Shifting Situations: Adriana Corral's Unearthed: Desenterrado Beyond the Border

This paper focuses on Texas-based artist Adriana Corral’s temporary memorial Unearthed: Desenterrado (2018), a white cotton flag hoisted sixty feet above the site of a former bracero processing center located near the US-Mexico border in Socorro, Texas. While flying above Rio Vista Farm, the flag momentarily and symbolically acknowledged the contributions of millions of braceros who aided in building the nation’s infrastructure and cultivating its crops between 1942 and 1964, crucial work that mitigated the potentially devastating effects of domestic labor shortages during and after World War II. Following its three-month installation near the border, the tattered flag traveled to a rural town in Virginia where it was exhibited in a small university gallery alongside a wall drawing made from soil that Corral collected at the original site. An undergraduate course was designed around the exhibition and a series of pedagogical aids that accompanied the exhibition included a bilingual Spanish-English multiauthor catalogue, an oral history with a former bracero worker, and a middle school and a high school curriculum. Dislocated from its original context, the presence of Unearthed: Desenterrado far from the border in the setting of a small liberal arts institution presented new opportunities to problematize past and present immigration policy and practice, to challenge omissions from the art historical canon, and to underscore the relevance of Borderlands Art Pedagogy well beyond the geographical borderlands.