Fieldwork • Dalia Garcia & Nariso Matinez in conversation

Jan 29

Jan 29 Fieldwork • Dalia Garcia & Nariso Matinez in conversation

Print Issue, Santa Barbara, MCASB, Interview

edited by Debra Herrick

Dalia Garcia: I’m an Indigenous Mixteca from San Juan Mixtepec, Oaxaca. I have lived in Santa Maria for almost 20 years; and I’m the program director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara.

Narsiso Martinez: I’m from Oaxaca, from the Zapotec region, and I'm also an immigrant, and I make art.

Garcia: As an Indigenous woman that used to work in the fields, I see your pieces as powerful but at the same time, I have questions about your intention and what it is that you are seeing.

Martinez: Since I was a kid, I have drawn people on pieces of paper with just pencil—farm workers—because I was working in the fields, and that was the subject matter at hand. Then, when I began going to art school, I started painting the fields and fruit and orchards that surrounded me too.

*Narsiso Martinez, Fruit Catcher, 2021, ink, charcoal and gold leaf on produce cardboard box*

I was in the fields to earn the money to go to school but when I started painting portraits of farm workers, people started asking me questions about who these people were and why I was painting them. Later on, as I started working with farm workers from different countries like Honduras, Salvador and Guatemala, I realized that we all had something in common: We were immigrants. Some of us were undocumented, so we also couldn't speak up. Sometimes the foreman wouldn’t even know the owners of the orchards. So how could we complain about something? I realized that I was able to tell stories about these struggles during critiques of my work.

People who are not from the fields or who are not familiar with what happens there, were learning about fieldwork through art; and I realized I could use art as an excuse to talk about issues from the fields.

I decided to create figurative art because I wanted the audience to understand these people and I wanted these people to understand and see themselves in art. I considered creating abstract or conceptual art but then the farm workers, I felt, wouldn't understand the art. I think at the end of the day, I just want visibility and acknowledgement for them.

Garcia: I think that’s how I see it. Most of the time we are invisible because we are Indigenous. I think we normalize that because we’re undocumented immigrants and working in the fields is the main thing that we do as labor in the US.

I learned in the fields that there’s a lot of struggle. There are a lot of stories that people don’t tell. The perspective of field workers is that we are field workers because we’re 'less than' because we come from impoverished communities. We don’t see the richness of who we are—the labor that we bring—and the culture that we offer to the towns we live in.

So when I saw your pieces, I felt they portrayed the people that work in the fields through a different lens. In our communities, people ask: ‘Why are you studying art?’ ‘How are you going to make money with it?’ Going into the arts is unappreciated. By going into art, you’re challenging that. By portraying people in the fields, it feels again, like a different lens. I will say that we feel good about it and that it feels dignified.

One of the things that is particularly unique is the material that you’re using, the boxes for the companies. Where did the idea to use boxes come from?

Martinez: Maybe two or three different situations led me to the boxes. I saw an exhibition of one of my professors who had at least one painting on cardboard and I liked that. But it didn’t occur to me to actually paint on cardboard until I was working in the fields after finishing my undergraduate degree in 2012. I worked in the fields for three consecutive years after graduating, from 2012 to 2015. During that time, I had my studio in my sister’s garage. When she would go to Costco, she would bring all these boxes home. I would use them as canvases because I didn’t have enough money to buy canvases. I would cut off all the labels and the edges of the boxes and use the bottom part of the box—the good part to draw on—or I would go outside and do plein air paintings.

When I went back to school for my MFA, I wanted to continue doing oil paintings but the critiques were a lot more technical. Was I a good painter? Was I not a good painter? Was the proportion right? Things like that. Nobody would talk about the issues that I wanted to talk about, which was the community of farm workers and the working class. At one point, I was so frustrated that I stopped painting. I wanted to do something that I was used to doing without anybody telling me whether it was good or bad. So I took a box that I had from Costco to my studio and I drew a ‘banana man.’ I called it that because it was a box for bananas. I didn’t cut the labels off yet. I drew it on the center and it barely touched the labels.

