Las Madres in the News
In addition to the selected articles below, more information about Las Madres can be found at:
Youtube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3eYDo3L5a4, 6/07, “Las Madres Project Video”
KXCI 91.3 FM, Broad Perspectives, 12/07 "Las Madres reads found letters."
Audio recorded by www.earthtribetv.org
Listen now!
Univision Online, 6/08
La muerte revive en el desierto: Valarie James junto a uno sus trabajos, montado con materials dejados por inmigrantes
Go to their site to view the story: www.univision.com
Fiber Arts Magazine, Summer 2008, "Artist's Work and Life at the U.S.-Mexican Border" http://www.fiberarts.com
ABC KGUN 9 News, 5/08
The Wall Street Journal, Desert Castaways Get Second Life in Art Exhibition; Cactus Needles in a Mitten,” 1/2008
http://online.wsj.com/public/
article_print/SB120051160436595209.html
Hispanic News http://hispanic7.com/transforming_tragedy_into_art.htm
Tucson Weekly, 12/07, "Dislocation and Separation,"
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Arts/Content?oid=oid:104238
KOLD News 13 Exclusive, 11/07, "An Inside Look at the Migrant Journey; Art or Evidence,""
http://www.kold.com/Global/story.asp?S=7431827
Sculptural Pursuit, Winter Edition 2007, "Valarie James and Las Madres Project; Putting a Human Face on the Plight of Migrants,"
http://www.sculpturalpursuit.com/
Arizona Daily Star, 10/07, "Art made of Entrants' Discards; Exhibit gives visible form to crossers' secret journeys,"
http://www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/208737.php
Censored, 9/07, "Finding Spirit, Living Compassion, Migrant Shrine at Southside,"
http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html
Somos Primos, Society of Hispanic Historical & Ancestral Research, 6/07 “Heirlooms in the Sand,” http://www.somosprimos.com/sp2007/spjun07/spjun07.htm
Tubac Villager, 4/07, “Turning Tragedy into Art” “Las Madres”
KXCI 91.3 FM, Broad Perspective, 4/07
Book Women, Minnesota Women’s Press, 4-5/07
CBS KOLD NEWS, Tucson, AZ, 6/06, “Artwork Honors Illegal Immigrant Plight”
El Imparcial Internacional, Mexico, 4/06, “Despojos De Inmigrantes; Convertidos En Obras De Arte”
Canal 13 CBS KOLD-TV, Ayer Hoy Manana, Tucson, AZ, 3/06, “Las Madres Project”
The Connection, “Of Art & Altars”
The Tucson Citizen, AZ 9/05: “Giving Illegal Immigrants a Voice”
The Arizona Daily Star
With their discarded belongings, artist tells of mothers lost to desert
Opinion by Ernesto Portillo Jr.Tucson, Arizona | Published: 05.13.2007
Many of the items were once held by mothers who crossed the parched desert in search of a bountiful life:
- A baby's bloodied blanket and bottle.
- A child's Tweety Bird backpack, Minnie Mouse T-shirt and school notebook.
- A woman's shoe, cosmetics and wallet.
- A bordado, an embroidered cloth with stitched words of hope and love — Te Amo, Cariño Mío, Amor Mío.
The discoveries are many and varied. But they hold a common bond for James, a mixed-media artist. "These would be secrets lost in the desert," she said.
Artist Valarie James combines man-made and natural elements into
her pieces, drawing on the saga of illegal border crossers struggling
across the desert.
The desert holds the secrets and truths of undocumented immigrants who have successfully or unsuccessfully crossed it. But there are few people or ways to tell their hidden narratives.
James does.
She collects some of the border crossers' abandoned belongings, takes them inside her studio and gives them meaning. Along with several other committed artists, James transforms the lifeless objects into pieces of art that speak to her convictions and give voice to people whose identities have been lost.
"If these clothes are not found and brought in, we wouldn't know these people existed," James said.
For the past several years, James has turned her artistic energies toward honoring las madres del desierto, the mothers of the desert.
Incorporating man-made and natural materials found around her home, James creates mother figures. Their stillness hints of the women's living faith and dreams.
Closed eyes.
Crossed arms.
Contemplative faces.
James takes denim jeans punctured by spiney ocotillos and sharp rocks, and cotton clothing containing the wearer's desert saga of blood, sweat and dirt.
The clothing is shredded and turned into a pulp. It is shaped and formed, and held together with natural elements such as prickly pear mucilage, bees-wax, arroyo sand and dark mesquite sap called chucata.
In late 2005 three life-size figures were placed at Pima Community College's East Campus. The installation art is called "Las Madres: No Más Lágrimas, The Mothers: No More Tears."
James' fellow artists include Antonia Gallegos, Cesar Lopez and Deborah McCullough.
