Migrants

Last month, I posted pictures of an installation by Helen Escobedo, called Éxodos.  Max and I had passed it on our way to the our tutor Mercedes' house.  The installation consists of approximately 50 life size, downtrodden figures trudging across a plaza and down some stairs in front of the church in the Jalatlaco neighborhood. Although the figures appear to be made only of re-bar covered in rags, their posture and their positioning make the group very lifelike.  In fact, when Natalie and I went back last week, it had migrated to the edge of the plaza and further down the stairs.

There are two possible explanations for the movement.  One is that the installation is intended to be mobile.  The other is that the church needed the plaza for something else so they relocated the figures to the side.  I prefer the first explanation, although I suspect it is not the case.  It would be fitting to have a monument about the plight of migrants migrate across the plaza.

According to an obituary for Helen Escobedo, who died last year, she first exhibited Éxodos in Mexico City in 2009.  (The full exhibit consists of 101 figures, but only about half traveled to Oaxaca.)  The obituary states that the piece evokes "the thousands of persons being exiled from their homelands.”  For me, the piece evokes the migration of Mexicans to the United States.  Almost everybody we speak to in Oaxaca – from taxi drivers to teachers to businessmen to the Zapoteca woman who sells dried seeds at the market – has either been to the United States in search of work or has a relative who has been there.  I often have thought about the difficult border crossing, or of the poor living and work conditions in which many Mexican (and other) immigrants find themselves.  But the toll on those left behind also is heavy.  People here have told us about vast parts of the Mexican countryside that no longer are farmed because the workers all went to the United States, and in some regions skilled labor is scarce for the same reason.  The city of Oaxaca does not feel abandoned in that way, but we have met plenty of people whose father, or whose aunt and uncle, or whose children, live in the United States and are deeply missed.  Perhaps the figures of Éxodos, slowly working their way across the church plaza, are meant to remember them.

On a lighter note, some of you may be wondering about the status of Max's and Helen's food protest that I described in the last post.  Take a look at the date of that post.  Sorry, I could not help myself.  --Harrison