Mexico City, May 4 (EFE).- The emerging artist Manuel Gaona portrays in “The American Dream”, an exhibition in which painting, sculpture and serigraphy come together with a social perspective, the broken dreams of Mexican migrants who are in search of a better future in the United States.
Inaugurated this Thursday in Mexico City, Gaona captures in the exhibition a social phenomenon, migration from all parts of Latin America to the United States, which has spilled over into a humanitarian crisis in recent years.
The artist, born in Mexico City but living in Aguascalientes, remembers the exact moment in which he knew he wanted to tell the migratory drama of many of his compatriots: a traffic light, a man with amputated limbs, a murderous train.
“It was a moment at a traffic light, in which a man approached to ask for money, he had no limbs. Later I started talking to him and it turns out that he lost his limbs because of The Beast – a freight train that runs through Mexico from south to north and in which many migrants travel on its back – in his search for the ‘American dream’ ”, Gaona told in an interview with EFE.
Since then, and over the course of two years, the Mexican has investigated everything that surrounds the American dream of migrants: he traveled to Texas or California to see how they lived, he spoke with people in transit, with others to whom their relatives send remittances. .
This is how he depicted in oil a Haitian family that, as they passed through central Mexico and after being looted, only had a Winnie The Pooh stuffed animal and a small children’s backpack left; or a migrant in Los Angeles, United States, while he takes off the Mickey Mouse costume with which he tried to earn a few dollars.
Another of his colorful works, “Building America”, shows a group of Mexican workers in the United States, riding in the back of a pick-up vehicle with no more clothing than caps and glasses.
“This is how the migrants are there, naked,” argued the artist.
Through his paintings, Gaona invites us to reflect on what leads so many people to abandon their roots, what they are willing to risk and how their dreams are cut short.
Art with a conscience, he admitted, has the capacity to confront xenophobic discourses and attitudes against migrant communities, so common in Mexico and the rest of the planet.
“What I am looking for is that we see them (migrants) horizontally, they are people like us. Because we say migrants and we say it in a derogatory way,” explained Gaona.
But in his eagerness to portray the migratory movements and his truncated dreams, Gaona ended up seeing himself portrayed.
“I left home at the age of 17 to follow my dream of bullfighting, I feel identified with the immigration issue,” said the man who was a bullfighter and has ended up dedicating himself to art hundreds of kilometers from his birthplace.
