LACMA

68 reinstills in them the mark of the hand. Cabrera's proximity to Juárez, Mexico—the site of many maquiladoras (assembly factories)—has figured directly in her sculptures and installations. She uses the stitch work of the same type of commercial sewing machines that occupy sweatshops around the globe to create sculptures of domestic objects like hand blenders and vacuums, and has even taken on the large-scale luxury mobile in her Hummer sculptures. These products, for some, represent the fullest attainment of the American Dream; when rendered in humble materials like vinyl and canvas and hung from threads or propped up with supports, they become limp and fragile. In May 2006, pro-immigrant marches swept across the country. Kindled by Spanish-language mass media (whose popularity had, up to that point, largely been lost on the mainstream press), millions of recent immigrants and numerous gener- ations of Latino citizens came out en masse to protest encroachments on immigrants' rights. Juan Capistran's proposed mural, What Makes a Man Start Fires (2007), is part of a series of defacements or effacements of the recognizable yellow-and-blue Corona beer logo. Originally inspired by the song "Corona" (1984) by Los Angeles punk group the Minutemen, Capistran's mural channels the survival ethos plain- tively sung about in the song's lyrics: "The people will survive / In their environ- ment / The dirt, scarcity, and the emptiness / Of our South / The injustice of our greed / The practice we inherit." Through his mixed references to underground history and current events, Capistran makes a link across his own political landscape, shaped by punk rock and hip-hop lyrics, and the mass movement for immigrant visibility. That the Minutemen moniker has been appropriated more recently by staunch nativists is also not lost in this chain of associations. In a discussion of "post-black," Cathy Byrd shared her sense that the "matter of exposure" and years of debates around ethnic specific aesthetics "have freed the latest generation…to say whatever they want with their work." 49 The construction of a liberation narrative in the reception of post-identity art does not adequately describe the still insistent representational imbalances in the art world, nor the necessity for creating new unpredictable critical models. What I have described as interventions into a global circuitry in the urban formations of Phantom Sightings has less to do with the reification of art as global capital and more to do with the formation of new allegorical and topographic imaginations of migration and cultural fusions. Gamboa's call for "out-of-bound ethnic visions" was not predicated on an aesthetic rupture but a reframing of "social responsibility." Artworks like Capistran's What Makes a Man Start Fires and others in Phantom Sightings negotiate spatial politics with a heightened sensitivity to the "glocal": that is, a willingness to situate a localized identity conscientiously and strategically both in the art world and on the streets. 50 Christina Fernandez, Coverstitch, from the series Manuela S-t-i-t-c-h-e-d, 1996, color photograph, 30 x 40 in.

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