[upbeat music]
- My dad was one of the first braceros
to come to the US of A during World War II.
The U.S. made a deal with Mexico to bring in workers,
and it was fortunate because he met my mom
on one of those early jaunts over here.
When he finished his bracero stint,
he was taken back to Mexico, and he wanted to come back.
He came back illegally with no papers.
My mom was always instrumental in figuring out
how to smuggle him across the border,
and very many times I remember hiding him in the car,
putting my feet over his body as he lay where our feet were,
and once in a while, he'd get caught at the border,
and it was always a very tense,
dark time for me, my early years.
We were never allowed to speak to outsiders
about anything, 'cause my mom was afraid
we'd bring interest to the house and then they'd discover my dad.
And it was during the time when there was no work
'cause it was raining so much, and he'd hide out in the garage,
and that's when he would weave on his frame loom,
and that's when I would hang out with him.
So this piece I wove for him.
I used the image from his immigration passport.
When he finally did get legal,
I was 13 and it was in the early '60s
when he finally got documented,
and he is the one that inspired me
through his Huichol roots to weave.
"Rebozo de la Frontera."
This rebozo was the first rebozo I created.
I've always loved the rebozo.
The rebozo is a fabric that's very long and rectangular,
and it's used as a shawl.
It can be used as a papoose to hold a baby.
In the revolution, it was used to hide the rifle or the gun.
It's a place that you can lay down
in the desert as a blanket.
Ever since I learned how to weave in San Diego,
I wanted to weave one,
but I never saw a way to enter that world as art.
But then I started thinking, "Well, let's make a rebozo
"for that Indigenous woman that crosses the border
and has no time to weave."
I don't have time to sew either.
I use safety pins to hem up my skirts
when I need to sew it.
Safety pins.
Oh, oh, that's the contemporary way to sew.
And no matter how much they infiltrate the society,
they will always be on the radar of the INS.
How do I put that in there?
Oh, I'll just, millions of little caution signs
is my code way of saying, "If you're Indigenous,
"you're always gonna be under the scrutiny
of the border patrol."
So I decided to combine these ideas of no time,
always on somebody's radar,
and functional versus nonfunctional.
And so it's a wearable, but it's obviously a wall piece,
but to me, it's a marker that stands for woman,
culture, and the struggle to survive.
[mellow music]
Marcos A. Underwood.
Yes, 14 years old.
I was a freshman.
The Beatles had already broken through.
My sister and I went to the library
and then these punk kids, you know, guys
started following me around the halls of the library,
you know, "Hey, what's your name?" blah blah blah.
And I noticed that one guy,
he was just sitting on the table reading a book.
And I went, "What's with that?
How come he's not chasing me?"
- Consuelo was a very beautiful, young, young, young lady
when she appeared in Calexico,
and that meeting in that library left me intrigued.
- At the freshman dance,
it was the last dance of the year.
I remember, "Oh, my God, he's gonna ask me to dance.
Wow!"
So he asked me to dance,
and it was like we had already known each other
for, like, 20 years. [growls]
You know, those kind of dances, right?
- So I danced with her all night long.
I still remember that.
It's one of the most memorable nights in my life.
- And I realized, "I like him, he likes me."
So at 15, I decided, "Okay, it's Marcos."
So next thing we knew, there we are.
50 years later.
He always told me, "It's all right, chila,
"you don't have to work.
"Just take care of the kids and the house.
"I'll go to school first, and then when I graduate,
then you can go to school."
So that time came, he graduated.
"Now what am I gonna do?"
"Whatever you want you to.
Do whatever you want."
That was pretty cool.
I probably would not have gone to school and been an artist.
I would've been a dentist or a dentist assistant
or a secretary or whatever.
[mellow music]
- I'm loading up the shuttle with wire.
It's plastic-coated wire, very flexible,
and it's like a tough thread.
That's what it, how I think of wire, a thread that's tough.
At San Diego State, it was all about form.
It was about learning how to weave,
how to traditionally use thread, and how to make an object.
And then I went on to San Jose State
who said, "Oh, my God, what's that all about?
"Who cares?
It's the content, not the form."
So how do I get content in a weaving?
Hmm, materials?
Well, my weavings are gonna be tough.
They're not gonna be beautiful things.
They're gonna be tough.
Wire, and that's like a thread.
That's when the wire started.
