La Frontera: The Border Exhibition Employs Art To Put a Human Face on the Immigration Debate

A 27-year-old Irving resident, Carlos Padilla was deported from the United States in early 2021. On his way back after crossing the border, his family lost contact with him in March 2021. About a month later, his remains were found in Brooks County in South Texas.

Jorge Baldor, the founder of the Latino Arts Project, was intimately involved with the legal process of getting Padilla’s remains back to his family, which took over two years. His experience led to the Latino Arts Project’s curating La Frontera: The Border exhibition, which premiered at the University of Texas at Dallas last October and is now set to show in Padilla’s hometown at the Irving Archives and Museum on March 22.

La Frontera: The Border centers on art depicting the current humanitarian crisis happening at the U.S.–Mexico border. The exhibition is meant to display a “multi-sensory focus on undocumented immigrants” and hopes to shed a “light on the lives lost during these journeys,” according to the Latino Arts Project’s website.

“It’s a tough journey, and the art really relates to what that journey is,” Baldor says.

In 2022, 853 people died trying to cross the border, according to U.S. Border Patrol data obtained by CBS News last year. The Border Patrol has seen an increase in migrant encounters over the last couple of years and had nearly 250,000 encounters in December 2023, the highest of any month on record, according to the Pew Research Center.
Baldor notes the goal of the Latino Arts Project is to tackle “tough topics” that other museums may avoid, and that the numbers mentioned above often mask the people who suffer from these experiences.

“You see these numbers, you see a statistic, but you don’t see the human element of it,” the SMU alumnus says.

When he got involved in the legal process of helping the Padilla family, Baldor learned that Carlos Padilla was involved with the Latino Arts Project and had helped on several occasions.

One of the pieces displayed in the exhibit is “852+ Carlos,” a visual presentation of photos showing Padilla’s life while referencing the staggering 2022 statistic.

“We had a lot of photographs of Carlos, and he would share things about his family events and trips that he had gone,” Baldor says. “And so we put together a collage of him over the years and really use this as a way to humanize the story about lives lost.”

When the exhibition premiered last year in Richardson at UT Dallas’ Edith O’Donnell, Arts and Technology Building, its success led to artists reaching out with interest in presenting their work. Although the Latino Arts Project is still curating for next week, Baldor says the Irving exhibit will have twice the number of pieces as the UT Dallas one.

Even though the curation of an exhibition is always a very moving experience, Baldor found that since most of the artists have been affected by the border crisis, the creation of this particular exhibit was different.

“It's a very deep and moving expression of their own lives and their histories into each piece that we have,” Baldor says. “There are a lot of pieces there that you could tell the heart is into the message — this isn’t someone painting just a pretty picture of some roses.”

The emotional and valuable aspect of La Frontera: The Border is not the only difference. The Latino Arts Project is a self-proclaimed “pop-up museum,” which means the project moves from one venue to the next without a set location to present exhibitions.
Baldor has found a “disconnect” between the local community and the rest of society when it comes to the portrayal of art, and that placing exhibitions in local venues is the best way to reach them.

“We go to different parts of the communities to bring these messages to them,” Baldor says.

The unveiling of the exhibit in Irving also coincides with the five-year anniversary of the Latino Arts Project, which was unveiled in May 2019. In those first five years, the project navigated the years of the pandemic and created several exhibitions, ranging from Afro-Latino art of the Yanga: Journeys to Freedom exhibition to a Día de Muertos ofrenda-themed project in the Betsabeé Romero: An Alter in Their Memory / Un Altar en Su Memoria. With La Frontera: The Border, Baldor and his team are all too aware of the significance of the anniversary coming in a couple of months.

“One of our missions is to broaden our education and knowledge that this exists, that this is a bigger topic that isn't just as focused as we sometimes think it is on the news,” says Baldor. “It's not lost that this is a really a multicultural, multi-ethnic type of exhibit that brings communities together.”

La Frontera: The Border opens at the Irving Archives and Museum, 801 W. Irving Blvd., on March 22 at 6 p.m. and will run until July 31.