Kerry Doyle and Professor León De la Rosa Carrillo

[00:00] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: Hi. My name is Leon de la Rosa Carrillo. I'm 45 years old. Today's date is January 15, 2023. We're in El Paso Tejas, in the border with Ciudad Juarez, and I'm here with my very good friend and colleague, Carrie Doyle.

[00:16] CARRIE DOYLE: My name is Carrie Doyle, and I am 53 years old. It is January 15, 2023. We're in El Paso, Texas, border with Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. I'm here with Leon de la Rosa, my good friend and colleague.

[00:30] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: Hi, Carrie

[00:31] CARRIE DOYLE: Hi, Leon.

[00:34] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: So do you remember how we met?

[00:37] CARRIE DOYLE: Apparently I don't, because I think when we were talking about this earlier, I remembered the second time we met, but I think the first time that we met face to face was at a meeting. No, you came to the Rubin center, right. Where I work at the Rubin center for the Visual Arts, a visual arts center at the University of Texas at El Paso. And you came for a meeting about the exhibition Los de Separacidos. That was about people in Latin America who had been disappeared in artistic sort of expressions about that. And we were trying to think of some local programming. Is that right?

[01:09] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: Absolutely. Yeah. You put out a call for local artists and curators and whatnot, to do proposals for parallel programming while losing parecidos. What's up? And this, to me, is especially meaningful because that show, one of the reasons why my department head told me about this is because I had seen that show in Santa Fe, and as you said, that show is, is built out of artwork by latin american artists responding to the, what is called as las guerra sucias, or the rewards. In the seventies and eighties, where so many people went missing in dictatorial countries and states of government. And one of the things that my then wife and myself always reflected on that show, who I was with at the time, was that even the mexican desaparecidos were missing from the des apparecidas because there was no mexican representation in that show.

[02:24] CARRIE DOYLE: Yeah. It's focused on South America entirely, a.

[02:27] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: Little bit on Central America, but, yeah, nothing about Mexico. And that felt meaningful to me, at least, and it still does. And so when, when the Rubin center, you guys put out the call for proposals, I jumped on it because we were missing from there. We were missing from Los Persidos. And at the time, I just happened to be working in a colonia in Ciudad Juarez, Colomas, El Poleo, which was going through a process of getting disappeared, of getting wiped out of the map by very powerful businesspeople who claimed to ownership of that land. And so it felt kind of like, the perfect opportunity to. To work on that.

[03:07] CARRIE DOYLE: And for me, I think, if you remember, that was when I had just started working, really, at the Rubin center after coming out of 15 years working in the community on both sides of the border and actually living very close to Loma de Poleo. And when I saw the show, the desipatisidos, one of the first kind of professional actions I had at the Rubin center was thinking about how we could respond from this place, because at that time, the violence was really ratcheting up in Juarez to levels that we hadn't seen previously. And the show felt enormously relevant to me at this moment in time, even though the way it was framed was sort of talking about something that had happened in the seventies and eighties in South America, it seemed enormously relevant. And I hadn't thought about this for a while. But there's two things I thought about that show. One was the project that you did up at Loma de Poleo, sort of giving cameras to kids to kind of tell that story there and then. Do you remember the workshop that we did at Hua Cejata with Fernando Traverso, with the bicycles?

[04:01] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: Absolutely.

[04:02] CARRIE DOYLE: Yeah, that was. I mean, those were one of those moments where I really felt like, oh, it might be right for me to be working in the arts rather than, you know, I was having a bit of a tension between going from more direct sort of social and political action to working in the arts. And that was a moment when I felt, you know, through your connection and the way you set up that workshop and what happened at that moment in time that those two things were connected.

[04:24] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: That banner with Fernando Traverso's bike still hangs above my bed as we speak. And, yeah, it's one of my favorite things to hold onto.

[04:34] CARRIE DOYLE: So we were in that banner workshop that was at the day that mania, Arroyo was killed. Is that correct? Am I remembering that correctly?

[04:41] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: I don't know if it was the exact day, but it was around that time that many arroyo was murdered.