I just learned how to express myself as an artist
and learn how to use materials to help me in my expression.
And the expression that I would wanted to do
was about me, Consuelo.
Well, I'm tough.
I like wires.
I love silk, but I also like wires.
And that's when I started weaving
with wires and barbed wire.
[mellow music]
- This place has been here
thousands and thousands of years.
It was sacred to the Pomo.
It probably has a lot of forest spirits, animal spirits,
and in the people that have lived here,
you know, that a lot of them love this place.
They're still here.
The ashes of several of the people that lived here
are scattered in here.
We needed to purchase another property,
and we had a short period of time.
I looked on the map, and the only Indian name
I could see along the coast,
it was either Spanish or English,
but the only Indian name I found was Gualala.
So I told Consuelo, "Let's go over there.
We might be able to find something over there."
And we came over one weekend
and I remember driving up the driveway.
I said, "This is it."
[mellow music]
- Look at this, love, this doesn't sit there.
- I was gonna say, "Isn't this the one I made?"
- Break bread.
Did you have to remake love like bread all the time?
- Yes. - That's ridiculous.
- You fall in and out of love all the time.
- You do? - Mm-hmm.
Different people that you meet.
- Really? - Friends, family.
- I thought love is forever? - Only for you and Marcos.
How long you guys been together?
A hundred years? - I don't know, Paula.
We got, we signed the paper in '68.
- Oh! - So how many is that?
- Forty...
- So you're going on 50.
- Yeah. - Yes.
Oh, my word.
- The exhibition at the Triton Museum, 2013 fall
was pretty exciting because originally, they wanted it
to be a retrospective,
since I'm retired from San Jose as a professor.
And the reason it came about was very interesting.
I was in a group, Chicana kind of show
of the Bay Area work at the Triton,
and I made this wall of undocumented border flowers,
and that was, like, the hit of the show.
And I think because of that, they offered me the solo
in three or four years' time.
So I'm preparing all this work for that exhibition,
and the flags have been with me since I was,
first grade I pledged allegiance to the flag of America.
I've always thought about that flag,
and when I cross the border to Mexicali,
I think about the Mexican part of me.
[sings in Spanish]
And so what I've been doing is merging
the two flags as one.
I think they're beautiful.
I respect them.
I love the safety pins.
They look like a sea of people.
The safety pin is one of the lowest, lowest elements
in our society, but I love bringing the lowest
into the highest realm of art hallways in the museums.
To me, that's always been almost like church.
It's like you flip the world around, you know,
you play with ideas and understandings of your reality.
I mix it up.
On this loom, I'm weaving a strip that is 30 feet long
and it will be a wall installation
at the Triton Museum.
It will identify the border line on the wall.
And so I'm mixing up the red, white, and blue
and the red, white, and green of the Mexican flag,
and that's gonna be throughout the whole piece.
It's the mixed media weaving where I have the most fun.
I make it up with each throw more or less
'cause these throws only last, like, two feet.
This one in particular is made with The New York Times,
blue plastic wire, a piece of cut up raw DuPont silk,
and blue barbed wire
that I had made earlier for another project.
The white is made up of this plastic raffia bandana scarf
and some white cotton thread.
This red was made with a cotton thread, wire,
and a red silk bandana.
So all these materials,
I determine which one to use at the moment,
and that's what's the most fun.
It's very fast.
It's very immediate.
And in the end, it will also be very meaningful.
The border line is the actual line,
if you look at a map,
the line between Mexico and the United States of America,
and it starts in California, travels along Arizona
to New Mexico, and it drops down into the peninsula of Texas.
And I'm very focused on that line
because that's the line
where they want to put up the wall
that will separate the two nations.
And for me, on each side of that wall,
it's a dead zone that they're creating
for all the wildlife, the wild plants,
the people leaving.
But I'm more, at this point, if they don't care about people,
well, then, do we care about, you know,
the bugs and the flowers and that we're creating a desert
for our great-grandkids when they grow up?
That will be a dead zone.
That line will be, in a hundred years, a desert.
And right now, the desert is alive,
but in a hundred years, that desert will be dead.
In the beginning, my work was different
because I was making artistic expression with threads,
with fiber, and then other people
started working with that,
but I found that my message was still different.
Even today, I feel that I'm one of the few voices
that is still talking specifically about the border
and the ecological impact that that's having.
I just know that I need to talk about that.
[mellow music]