Like the real-life defenseless mothers who disappear in Southern Arizona's harsh elements, the unprotected stationary madres are disintegrating from exposure to sun and heat, cold and rain.
James said the items recovered in the desert and the resulting art works challenge her to confront the reality of transborder women who make life-enhancing or life-ending decisions to cross the border on foot.
Las madres are forced to leave their homes because of economic forces that bring poverty and frustration. Yet these same global economic changes are the magnets that attract them to the dangerous journey north.
James grew up in a military family and lived in Puerto Rico, England and Alaska. She worked as an artist in Northern California before moving to the Amado area four years ago.
Three years ago she created an exhibition on her property called the santuario, a shrine to border crossers. It continues to grow with the wide assortment of personal items left behind.
Currently James and fellow artists are creating a new series of madres. They are sculpted upper torsos of women with their hands crossing their chests. Each will be a different color and texture.
There is a sense of urgency and purpose to James and her work.
Las madres are dying in the desert and James wants people to see the despair in their faces.
"This is part of our living history," she said.
'Las Madres' artist honors all mothers through her own
By Mike Touzeau,
Special to the Green Valley News
Saturday, May 12, 2007 10:39 PM MDT
Mario Aguilar | Green Valley News
AMADO ARTIST Valarie James works with one of three-larger-than-life sculptures that make up her project, “No Mas Lagrimas-No More Tears.” The sculptures are made from many different materials, some of which include discarded denim and khaki jeans, as well as plant materials. They are on display at Pima Community College’s East Campus in Tucson.
A mother's abiding concern for her child is unconditional and unending, perhaps the most powerful loving force among all living things.
Amado artist Valarie James came across a diaper bag abandoned in the desert near her small ranch three years ago, pondering the plight of the woman and her baby as she stared at the original birth certificate she found in the bag and brought back to her studio.
“It was like a crime scene, and I wondered what was their story,” she recalled asking herself.
“Since 2004, my neighbors and my colleagues and I have recovered over 35 embroidered cloths from the desert near my ranch in southern Arizona,” she wrote in Carino Mio; Art from the Migrant Trail, a piece for a national art magazine, “cloths created by nameless women, whose personal stories we will never know.”
Heirloom quality
Many are of heirloom quality, she says, lost by migrants struggling across the desert, stitched with words in Spanish of remembrance and love for mothers left behind when sons risk their lives for work.
“How similar this is to the work of own mothers and grandmothers,” she said. “It is the universal language of art.”
In a building next to the house, they hang on the wall above piles of backpacks, burlap bags, and bandages; shoes and shirts and mittens; pills and potions; kids' drawings and family photos; bits of Bibles and holy candles; a note to a father that says simply, “We want you to come back”—all remnants of faceless, nameless family members torn apart by the modern border struggle we all refer to as “the immigration problem.”
Dragging that diaper bag back, she found a small bottle of Johnson's Baby Shampoo, with the familiar No Mas Lagrimas-No More Tears brand.
It left an indelible impression on James, a former art therapist who left her parents' Alaska home to cross the country, as many teenagers did then, caught up in the turbulent generational conflicts of the 60s and 70s.
“I know what it is to be hungry, to be on the outside looking in,” she said as she recalled her own struggle then and still tries to imagine the pain her mother, a widow who now lives in Green Valley, must have endured as well.
They have long since reconciled, she explains.
“We've become the best of friends. My mother and I have managed to come to a sweet place.”
Featured in an article titled “Transforming Tragedy Into Art,” in last month's Tubac Villager, James has, since those discoveries, dedicated her craft to depicting the fragmented lives affected by the border-crossing crisis, specifically the relationship between mother and child.
Remarkably, the multi-media artist is “recycling” the discarded man-made items left in the desert, mixing them with grasses, mesquite, yucca, and other plant materials to get a “paper look,” sealing them with encaustic natural resins to create spectacular and heart-rendering images of this human struggle, notably the Las Madres project, which includes three life-sized sculptures she set with three other local artists in 2005 behind Pima Community College's Tucson campus that depict mothers concerned for their children's safety.
Those and more information about the project can be seen at www.lasmadresproject.org., and those interested in more of her work can find her at www.divinaarts.com.
Discarded artifacts
Particularly fascinating are her assemblages, part of the “Window Series,” hanging on her studio walls, each with its own story told through the discarded artifacts of thousands of Sonoran Desert immigrants.
“Ocotillo Rose” features old Ace bandages used to wrap injured feet, dyed with cochineal and wound around thorny ocotillo, eerily though unintentionally reminding one of the Crucifixion crown of thorns.
“Tea Leaves” combines a young woman's faded photo with tabs of birth control pills, depicting the tragic prediction that some may face sexual assault and so protect themselves from pregnancy prior to crossing.
