Enrique Chagoya has created a pastoral pastiche based on George Caleb Bingham’s painting “Jolly Flatboatmen” and an Albert Bierstadt painting of the American West. It is a commentary on current immigration concerns with the scene populated by a diverse mix of characters. Using images appropriated from many sources, Chagoya has combined the heads from some images with bodies from others. He has Border Patrol officers with Indian headdresses and businessmen with turbans. He has drawn Humpty Dumpty as the Lone Ranger and many smaller figures appear in the background. Many of the characters have cartoon “bubbles” quoting “artspeak”….in this context the quotes become a satirical self-criticism of the print and its imagery.

Chagoya states: The concept of this particular codex is in direct response to the conservative xenophobia triggered by recent border crossings by thousands of unaccompanied children from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. I chose to symbolically portray the train known as La Bestia (The Beast, due to the fact that there are many accidents and fatalities during the trip), that travels from southern Mexico and up through the border with Texas. This country was created not just by immigration, but rather by illegal immigration, from the Pilgrims and Conquistadors to the recent immigrants from the Americas, Africa and Asia. At the end there is a legalization process, new cultures emerge and America benefits from the richness of the diversity of arts (music, visual, dance, literature), food, costumes, mythologies, etc. The images in La Bestia’s Guide to the Birth of the Cool are juxtaposed with modernist paintings happily celebrating the immigrants’ acceptance into American culture. Diversity in my book is a wealth of culture, not a threat, hence the celebration on the last page.

In this map Chagoya depicts a world beset with problems of man-made pollution: environmental, industrial and social. The planet needs a break! Each country is drawn in a distorted size proportional to its carbon emissions. Sea creatures fight back by attacking oil tankers and an army of green men follow an elephant into an unknown, but perhaps a more hopeful, future.

The artist describes The Ghosts of Borderlandia his new print: “The imagery in this codex refers to the borders that people build between themselves. In The Ghosts of Borderlandia, people’s eyes are hidden behind a wall or underground to symbolize the lack of sight that borders create. The invisible borders create stereotypes that dehumanize the “other” and creates an “us vs. them” context. There are physical and invisible borders. They may be between social classes, genders, religions, ethnicities and cultures. Viewers may discover some recognizable artists and stereotypical characters in front and behind the wall.”

Travels of Fortune is a tribute to the recent Mayan immigrants from Southern Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras (as well as many others from the Caribbean islands, and Africa) who have faced a harsh reality when trying to apply for refugee status in this country. Particularly interesting to me is the fact that Indigenous people from meso-America, who speak Spanish or English as a second language, are more American - from the Americas - than any European takeover of North America. This work is based on ancient Mayan art from painted ceramics and sculpture and includes a contemporary Mayan girl. Immigrants are victims of old colonial practices – economic (unequal exchange), political (dictatorships imposed by US interventions), and climate change (caused by developed nations). They arrive to the border as desperate refugees and find a reality as dangerous as the life they left behind. In the print, I wanted to focus on the positive cultural heritage these refugees bring. There is no need to fear them. Our country will get richer culturally (with art, food, music), and economically (as hard-working people who take jobs Americans don’t want) if they are ever accepted. They take life threatening chances few people would take in search of a better life not unlike the Pilgrims, hence the word Fortune in my title.

“The Ghost of Liberty” is Enrique Chagoya’s sixth codex in a series begun at Shark’s in 1998. Improvising on the traditional Mayan codex format, Chagoya has made a book with pages of varying sizes creating a format for large images and a varied rhythm across the codex. Chagoya’s selection of diverse images from many sources includes historic engravings, Chinese woodblock prints, comic books, pictographs and text in various languages. He re-interprets Philip Guston’s drawing, “Poor Richard”, replacing the figure with a portrait of George W. Bush.Chagoya creates pages where cultural, religious and political images are presented with humor in contradictory, unexpected and sometimes controversial contexts.

“Expresses Nothing but the Self” and “Invites Into the World of the Eternal Instant” are both concerned with the current unsustainable interaction between people and nature. The artist describes this project: We are part of nature, not a species apart. We are creating an ongoing extinction of fauna and flora and we are headed toward massive extinction if we don’t take urgent action. I try to use some humor in my work as a form of a personal defense against my own anxieties in this context. Humor is a door opener into uncomfortable topics that we need to deal with.

Enrique Chagoya has made a new codex, the seventh in a series begun in 1998. “Double Trouble or Anthropology of the Clone” takes a satirical, humorous look at our social and political environment. Suggesting the arrogance of a U.S.centric world, Chagoya depicts stereotypes like Aunt Jemima and popular icons, John Wayne and Lucille Ball, juxtaposed with current politicos, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Osama bin Laden. Chagoya again manages to combine humor and serious political and cultural criticism in this colorful, funny print.

“Expresses Nothing but the Self” and “Invites Into the World of the Eternal Instant” are both concerned with the current unsustainable interaction between people and nature. The artist describes this project: We are part of nature, not a species apart. We are creating an ongoing extinction of fauna and flora and we are headed toward massive extinction if we don’t take urgent action. I try to use some humor in my work as a form of a personal defense against my own anxieties in this context. Humor is a door opener into uncomfortable topics that we need to deal with.

Codex YTREBIL, (liberty backwards), is based on a series of small books by anonymous Indigenous artists in the XVI Century known as Testeriano codices. Many of the images came from my research at the Bibliotèque Nationale in Paris which holds hundreds of Mexican Indigenous manuscripts and codices in its collection that are rarely seen by the public. The Testerianobooks, usually written in ancient Otami, were used during catechism sessions in the colonial Christianization of the Native American populations in Central Mexico. My version is not religious but a secular “catechism” with a nonlinear vision of a colonial legacy going out of control with difficult issues plaguing humanity. Concepts like freedom, democracy and fraternity mean different things to different polarized social groups, social classes and political parties. In a world where the truth is understood backwards, I am addressing this reality with a sense of humor.”

The artist describes this project: In this print, a geographic/physical border, such as the US/Mexico border wall, is a symbol of many other walls that exist between people. These other walls may be less obvious (like gender, class, ethnic, religious, and national origin stereotypes, among others), but as real as the physical ones. Yet, we are all one human species, despite our external differences. We realize this when we decide to cross over any border. The experience of crossing expands what language (visual or phonetic) can explain only in a limited way. Among the characters lining the wall in my print, the child represents an innocent mind still free of misrepresentations. Ancient line drawings between the portraits portray how pre-Columbian people represented themselves.

The artist describes this project: “In this work I defang the stereotypes of Native Americans depicted as primitive savages in the painting by Wimar. The mask and the Mayan head team up with a third character to form a fictitious, original, trans-continental Border Patrol. This work is a humorous reminder that all nations in the Americas were created by undocumented immigrants from Europe. Today, some politicians call refugees from Central America and other countries “illegal aliens” but for me they are no different from the Pilgrims or Daniel Boone’s daughter. Xenophobia goes against the spirit of this great country I immigrated to and adopted as my home when I became an American citizen.”