[04:46] CARRIE DOYLE: So a friend of ours and then a professor of sociology and active in the community with youth. And so all of a sudden, we had this very physical manifestation of what we were talking about, this kind of violence in Latin America, which, in the context of that exhibition, seemed like something from a faraway place in time. And then real live art being made on the border that responded to what we were living through. And that, I think, in some ways, has been the seed of our relationship. Right. Sort of making art in the context of this place, which is so different than any other place.

[05:18] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: Yeah. Constantly contested. And I remember we walked down, we were part of that march remembering Mania Arroyo and demanding justice for many. Arroyo. And we walked down that march holding that banner with the bicycle. Fernando Traverso's banner. Yeah. And around that time, and I've told this to you before, but I was never really, and I don't know if I still am, I was never really a true fan of art in general terms. But I think that even though you're.

[05:52] CARRIE DOYLE: A professor of art, even though I.

[05:53] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: Teach art, but I feel like throughout my relationship with you and our different approaches to art and contemporary art and the border, through art, I've learned to hold, like, a meaningful relationship with art, even if it's not an effective one necessarily. It is very much a love hate one, but it is always meaningful. And I think that with you, I've learned to understand the many powers and possible repercussions of art when it's done.

[06:31] CARRIE DOYLE: Well, can we talk about living on the border?

[06:34] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: Sure.

[06:36] CARRIE DOYLE: Tell me about your relationship to the border.

[06:39] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: I was born in la fronterae. When people ask me for my bio statement, I always ended with La Frontera. Smash him into shape, meaning myself. I don't know myself without la frontera. I don't know what I would be without being literally on this side of the border. My entire childhood and my entire life, really. I grew up in a very small rural town called San Agustin in El Valle de Juarez, where I still live right now. And we used to take walks down to El Rio Bravo with my dogs. And my dogs used to jump on Rio Bravo back when it still had water, somewhat clean water, that it wasn't dangerous for dogs to actually swim in it. And I'm talking about the eighties now. There was still no border wall, which, by the way, is not a trump wall. It's a bush war wall.

[07:41] CARRIE DOYLE: Clinton wall.

[07:42] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: It's a Clinton wall, too. Yeah, I mean, an after wall, an afterwall. And there was no wall back then. Every now and then, maybe Amiga would come up and even kind of like, wave at us or something, you know? It wasn't really a contentious relationship. These days, when I try to walk down to the river or bike down to the river, one thing that has changed a lot is that there's less ways to get to the river from my house because everything has become private property as opposed to just ejidos, which is an interesting concept in mexican land politics. And now there's. And I remember once actually trying to take you and Chico McMurtry to find our way to the river. And it took us a while because so many of those roads are now closed off or gated. There's still ways to get in, to get close to the river, but not as many. So that's number one. And of course, the big change is how we are greeted now by migra patrol cars, not in a friendly manner, but just in a very succinct and overlooking manner of what we're doing whenever we get close to the border, which, by the way, it may not be that different. If you get close to the border here in Juarez, you do get approached by guardianacional as well. On the mexican side, we don't have the guardianacional over there in San Agustin, where I live. So even approaching the border has changed so much since the eighties. So what's that, 40 years or 40 some years? And I've also had a very privileged relationship to the border in the sense that I don't remember a time when I was unable to cross the border, which is not true for many people here, and which tends to be forgotten very easily. And the fact that I did all of my higher education in the United States in English speaks a lot about all of those privileges as well. Well, right. And so I'm one of the privileged few in the border, and I understand that, and I try to work through that and I try to be conscious of that. Yeah. What about you? What's your relationship to the border?

