(Background noise)
(Scraping)
(Sound of a heart beating faster and faster)
(Sound of the heart stops)
(Rain-like sounds)
(Ominous sounds, a throbbing sound)
(Sound of fire)
[On September 26, 2014, 43 male students]
[from a rural teachers’ college]
[were kidnapped in Iguala, Mexico.]
[They were attempting to protest a speech]
[when the mayor told the police chief to make them disappear.]
[In the course of this,]
[three bystanders were killed]
[and two students were found]
[with their faces torn off.]
[The rest of the bodies were never found.]
I still remember that tremendous pain I felt
the first time I came across this story on Facebook.
My friend who had posted it
had also changed her profile picture to a black square.
Soon, more and more profiles were becoming blackouts.
I hadn’t known these 43 students,
but I knew I had to tell their story.
I decided to become that black square.
So I painted out a room, entirely in black,
and in homage to the 43 students who had been wanting to become teachers
I wore that blackness, erasing my identity into nothingness.
Questioning the value of life:
What’s the value of Jose Ángel Navarrete’s life,
18 years old?
The value of Jorge Álvarez Nava,
19 years old?
What is the value of your life?
Mine?
The 41 other students?
I extracted these images from the video performance
to create image and narrative from that which had been erased.
(Silence)
Many years ago,
I traveled to the Yucatan peninsula, deep in the jungle in Mexico.
There, I was mesmerized by the blueness of a cenote, a sinkhole.
The guide told us that that was the grave site
where hundreds of girls had been murdered,
drowned as offerings to the gods.
I thought about myself back then, as a teenager, about my sisters.
How quickly your relationship to a space can transform with information.
So I went back in 2012 and asked the guide if I could rent a horse.
I wanted to swim in that blueness with a white stallion.
How come boys get to come of age by conquering some part of nature,
and women instead get killed in nature?
As I put on my dress and my stilettos, this guide looked at me as if I was crazy.
I was going to get hurt, possibly killed.
And what about their white stallion, Tequila?
(Loud noise)
(Water noises start)
(Loud splashing noises)
(Muffled, eerie singing)
(All noises stop; classical music starts)
(Music in sync with horse walk)
(Music ends)
As we began the process, the guide completely immersed himself in it.
Once he saw what we were trying to do,
he’s like, “Film it from over here, it looks way better!”
We all got lost for hours, trying to accomplish this vision.
He told me afterwards
that that was one of the most interesting things
he had ever done on his job.
I’m sure that now not only does he narrate about the corpses that lay below,
but also about the crazy woman that tried to ride that stallion in the cenote.
West Oakland is infamous from many stories,
different activities including prostitution.
So I went to them in Boulevard and stood above the sewage grate.
And for over 45 minutes, I waited for my ice-stilettos to melt.
I wanted to melt away that age-old myth of Cinderella:
a woman behind closed doors, needing to be rescued.
As I stood there, this big Cadillac pulled up,
its tinted windows rolled down,
and an African-American man with a gold tooth and a smile
yelled out at me, “Are those ice shoes?!”
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
And as my shoes melted, he said, “That’s hot.”
I knew in that moment I wasn’t an object or just flesh,
but instead, someone that had tickled his imagination.
I bet that no one would ever believe him
if he told someone that that night
he had seen this crazy woman wearing ice shoes.
My name is Ana Teresa Fernández.
I’m an artist.
I create art that tells stories.
Stories you probably have not heard before,
that attempts to erase the distance of those we do not know,
so that we may begin to feel and empathize with that which is hard to digest
and gets thrown to the back of people’s consciousness.
I was raised in Tampico, Mexico,
and my family moved us to the US when I was 11 years old.
My father, a cardiologist, was invited to work in San Diego
because they needed more bilingual doctors.
So I grew up between two worlds,
a hybrid existence of ideas, languages, expectations, opportunities.
However, you have to understand that most of my family are left-brain thinkers,
physicians.
I lean heavily towards the right.
I was always interested in languages and literature
and often found myself on the floor of my room, drawing for hours.
However, I wasn’t able to take an art course until I was in high school,
the ceramics class, where I failed with flying colours
because I insisted on sculpting figures and horses instead of pinching pots.
(Laughter)
I was a law student with mediocre grades,
and I wasn’t accepted into any university I applied to.
So instead I went to community college,
and there I was able to take my first sculpture class.
At the end of the course, our professor asked us to bring in our portfolios.
I didn’t know what that was; what is a portfolio?
So I took pictures of everything I had created thus far
and brought in this drawing I had made on the floor of my bedroom when I was 17.
The San Francisco Art Institute recruiters were there,
and they were dumbfounded to see this
and offered me a full scholarship on the spot.
Thank you.
My mind was blown open!
You can make art full time?!
(Laughter)
Even though I spoke four languages fluently at that point,
I realized that this was the most expensive one.
The one in which I could articulate and express myself
so much more clearly and elegantly;
the one which could uncover the stories
I wanted to share with the rest of the world.
One day, I was talking with a white man about politics,
and our discussion got pretty heated.
He snapped back at me and called me a wetback.
In that moment, my body shook with shame, feeling the filth of that term.
