Professor Natalia Aguilar will explore these questions by focusing on the prominent place of household objects in conceptual works by contemporary Mexican and Chicanx artists Damián Ortega, Carmen Argote, and Margarita Cabrera. She analyzes how these works develop an “appliance aesthetics” where objects reveal the intimacy of migrant histories and the different strategies by which people adapt to transnational labor regimes while sustaining care within communities. Professor Amy Sara Carroll will then analyze Tijuana artist Ingrid Hernández’s ongoing exploration of the city’s “asentamientos irregulares,” or houses and neighborhoods autonomously constructed by their residents using materials and design elements that circulate on both sides of the border. In this respect, Hernández’s photographs reveal a migrant, improvised, and shifting form of building and dwelling that reflects in complex ways the culture and economy of the Californias. Finally, PhD. Candidate Francisco Tijerina will discuss Cecilia Miranda Gomez’s casicasas (almost houses), conceptual works that combine poetic and visual media. Tijerina will emphasize how Miranda Gómez understands dwelling as an open-ended practice under permanent construction. At the same time, Tijerina argues that her work centers the place of care both aesthetically and ethically, even if imperfect and mutating permanently under changing circumstances.

In different ways, these three presentations will address how recent Mexican and Latinx conceptual and documentary art practices present housing as a borderland terrain where strategies and tactics of adaptation, intimate care, and belonging mutate in response and resistance to larger economic and social conditions. Each participant will present for 18 minutes, this will leave around 20 minutes for discussion and Q&A moderated by Professor Alfonso Fierro