[10:37] CARRIE DOYLE: I came to the border in 1991, as I think you know, but, and from Chicago, Illinois, where I grew up and lived my whole life. And honestly, if before I got here, if I had to find El Paso, Texas, on a map, I couldn't have, and I sort of imagined everyone would be wearing cowboy hats and riding horses. But I came for a volunteer program, Annunciation house, that was working with central american refugees at the time. And it was a very powerful entryway into the border because we had this home full of central american refugees. The first six months I was in El Paso, Texas, and these were people who were coming up, really, as a result of us intervention in Central America. So that connection between migration and us presence, for me, that was, you know, I had learned about that in my political science classes in college, but that lived experience of seeing, you know, human beings leaving their homeland out of conditions that were created by our country. That was very, very powerful to me. And then we moved over to Juarez, to a colonia called Anapra. That was one of the sort of newest colonias at that time. And it was part of this trend of people migrating from the interior of Mexico to work in us factories called maquiladoras. So it was another way of seeing us economic and political policy through the everyday lives of the people who were around me. And that was sort of. That was my entryway into the border, both in terms of migration and then in terms of the economics and politics of the maquiladora system. So we lived in a colonia, in a house made of pallets with no light or running water. It was still nicer than a lot of our neighbors. It was sort of the way people were entering into the city at that time. So we really learned a lot about Juarez through that. And I continued to work in a shelter for central american refugees in the center for another five or six years. So that was my entry point, where most of my time was spent on the Juarez side of the border, which I think it's a different kind of privilege in the sense that I got to know the border from that side initially, even though I always had the freedom to leave at any moment in time and work and live anywhere that I wanted to. But we were also here during operation hold the line in 1994, which is why it was important for me to say the border is connected to NAFTA, because that was part of this economic agreement of putting us factories on the mexican side, was that we would start to seal off the border. And so I saw, as you did, the fences going up, the helicopters coming in, a change in tactics of the way that we defend the border. Not at all to paint a pretty picture of how it was defended previously. But all of a sudden, the zone became militarized, and that was a very powerful moment in time to live through. And it also marked my understanding of this place, you know, to watch that border kind of gradually be sealed off and, you know, to see where we are today, I think that was the beginning of that, really.

[13:25] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: Right now, when you set up, when you spoke about militarization, it came to my mind. I don't know if you remember this, but we were preparing a presentation in El Paso about trans border ethics and this whole idea that we've been working on for a while. And the presentation was in El Paso, and so you came and picked me up the night before so that we can work on the presentation throughout the night. And so we were driving back to El Paso, and I hadn't been across for a while. I just hadn't, for whatever reason, to the point where I hadn't seen the barbed wire at the border. At the bridge, yeah. Which one did come with Trump. And I remember we even took pictures of it in a kind of hidden way, because you're not allowed to take pictures in the bridge. And we ended up using those pictures in the presentation. And just the entire notion of the fence is not enough. The bridge is not enough, the passports are not enough. We need barbed wire now. And how just insane that sounds. And the escalation of efforts to remind us that we just don't belong across that barbed wire, right? Because that's what it means, right? We don't belong there. We don't belong across it. And so, yeah, it's been, who knows what's going to happen in the next 40 years to that border. How did you feel about the border literally shutting down for 90% of the people during COVID It was one of.

[15:21] CARRIE DOYLE: The most alienating experiences, I think, of my life, even though, again, us citizens during that entire time had the ability to go back and forth. But it sort of compounded that sense of isolation I think we had during COVID a lot of us with friends. What I was comparing it to was sort of that period of the quite severe violence we had between 2009 and 2013, where lots of people didn't go back and forth. But you did have the ability to do that. And friends from Mexico could come over and we could spend time. But I think about the kinds of projects that we do, and certainly you could argue that some of them can be done virtually, sort of cross border projects, conversations can be had virtually. But the inability, for example, to invite you and Bianca over to dinner, it just really reminded me of this thing that we talk about all the time, that there's many of us that live between both cities as if there weren't a border, and only people with a lot of privilege can do that. But many of us that go back and forth all the time, speak both languages, and spend a lot of time in both places. But that border is extremely real, and it's from one day to the next that it becomes an unpassable border for so many people. And so that was very present to me, and that, to me, felt like the most alienating time. It was in another global context, in which we were all alienated in some ways from one another. But that felt particularly true here at a local level.

