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2025

Making Do, Mending Meaning: Material Language from the Borderlands

Tucson Museum of Art

Rigoberto Luna

“The border is a place of recycling—of cultures, identities, and languages—a site where nothing is thrown away but everything is transformed.”

—Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Objects and materials are pivotal in our lives, acting as vessels that articulate memories of those who used, repaired, or simply aspired to own them. In the context of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands—a place Gómez-Peña described as a site of recycling and transformation— the artifacts of everyday life form the alphabet of a distinct vernacular of our existence and intertwine personal histories with spatial connections. To become fluent in this language, one must learn to listen actively, be observant and engaged with the embedded stories of communities, and recognize the broader cultural narratives and regional landscapes they represent. For artists working in this context, what emerges is not just an aesthetic but a philosophy—one grounded in careful observation, where making becomes an act of translation that draws out the layered connections between material, memory, and landscape.

To see potential where others see waste.

To claim space and meaning with what is available.

And, to honor the everyday as a site of creative workarounds and intentional making-do.

In confronting Western and Eurocentric frameworks that historically exclude or marginalize their experiences, these artists forge new methods and conceptual frameworks that honor their complex identities. This is how we build a visual practice rooted in place— one that does not aspire to mimic dominant narratives but instead insists on the value of our own.

To live and create in the shadow of the border is to understand the political implications of materials. The artists in Ya Hecho: Readymade in the Borderlands mobilize what the dominant culture deems discardable surplus, and material that carries lived experiences embedded in the borderlands. Through these found objects, they generate new visual languages rooted in what scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto called a “rasquache sensibility:”3 resourceful, defiant, and unapologetically “los de abajo”4 or from below. Like the artists of the Chicano Movement (1960s–1980s) Ybarra-Frausto described, who were seen as malcriados—“too brash, too passionate, too disruptive of institutional decorum”5— this generation, those producing in the “twenty-twenties,” also trespasses boundaries. As Ybarra-Frausto notes, “the very essence of a bicultural, lived reality was scored as un-American by the dominant culture.”6 While these artists, featured in Ya Hecho, draw from that legacy, they inhabit their own distinct contexts as they navigate multiple identities and fronteras,7 and recontextualize materials to reclaim space in a political and cultural climate that continues to be hostile toward Latino/a communities.8 In light of escalating public clashes with law enforcement, anti-immigrant legislation, a rise in nationalism, and renewed efforts to challenge the legitimacy of Latino/a/x presence in the U.S., being Latino/a/x in American life has once again become a politicized condition— one that requires individuals to justify their right to exist within these borders. In this environment, found objects become conduits of remembrance, instruments of noncompliance, and tools for transforming our notions of what is sacred. As artist and curator

Amalia Mesa-Baines explains,

The sentiments from Ybarra-Frausto and Mesa-Baines underscore the ways in which materials, items that reflect cultural experiences, hold memory while also becoming the building blocks for new creative pursuits.

If classical sculpture found its language in marble and bronze, and the industrial debris of New York streets informed postwar (1945– 1970) assemblage and minimalism, what constitutes the sculptural vernacular of the U.S.-Mexico border? What materials best capture the essence of this place—its histories, tensions, and ingenuity? Traditionally, institutions have favored the permanence of marble, bronze, and stone, to create works deemed worthy of preservation, often conflating artistic worth with material longevity. This fixation mirrors dominant narratives that render working-class, immigrant, and Borderland experiences as ephemeral or disposable. By contrast, the works in this exhibition—often assembled from what is dismissed as mugrero, junk, or lowbrow—disrupt the notion of what belongs in a gallery or museum. Who determines what substances are worthy of aesthetic inquiry? What does it mean to introduce

discarded truck parts, clothing, and supermarket waste—materials rooted in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands—into the space of the white cube,10 a space that has long overlooked or rejected their cultural and aesthetic significance?

Living between the United States and Mexico means navigating a hybrid landscape where commercial advertisements imply the value and appeal of brand-new and freshly packaged consumer goods, overshadowing the dignity of secondhand finds. It is easy to internalize that worth lies in what is new, untouched, and expensive. This perception carries over into certain sculptural traditions that regard specific materials as the pinnacle of artistic craftsmanship and expression, elevating and rendering them more legitimate. The artists of Ya Hecho consciously reject these ideals. Their aim is not to replicate dominant perceptions of value or permanence, but to challenge them. Instead, they translate our experiences through found, repaired, recycled, and recontextualized objects that resonate loudest and most fluently—items shaped by everyday use, carrying our memories, and textures of real life, place, and environment. These materials provide a sense of identity, enabling us to construct forms and tell stories about resourcefulness, adaptation, and cultural continuity across—and in spite of—borders.

