Worry, separation, and anxiety were regular companions for artist Tanya Aguiñiga during her childhood, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border every day to get to and from school. Of course, joy, play, and laughter made appearances, but she recalls feeling a lot of fear, too.
“(My parents) told me that I wasn’t allowed to tell anybody that I lived in Mexico because I would get kicked out of school for not being in the school district, so I was just constantly really scared that I was going to get kicked out, that we were going to get found out for not living in the U.S.,” she says. “A lot of my childhood, honestly, was thinking about Mexico and living in Mexico as a really stigmatizing experience where I had to kind of keep everyone separate from myself. … I felt too vulnerable to tell anybody the truth, too insecure with my ability to stay, so a lot of it was very guarded and being constantly scared.”
After finishing elementary and high school in San Ysidro and Chula Vista, she attended local community colleges before finishing her bachelor’s at San Diego State University and earning a master’s degree at the Rhode Island School of Design where she studied furniture design. She uses craft, traditional materials, and collaborations with other artists to create installations, sculptures, and community-based art projects to help tell the stories of people living transnationally.
“A lot of my work, because of having grown up on the border and crossing every day and because my family is still in Tijuana, I think a lot about issues of immigration and figuring out ways of using craft as a way to address some of those issues,” she says.
Her AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides) project is an ongoing series she created in 2016 to provide a platform for binational artists in response to the bigoted rhetoric occurring about the U.S.-Mexico border. Currently, she’s completing her residency as the Longenecker-Roth artist in residence at UC San Diego and has an open studio session from noon to 2 p.m. Friday in the main gallery of the school’s visual arts facility. The residency, established in honor of Martha Longenecker-Roth, the founder of the Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park and an art professor at SDSU, is focused on hosting artists whose work is committed to connecting diverse people, traditions, and cultures. Aguiñiga, who currently lives in Los Angeles, took some time to talk about her experiences growing up and navigating a “divided identity,” and how that shows up in her artwork and her community organizing. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: You were born in San Diego and raised in Tijuana; what do you recall of that daily experience and routine of crossing the border every day?
A: Honestly, it was really difficult because, in the ’80s, there were just hundreds of people along the border fence waiting for an opportunity to get across. It was pretty nuts to see big encampments of a lot of adults, of people getting run over. I feel like, everywhere, it was really apparent that people were trying to get to the U.S., so it was pretty hard as a little kid to think, ‘Why can I just go across and they can’t?’ and ‘Why are people struggling so much? Why are people dying?’ It was hard. I also remember that my family on the Mexican side and on the U.S. side in San Ysidro would always help people who were migrating. So, people would come over and be like, ‘Hey, I’m on my way to try to make it across, do you have any food I could have? May I use your bathroom? Can I use your shower?’ Because my family lived in Playas (de Tijuana), which is opposite Imperial Beach, and my grandma lived in San Ysidro. We were sandwiching opposite sides of the border, so migration was always a massive part of our day-to-day (lives) and the environment that I witnessed.
Q: What do you remember thinking, back then, about having to cross the border every day? And, how do you see that experience now, as an adult? What does it mean to you to exist as a binational citizen?
A: I would get dropped off with a lot of different people: family members, best friends’ families, grandma. It took a bunch of people being OK with being inconvenienced for me to be able to stay in school, so it was really hard because I didn’t really understand why my experience was do different from other people’s. It was just difficult to stay under the radar; I’m a really social person. Like, I really, really, really like having lots of friends, doing stuff with people, having gatherings, so it was difficult to never truly be myself out of fear.
My experience growing up in Tijuana in the ’80s was also really different. We had, I guess, what would be called rolling blackouts. We would have a loss of power all the time, we would have a loss of water all the time. We’d have to fill up jugs at my grandma’s house in the U.S. with a water hose and that’s how we would get water. It was a very different living situation to a lot of people in the U.S., or in San Diego, at least. It felt closer to friends’ experiences growing up in rural areas; but at the same time, San Diego is such a developed, well-off city, so it was different. It was constantly processing a lot of different identity things, socioeconomic and class things, racism and stigmatization of being Mexican and of Mexico, itself.
Q: Your website says that your work “speaks of the artist’s experience of her divided identity and aspires to tell the larger and often invisible stories of the transnational community.” Can you talk a bit about your own experience with a divided identity and what that means for you?
A: I think a lot of it is about talking about how difficult it is to come to terms with how different the two sides are. For me, a lot of it is trying to figure out ways to make opportunities for folks who are navigating those two sides all the time, to be able to tell their own stories because I realized that my experience is my experience, so it doesn’t mean that the same experience is everybody else’s.
