Algún día este autobús me llevará a casa / Someday this bus will take me home

Abstract

This is the world I imagine. This is the world I want to create: this world without borders where the Los Angeles Metro bus has a stop in Oaxaca, where we can all move freely across landscapes, and where we have autonomy over our own mobility.This piece, like a lot of my drawings, is a reference to the Oaxacan immigrant culture in Los Angeles that raised me. It depicts an orange Los Angeles Metro bus arriving to Oaxaca City, where in the background we can see my version of the iconic Santo Domingo church, an icon of Oaxacan history and geography. The bus’s arrival is celebrated with a calenda, a type of parade that invites people to a festivity; there are marmotas and women carrying canastos ready to greet the bus’s passengers. This celebration marks a reunion between immigrants arriving from Los Angeles and their pueblos that have not forgotten them. The colors in the piece are references to alebrije sculpture art and my own childhood obsession with Lisa Frank. This fusion of style represents my own blended upbringing between US pop culture and my ancestral artistic practices.In this piece, I wanted to illustrate a world that challenges the way oppressive powers have attempted to dictate movement for Indigenous peoples. As a daughter of Zapotec immigrants, I have much to say about how we are “given” or denied access to move across landscapes. Elsewhere, I have discussed how Zapotec immigration from Oaxaca to the US is mired in challenges produced by both the US and Mexican governments that limit Zapotec mobility, especially those with an undocumented status.i In my academic pursuits I study the multilayered experiences of undocumented Zapotecs in Los Angeles, some of which I visually represent here.In our small pueblo in the central valley of Oaxaca, the construction of the federal highway that crossed our land was a celebrated yet controversial development. While it offered new jobs and opened up commerce, it also disposed homes, disrupted natural life, and altered many of our cultural dynamics. The state believed that the road, in addition to other benefits, would help modernize us, that this highway would somehow erode our Indigeneity. I challenge this absurd idea by decorating my road with grecas, geometric patterns that line the structures of our pre-colonial cities. The movement of this bus into the more defined grecas is not a movement into “modernity” but an embrace of our identity and our relationships to home. Roads and cities are not antithetical to Indigeneity; rather, they have always been a part of our histories. Pressuring us to move to larger cities, whether they be in Oaxaca, Mexico, or in the United States, will never erase who we are.On the other end, sometimes our movement is unjustly denied or limited. I grew up as an LA bus rider, often accompanying my family on their long bus rides to work. Bouncing from stop to stop until we traversed half of the city to make it to our destination. For most of my adolescence, California prohibited undocumented immigrants obtaining driver’s licenses. For a city that sustains itself from the labor of undocumented workers, it was incomprehensible to me why they would make the journey to work more arduous. I would often meet other paisanxs on these city buses, equally tired from their commute, from their double shifts, yet despite these challenges they continued on. Like many, sometimes my mom would fall asleep on these long rides, and I would stay vigilant that we would not miss our stop. I once asked her whether she dreamed of anything while she slept, to which she replied, “I dreamed this bus took me all the way home.” I knew that she meant her pueblo. She wanted to be home. She wanted the ability to travel. So I drew this for her. I drew her bus. I drew this for all the people who, like her, dream of a world where we can move and travel beyond borders. A world where home can have multiple meanings and multiple locations we can traverse between. A world where the Los Angeles Metro bus has a stop in Oaxaca.