LACMA

was an amazing public intervention—to be smuggled into the U.S. through [the U.S.'s] own iconography. So I began to think about the different stories growing up in Tijuana and the failed attempts of how people would cross by customization of cars." Undocumented Interventions is based on twenty images culled from coyote stories Morales has heard as well as from the website of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, organized as a storyboard. The simple illustrations document the intricate tactics employed to successfully transport people across the U.S.–Mexico border. To soften the harsh reality that these images reveal, Morales renders his analysis in watercolor, creating delicately transparent illustrations. Morales uses a wide variety of media in his art practice, including digital technologies, photography, watercolor, and vinyl-on-wall constructions. He renders his analysis through skillful and sharp multimedia installations that are graphically and digitally based, and which stand in contradistinction to the amateur fabrications of the street vendors he portrays. Morales creates a discursive context to engage the viewer in an analytical social dialogue about the movement of labor today and the immigrant experience in California. Through this dialogue, his work serves to humanize those who out of necessity have had to resort to underground or informal economies in order to survive. —DIANNA MARISOL SANTILLANO As Hakim Bey notes in Millennium (1996), "We can't talk about the Third World any more for the one reason that there's no second world. So even this third world as it used to be is now simply just the slums of the one world. It's just the no-go zone of that one single unified world of Capital." This observation comes to life in the work of Tijuana-born artist Julio Cesar Morales. In a city like Tijuana, Mexico, where the fantastic becomes banal and the banal becomes fantastic, where illogical juxtapositions form the fabric of daily existence, there arises an inscrutable street- level creativity. In Tijuana, paradox becomes quotidian because so much of the city is comprised of a menagerie of unusable discards from its rich neighbor reassembled for a useful end. This recycling par excellence is a result of the ingenuity that takes place when few recourses are available to people. For Morales, who now resides in San Francisco, these aesthetic conjectures inform his work, which analyzes and documents the informal economies of Tijuana, in particular the tactics employed by street vendors and the coyotes, or human traffickers. In his ongoing series on street vendors (2002–7), Morales examines the ways in which vendors' carts are constructed and customized, each telling of its owner's sensibilities and ingenuity. These carts are typically made of recycled materials, constructed piecemeal with a great deal of improvisation. The street vendor's creative approach toward a practical end is not new or unique to Tijuana, as street vendors and their carts have a long history in the urban experience —an inevitable occurrence when millions of people in the developing world make their humble livings outside of the formal economy and take those traditions with them when they cross borders. In major U.S. cities, realities of the so-called third world slip into the urban land- scape. As Morales says, "these vendors contaminate the pristine California landscape by creating their own systems of economic survival and its opposition by its first- world population." Morales's approach is that of a documentarian, recording these cultural phenomena and thereby bringing attention to issues of labor, economy, the effects of neoliberal policies, and how people adapt to a new environment and urban space by using the economic methods that they employed back home. In Undocumented Interventions (2005–8), Morales was inspired by a story in the San Diego Union-Tribune recounting an attempt to smuggle a four-year-old girl into the United States through a customized Powerpuff Girl piñata. "I thought that it 176 JULIO CESAR MORALES

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