LACMA

from exports. Cabrera's Pink Blender (2002) references the pink triangle with a black cross inside that has become a human rights symbol for the maquiladora workers, in partic- ular the hundreds who have been raped and murdered over the past fifteen years in Juárez. In addition to household appliances, Cabrera has addressed the disparity between the U.S. and Mexico through vinyl replicas of two archetypal automobiles: the VW Beetle — known by the nickname Vocho in Mexico and throughout Latin America—and the Hummer. The former is the "people's car" of Mexico (as it had been in Germany), until recently produced and sold within the country itself, and hence remade entirely out of vinyl; the latter is a peculiar American status symbol, an oversized gas-guzzler modeled after the military vehicles that protect U.S. oil interests abroad. If Cabrera's vinyl replicas conjure the missing people— workers and consumers—for the original consumer goods, then her most recent series follows another path, that of the border crosser. She uses the uniforms of border patrol agents to create potted cacti that range from one to six feet high. In contrast to Cabrera's limp toasters or blenders that almost parody the originals, her cacti are tightly woven and achieve a surprising degree of verisimilitude, especially from a distance. The viewer must look closely to notice the zippers, buttons, and labels, let alone the conceptual link between an unforgiving landscape and the relatively recent criminalization of border crossing.— CHON A. NORIEGA From the perspective of urban studies, El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, form a single metropolitan area. And yet, separated by the Rio Grande, these cities also mark one of the largest points of contact between a developed and a newly industrialized nation in the world. Margarita Cabrera grew up on both sides of the border as well as in the cultural "centers" of the two nations: Mexico City and New York City. She currently lives in El Paso, exploring the ways in which this social space is at once part of a binational region and a dividing line. In keeping with such duality, Cabrera's art is at once tactile and conceptual. Her soft sculptures— made from colorful vinyl with loose threads draping from their sides—have a sensuous, languorous feel perched atop their pedestals. The work alludes to Claes Oldenburg and pop art more generally. But Cabrera's process is quite different, conceptually linking two sides of a cultural and economic border: the all-American consumer- based home exalted in popular culture and the cheap foreign labor that makes that home possible. In an ongoing series of sculptures, Cabrera replicates household appliances, including coffeepots, toasters, blenders, and vacuum cleaners. Such domestic machinery was part of a concerted effort through the twentieth century to define the U.S. middle class around notions of leisure, design, and affluence. If the middle class could not afford servants, then the housewife would have the machines that allowed her to "manage" the house while not appearing to labor. Cabrera remakes these appliances to scale, replacing the plastic parts with vinyl; in fact, Cabrera disassembles a factory-made consumer item, removes the plastic, and then rebuilds the object with sewn vinyl facsimiles into a handmade art object. In manifesting the female artist's handiwork, the sculptures conjure up two phantoms that haunt these objects: the Mexican women who have produced them in low-paying maquiladora factories along the U.S.–Mexico border since the 1960s, and the traditional idea of these products being intended for housewives-cum-consumers. The maquiladoras are primarily assembly plants for parts made elsewhere around the world, except for the plastic elements, which are also the most toxic to manu- facture. The underpaid workforce is mostly female, young, and single; these workers are often prohibited from childbearing as a condition for continued employment. Since the early 1970s, these factories have accounted for half of Mexico's income 120 MARGARITA CABRERA

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