Fabian Garcia Rios was the last known migrant to die in Arizona in
the month of July.

The 24-year-old perished in the furnace known as the Tohono O’odham
nation on July 31. His cause of death: environmental heat exposure. The
young man was one of nine migrants whose bodies were found over six
days during the last week of July, and one of 37 who died and were
found in Southern Arizona during the whole month.

Fabian is no. 162 on the annual death list compiled by Kat Rodriguez
of Tucson’s Coalición de Derechos Humanos. He’s the last one
named on her count at the moment, but Kat will soon be adding more.
During sweltering August, in the weeks since Fabian suffered in the
ghastly heat, 21 more bodies have been found.

The August dead put Kat’s total for fiscal 2009 at 183. With five
weeks still to go until the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, those 183
corpses already equal the number of migrant dead for all of fiscal
2008. And those are only the bodies that have been found.

Young Fabian could easily have served as the model for a poignant
work on view in a show of political art at the UA’s Joseph Gross
Gallery.

Colored in the sands, blues and greens of the Sonoran Desert, the
print by Artemio Rodriguez pictures a desert as flat as the deadly
corridor west of the Baboquivari Peak area on the O’odham nation. Gray
rocks are scattered over the copper-colored ground. A Gila monster
thrusts out its poisonous fangs. A couple of sentinel saguaros rise up
under old devil sun, which bears the face of a pointy-bearded Uncle
Sam.

One migrant has already collapsed against a rock, while another
stumbles along front and center. This one is walking, but he won’t last
much longer. He’s already stripped off his shirt in a vain attempt to
cool off, and he trudges along bare-chested in blue jeans and sneakers.
The toe of one of his shoes has been shorn off by a fierce cactus. His
head is bent down—he’s on his way to tumbling over—and
beads of sweat jump off his face.

In his mind, he’s in the arms of his beloved. In a thought bubble
over his head, colored the black and white of a faded photograph, he
and his true love embrace and kiss.

He won’t be seeing her again in this life.

Rodriguez, a member of Justseeds, described in gallery materials as
a “radical art cooperative,” has cleverly drawn on traditional Mexican
art. His piece wonderfully mimics a traditional woodcut, with rough
black cuts and bold outlines throughout. And this being a show called
Confronting the Capitalist Crisis, Rodriguez also includes an
explanatory text in English and Spanish. Below the title—”Going
to Where Globalization Takes Jobs”—he elaborates, “U.S. policy
sends hundreds of migrants to their deaths every year as they cross the
border.” Pushed from their homes by poverty, they come north to work,
to where the jobs are.

This engaging traveling show gathers together 95 graphic prints from
the co-op’s artists, who live variously in Brooklyn, Detroit,
Pittsburgh and other epicenters of industrial decline. Their work
carries on the radical art of the 1930s, when Depression-era artists
chronicled the nation’s despair and poverty in vivid woodcuts, linocuts
and silkscreens. These contemporary radical artists add offset lithos
and stencils to the repertoire of printmaking media, and they use
bright colors and bold lines. Even so, their pieces have an
old-fashioned air, refreshingly so.

At a time when other contemporary artists are concerned primarily
with breaking media boundaries and redefining art, no small thing, the
Justseeds folks have an even bigger concern: saving the world. They
enlist their art to fight not only against catastrophic U.S.
immigration policies, but also against the war in Iraq, environmental
destruction, the loss of animal species, the oppression of the
Palestinians and the harsh U.S. prison system, among other evils.

“Abolish the Prison Industrial Complex,” cries one work, targeting
the for-profit prisons that too often escape legal scrutiny. The words
accompany a simple milk carton in white and gray. “Missing,” says the
legend over the silhouette of a man’s head, “2.3 million Americans from
their family, friends and community.” (The artists who made the 21
pieces in the section on prisons are unidentified.)

“Prisons: Slave Ships on Dry Land,” rages another, pointing up the
racial imbalance among the imprisoned in the United States. This artist
cleverly imposes architectural drawings of contemporary prison blocks
over sketches of the crowded hold of an old slave ship.

A special section called People’s History has 43 pieces. Heavily
weighted with text, these educational works cover everything from “The
Battle of Blair Mountain,” a 1921 landmark in the history of mining and
labor, to the struggles of the Korean Peasants League, ACT UP
Philadelphia and the Mothers of East Los Angeles, who in 1985
successfully fought the construction of a prison in their neighborhood.
They make for interesting viewing—the Justseeds artistic
standards are high, with varied compositions and creative use of
media—and interesting reading. Any one of them could serve as the
basis of a dissertation.

In the general section, where the works are signed, an effective
anti-war piece uses a screened photo of a city street-corner
demonstration. The urban skyscrapers—they could be in lower
Manhattan—loom over a solitary woman who’s middle-aged to
elderly. She stands alone with her sign, which also serves as the
title: “How Many Dead Are Too Many?” Artist Josh MacPhee uses color to
emphasize her lonely heroism. She’s been converted into a pink line
drawing that makes her stand out sharply against the blue-gray of the
photographed streetscape.

Roger Peet laments the possible loss of the endangered hammerhead
shark in his vivid “Down the Drain.” Two dense schools of the fish
swirl downward into a black hole. The denim-blue fish swim in two
spirals of sea-green, separated by a curl of sand-colored yellow.

Occasionally, a work fails in its mission to inform. MacPhee’s
“Huelga” (Spanish for strike) has a series of cloudlike circles
hovering over what looks like a tipping skyscraper. It’s a startling
image, but MacPhee’s meaning is unclear. Could it be an explosion?
Capitalism blowing up? In this kind of quick-synopsis art, if you have
to ask, the piece doesn’t work.

Quite a few of the prints deal with the unresolved tragedy of
illegal immigration. Given current Arizona’s status as the nation’s
migrant killing field, they carry special weight here.

Nicolas Lampert recalls past immigration embarrassments in “Welcome
Not Welcome.” He’s screened a historic photo of Chinese workers, whose
hard labor helped build the West but whose presence was reviled.
Melanie Cervantes, in a vivid companion piece to Rodriguez’s picture of
the death in the desert, brings up the issue of gay families split
apart by archaic immigration laws. She’s made portraits of two loving
families with children, one headed by two women, the other by two men.
Pictured in bright, flat color, the two groups are separated by a
banner trumpeting the slogan “Keep Our Families Together.”

Erik Ruin zeroes in on Arizona’s deadly migrant trail. In an
arresting black-and-white woodcut, divided into three verticals that
suggest the journey’s length and difficulty, he pictures the relentless
surge of the Earth’s dispossessed toward the Promised Land. Mothers,
fathers and children walk up and down his panels, down through desert
arroyos and up over the border wall.

They’re bowed and strained, laboring to push on, suffering from the
exertion. And any one of them could be the next Fabian Garcia Rios.

This article appears in Sep 3-9, 2009.