MARFITA: An Interview with Artist Josh Franco, Part 1

I’ve known Josh Franco for about a year now. He teaches in the Art History department at Ithaca College, and I teach in the Writing Department. We both came to IC under the auspices of the Pre-Doctoral Diversity Fellowship. Josh and I share a mutual admiration for the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, and in teaching the Poetics class this semester I invited Josh to come talk to my class about his involvement with the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa and about his dissertation, research, and art practice. In awe of his work, I initiated this conversation with him via email, which I am so excited to share with all of you.

LB: So we are coming to this conversation via Gloria Anzaldúa, who is important to us both as a writer, artist, activist, queerPOC human. In class you mentioned the phrase "the border crossed us," which you've heard a lot as a Chicanx from Texas and I'm interested in where and how this intersects with your work in terms of research on Donald Judd, Anzaldúa and rasquache art in a place like Marfa—with all the capitalism and imperialism that that can imply--(when I think of Prada Marfa, for example, I also think of the seminal year of 1913 when Prada was founded in Milan, I think of Prada Milano today, stores staffed with African greeters, I think of the Futurist manifesto and Marinetti in the early 1900s and the way the artistic "rebeldia" of that manifesto is suckled by the black Sudanese breast and imperialism and colonialism and art)--seems incredibly significant. Could you talk about being crossed by a border(s), your own crossing from writing-to-making in your own work?

JF: Yes, so my work, especially earlier projects, often stems from my own familial phenomena (lost rebozos, migrant farmwork patterns, linguistic shifts, gender policing…). One phenomena that describes my family encapsulates in this common saying in what is now the Southwest United States: “We didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us.” This refers to families that did not physically migrate, but woke up after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to a world in which they were no longer Mexican citizens and were abruptly troubled and troubling occupants of the United States. This is most of my family as far as my great and great great grandparents who were alive then. My paternal great grandfather’s ranch land, where large portions of the adobe home still stand outside of Terlingua, Texas, is in the shadow of a mountain (a gorgeous mountain in the sunset especially). Just on the other side of the mountain is Mexico. The razor cut close for us.

The saying is an easy way to picture for audiences what the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo did on an intimate level. On the other hand, this phrase is also used in deeply disturbed and disgusting ways by some residents of Mexican descent in this country to perversely resolve the paradox their own being here and their desire to see the border tightly policed. So they get to hold on to their Mexican subjectivity and express a conservative and hateful politics. It is awful. So it is a slippery phrase for sure. I often wonder how Anzaldúa (would have) wielded it in casual conversation, if at all. It would certainly be attached to other subtle signals; for instance, if someone identifies themselves as Chicanx, as I do, they almost certainly consider the phrase useful for the first reason. If they insist on “Hispanic” or “Latino/a,” and demonstrate a distaste for “Chicano/a” then you are probably dealing with the latter.

But then again, many who fight for Mexican immigrants’ rights and a more porous (or non-existent) border, are critical of “Chicano/a” on not unfounded grounds. They are critical of it as an identity that reproduces the ivory tower within Chicanx-Mexican / American-Mexican social structures, down to the level of family. In this framework, “Chicano / a” is uppity and pretentious, and more importantly, it ignores the working and migrant class peoples while it faces inward to institutions of higher education. While I have many arguments and examples against this, and embrace Chicanx for myself, I also can’t say these critics are entirely wrong. I have had to face myself in this particular double-pierced mirror much more in the past year, being called out for it quite explicitly at a conference last Fall, so it is on my heart. But this started as a response to a question about language, so to conclude this bit, I advise checking out Alfred Arteaga’s Chicano Poetics. Stunning still after quite a few years.

Right now, this very minute as I write, a wound threatens the whole Big Bend region of Texas: the proposed Trans Pecos Pipeline. When Anzaldúa wrote of the border wall, the fence as she encountered at her oceanic end of the Texas-Mexico border, she exclaimed, “me raja, me raja.” It splits me, it splits me. I thought I totally identified with that until this pipeline was recently proposed. Now I see that I was with Anzaldúa conceptually, but not on the somatic level. With this pipeline, I now get what it is to be threatened with being split. Just this week I am discovering this new depth to how I sense my body’s metabolisis with that land, from my desert end of Texas and along a North-South rather than West-East axis. My living and buried ancestors are all up on the splitting block right now. My unknowing baby cousins and my brothers (the one in the ground and the one I can text). I thought, because our grandparents always told us to call ourselves Mexicans, that I empathized with Anzaldúa’s bodily outcry in response to the open wound kept open by the metal border fence. I really did not. Now, with this pipeline, I horrifically do. My stomach is in knots. The knots wait to be gently untied or fucked into oblivion by a goddamn fucking pipe. There were the Hanging Trees (still there). Now there are the Fucking Pipes. Chingao.

I have to write all of that. INFORM YOURSELF AND SIGN THE PETITION. Somehow now, transition to discussing Donald Judd (who, if I may take a wild liberty, would probably be on the front lines. His body is and is in this land too)…

The epistemic co-existence of Judd and Anzaldúa—through their writing and art—in my body as it stands in Marfa can be fairly called a site of dehiscence. They are the calyx lips through which I peek out my half-formed flesh optimistic about what’s out there. And terrified about what’s out there. I am mostly anxious in Marfa.

I am not typically an anxious person, I think. For a while, like an apparition, an Anzaldúa quote was muralized on the façade of the Blackwell Elementary School building in Marfa, where my grandfather and most students of color attended. “Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar. Gloria E. Anzaldúa” Addressing the walker, Anzaldúa tells her there are no bridges, but that bridges are made in the moving. It totally makes sense that she would appear in Marfa in her textual form. That is also her bodily form, if we take her at her word. I do. So for this time, Anzaldúa presented large in Marfa. I basked there in front of the wall one afternoon for I don’t know how long. Perhaps other passages would fuel an understanding of the tense relations between brown and white in Marfa as a violent wound, but this one really quieted me. It is so well chosen to appear in this place. I sensed permission, finally, to not feel guilty about also basking in Judd’s immense-but-human spatialized objects and object-anchored spaces. To me that is the subtle distinction between wound and dehiscence: permission and capacity to see what emerges through the splitting of flesh (and land, and text, and architecture, and social fabrics…). It is such a delicate thing though; apologia for violence is the sugar-sharing neighbor of this capacity. It’s a tightrope walk…I am mostly anxious in Marfa.

Related to this, let me finally talk about an aspiring artwork. I do have this idea inspired by my work as an Artist-Guide at 101 Spring Street, Judd’s New York home and studio. It involves a pilgrimage in a pickup truck from SoHo to Marfa. In Marfa, the bed of the truck is filled with dirt from my grandfather’s childhood backyard (now the home of the lovely Sanchez family). Then, the filled truck is driven back to SoHo. Its contents emptied to wrap around the corner where Judd’s home sits. We wait to see if Anzaldúa appears to acknowledge Judd in his place, or if it draws out Judd to acknowledge her. Perhaps La Guadalupe, who already has appeared in Marfa and is neighborly with Judd, might also make an appearance in downtown Manhattan on the glass and cast iron façades. One can pray and light candles. This vision comes out of working that wound—dehiscence tension. Just an idea for now, but perhaps one day.