[UFW], used banners containing her image to instill ethnic and national pride in the famous 1965 laborer’s strike against the California Grape Growers. Mendoza’s allusion to the halo of the Virgin de Guadalupe thus invokes the ethnic, revolutionary, and labor causes with which the figure is associated. However, the danger of appealing to an icon so integral to Mexican nationalism is reinscribing “foreignness” onto the undocumented immigrants depicted. This serves the rhetoric of anti-immigration advocates who want to frame undocumented workers as alien pathogens that sicken the U.S. body. Instead, Mendoza also incorporates a cultural aesthetic that complicates the idea that the Southern Border draws a clear line between “insider” and “outsider.” The halos surrounding the heads of the undocumented immigrants in the installation may also refer to the indigenous headdresses that, along with the intricate Mesoamerican patterns found in some of the portraits, recall the iconography of indigeneity used by the Chicano Movement of the 1960s to inspire the underprivileged Americans of Mexican descent to action. Known as "el Movimiento,” the U.S. Chicano Movement sought to address the corrupt labor practices that oppressed Mexican Americans, as well as their poor living conditions and lack of access to health and education. Lourdes Alberto writes in “Nations, Nationalisms, and Indígenas: The ‘Indian’ in the Chicano Revolutionary Imaginary,” el Movimiento “invoked a Mexican indigenist aesthetic” as part of a “paradigmatic shift in the meaning of citizenship, belonging, and nation” (108). Alberto argues that the idea of indigeneity has a history of being strategically used to legitimize revolutionary movements: The ‘Indian’ has operated as a symbol, racial category, and myth, a kind of palimpsest that has been written and rewritten in an effort to anchor revolutionary imaginaries in the Americas” (113). The Chicano Movement used the idea of Mexican American indigeneity to build a racial and national identity with which to legitimize their cause and resist assimilation. Rooted in the 1920s, Mexican indigenismo – the same political ideology with which the Mexican Muralist Movement looked to unify postrevolutionary Mexico – Chicano indigenismo also selectively incorporated Mesoamerican aesthetics and indigenous history to create a “Chicano national culture” (109). In their manifesto, El Plan de Aztlán, el Movimiento claimed that Chicano people were descended from the Aztecs and, therefore, the rightful inheritors of their ancestral homeland, Aztlan (University of Michigan). While some question the existence of Aztlan owing to a lack of historical evidence, for Chicanos, the “northern land of Aztlan” refers to the Mexican territories annexed by the U.S. after the Mexican American War (122). Employing the narrative of Aztlan as their place of origin, Chicanos argued “they were residing in their ancestral homeland and thus could not be called out as ‘illegal’ or ‘alien’ to 17
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