It also comes from a place of privilege; I was a U.S. citizen able to cross, so I always had the ability to go safely back and forth. That’s not the case for a lot of people, so a lot of it is kind of taking deep dives into how complex and varied people’s experiences are on the border, and also how our communities are constantly changing because of the influx of migrants from other places and why they’ve fled their countries. It’s a really weird space because people are always coming to the border, but then the door is always closed, so then there are so many inhumane things that happen and we’re not our best selves when a bunch of people come to our door. So, a lot of it is just kind of exploring all of that—how can we do better by each other?
I always think about people who are immigrating to go through so many different countries’ borders, and all of those countries have failed them, and that’s why they made it all the way up here because nobody provided a safe harbor, opportunity, care, growth. If I think about when we first had Haitian migrants coming to the border, they told us that it took them anywhere from five to eight years to make it up to the border and they had to go through Brazil. So, I just think about how no country, no state, has really made a big effort to protect us and they just constantly cause more trauma. I think about our responsibility as humans, to each other, and how we can make efforts toward mitigating further harm and making sure that we show up for each other regardless of where anybody comes from, or what anyone has told us in the past, or the stuff that’s been said about us. It’s complex. Those of us who go back and forth are the ones who are constantly joining the two sides and trying and processing it. Making it this different, third thing where we’re the bridge between the two sides, but the issues on each side are so different.
It’s also thinking of things as a massive landscape and how so much of our actions are constantly shaping and affecting each other’s ability to survive. It’s spending time in the place, building community, talking to folks and trying to figure out ways to care for communities in need, to think about who’s the most vulnerable in our communities and how can we work toward making sure that they’re OK. If they’re OK, then we’re all OK.
Q: What would you say have been some ways that you’ve been able to channel that into your art?
A: The reason why I’m here, at UCSD, is because I’m working with the archive of the Border Art Workshop/Tallér de Arte Fronterízo. That was a historic arts collaborative that was multi-generational, multi-ethnic, multi-national that was started as a way to talk about border issues. I was part of that group from ’97 to 2003. My mentor, who was my teacher at Southwestern College, was the only founding member who stayed on until he passed away in 2012, so I constantly thought about all of the things that I was trained to do and all of the ways that I was taught that art can be used for community organizing, for mutual aid, for talking about migrant rights and human rights. A lot of the work that I do stems from having learned that, so I wanted to come back and work with the archives and help me come to terms with a lot of difficult issues. Having created my own work to address issues on the border, I really wanted to spend time with this legacy, but also expand and make something like a family tree of everyone who was involved. What is everyone doing? How did their work as part of the Border Art Workshop, their time in the borderlands, affect the way that they navigate the world now? What were the lessons that they took from this? What are the lessons that those of them who are educators or leaders, how did the border influence them? How did that time period ripple out all over the U.S.?
For myself, having created AMBOS after Michael (Schnorr, my mentor) passed, I kept thinking about who’s lifting this heavy load? If there’s anybody willing to continue it at a collaborative and large scale. I was writing grants, trying to figure out how to come back to San Diego and what type of project I could come up with. How do I use craft (because that’s what I had been trained in in school) as a way to help me find my own way to address my community’s problems? Nobody would give me a grant. Then, with the 2016 election and so many negative things being said about Mexicans, suddenly I got three grants. Since then, there have been a lot of escalating negative and violent actions and rhetoric against immigrants. I’ve been able to continually come up with different ways of using craft and using museums and different spaces to really help our community deal with stuff, but also to have a voice.
The biggest thing we have going on right now, in our fourth year, is we have a ceramics program at three LGBTQ asylum shelters in Tijuana. The project started as a trauma-informed ceramics program, so there’s a therapist in the class, it’s taught by queer instructors, and it’s a collaboration between our ceramic studio and social services for immigrants, and AMBOS (my group). We also rely on the craft community in Tijuana, San Diego, LA, and Santa Barbara for donated materials, and we collaborate with ceramic artists from Mexico City, San Diego, Tijuana, and LA to do fundraising and collaborations with our students. For me, all of that is a way of sharing responsibility and asking our communities to think about ways of becoming involved in mutual aid, thinking about migrant rights when they may not be somebody who thinks about that, as a way to connect them to a person that is going through the process of asylum seeking or refugee status. A lot of it is also thinking about our participation and how we are complicit in all of these different systems, and how can we make opportunities for accountability?
Q: You have an open studio session coming up; can you talk a bit about what your plans are for this session?
A: It’s pretty much set up like a shared resource space with a bunch of books about border issues, about identities in Latin America, social praxis, fiber and craft. There are some books on Indigenous issues. There are some self-help books, little self-published ‘zines. There are children’s books that are mostly about Mesoamerican culture. I have a bunch of resources about how to teach identity issues, how to work through different issues that Black and Brown communities face. A lot of information on migrant rights, as well. Then, I’m going to be printing a lot of the stuff that I’ve gotten from the archive, so I can work through and be able to talk to people about this history, which most people don’t know about because all of this stuff happened before the internet, so there aren’t digital records of a lot of this having ever happened.