Black and Indigenous Lives: Why Are We Always Running?
On photography, (un)documented migration, and resistance
I do not trust photography.
For eighteen years of my life, I had no access to childhood photographs. In many ways, it was like having no memories: no stories to call my own, no traces of who I was, or of whom shaped me to be who I am today. Everything’s a blur. In my mind, the Black indigenous women who raised me in Oaxaca, México are just shadows: abstract Black figurines that I cannot distinguish. Sometimes, I am afraid that I do not have a past, or a present.
I migrated to the United States in 1999, alone. I came here undocumented. That is, I lived in a constant state of fugitivity, anxiety and fear of criminalization, incarceration, and deportation. But, I’m not the only one.
There are approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.
Having lived undocumented for most of my life, there was one thing I knew: I had to avoid being photographed, because photography meant surveillance. Living as an “illegal alien” meant being on the run — always hiding. Like theatre and law scholar Gad Guterman explains, being undocumented means embodying a performance of “perpetual non-existence.” Photography brings us into existence. Maybe Roland Barthes is right when he warns us that the “photograph is dangerous.”
I did not have faith in photographic technology until I met formerly undocumented artist and botanist, Yesi. I met Yesi through a mutual friend who connected us via Instagram. The context of our introduction to each other was that we are both Afro-Indigenous immigrants who had lived as undocumented in the United States for most of our lives. Upon perusing through Yesi’s Instagram account, I became intrigued by her practice of hyper-documentation and creating a digital map of her migrations/locations through the app’s ‘check-in’ feature. I was star-struck.
Yesi made me ask: Can photography be a way to counter our experiences of illegality and fugitivity? Can we critique, rupture and resist the dangers of photography as (un)documented Black Indigenous immigrants? And, most importantly, is this an alternative form of citizenship-making that undocumented immigrants can engage in without needing “legal” validation from the nation-state?
I do not trust photography, but I trust this photographer.
Living as undocumented, Black and Indigenous hasn’t been easy. Finding a community has been a struggle, but by engaging in the virtual community of Instagram, Yesi is re-imagining life and developing a new sense of being —Yesi is helping to develop (what visual historian Leigh Raiford calls) a “critical Black memory” amongst undocumented Black and Indigenous communities.
In caminando por el bosque, me encontré a una morena, Yesi renders us a single photograph that has been manipulated through the use of Adobe Illustrator. Yesi outlined her body by what seems to be a red-orange tint. This is what Nicole Fleetwood calls a “visible seam.” For Fleetwood, the “visible seam” represents “an…intervention that reveals the gaps and structures of dominant visual narratives and the underpinning ideologies that maintain them.” By outlining her body and blurring her torso, Yesi ruptures ways of seeing, as we might misread and misrecognize this image as a collage.
The “visible seam” becomes her own body. We see her, and we see her wounds.
In her title, we encounter a second “visible seam.” My translation for her title is: walking through the forest, I found myself a dark skinned woman. Here, there is no set translation, because “morena” (in the Mexican context) might mean “Black”, “darker skinned” Brown person, and/or a coastal person. In addition, “me encontré” can be read as both “I met” and “I found myself a.” I choose to read it as “I found myself a” because I know that the photographer and the body photographed is the same person. These words that cannot be directly translated are ruptures: “visible seams.” The instability of interpretation/translation works to recuperate the Afro-Indigenous body erased through illegality, as there is no one-way in which to make sense of such catastrophic violence.
In caminando por el bosque, me encontré a una morena, I see a mysterious and fantastical scene that makes me ask: is Yesi moving? Is she running? Is there a flash (of light/ of flight/ of hesitation) present in the photograph?
As I experience this image, I crave to know what is happening: I think I understand what it means to run, to hesitate, to flight away. But, I’ll never fully know what the artist is thinking. Perhaps, this exact not-knowing is the intervention.
