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On an early summer morning, I drove down 100 miles from my home in Altadena, California, to the Oceanside Museum of Art in San Diego County for a public discussion of the exhibition I curated entitled Alexa Vasquez: Undocumented Times/Queer Yearnings. I began my commute extra early to avoid traffic. My plan worked until I reached San Diego County, and traffic slowed. Stuck in traffic, I looked to my left and noticed a border patrol van pulled up to the lane next to me. I glanced at the very distinct white van with the bright green stripe across it and then at the white truck directly in front of me transporting gardening equipment, the driver of which reminded me of my family. I thought about my parents’ fear of ever coming across a border patrol car and how they would be panicking if they had been in the car with me. This is why my undocumented family does not come this far down south.
The solo exhibition Alexa Vasquez: Undocumented Times/Queer Yearnings opened on May 25, 2024, at the Oceanside Museum of Art in Southern California, displaying the work of Alexa Vasquez, an undocumented trans woman born in Oaxaca, Mexico, and currently living in Corona, California. Like me, Alexa crossed the US-Mexico border by Tijuana as a child, and despite being raised in Southern California, the hyper-presence of border patrol and fear of deportation prevented her and her family from traveling to San Diego. Despite the museum being located in the northernmost city of San Diego County, the proximity to the border haunted the curatorial process. Throughout conversations with Alexa, we discussed our anticipatory anxiety and the disheartening reality that many of our loved ones would not be able to join the opening of the exhibition due to their immigration status. For both of us, this was our first show in a museum.
In this essay, I reflect on the experience of curating Alexa Vasquez: Undocumented Times/Queer Yearnings as an undocumented immigrant anthropologist and lessons regarding the potential for curatorial anthropology as a praxis of care. I examine the importance of our exhibition in Oceanside, about 50 miles from the U.S./Mexico border and part of a militarized border county. Additionally, I explore how a curatorial praxis of care disrupts hierarchies of knowledge production and complicates narratives on undocumented immigration.
Oceanside, California: A Beach Suburb with an Immigration Crisis
According to the Migration Policy Institute, there are approximately 169,000 undocumented immigrants residing in San Diego County. However, between September and November 2023, about 42,000 asylum seekers were dropped off across the San Diego County streets by border patrol. According to San Diego County charities, while they were accustomed to serving hundreds of immigrants, they were unprepared to serve the tens of thousands of immigrant arrivals in the fall of 2023. The unprecedented number of immigrants seeking help was triggered by federal efforts to clear encampments of asylum seekers along the U.S.-Mexico border fence. Despite border authorities being responsible for transporting migrants to their appropriate destinations, they dropped them off at bus stops across San Ysidro, El Cajon, and Oceanside.
Migrants arrived at these destinations disoriented and confused, unaware of where they were being dropped off and why. Migrants often thought they were being deported; many were separated from their parents, children, or spouses without any means to reach their sponsor families. Networks of non-profit organizations across San Diego County took up the responsibility of informing arriving migrants of their immigration situation and providing food, shelter, transportation, and the cost of flights to their sponsor families. Local non-profits additionally helped migrants reunite separated family members. The North County LGBTQ Resource Center in Oceanside alone served 1,482 immigrants dropped off in the city. To support local organizations that were exhausting their capacities to assist migrant arrivals, San Diego County distributed 3 million dollars from remaining COVID-19 county funds.
Despite the support of local non-profit organizations, the increased presence of undocumented immigrants in the county has spiked xenophobic sentiments among residents and politicians advocating for more border security and permitting collaboration between border patrol and local law enforcement. For example, Supervisor Jim Desmond, representing North County San Diego, stated, “Our current policies exacerbate the problem. California offers free healthcare to illegal immigrants, the County of San Diego provides free legal defense irrespective of the crimes committed, and our status as a Sanctuary State impedes law enforcement’s ability to collaborate with ICE.”
Amidst the political tensions in the area, in which some attempt to support and others vilify undocumented immigrants, Alexa Vasquez: Undocumented Times/Queer Yearnings aimed to provide an alternative narrative about undocumented immigration. Alexa Vasquez: Undocumented Times/Queer Yearnings tells an intimate story of coming of age as undocumented, queer, and trans in Southern California. Alexa reflects on her childhood as a trans immigrant child through a series of self-portraits and embroidered stuffed animals. As such, Alexa Vasquez: Undocumented Times/Queer Yearnings explores the experience of double marginalization in which undocumented queer and trans women must navigate xenophobic, homophobic, and transphobic violence. Ultimately, the exhibition calls for the need for a more compassionate childhood for undocumented queer children. Our exhibition speaks to the pertinent issues of undocumented queer immigration within the county. Curating this exhibition in Oceanside was, in many ways, a symbolic return to the border Alexa and I crossed as children.
Curating Immigrant Narratives with Care
Within anthropology, curation has emerged as a way to work with art by producing research and knowledge outside the academy. Anthropologists have explored the collaborative methods in curatorial projects that allow multiple dialogues, relations, and knowledge-making practices to come together as an event. James Clifford argues for a new understanding of curating as a profoundly relational caring practice that “is about preservation (in the sense of thriving) through active relations of reciprocity and dialogue.” Similarly, María Puig De La Bellacasa theorizes care as a political commitment to using knowledge as interventions to create “as well as possible worlds.” As such, care has the