[16:46] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: Yeah, as a matter of life, I always let my visa expire for at least one year before I renew it, just to. Not to have that excuse that I cannot go across the border because I don't have a visa. Right. Or just to know that. And I remember when I first heard about shutting, about how they were shutting down the border, my first thought was, well, it's not going to be any different than when I let my visa expire and not worry about it. But it was immediately evident that it was very different and that this time there was zero control over it by us and there was no new visa that I could come up with that would deem me essential, which is in itself problematic. Right. Who were essentials and what was essential about it? And I wasn't one of the essentials, evidently. And I think that that's when the pandemic felt real, is when they shut down the border, which is something that I never thought could happen just because of all the money and all the. Of course, they found a way to keep the money flowing, but not the people, which seemed impossible to me before they did it. But it happened. Right? And it keeps happening. And so do you ever foresee a future in which this border gets permanently shut down for people?

[18:21] CARRIE DOYLE: I mean, for me, it's part of this conversation that I think is coming to a head, not just in our country, but around the world about the sort of haves and haves, not like what we've seen, like in the, you know, by the time we've lived on the border. You've lived on the border since you were born. But, like, in the past 30 or 40 years, what we've seen is this sort of increased polarization where we realize that, you know, the borders of physical representation. I think of the ways in which our economic systems operate where some people are living these lives of, again, enormous privilege, and then other people are kept out of that privilege and producing things for that privilege. The border exists to keep that intact. And I don't want to get too esoteric about it, but I see it as a north south conversation. I see it as a polarized of the rich and the poor conversation. And I think, you know, something pretty profound has to happen before that that breaks away. I don't see an easy path from here to there.

[19:17] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: Do you think that? And I guess you do, right? And I guess I do too. But do you think that art can play a role in keeping those borders open?

[19:30] CARRIE DOYLE: I'm glad that you said that because, I mean, I think that's what we wanted to talk about today is sort of why are we trying to make art across this impossible border? But I do think so. You know, I think it's one way to sort of call attention to what's happening here. And I think we both worked with a lot of artists that are very interested in doing that. I think the relationship that you and I have developed over the past 15 years where we've done a, you know, easily 20 projects right across the border, where we're trying to make some sort of connection, either physical connection through objects or connections and conversations, that becomes itself both a point of connection. And as we've talked about before, it illuminates the difficulty of doing things across borders because of the great inequities that exist. And so I think it's important to keep trying those things because they sort of teach us about, about where we are and help us understand where we are.

[20:24] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: I'm really interested in the ways in which art can work beyond representation and where art can work in order to actually transform social relationships and power dynamics. One of the biggest projects that we worked on is Lozano Hamer's border tuner. Do you think that that kind of spoke in some sense to that possibility of art changing or transforming some social dynamics in some way?

[21:07] CARRIE DOYLE: I think, yes. And it also spoke to the contradictions. So, you know, that was a project, a huge project of eleven days of lights across the border that allowed people on both sides of the border to speak to one another. The infrastructure was enormous. It took us almost two years to get both cities on board for doing that. And that, again, it's sort of a process that sort of shows you what it's like to live here, right? So we had to deal with the Border Patrol and the military and all these other people just to be able to set up this light show and this kind of conversation. But there was this also really interesting grassroots thing, things happening at the same time, you know, where we worked hard to get local artists involved in true conversations and activists involved in true conversations, and even everyday people who came up and spoke to one another across the border. It was a beautiful thing, but it did highlight, if we wanted to have an ending party, we had to do it in Juarez, because the people in El Paso could always go to Juarez, but the people in Juarez couldn't always go to El Paso. You know, I think about the amount of time and money that came not entirely from us organizations. We got a significant amount of money from mexican organizations, but the money to do something like that came largely north of the border. And as much as we tried to make it an even sort of back and forth, it also highlighted a lot of the inequalities. So I think it did both things. I think it was a very special moment in time. It was right before COVID and it was this beautiful moment of playing cumbia across borders and singing poetry across borders and having First nations voices across borders. And at the same time it highlighted the inequities, I think, between the two countries. But also, again, for me, with that project, the inequities between sort of haves and have nots that exist on both sides of the border. What about you?

