Retorno: Salvadoran Repatriation and the Landscape of Memory Interview with Mark Menjivar

INTRODUCTION

The Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum in San Antonio recently commissioned a multi-media installation by the Borderland Collective, a loosely-knit group of Texas-based artists and educators who produce socially engaged projects.¹ Their installation, Northern Triangle (2014), takes its name from the geographic region, one of the most violent in the world, as well as the trade agreement that binds the countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.² Led by artists Mark Menjivar (b. 1980), Jason Reed, and art historian Erina Duganne, Northern Triangle responds to the recent wave of unaccompanied Central American minors apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border. On the occasion of the project's initial debut, I sat down with Menjivar to discuss Retorno, a series of photographs made in collaboration with a community of former refugees in El Salvador that figures prominently in the installation, and the complicated relationship that continues to shape politics between Central America and the United States.

In 2014, authorities apprehended about 68,000 minors fleeing the violence of the Northern Triangle. Once in custody, immigration officers placed the children in the newly constructed private prisons that dot the South Texas landscape. The detention centers became their temporary dwelling prior to facing deportation proceedings, a remarkable shift in policy given the region's former reputation as an entry-point to the Sanctuary Movement, a religious and political movement that provided safe-haven to Central Americans fleeing war-torn countries in the 1980s.

As an example of the current migrant crisis that characterizes our time, and parallels the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe, these Central American minors transformed into what legal historian Mae Ngai calls "impossible subjects." Their presence poses a problem, not only for enforcing the boundaries of the nation-state, but also for visual modes of representation.

Taking the refugee crisis as a point of departure, Borderland Collective embarks on a conceptual project that problematizes the violence of the Northern Triangle as a schema long in the making. Inspired by the New York-based art collective, Group Material, and their curatorial mediations, particularly, Timeline: A Chronicle of U.S. Intervention in Central and Latin America (1984), Borderland Collective places art objects in conversation with historical documents from the Library of Congress, the National Archives, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, news footage, human rights cases, and personal documents. Reed and Menjivar contribute photographs, while Duganne establishes a research-based approach to the display and accompanying wall text. Several invited artists, including Adriana Corral, Vincent Valdez, and Ricky Yanas, extend this dialogue to create open-ended works that question the constructed nature of mainstream images of the crisis. The result is a provocative and disquieting installation that doubles as a history museum and classroom. One critic commented that the installation "functions as a kind of puzzle."³ Viewers move through the space slowly (Fig. 1), connecting images with historical narratives, approaching three-dimensional objects such as an empty blue water barrel that signals the stakes as bodies, not much different from our own, traverse geopolitical borders. The work on display

Fig 1.

Installation shot of Northern Triangle (2014–) at Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, San Antonio. Courtesy of Borderland Collective.

Fig 2.

Installation shot of Northern Triangle (2014–) with Mark Menjivar's View from Santa Marta on the left. Courtesy of Borderland Collective.

deconstructs "the language of colonization and power," as one Artforum critic put it, in order to unsettle our assumptions about a region whose violent history is often shaped by outside forces.⁴

It is within this diverse range of objects, discourses, and texts that viewers get acquainted with Menjivar's luscious photographs. (Fig. 2) Born in Richmond, Virginia, to a Puerto Rican mother and a Salvadoran-American father, Menjivar is a military brat, whose unusual upbringing took him overseas to Honduras, Panama, and El Salvador during the 1980s, an intense period of U.S. intervention in Central America. While many viewed the surge in unaccompanied Central American children at the border...