*Narsiso Martinez, The One, 2023, ink, gouache, charcoal, and acrylic on banana box*

When I showed this drawing, there were different kinds questions. They weren't asking about technique. It was more about who this person was and why I chose them. I would answer with my own experiences from working in the fields. Because I had already established that I wanted to paint the working class, not the wealthy, the connection and the theme evolved to be about agribusiness and farm workers.

One of my professors mentioned ‘seriousness.’ He was like, ‘Let’s see how serious Narsiso is with his boxes.’ But I was still doubting what I was doing so the word ‘seriousness’ was key. I started collecting boxes and doing more complicated compositions on more boxes, and some sculptures too.

Garcia: When you work in the fields, at least if you do contract work, such as picking strawberries, the main thing you need is to fill up boxes because they pay you by the box. The boxes have a correlation to the struggle of working in the fields. Those boxes have that relationship between labor and the corporate world.

I know people that work in the fields can understand what a box in fieldwork means. But at the same time, people that are outside of fieldwork can also see that boxes are part of the corporate world that moves the product of our labor. The boxes can be just boxes for some people while for others, they can represent the exchange of labor. But it is not just labor, you can also see the political heaviness when we talk about exploitation or racism, well, at least for me, because I don’t want to suggest that people from Oaxaca are the only ones working in the fields.

Still, from my perspective, as an Indigenous Mixtec woman—whose family came from that history of immigrating from Oaxaca to the US for work—these boxes represent the corporate world and the people that you portray on them, they are the ones doing the labor.

Martinez: It’s difficult to somehow have the corporation and the people who work in the fields together. Sometimes we don’t even know who the owners are or who is the real manager. We would always hang out with the foremen who were also from our countries, who also didn’t speak English and who also sometimes didn’t know the rules or how to treat people.

Garcia: It’s not just a question of labor either. There are social aspects. For instance, it’s not one community. There is a lot of division and questions of identity. Who works in the fields? Who has a position of power? Who is paid what?

The fields speak to different things. Most of the time, it’s not good things, but I feel that your pieces show the beauty of the people. Even though people are struggling working in the fields, they still have positive attitudes.

Martinez: Throughout history, portraits have been reserved for the wealthy, and that’s another aspect of making portraits of farm workers. For example, Sergeant Singer, the American painter who made portraits of all these wealthy people—all these landowners—who were posing for these paintings. And who cares about the people who work in the fields—the actual farm workers? Maybe they were here and there, but they were never the main subject. In contrast, in my work, farm workers are the main subject.

I tell my family, ‘This is you, but it’s not all you.’ It’s just a representation. Sometimes, somebody I painted in the fields as a high school student, goes on to college and graduates. I think it’s fair for the work to include farm workers who are not just in the fields. It’s important to highlight that we are capable of other things.

Garcia: I think that’s part of it, wondering who they are and where they are right now. Communities in the fields have different backgrounds. It’s people who recently got to the United States and need to work, but sometimes they’re doctors or they have some type of profession back in their country. Or you can find high school students that are working just for the summer. And you also find people who work all their lives in the fields.

Martinez: I didn’t know anything about Mexican history until I studied Latin American art history, and I realized that it was not my fault. It’s not the fault of the people. The whole system is horrible and keeps us that way. But I’m happy that a lot of kids from my hometown are now getting college degrees and are more aware of their surroundings.

Garcia: I feel that more than ever because I got here when I was 16 in 2004, and I feel that more of that conversation is happening in our new generation, born and raised in the United States. Before we didn’t know to describe in terms of racism. But now we know that’s racism: being discriminated against because of who we are, how we look or our socioeconomic status. It’s part of that racist system that doesn’t just happen in the US. It also happens in Mexico and in our towns.

I’m also an artist but it took me a long time to feel comfortable saying that because even though I know techniques for textiles I didn’t see it as practicing art. I thought I needed permission from an institution or someone outside my community. You opened a pathway for others to understand that what we produce and what we do is art.