[22:53] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: A couple of things always come to mind when I think about border tuner. One is the makeshift camp that was built just, I don't know, maybe 100 meters away from, I don't know what that's in feet, but a few meters away from the installation of migrants, these were from people from southern central Mexico that were coming to Juarez to plead or try to plead their case for political asylum. And they set up camp in El Chamisal, where border tuner was set up. And that contrast of the migrant camp, which, by the way, was in itself an interesting phenomenon because again, these were all mexican migrants who refused to be part of the camp with central and southern american migrants, which speaks to a whole other set of issues and beliefs. And I remember that one of our first concerns was that the Juarez municipal government would not take the installation as an excuse to remove the migrants camp. And I remember you working very hard and diligently to make sure that that wouldn't happen. And then the second part was, well, how do we reach or outreach to them, reach out to them and invite them to be part of it? Which we did. And there was a couple of meetings, a couple of missed calls. Nothing really came about. They were busy doing something else. Evidently, they were busy trying a great.

[24:42] CARRIE DOYLE: Metaphor for the arts in today's world.

[24:44] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: Exactly right. People are busy to visit, to engage art, but that will always stay with me. Kind of that tension, that inherent tension in public and participatory art and how and who does it serve? And it was meaningful. The other thing that always comes to mind is that in the El Paso side of border tuner, everybody had to work very hard to make sure that there were food trucks, that there were soda available, that there were vendors available. And when somebody came up to me and asked me if we were going to do something like that in Juarez, I thought, no, people are just going to show up. Don't worry. Vendors will show up.

[25:31] CARRIE DOYLE: Exactly.

[25:32] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: Just don't worry about it. And they did. And we probably had a much wider.

[25:37] CARRIE DOYLE: That was a better time, I'll be honest with you. It was a better time on the water side of the border.

[25:41] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: And because people just show up right. A couple of things that I feel were left on the table for border tuner was that we never got around to set up the public transportation for people that couldn't access the point, because, again, when it comes to public art, you need to concern yourself with the access that people have to that public guard. Right. And a lot of Juarences do not have access to the site where border tuner was set up. And so that was a concern that was kind of left on the table from my memories.

[26:23] CARRIE DOYLE: Yeah, I think there were a lot. But, you know, that project reminded me of something that you and I talk about a lot, like when we're trying to explain the border to people from the outside, and it's that thing that anything that you can say is true is also equally untrue. So there were moments where you really understood this sort of sense of connection across the border of people being in one place. We know that people have family on both sides of the border and move back and forth across the border, and then at the same time with those migrant camps there, you realize that border, for some people, that connection is just such a ridiculous, pie in the sky idea. It has no connection to their real life. The border is a real physical barrier. And I think that there, you know, are so many things about the border that are contradictions. And when you try to operate across it, those contradictions become really clear. And we felt that a lot, I think, over the years that we've collaborated.

[27:15] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: How would you explain the border to somebody who doesn't, hasn't experienced it firsthand?

[27:20] CARRIE DOYLE: Well, I mean, it's almost my job.

[27:22] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: Well, and I should say the Juarez El Paso border, because there's a lot of boys.

[27:25] CARRIE DOYLE: I get people coming in. So at the Rubin center, we're getting artists from all around the world, including from Latin America. And I think that people do have this idea that they have this kind of very clean idea on their head of the border, that Mexicans want to come and live in the United States, that, for example, people in Juarez speak Spanish and people in El Paso speak only English, that people in El Paso are blonde hair and blue eyed. The people in El Paso have money, and people in Juarez don't. And all of those things. I mean, stereotypes often arise out of some aspect of truth. But I think when you come here, you realize how complicated that is. You know, working at the university, we have eight interns, and six of the eight have nationality in both countries and have had a significant part of their education experience in both countries. So, you know, they're not mexican american in the way that someone might be if their parents moved to Idaho, say, 20 years ago. They're mexican and they're american, and they live on both sides of the border, and they operate on both sides of the border. And so it's just a lot more complex than I think people imagine it to be. And also the idea that everyone wants to come to the United States, which is simply not true. I think, again, about students of mine that hold us citizenship but choose to live in Mexico and work in Mexico and friends that do as well. And that sort of. It's a very sort of complex landscape. Yeah. And I think people, again, it is a privileged few that can go easily through both cities like you and I can. But there are many people who are living across the border in one way or another because the people they love the most live on the other side of the border because their jobs are on the other side of the border. Border. All sorts of things like that. How would you explain the border?

