Artwork omitted from Transborder Biennial 2018 / Bienal Transfronteriza 2018 pictorial map (Image used with permission from Los Dos)

22 November 2018

Dear El Paso Museum of Art,

How do I support public spaces in El Paso without upholding the structures of power that erode them? While I have no doubt that you won’t miss (and likely don’t feel you need) my $30 membership contribution, I question if my resistance toward this contribution causes more harm than good. Refusal to renew my membership will sever me from a community I have grown to love over the past couple of years. As I write to you on this day of Thanksgiving, a holiday commemorating the displacement and erasure of indigenous peoples and their histories, I reflect upon our common goals and ask for your accountability. I arrived home to find your letter requesting the renewal of my membership, yet my recent social media posts requesting your transparency in regards to the last minute decision to censor Barrio Duranguito from Los Dos’ commissioned pictorial map for this year’s Transborder Biennial have been untagged and ignored. As a public museum, a desire to avoid controversy is like standing in a full-length mirror and trying not to look at one’s legs.

Our public spaces are disappearing. Recently, it was announced that El Paso’s Main Library would lose 40,000 square feet of space instead of being expanded as desired by El Paso voters. Right now, just around the corner from you on Chihuahua Street, the sidewalks that house Museo Urbano, a museum created by the people in Barrio Duranguito, are barricaded by chain-link fencing erected by our city government. I have been disheartened, and I have allowed myself to feel powerless as I witness the growing corruption in our community, but I can no longer in good conscience remain quiet.

Museums were created as public centers to feed and safeguard community, not private spaces to maintain subservience to their top donors, many who aren’t representative of the larger community in terms of race, ethnicity, culture, and most importantly, financial status. In a recent On Being podcast episode “When the Market is Our Only Language,” Anand Giriharadas says to Krista Tippett, “You can tell the rich and powerful in our age to do more good, but you can never tell them to do less harm. You can tell them to give more, but you can’t tell them to take less.” Do you accept contributions in order to do good for the greater community without thinking about the harm it may cause? Under the guidance of your new director Victoria Ramirez, strides have been made in introducing programming more representative and inclusive of the borderlands with exhibitions like “Ethics, Excess, and Extinction,” “Papel Chicano Dos”, “Transborder Biennial 2018 / Bienal Transfronteriza 2018” (in partnership with the Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez), “Cholo at the Border: Works of Paola Rascon,” and the recent “After Posada: Revolution.”

It is not lost on me that my collage pieces selected for inclusion in this year’s Transborder Biennial, which sought to remind others of colonial enforcement and aggression by then-Mayor Tom Lea (not the artist) against residents of the El Paso/Juárez borderland, were displayed in the Woody and Gayle Hunt Family Gallery. Mr. Hunt is on the executive committee of the Borderplex Alliance, which has deep financial interests in the demolition of Duranguito for a new sports arena while the most recent one, Southwest University Park, flounders. El Paso’s mayor, Donald “Dee” Margo sits on the board of this outfit. This appears to be a glaring conflict of interest. Almost a century after Mayor Tom Lea’s memorandum and violent fear, our city is revisiting similar tactics including resident displacement, voter deception, and historical erasure. You have now extended the reach of our government’s crusade for erasure and have, in my view, undermined the vision of the Transborder Biennial. Artists contributed artwork that reimagined languages of the borderlands. What is to be achieved with new programming for the greater community all the while invoking silence in addressing the censorship of Los Dos’ art? Your continued silence about the map revision is systemic — it effectively gags your partners, employees, artists, members, volunteers, and patrons.

Local government has repeatedly taken measures to reform El Paso into a city that looks like every other city in America, but this borderland is not like every other place in America. How can residents of this beautifully diverse borderland resist the franchise narrative our elected officials have conspired to construct? How can we as a community protect the social and spiritual imagination of the El Paso/Juárez borderland?

I remain hopeful that you, El Paso Museum of Art, a public space I wish to help safeguard, and a self-professed “microcosm for its border community,” will respond to my request for transparency in regards to Los Dos’ art on their pictorial map. I ask you, EPMA, what do you want your relationship to be to this community you were designed to serve?

With love, Andrea Blancas Beltran

My amendeded version of Los Dos’ pictorial map

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Thank you to Nicole Antebi for her eyes, suggestions, and support. Thanks to Los Dos for speaking out and allowing use of their images. For those interested in further reading, I recommend David Romo’s book Ringside Seat to a Revolution from Cinco Puntos Press for a greater historical perspective of El Paso (this book was a direct influence on the collages I reference in this letter). You can also follow Paso del Sur for more information and new developments on Duranguito, including a recent petition appealing to Beto O’Rourke that’s still open for signatures and circulation. Here’s a video by Paso del Sur one year after the unauthorized demolition began: https://youtu.be/wqYu0F3uupA