose the place where they belong and their absence is a gaping hole filled with the tears of mothers and children left behind.

Santiago is now part of that absence – taken too soon. Oaxaca lost its most grounded ambassador, the native son who sang its story to the world. He was famous enough to live anywhere he wanted, could have traded on his talent and exotic charisma. But he came back home to hire and train other indigenous artists in Oaxaca. He came back home to support independent film and documentaries. He came back home to live beside his grandmother and her sewing machine. 

What Mexico Taught Me About Monsanto

I’ve traveled and worked in dozens of countries around the world, and usually find something about the experience that makes me appreciate the United States all the more when I return. Odd things, usually, like safe building codes and the rule of law. But sometimes traveling shines a spotlight on what needs changing in this country. It took a one-woman performance art show in Oaxaca to make me pay attention to genetically modified foods and multi-nationals like Monsanto. And ironically this Saturday a Chilean friend and former model is organizing a protest march and information session at Waterfront Park in Beaufort. Josefina Blanc isn’t trying to radicalize her new home town; she just wants us to pay attention to a policy and apathy that our country is foisting on the rest of the world. Our ambivalence about genetically modified foods has consequences far beyond the junk we feed our children. I just didn’t realize that until I met a dancer who goes by the name Violeta Luna.

We heard about her show on the street, a flier thrust into the hands of tourists passing by a beautiful Colonial building in downtown Oaxaca. I knew, vaguely, about the tortilla riots in Mexico after NAFTA flooded the market with genetically-modified corn so cheap that local farmers couldn’t compete. Honestly though, it was the chance to sit under the graceful arches and magnificent tile work that motivated me to go inside for her performance. But once the music started, I couldn’t take my eyes off Violeta Luna.

She transformed herself from a beautiful indigenous dancer into what threatens her people most: genetically modified corn. It was a dramatic, shocking, creative representation of what she feels has happened – she “modified” herself on stage, literally injecting herself with water and layering artificial coverings over her body until she almost suffocated. At one point she left the stage and walked to where I was sitting. I was embarrassed, and a little ashamed. It’s my country that is pushing this unnatural process on hers. She knelt before me and patted clay over my legs and feet. I felt conspicuous and yet it was logical that she assumed I had the power to spread the word beyond Oaxaca. But when I looked into her eyes I saw so much more. It was not so much a symbolic anointing of a white woman in a crowd of natives but an offering of protection.

MAM