On the Cover: <em>Cross My Heart</em>

Abstract

On the CoverCross My Heart RAEchel Running (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Cross My Heart. RAEchel Running. Courtesy: the artist. In 2006 I traveled to Mata Ortiz, Chihuahua, Mexico, on a three-day assignment to photograph master potter Juan Quezada, in Mata Ortiz. And I stayed for five years. Over that span of time, I witnessed the militarization of the US-Mexico border and the implementation of Arizona's SB 1070, which enabled the profiling of Mexicans in the United States. In Mexico, I also met and learned from local artisans, ranchers, farmers, and anthropologists, and came to see deep connections between Mesoamerica and the greater US Southwest. My first time out on the Arizona border, documenting the humanitarian aid group No More Deaths as they put out caches of water for migrants, I found this bra in the desert and instantly wept. I remember picking it up gingerly. How it pained me to wonder [End Page 5] what had happened to the young woman it belonged to. I imagine her mother giving it to her, its perfect virgin whiteness, soiled, stained, destroyed by the dirt rubbed into it violently. It lay there forgotten and discarded. I remembered the many faces I'd seen of a young woman whose heart carries the dream of America in her tender breast. The pink crosses of Juárez mark the signs of the hundreds of disappeared women of the borderlands. The crosses look like embroidery or scars of a badly sewn wound. Yet it's soft as the curve of the earthly form of a newly budding woman, the details of youth; tender flowers are placed across the harsh landscape between two countries both divided and united by lines on a map, and by the bloodlines and love lines we all share. Though it may seem futile, it is necessary to give voice to the voiceless. The land holds the stories of the ancientmigrations and the plight of the immigrants. It is tragic and it is beautiful with all the seasons of life, like a love song full of longing. The birds still migrate and people pray for rain up and down the Americas just as they did thousands of years ago. Hope is like water in the desert. I don't want to forget her. Daughters. Sisters. They were once someone's baby girl. I want to water their dreams. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Migration Series no. 1. RAEchel Running. Courtesy: the artist. My migration series explores the historical and symbolic connections of Mesoamerica, the US-Mexico borderlands, and the Greater Southwest. In my photographs I combine contemporary issues with the symbols of ancient cultures such as the Pochtecas, the trader priests who migrated across the Americas carrying stories and corn kernels, chocolate, macaws to the north and turquoise to the south. These also feature symbols of the Quetzalcoatl, the rain god embodied as a plumed serpent, and Thaloc, the wind god, as documented in pictographs and ceramics traded over the millennia. The T-door and cloud-shaped geometrics designs are seen in the complex architecture and designs in art and ceramics from the land of the Maya to the Olmec and Toltec sites [End Page 6] of Teotihuacan; to the outlier ancient city of Paquimé; to Chaco Canyon and the pueblos of New Mexico; to Mesa Verde, Colorado; and to Wupatki sites in Arizona. Walls of separation cannot stop the natural pattern of the world. The threads of human migration and history are interwoven into new designs. Today on the arid mesas and adobe pueblos, corn is still farmed in the old ways. In the ceremonial dances, turquoise, a dash of red macaw and eagle feathers, flash against gathering rain clouds; the gourds and sea shells clink rhythmically, resounding up and down the spine of the Americas, prayers to help keep our world in balance. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Migration Series no. 2. RAEchel Running. Courtesy: the artist. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 4. Migration Series no. 3. RAEchel Running. Courtesy: the artist. [End Page 7] RAEchel Running RAEchel Running, of Afro...