[percussive music]
- It's looking pretty good out here.
- It's looking good.
This could be our opportunity.
- Yeah, I think this is it.
- The piece is called "The Repellent Fence."
What we are proposing to construct
is a two-mile monument that crosses the border.
- I'm sorry, um, forgive my ignorance.
What you guys are talking about
is another fence on the border?
- It's almost to flip the script
or to complicate the way we understand fences.
- When I look at the borderlands,
I see a clear demarcation of colonization.
That's the underlining meaning of that border.
- If the word "Mexican" in this country
is synonymous with "alien" and "illegal,"
we've forgotten the indigeneity of those people.
- People can't remember
what it means to be American,
not United States citizen.
American as in of the Americas.
- Indigenous peoples of this hemisphere
have had to bear genocide,
but they also mixed with
Spanish settlers and families.
I am a product of that.
I grew up in North Central New Mexico,
where the communities were all indigenous Pueblos.
My ancestors are
native American Pueblo people and Chicanos,
Mexicanos.
- I grew up three hours from the border.
- I'm the son of a Cherokee plumber
in a town that was
largely defined by migrant farm workers.
You saw indigenous people everywhere,
whether you've been anglicized or Hispanicized.
- Two more would be for sure. - Okay.
- Postcommodity was born
for the purposes of doing "Repellent Fence."
That was our first idea out of the gate.
That idea started in 2006.
Our whole art practice
was built out during that time.
- The idea of the balloons is to intersect
the U.S.-Mexico border
that signified a suturing
or connecting of the Americas together.
- In indigenous cultures,
this eye means a open eye.
An eye that's aware,
an eye that's knowledgeable.
- This work is testimony that
the indigenous people presupposed
this hard-edged border.
Suturing is remembering.
- And healing.
- And reasserting one's place on the land.
- The border wall,
it's a very long line.
But what is the border really doing?
It's like a corral.
It's trapping Americans more than anything.
It's fencing us in.
- At the same time, indigenous peoples
continued moving northward,
marking the new journey, the new migration.
- So what does it entail? Like...
- It'll be 8 of the 12 pounds when it's filled
all the way down to the bottom.
- Okay. - And the remaining pounds
will get filled 3 feet down.
And what those will do is those will hold
the additional rebar that will stick up
out of the top of the tower.
- And that'll take a day, right?
- That'll take all day. So we'll be here.
- Ten years ago, I met these guys
at the Arizona State University Art Museum.
They had a slab of the concrete floor
cut and mounted on a pedestal.
And then they suspended a microphone
over the earth beneath
and had a speaker with a native Pee-Posh ceremony
being played at a very low volume.
So as you walked in,
you weren't sort of struck by the sound
until you got a little bit closer.
[faint music playing]
The project was very related
to the land literally beneath the museum,
and that was burial, um, grounds.
They seemed to always be able to find something
very interesting about the site
where they were working.
I was really interested to see
what they might think about in the context of Chicago.
- Wow. - It's pretty sick to watch.
- Yeah.
- You know, it's like a little dance.
- After building the "Repellant Fence,"
we started thinking about
our future demographically here in the United States.
The U.S. Census projected that 2043
will be the year that white people
in the United States become a minority.
Here in Chicago, we're in the middle of one
of the largest migrations
of peoples from the south to the north.
A lot of people think of Chicago
as being ground zero for the great Black migrations.
This is even larger in scale.
There are currently over 750,000 people
in the county who are of Mexican descent.
And that number is growing and will continue to grow.
So the expectation is that the landscape
is gonna be transformed culturally,
politically, socially.
We wanted to build a piece
to mark that this transformation is happening,
this migration is happening.
[light music]
- Throughout all of Latin America,
you oftentimes will find these columns
that are projecting off the rooftops
of homes, and a lot of times,
people who are not from Latin America
misinterpret the meaning of those columns.
They think that the homes aren't finished.
- [speaking Spanish]
- What the columns often signify
is a pragmatic approach to growth.
As the family expands, the home expands.
And so the house is always growing, always emergent.
- This piece and the skyline that surrounds it,
it's a way to acknowledge
a very strong Mexican cultural tradition
being established here in Chicago...
And that cultural transformation
also happened a long time ago in California.
[tool buzzing]
So we wanted Los Angeles to inform the next project.
- You're like the... [speaks Spanish]
Of low-riding or custom or rod. - [laughs]
- Doing what I do for a living
is I build people's dream car
or you know, their bucket list car.
And I know the stereotype is, like, the bouncing Impala.
Everybody's thinking "Boyz n the Hood,"
uh, "Friday," but it's deeper than that.
Come on through; I'll show you the rest of shop.
- Low riding, it's about hacking the car,
reimagining the car as mobile sovereign space.
And we have always imagined ourselves
and fashioned ourselves as hackers.
Chicanx people, they have been able
to develop themselves in the city
through this process
of modifying and salvaging and recycling.
Every car is a story.
You know, Chicanos are the pillars of the city.
We want to build new public memory about LA.
- So the way we're gonna set this up
is we want to run, like,
a mid to late '70s style graphic.
- Yeah, just wait till we get all the colors on here.
That's when it really explodes, you know.
[upbeat music]
- Similar to what we're doing in Chicago, in LA,
we're taking the architecture,
the very bones of the building,
and we're hacking it.
- Putting in polyester primer, and block...
- Working with Postcommodity,
it was about self-expression,
helping us expose low riders to a different audience.
For us to be able
to leave a mark in a permanent structure
that my grandkids will probably see someday,
it's very empowering.
- These I-beams are like the indigenous people,
like the Latinos that have built LA, right?
That everybody walks by them day in, day out.
We don't notice the guy
who was selling elotes at the corner.
We don't notice the guy who was cutting our lawn.
But it's part of the infrastructure.
It is part of the strength
that makes the city what it is.
Move your hand! - [laughs]
- The beauty of us working together...
It's incredibly powerful.
all: Salud.
- We feel that in order to have a world,
we need to divide ourselves from one another.
- How are you? - Good.
But it's that love we get to experience
oftentimes when we're making art together,
that sort of restored in a lot of ways
our faith in humanity.
Our self-determination is proliferating.
We're starting to find our way
in places that we wouldn't otherwise be in.
- We've made the covers, which are cedar boxes,
so that those columns are being preserved.
They'll be there permanently with that building.
Columns that no one will see,
but at certain times of the year,
those cedar boxes will be opened up
and taken off to acknowledge
that history of a people and a community.
- When people of color become the majority,
I hope we'll have built enough dignity
to be good stewards of one another,
of each other, of ourselves, of the land.
Postcommodity isn't an identity building project.
Our job is to provide
space for people to connect their own narratives
of cultural self-determination
and to allow a new public memory to be born.
[soft music]