Wetback, mojado:
a term to describe an undocumented migrant.
Similarly, so often women get portrayed
in negative connotations in relationship to water, as well.
In archetypes such as siren, the voices that lure sailors to a watery grave,
or La Llorona, the weeping woman
that weeps for eternity because her husband left her.
So she drowned her kids and will drown your own kids if they misbehave.
I wanted to present a body that was strong in water, thriving.
So I created my own myth;
I plunged into a pool wearing the dress and stilettos,
and with the drag of femininity,
I swam for an hour each day for an entire week.
I projected this performance
in the heart of the Latino district in San Francisco, called The Mission,
where most of the migrants live.
It became a beacon of light, of hope, of strength.
The serious ablutions stem from this performance.
Ablution is the term
that describes the spiritual act of cleansing one self with water.
I wanted to wash away the filth of the term “wetback.”
I also wanted to wash away the filth that was rampant at the US-Mexico border,
even if it was mopping it with my own hair.
There’s this place that exists like no other, surreal.
Traintracks raised from the sand, splitting the sea in two,
making waves bi-national, impeding journey and movement.
This is the border I had to cross to come and live in the US.
However it wasn’t until I moved away to San Francisco
that I began working with migrants,
hearing how they’d been torn apart from their families,
and how they risked their lives to be here
that I began to understand this place a lot more.
Similarly, my mother began photographing the border
and the stories around it, 15 years ago.
She introduced me to this place called Friendship Park
where I was able to see how fortunate I had been
to be able to swim back and forth so seamlessly.
In 1971, Nixon gifted this area to state parks.
Pat Nixon came to dedicate it as Friendship Park,
a place where Mexico and US meet, amicably,
only divided by a chain fence and a free standing monument.
She actually asked the border patrol to cut the chain down
so that she could greet people and residents on the other side more properly.
She said, “I hate to see a fence anywhere,
I hope this fence doesn’t stand here this much longer.”
However, in 1994, a metal wall rose, through Operation Gatekeeper.
In 2005, it was translated into these traintracks
that look like prison bars.
This did not stop families and loved ones from converging here.
Sometimes after not having seen each other for 20 or 30 years,
they came to greet, hug, kiss.
This changed in 2011, under the Obama administration,
where people were now only able to touch their fingertips
through this think metal mesh.
Imagine if you weren’t allowed to embrace your mother,
if you weren’t allowed to hug your father, or hold your child.
Or kiss your lover.
I knew I had to do something.
I was outraged, heartbroken.
And then one morning, I realized,
why don’t I use my most powerful weapon, which is paint?
I knew that I had to sing in the same tone as the sky
if I wanted to bring the sky back down, between the US and Mexico.
So I flew down to San Diego and went to a paint store
and went over hundreds of phantom chips.
The next morning, at the border,
I went there with my mother at 7 am,
and I began to erase it.
Fifteen minutes into it, we heard these glaring sirens
come through the beach, on this pickup truck.
Two border patrol agents attempted to arrest me.
Had I not been wearing a dress and stilettos,
which completely baffled them, I think they would have!!
But it allowed me to start talking about the concept
and what I was trying to do.
And I could see over time that they started grasping the idea,
and after 45 minutes of debating back and forth,
they finally allowed me to proceed.
I continued for five more hours.
I was almost done when I heard a loud voice:
“I get it! I get it!”
I’m doing this because I’m a runner coming from far away.
(Laughter)
I got down from the ladder,
and this runner said, “I thought the wall was coming down,
and for a minute, I was able to imagine what this place would look like:
What if there were no walls?”
This image went viral,
and in 2015, I was invited to do the first artist statewide residency
with Mary Stephens and ASU university.
The talk about building another wall was rampant at that time.
So we decided to do “Borrando la Frontera” again,
but this time at the Nogales border, as a community engagement project.
People came from all over the state of Arizona,
from different parts of the community.
Luis Guerra happened to be there, collecting cans that morning.
He had recently been deported.
His wife, two kids,
his life of 16 years was on the other side.
He said that that action that day,
“It gave me strength;
I was able to feel for a minute that I was no longer in jail.”
A border patrol agent came up to me and asked us what we were doing.
Without hesitation he picked up a roller and began erasing, next to Luis.
I was moved beyond words.
The New York Times and LA Times captured the story, and love letters poured in.
But so did hundreds of hate messages.
“We’re going to kick you back, you dirty Mexican.”
I was called the Mexican Al-Qaeda.
(Laughter)
I was devastated.
How could I have spurred so much hate?
I wasn’t holding a gun; I wasn’t inflicting any pain.
And then I realized: Fear had erected those walls.
It was the shear illusion of the wall not being present that terrified people.
I realized how important the imagination could be.
It was with hope that my father and mother brought me to this country.
It was with the ability to see and understand the world
on both sides of this wall that I began to find my voice.
To see what was possible.
It’s time we learn to listen and hear each other,
without prejudices, without walls interfering.
I will keep creating work
that values you, me, Luis, the 43 disappeared students.
I will keep painting the future
as a majority of one that widens the path of possibility.
Thank you.
(Applause)
”
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