Melissa Gamez-Herrera
Nuestra artist member Melissa Gámez-Herrera shares her artist statement about labor within the maquiladora workforce at the borderlands. Her works emphasize the humanity of the invisible labor behind the products we use every day. To look at her work means to get a glimpse at the personal lives of the hands that bring us the comforts of our homes.
Artist Statement
“Pues que le puedo decir?
Le doy gracias a Dios por vivir aqui
y conocer este lugar.
No digo que es bonito.
Aqui es puro trabajar.”
“Well, what can I tell you?
I am thankful to God to live here
and to know this place.
I won’t say it’s a beautiful place.
All we do here is work.”
- Otilia Cristobal, A maquiladora worker from Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico.
The U.S.-Mexico borderlands is a place of constant manufacturing for the world’s products. Te Digo Que Lo Llevo en La Sangre (I'm telling you that I carry it in my blood) is a project where I traveled to Mexico (near the border) to meet women factory (maquiladora) workers in their homes and to listen to and record their personal experiences as mothers, sisters, and active labor organizers. From this research, I have made works on paper, photography, sculpture, and video. Much of this work is directly related to their oral histories, but much of it is also my interpretation and relationship to labor.
At the end of the work day, the Home (the house) is the place that the factory worker will come back to. In the Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, he says of the home– “…if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths.” In the home is where we must be able to find refuge. To be able to live and be as we are. This is something that we can feel as laborers across nations. The quantity of products factory workers in the borderland produce is not the center of who they are, but rather their humanity, their experience, and their hope.
For more information about Melissa, visit her website at https://mgamezherrera.com/ .
