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ABSTRACT
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, artist John Hood collaborated with California’s Department of Transportation to erect yellow “CAUTION” signs to warn drivers against migrants running across the San Diego freeways. This essay marries migrant/queer world-making theories and ideographic analysis to describe how artists imagined new, often contradictory, worlds to resist modernist notions of citizenship, gender, sex, family, and humanity through (re)drawn iterations of the sign. I show an overlapping and reflexive interplay between what the iterations visually represent and the ways that migrants/queers, including my familia, perform what the images mean in the realm of the material, everyday.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Family.
2. Stories, or experiences.
3. Kid, or rascal.
4. Toy cars.
5. Little brother and mommy.
6. Holy Virgin Mary.
7. The use of tactics is intentional. Enck-Wanzer provides a comprehensive explanation of tactics in contradistinction to strategies. Namely, Enck-Wanzer draws from Certeau to argue that tactics “activate performative repertoires, craft spaces of resistance to the established order, and alter the capacity for others to act” (351).
8. Stylistically, scholars use the “<” and “>” brackets to notate ideographs that reflect “the normative, collective commitments of the members of a public,” but many scholars, particularly those that study visual ideographs, do not use the brackets for ideographs that may be vague and will, consequently, require additional “linguistic details of spelling out specifically what those [ideographs] are supposed to be standing for” (Boyd 147). In this piece, I do not use brackets for the border sign ideograph because, although the sign is a constant referent in discussions about immigration, I contend that migrants’/queers’ iterations push our collective memories to visualize the sign in unpredictable, newly emergent ways that could stand-in or replace the original.
9. My aunt is a badass.
10. Anzaldúa refers to this as a profound sense of understanding (The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader).
11. Grandma.
12. Uncle.
13. Friends.
14. Queers.
15. Queers.
16. Much desire.
17. Beautiful.
18. The OCDT displayed the multi-colored image on their Facebook page, which is no longer available. I archived the image in my personal collection of border sign iterations/images.