[29:05] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: I think that the quickest way to make it more complex than just the mainstream attitude towards it would be to go to the bridge, to either of the bridges around 04:00 p.m. on a weekday and witness the amount of people that are willingly going back to Juarez every single day. It is not true that we all want to stay here. It is not true that we are trying to get across to stay and live off this state or whatever. I myself went back and forth every single day for about ten years, and not once did I think about moving to El Paso. I was simply having too good of a time living where I was living in Juarez, and I was enjoying it. And to some degree, the journey going back and forth gives you meaning and gives meaning to the border, which is, again, one of the things that I think you in the Rubin center are very diligent about. When you have an artist here for one of your immersion trips, you make sure that they go back and forth at least a couple of times. Right. To experience that sense, that sense of what it means to cross it. And it's not something that you can explain it. I don't think I. It's something that you need to live it. And last time I did that with an artist that contacted you, he was a musician. I'm blanking on his name. Do you remember his name? But you know who I'm talking about.

[30:59] CARRIE DOYLE: I don't know.

[31:00] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: Okay. He was a musician, and he wanted to experience the border firsthand because he was working on a. Oh, totally. Yeah, on a music piece about the border. And this was around Covid time still. I hadn't crossed the border with my new vaccination passport before that. And when I was driving with him and as we were approaching the crossing point, I told him, you know, they may not take my vaccination card because it wasn't one of the ones that were accepted, which is a whole other conversation. And then I told him, but that's part of the experience of crossing the border. You may, in fact, get turned around and you may have nothing to say about it, because that's just the way it is.

[31:53] CARRIE DOYLE: If you had to think about lessons learned from 15 plus years of trying to do art projects across the border, what would you say you've learned in this collaboration that we've had for all these years?

[32:08] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: That despite sharing an environment, the language that gets developed through art remains so particular to each side of the border still, and has to do with education, it has to do with aspirations, has to do with access to resources, has to do with all sorts of things which are not necessarily embedded on the border or kept on either side of the border, but then they're just embedded in the experience of each side of the border. We've talked a lot about how inherently every single project that we worked on, the resources come from the United States, even if the objective is Juarez or the other side of the border, resources come from the United States, which, of course, gives power to the United States side. And it takes somebody like you, a true ally, to actually share that power. And I think that it just has made me so cognizant of the necessity of allies.

[33:39] CARRIE DOYLE: Thank you.

[33:41] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: Thank you.

[33:48] CARRIE DOYLE: I think for me, the thing that I've learned most from our collaborations together has been the importance of process. And I think it's one of the things that I appreciate about you as a colleague and a friend is that we've been able to slow things down when we need to and really get into the difficult parts of the collaborations. I feel like you have spoken up as a really clear and honest and critical voice when that needs to happen. And I think that, for me, the cross border projects have never been about making it. Like, everybody's happy here, and we're all holding hands across the border, but it's sort of laid bare the dynamics and partially through, like, you know, our ability to be honest with one another and, yeah, to stop things when they're not going in the right direction and to ask the right questions. And so that's something that I've really valued about our collaboration over the years is that we have had a process that has allowed us to kind of confront some of these difficulties. And even if they're. They feel very unsolvable, which I think they still mostly do in many cases, at least we're allowed to be honest about those dynamics and let those be seen, which is really important to me.

[34:59] LEON DE LA ROSA CARRILLO: And hopefully the artwork that comes about will always be honest about those dynamics as well, right?

[35:05] CARRIE DOYLE: Yeah. I feel proud of the projects that we've done over the years and the work that's come out of it.