“Doing this work helps me transform my feelings of powerlessness every time I meet migrants for whom I can do little more than offer food and water,” said James, who learned to embrace cultural differences early traveling the world as a Navy man's daughter, though she bristles at the mention of the complicated politics of the illegal immigration issue, emphasizing how it has divided us.
“I just reveal what I see,” she says, “ and art is learning to see.”
Grinding grasses and flowers to make pigments at age 3, digging clay from the Bay of Anchorage as a pre-teen to sculpt Indian heads, and weaving flowers and barks into tapestries were her earliest recollections of a developing passion for creative expression that eventually culminated in a successful art career as curator, manager, teacher, promoter, and skilled therapist.
National grant
Her work has been shown all over the country and earned her a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He pieces can be found among high profile collectors, corporations, and are part of the U.S. Embassies American Art Collection in South Africa and New Guinea.
In addition to the Las Madres Project, dedicated to her mother, James and two other producers are putting together “A Trail of Thread,” a documentary about her process of integrating natural elements and the trash she finds, and she's planning a border arts exhibit for September at El Ojito Gallery in Tucson.
Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson has commissioned her to do a “living memorial,” created from the distinctive tire treads soles from discarded migrant shoes. She hopes to complete it in August.
Seeking volunteers
Since moving to Amado three years ago to be closer to her students, she continues to look for volunteers to help with Las Madres as well as “Heirlooms in the Sand,” a new project to design and distribute cards and calendars that reflect her desire to help be a voice for all those mothers whose children are forced away by these kinds of economic pressures they face each day, as proceeds from their sale will benefit family-run handicraft businesses created on both sides of the border that she hopes will ease the burden that pushes fathers and sons to cross the desert to feed their families.
She's putting a lot of love into a clay rendition of her colleague and friend, the model for Las Madres, Antonia Gallegos, a migrant mother from Eloy who was reunited after 30 years with her kidnapped daughter.
More important to her, it seems, than any of her past accomplishments, projects in progress, or need to chronicle in her work the controversial great migration with no solution in sight, is the renewed and cherished bond with her own mother.
She's still moved to tears when she talks about that teenage time away from her when she was searching for herself.
James declared in the guest book on her Web site, “Las Madres Project is dedicated to my mother, who knows what it's like to lose a child before their time (her younger brother), and to all the other mothers who have lost their children in the desert.”
Much like the old Jewish proverb that states,” God can't be everywhere, so he invented mothers,” the work of this gifted artist, inspired by the woman who never gave up hope for her daughter's return, reminds us all that, regardless of our cultural and political differences, we were all once children, nourished by the most enduring love on earth.
Mike Touzeau is a freelance writer
Las Madres weep silently for loved ones' safe return
LA MONICA EVERETT-HAYNESThree female sculptures on Pima Community College's East campus begin to melt at sunrise each day.
The visual effect is that the sculptures - "mothers," as they are called - are sweating and crying.
"With the heat, they're beginning to show wear and tear, just like human beings do in the elements. They're beginning to communicate," said artist and creator Valarie James.
The life-sized sculptures represent Mexican and Latin American mothers who stay behind when their children and husbands cross the U.S.-Mexico border, she said.
The figures are part of a project on display at PCC since last winter called "Las Madres; No Mas Lagrimas" - "no more tears," as the title says, yet they are "weeping," James said.
"There are all of these hidden narratives - stories we will never know," she said.
And it's happening at the onset of the deadliest time for illegal immigrants crossing the border.
James collaborated on the pieces with fellow artists Antonia Gallegos, Debbie McCullough and Cesar Lopez.
The group used pieces of jeans, khaki pants, burlap, yucca and mesquite found in the desert between Amado and Arivaca to make the mothers.
They then painted or dipped the pieces into a natural biopolymer sealant made from natural resin and beeswax.
Then, the "mothers" were installed as part of PCC's Sculpture on Campus program.
Each morning, the sun causes their natural fluids to seep to the surface, as designed.
Late last month, the burlap-based "mother" collected so much moisture around her eyes that she appeared to cry.
For James, the weeping carries spiritual meaning.
"These sculptures are echoing the reality of the pain and the loss that mothers feel when their children and their husbands are gone, crossing the desert," James said. "It's the transcendent nature of art. This project goes beyond the politics of the issue."
The mothers are quite popular on PCC's East campus, 8181 E. Irvington Road, said Mike Stack, the PCC art faculty member who started Sculpture on Campus.
"Everyone is involved in the issues by living in southern Arizona," Stack said. "We run into the issues surrounding the piece."
It is a positive piece, he noted.
"It challenges an individual but, aesthetically, any individual can embrace the piece," Stack said. "It shows a very human side."
Las Madres Project en Español
Discover ::
- Home Page
- Making Las Madres
- Time & the Elements
- The Shrine
Heirlooms in the Sand- Las Madres Series
- Windows Series
- El Santuario Migratorio
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Artist's Colleagues ::
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