The Southern Borderlands of the U.S. are not dominated by cities lined with high rises or architecture curated by ambitious urban designers. Instead, they are places composed of humble structures marked with enduring character and history that often remain in place for generations. Unlike the polished storefronts of Fifth Avenue in New York or Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles, the border

region does not announce itself with glitz or grandeur. While they may resist large-scale development, the daily rituals that define life here—the U.S.-Mexico border remains rooted in the working- class experiences and cultural resilience. The visual language of the border can be derived in spaces like flea markets, produce markets, secondhand shops, scrap yards that are not just commercial spaces but cultural institutions as significant and culturally relevant as a panadería, the molino, the tortillería, or local botanica. We inherit a visual language grounded in necessity and ingenuity in these routinely visited spaces. From them, we learn the value of making do, repurposing, reinventing, and resisting waste. We are taught to solve problems creatively, learn life hacks, negotiate, spot usefulness and quality, repair what’s broken, see potential in the overlooked, and treat the materials as something alive with possibility. When things fall apart, people pay with time—time spent solving how to fix or patch what is broken, making mending part of everyday life and a common act of care.

This hands-on approach to problem-solving is not only practical and cost-effective—it is deeply creative. It cultivates a material intelligence that recognizes potential in what is discarded and broken. In border households, we not only fixed things—we transformed them, pushed them beyond function, reprocessed them through a new lens, reimagining use and value born from necessity. Artists raised in this environment carry these sensibilities forward into their work, reactivating the visual and material language of their upbringing to build sculptural vocabularies grounded in adaptation and survival. A refusal to assimilate quietly, to be forgotten, and to leave behind the visual and material

sensibilities of their upbringing embedded in their beings and practices. While informed by the traditional European masters and elite forms of sculpture, their work honors the knowledge passed down through intergenerational labor, scarcity, and safekeeping.

For the artists of Ya Hecho, living and creating with a border identity means grappling with layers of displacement and connection that are felt most intensely when crossing physical and political borders. Migration, trauma, and realities of exclusion complicate their relationship to the land and culture. Navigating these barriers often leave scars but also sharpen self-awareness, offering a dual vantage point: seeing the border both from the inside and afar. This perspective exposes and encourages them to recognize the contradictions and challenges embedded within systems that limit belonging and freedom through documentation and legal status. In this context, art-making has become a critical tool for healing disconnection, reclaiming ancestral practices, and voicing opposition against injustice.

Many artists have left their regions of origin, decentralizing themselves from their homelands and family. This transition, often generating sentiments of conflict and grief simultaneously, enables them to recognize themselves more clearly and understand the uniqueness of their own existence. Caught between homelands, between languages, and between states of belonging, their practices evolved through rigorous experimentation, and critical engagement with prevailing art histories and traditions. As Guillermo Gómez-Peña observed, “Home is both ‘here’ and ‘there,’ or somewhere in between… The border is no longer located at any

fixed geopolitical site. I carry the border with me, and I find new borders wherever I go.”11 For these artists, the border transforms from a physical boundary into an internal, mobile condition—one they continuously negotiate and express through their work across shifting geographies and communities.

Confronted by systems that undervalue their histories, some artists initially adapted covertly into the dominant artistic traditions, abandoning personal and cultural specificity, appearing to blend in with institutional expectations. But this surface assimilation paradoxically intensified their commitment to maintain or in some cases reconnect to their own histories. Much like the culture of the Borderlands itself, these artists learned to exist in a hybrid state that acknowledges and engages with Western art histories while trailblazing new paths that reflect their lived realities. What emerges is not a rejection of form or tradition, but a reclamation. By centering their communities’ materials, aesthetics, and narratives, they have destabilized conventional artistic practices and asserted agency over their work. This decision is not just aesthetic, it is an act of self-liberation that enables artists to create outside of institutional boundaries and tell stories that are personally meaningful, culturally specific, and inherent to border existence.

By inventively synthesizing found and familiar objects, the artists in Ya Hecho generate a living material language of possibility, bridging personal associations with complex diasporic themes— conveying histories of labor, migration, survival, and resilience. Their attention to the mundane fosters a creative remixing and reinterpretation, combining ubiquitous materials—such as cowboy

boots, piñatas, sarapes, hand tools, or ceramic pottery—into new sculptural forms. These gestures are acts of strategic disruption, deliberately rooted in the material culture of the Borderlands. By deploying humble everyday artifacts as cultural signifiers, not only do they recalibrate the legibility of these artworks to the gravitational center of the local, but they give materiality, significance, and form to our collective narratives of belonging within a context of metamorphosis and movement.

In the hands of these artists, found, given, secondhand, commercially manufactured, and naturally sourced materials are reconfigured into surfaces for portraits, altars, sculptural components, and structural and symbolic foundations. The context of these objects is altered when positioned conceptually, confronting the viewer with a new form, intent, and interpretational possibilities. The discarded remnants serve as a reminder of the adage that one person’s trash can become another’s treasure, or in this case, solution, enabling the emergence of complex and multifaceted themes. This act of repurposing damaged and neglected materials in dialogue with the artist’s interventions enters a metaphorical hybrid state, closely linked with border culture, creating a tangible representation of cultural amalgamation and adaptive ingenuity.