Traditional Mexican "Lotería" Images
Tomorrow night I hope to make my way to Cooper Square in
Manhattan, where our son Richard will be opening his exhibition
entitled “Lotería de la Migración”. I’ll
explain a little in a moment, but first some necessary context. Among the uglier developments of what I fear
is a general deterioration of our national spiritual life is the waning of the
American open-heartedness of my youth. I
sense an atrophying of generosity. I
have no other way of accounting for certain aspects of the tone of discussion
of immigration. God knows that American
immigration policy is debatable, the first point of debate perhaps being about
whether we even have one. But the
fecklessness of our elected politicians is more likely to be a symptom than a
cause of the hardening of the American heart.
Richard Fleming's "Lotería de la Migración" Images
As he began his
startlingly successful presidential campaign, Donald Trump had this to say. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not
sending their best….They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and
they’re bringing those problems with us (sic).
They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing
crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” For a moment ignore the substance and
consider merely the tone, which is far from being either generous or open-hearted. But substance counts too. There are at least five million Mexicans
illegally in this country. The laws of
sociology would suggest that in any human cohort so huge there will be some
criminals, including I suppose some rapists.
But an American assumption
should be that the vast majority, not a few afterthoughts among them, are “good
people.” Furthermore “Mexico” did not
“send” them. We are not talking about
penal transportation to the antipodes in the eighteenth century. Most of them came spurred by necessity and
hope, the same engines that launched the "Mayflower" and a couple of hundred years later animated my Fleming ancestors to flee the blighted bogs of Ireland. Furthermore their
admiration for our country is so great that they will undergo nearly
inconceivable difficulties and dangers to reach it and try to be a part of it.
There is a
popular Mexican card-and-board parlor game called “Lotería,” also known as
“Mexican Bingo”. It features a deck of
fifty-four numbered cards, each with a brightly colored distinctive image. On the back of each card there is a little
verse or proverb relevant to the picture on the front. There are also eight—the maximum number of
possible players—five-by-eight placards or mini-boards on which sixteen of the
card images have been randomly distributed in four rows of four each. Each active player has one and, drawing cards
in turn in regular rotation, hopes to be the first to fill a vertical,
horizontal, or diagonal chain of four pictures with makeshift tokens. BINGO!
It is a game of pure luck, without intellectual demands, but lots of
fun.
The
pictures are an odd assortment: a bird, a fish, an umbrella, a tree, a crown,
etc. There are a few hints of the darker
side of Mexican popular culture in such icons as “el diablito” (a small devil),
a skull-and-crossbones, and a skeletal Grim Reaper. These hints become much more detailed and
concrete in “Migration Lottery,” the “game” that Richard has reimagined. He has wonderfully captured the folk-art
style of the traditional cards, but much of the iconography is now very
pointedly related to the physical realities, dangers, and arbitrary
vicissitudes of the journeys as actually undertaken by thousands of actual
migrants. For example, one of the
traditional icons is “El Cantarito,” a ceramic water jug. This has been “updated” to a thin plastic gallon
milk container—the light but flimsy utensil of choice used to carry the water
on which a migrant crossing the arid
borderlands may quite literally stake his life.
"La Sed" (Thirst)
Richard
has explained his project in a succinct and informative on-line description that summarizes both its artistic and political dimensions. I saw a sort
of “preview” version of the exhibition on Governors Island some time ago. It was very striking then, and I expect it to
be even more so now. I actually find its
spirit to be not too far from that of Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales. The
comparison may seem strange—even off the
wall, perhaps--to those who ignore the seriousness of Chaucer’s contrasting
themes of “earnest” and “game,” the degree to which he finds in the incidents
of a physical journey the template of moral life. Our immigration policy may be a joke, but it
is not a game—ludicrous, perhaps, but not exactly ludic. Life’s lottery raises many profound
questions, questions that in our pluralistic and divided society will be
diversely posed and diversely answered.
For me the big question is this: “Lord,
when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to
drink?” Yes, that’s from the Bible. You can look it up.
The
opening of the exhibition “Lotería de la
Migración and the Visual Languages of Advocacy” will be from 7 to 9pm
on Thursday, April 19th, at the Hemispheric Institute for
Performance and Politics/ Institute for Public Knowledge of New York University
on the fifth floor of 20 Cooper Square,
New York City. It will feature a panel
discussion on the topic: “How
do visual and textual languages speak to each other—and to us—about complex
personal and political experience?”
The exhibition will run through May 31st.
