2026

One color screen print on watercolor paper

18 × 24 inches

In Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz's Labor and Legality: An Ethnography of a Mexican Immigrant Network by, she presents a case study in which she interviewed undocumented immigrant restaurant workers and staff who migrated from Leon, Guanajuato, Mexico, to Chicago, Illinois. (Guanajuato being the state in Mexico where I was born). Many of the workers believe they arrive in Chicago with nothing, so all they have to offer is their labor. Gomberg-Muñoz makes the connection that this humble belief and gesture has been skewed by people who are anti-immigrant through stereotypes and xenophobic rhetoric: “Mexicans only know how to work”, “Mexicans are hard workers”, “Mexicans are stealing American Jobs”, etc. I agree with Gomberg-Muñoz, through my own visual art research and practice, and personal life as an undocumented / DACA immigrant, I'd add that this belief also creates pressure to keep working past exhaustion, an expectation that becomes internalized rather than imposed.