Though Francisco Delgado calls El Paso, Texas, his home base these days, the multimedia artist still travels to his birthplace of Ciudad Juárez regularly. Many of his family and friends still live there, Delgado tells SFR, and even if the trek has become a more difficult ordeal under the Trump administration, those journeys coupled with the artist’s journalism-adjacent desire to document and unpack the world at this moment have become at least part of the impetus behind Delgado’s forthcoming solo show at Santa Fe gallery Hecho a Mano.
In Animales de Carga, the Yale School of Art-trained Delgado brings a satirical eye and multiple mediums like oil, lithograph, spray paint and colored pencil to the politics of identity and the borderlands. Delgado culls from concepts of self-portaiture, sociological commentary and even political cartoonery for the series—much of which depicts the challenges of dichotomy. Delgado has a foot planted in America and Mexico both, meaning he glimpses challenges on both sides of the border. Ultimately, though, he says, he’s looking to spark conversation, foster humanity and identify issues from a complex tapestry of, let’s face it, too many issues.
“I think I want to start some dialogue with the viewer,” he explains. “I don’t feel like I have the answers—I’d hate to have that responsibility—but starting a conversation will hopefully help resolve some ideas, some issues, some conflicts in people’s daily lives.”
In some cases, the message feels clear. Take the piece “Natalico de la Lucha,” an homage to Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” wherein a woman donning a lucha libre mask finds herself caught between a sword-bearing Zapata wrapped in the snake and eagle imagery of the Mexican flag and an animated Statue of Liberty seemingly ready to snatch up the subject with her flowy wrapping. The Venus-like woman stands in a taco take-out container rather than a shell and alligators loom in the water nearby and not far from the almost soulless US-Mexico border wall in the background. Like much of the work in Delgado’s newest series, the colorful composition and familiar imagery feel comforting at first and draw one in—the longer you identify its components, however, the more unsettling it becomes.
Unfolding elements becomes a bit of a theme. “Proof of Citizenship 2,” for example, features a tortoise crossing the US-Mexico border with identification in its mouth. The headlights glint in the desert sun as the slow-moving creature waits for approval from someone or something out of the frame, a camera trained intently on its shell and scaly face. The tortoise pops up a number of times in Animales de Carga. In another piece, a massive version of the animal practically forces its way beneath an underpass several times smaller than its shell; in yet another, a Border Patrol worker watches over dogs that investigate the creature as a helicopter floats menacingly above the border crossing.
“It’s a representation of people crossing over and cars crossing over—slow crossing times and how you kind of have to be in your little shell,” Delgado says. “It’s also a play on the tortoise and the hare parable, and not only about physical time, but also immigration status and how long that takes to get resolved, or how you spend hours trying to cross into the US and you can almost become this frustrated animal, this slow animal.”
Delgado is no stranger to those long wait times due to his regular border crossings. He’s repurposed that time into his practice, though, by using delays to suss out potential material.
“When you’re there, things slow down,” he says. “I started seeing things like signs, people’s faces; it gave me the time to think about these things, and even though they’re mundane, I highlight them.”
Provided
In case you’re wondering, a hare does indeed make an appearance in the series. While it resembles a car like the tortoise does, its energy feels entirely more frantic as traffic cones fly through the air due to its speed. The look in its eye is harrowing, perhaps as a representation of exhaustion or the ways in which some folks aren’t allowed to slow down.
“I don’t know if I’m OK,” Delgado notes, but I think it’s a relief in a way. You have to keep going because these things never stop. And these things that are sometimes against Latino or Chicano communities or the border community…they’ve been going for as long as I remember and I don’t see anything changing in the near future.”
This blurs the line between statement and satire a bit, but Delgado says gallows humor is simply a part of his upbringing. What’s the saying? If you don’t laugh, you cry.
“I think in Mexican culture we have this long history of…you see satire or dark humor as a part of life,” he tells SFR. “I you don’t take it like that, sometimes life becomes too much of a burden. Posada, for example, and his calaveras—he used a lot of satire to talk about the times he lived in and the events that were happening. Satire is, I think, a relief in a way.”
That doesn’t mean it’s not intense, but Hecho a Mano owner Frank Rose was looking for that kind of intensity for the show. He first met Delgado some years ago during the Hecho a Mano’s early days on Canyon Road. At the time, his Delgado offerings were mainly prints. Animales de Carga represents their first major show together.
“Accessibiility is a loaded word, but I’m drawn to work you can get into immediately but still have an ongoing relationship with it,” Rose says. “[The show] is both funny and satirical, but it’s also talking about these depressing things.”
Of course, Delgado can help identify various issues, but what comes next is hard to pinpoint. Think of that Botticelli homage from earlier in the story, Delgado says.
“I didn’t want to make it too clear, but she’s been bracing,” Delgado explains. “She looks stoic, and America does that to an immigrant—you come, but you don’t feel like you’re fully welcomed, at least not now.”