I use the word “fantastical,” because her blurred out and outlined body appear to be animated, and therefore, denaturalized. If her body is denaturalized, maybe the background is both landscape and backdrop. Krista Thompson argues that “backdrops may be interpreted as versions of the alternate realities conjured through science fiction illustrations… their settings bring into being landscapes that reconfigure the terms on which we understand the real and the fantastic.” Here, Yesi tells us she is finding a dark skinned (/Black Indigenous) woman. However, how does one go out to find a dark skinned (/Black Indigenous) woman? We might think that in this photograph, Yesi is traveling to the historic past, to multiple presents, and to a future to re-imagine both the Black and Indigenous body.
Her use of landscapes, backdrops, outlines, light, and animation remind me of two historic visual images: “THE RUNAWAY” slave advertisements, and highway border signs reading “CAUTION.”
Yesi travels to a slave past.
The visual economy of light presented in the photograph “has the power to bring geographic transcendence and social ascendance” as art historian Krista Thompson would argue. The harsh lighting in Yesi’s photo allows us to re-interpret the image and thus, we are led to “THE RUNAWAY” slave advertisement of 1837.
In this advertisement, we are presented with a Black male body in motion. He is an illustration (photography is introduced 2 years later). The title, “THE RUNAWAY,” and his towering over a half-naked tree transforms him into a fantasy. The background is composed of negative (White) space indicating both an excess and lack of light. The landscape, then, becomes a backdrop: he becomes a fantasy within a backdrop— a fantastical being.
Yesi’s photograph is social and political critique: Blackness and Indigeneity are always on the run.
Even though Blackness and Indigeneity are always on the run, Yesi makes us think about the potential of resistance in running, in reclaiming the body — in moving the body.
Yesi travels — and takes us — through multiple presents.
Diasporas are results of disrupting indigeneity. Slavery, fugitivity and illegality are (forced) performances of Blackness and Indigeneity that are both hypervisible and invisibilized.
Her photograph is a critique of undocumented immigration. In the “CAUTION” signs positioned in highways throughout the US/Mexican border, black figures (of what one could read as a family running) are used as warnings to vehicles as if saying: “caution, illegal alien invasion.”
The sign illustrates an abstraction. Our bodies are illegalized.
The people running become shadows: fugitives on the run. How do we read shadows? How do we read Blackness? How do we read Indigeneity?
In Darby English’s words: “How [do we]… see a work of art in total darkness?”
Make no mistake, both “THE RUNAWAY” advertisement and the “CAUTION” signs are examples of Black and Indigenous “visible seams,” for they exist in the same legacy of settler-colonialism and slavery.
Yesi is also traveling towards the future.
She is finding a Black Indigenous woman (una morena) in the forest. We cannot see her face. This not-being-able-to-see is what art historian, Lisa Gail Collins, describes as a Black feminist practice that “frustrates our cravings for… a feeling of mastery over the subject.”
We cannot see whom she is finding. We do not get to master a morena. We do not get to master Blackness. We do not get to master Indigeneity. We do not get to master the immigrant body.
Yesi is engaging in future-making. She is committed to a moving towards that reclaims the Afro-Indigenous body by resisting mastery, surveillance, and categorization.
For undocumented immigrants, Black kin, and Indigenous communities, the photograph is not only dangerous, but a site of border-displacement, surveillance, and sorrow.
For those who are undocumented in the United States, memories of their respective countries are lived through photographs they may have brought with them, songs that they have access to on the radio, the smell of their spiced food, their language, and of course, the parts of their culture that survive the violence of living as an “illegal alien.” However, all immigrants have “things” they had to leave behind. Perhaps, their “things” are in boxes, in linen closets, in suitcases that were supposed to travel with them, but did not, or, their “things” may have been thrown out because they had been away too long, and there was no sign of them ever going back “home.”
Yesi has taught me that the right to look, the right to be seen, the right to show, and the right to interpret can be ruptured and reframed for our needs.
Photographic technology was not made for us, but I trust Yesi. I trust the ways in which she manipulates this technology and re-imagines ways of being, community building, and the reclamation of una morena. In her work, I see resistance and my own “visible seams.”
