Art, Immigration, and Faith

The amber appears to ooze across the floor like slow-flowing lava. Containing found objects and materials sourced from Salvadoran communities around Los Angeles, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio’s artwork is expansive and expressive of the materiality of often-marginalized Central American migrants in Southern California.

His artistic craft, Aparicio said, speaks to the innovative, resourceful, and resilient voices of migrants throughout the city and beyond. Artists of many kinds hope works like Aparicio’s can tell new kinds of immigrant stories — ones often full of faith and spirituality, migration and baptism, encounters with Jesus and varying experiences with church life.

Amid the leaves, bones, broken dishware, condom wrappers, beer holders, and archival papers in Aparicio’s work is a single flier for a church — a “Casa del Dios” advertising their services with Jesus’ words in bold red across the top: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

The installation, on display at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, hints at how immigration and faith are represented in various artistic mediums.

While political conversations about immigrants and immigration policy tend toward broad, often dehumanizing stereotypes, artists such as Aparicio are using their art to help viewers reflect on the deep, and expansive, experience of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in the U.S.

Giselle Elgarresta Rios, the first Cuban-American woman to conduct at Carnegie Hall in New York, wrote that art — perhaps more than other media — can help us better “see the souls of immigrants.”

"Christ crucified on the streets of Los Angeles"

It’s an overcast Saturday morning on Gladys Avenue in Skid Row — a 54-block area in downtown Los Angeles, home to one of the country’s most stable populations of people experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity. 

Andrew Jiang, of Alhambra, a city in western Los Angeles county, is there with a group of around 15 other volunteers with the Friars and Sisters Poor of Jesus Christ to serve chicken, rice, and vegetables to some 150 people living on Skid Row. On other days, a team of friars, nuns, and volunteers will walk block to block, distributing up to 400 sandwiches to more than 200 people. 

Jiang, who has volunteered on Skid Row since 2018, said, “You get to know some of the people, develop a relationship. We try to do more than just hand out food, but talk and get to know their stories.” 

Sister Goretti and others serve migrant families on Skid Row (PHOTO: Courtesy Sisters Poor of Jesus Christ Los Angeles)

In recent months, Jiang said he has noticed, among the usual crowd queuing in line, an upswing in the number of new faces, many of them from Central and South America. “Immigrants,” Jiang said. “In the last five years, I hadn’t met a single one down here, but now we meet at least a few every week.” 

Skid Row is seen by many as the epicenter of the U.S.’s unhoused epidemic; it’s now home to an increasing number of migrant families from Colombia and Venezuela, being bused in by Republican governors in border states like Texas or making their way here to seek asylum. 

According to The Los Angeles Times, “there are more than 100 families living there now, with more than 200 children,” many of whom are recent migrants. While the majority stay at privately funded mission shelters that accept families, a smaller number of these families now reside “in an array of large tents, pup tents and tarp shelters” along Towne Avenue, near Fourth Street, in what the Times called a “last resort for families that have run out of options.” 

But Giovanni, a Skid Row resident originally from Mexico, said more families are running out of options. “Whole families from South America are coming here, with their kids and everything,” he said. “They say the numbers are low, but I’ve seen them increasing.”

And as more migrants end up on Skid Row, a Catholic order is stepping in to meet their needs.

This is their story.

Dead Pop & Sugar Skull Chic

Earlier this week, actress Kate Hudson made a splash strutting about in “sugar skull” chic, with her face painted in “homage to the Day of the Dead” as described by US Magazine.

Traditionally, sugar skulls — known as calaveras — are associated with the Day of the Dead — El Dia de los Muertos —  a hemispheric American holiday celebrated near the end of October or the beginning of November, with the official celebrations taking place on November 1 and 2 by people in Mexico, Guatemala, the United States, and some South American nations. The ubiquitous symbols of the Day of the Dead — calaveras, elaborate artistic representations of a dead aristocratic woman (La Catrina) and flowers such as marigolds — not only ordain altars in homes and cemeteries, but find their into museums, menus, suburban jack-o-lanterns, art shows, clothing, and Hollywood runways.

The traditions surrounding el Dia de los Muertos are prime examples of the process of transculturation — the processes in which people allocate elements of their native culture and meld them with ingredients of an “invasive” culture to create fresh combinations and in some way mitigate the undesirable elements of said introduced culture. 

*See more at FAITH GOES POP