SANDWICH
by Andrea Alemán
photo by Ingrid Aleman
photo by Andrea Aleman
04. Note from the Editor
06. Edibles: The Salty
07. Ornamentation: Interior Design YouTubers
09. Spirits: Palomas
10. Publication: books i sorta read in college
12. Artist: Jiab Prachakul
18. My Dream Summer Essentials
19. Obsession: DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS
20. Archives: The Border is Finding its Own Voice
Note from the Editor
Summer is my favorite time of the year Maybe because my birthday falls during summer
This summer if you find yourself dipping your feet at Barton Springs in Austin, you need to stop at The Salty before find out why in the Edibles section, page 6
I have shared my favorite interior design YouTubers in the Ornamentation section! I hope you check them out feel inspired by their advice and implement their ideas into your spaces.
Back on the zine is the Spirits section, with my favorite drink of all time, Palomas! They are FRESH, SO FRESH, SO SUMMER
When I was in High School and Uni I was forced to read some books and some of them are not so bad, find them in the Publication section.
The Artist this month is Jiab Prachakul You’ll love her
work, especially if you see it in person, find out how on page 12
I have shared my, very personal, dream summer essentials list on page 18. I imagine myself visiting SPI and living off of this items I wish I lived by South Padre Island
Obvi in the Obsession section I highlighted El Conejo Malo’s new album
Last but not least, in the Archives section I am sharing an excerpt from La Frontera: The United States Border with Mexico, by Alan Weisman
It’s hot, hot, hot out there! The title of the zine is inspired by the song Hawaii-Bombay by Mecano
with love,
Andrea D Alemán Editorial Director
photo by Ingrid Aleman
photo by Luis Paternina
Interior DesignYOUTUBERS my favorite
I have been through so many interior design phases. When I moved into my first apartment in San Antonio, I knew the importance of art and color but did not have the budget for it Then, for six months I lived in an apartment by myself in the valley, where my apartment was pink, bright, and colorful. When I moved back to San Antonio, I only decorated my bedroom, because I lived with roommates, but still, my space felt juvenile At some point, while I lived in that apartment, my bed frame broke (it was a cheap one from Amazon) and my mattress was on the floor for the rest of the lease, so much for design
Designing a space can take a lifetime, everything is a work-in-progress. Especially, as we transition from our college rooms/spaces into our adult homes Everything can change from one year to another Many people don’t care about design and choose to make it practical, but you know I’m not that girl, and if you’re reading this perhaps you’re not that girl either Before I moved to Austin, I discovered some interior design YouTubers and
their commentary served as inspiration for my apartment in Austin (as well as many Pinterest boards) They helped me make my apartment cozy, cool, and practical For the last two years, that I’ve been in Austin, I have avoided interior design YouTubers because I was happy with my space and did not want to saturate my mind with more ideas, because it can get expensive to get more things
But as you’re reading this I have, probably, already moved into a new apartment Since the moment I knew I was gonna move into a new space, I knew it was time to revisit some of my favorite interior design YouTubers for inspiration. These YouTubers all have different styles but I think ultimately they have similar goals, which is to help their viewers explore design and encourage them to create nice, comfortable homes to live in Here are some of my favorite interior design YouTubers that have served as a guide for me over the last few years Check them out if you’re looking for inspiration.
photos via nicklewis ca and YouTube
NICK LEWIS
CAROLINE WINKLER
PAIGE WASSEL
photo by Andrea Aleman
THE BORDER IS FINDING ITS OWN VOICE
NUEVO LAREDO, TAMAULIPAS, MEXICO, 1986
Text from La Frontera: The United States Border with Mexico, by Alan Weisman
Wooden donkey carts are found in every border town from Juárez to the Pacific Once a means of transportation, they are now immobile, bedecked with images of Aztec kings in heroic landscapes that display all the taste and energy of a velvet painting Sometimes the burros are dyed to resemble zebras Tourists climb aboard, don serapes and sombreros, and pose for $2 00 Polaroid mementos beneath signs reading “Bienvenidos a Tijuana ”
In 1985, David Avalos, artist-in-residence at the Centro Cultural de la Raza in San Diego’s Balboa Park, was invited to participate in “Streetworks,” an outdoor exhibition funded by the National Endwoment for the Arts Avalos, from National City, a working class district between San Diego and the border, submitted a sculpture of a life-size donkey cart. Instead of Cuauhtémoc, its backdrop depicted a Hispanic, his face contorted and arms upraised to suggest a crucifixion, being frisked by la migra Like a Mexican roadside shrine, the cart was trimmed with relics and images, including the photograph of an undocumented alien who was fatally shot by border patrol-men in 1980. Avalos surrounded his work with a wire fence and entitled it, “San Diego Donkey Cart ”
His cart art was reviewed and a permit was issued by the General Services Administration to install it in the Federal Building plaza in San Diego. The next day, without a hearing, Chief District Judge Gordon Thompson had it removed, “for security reasons ”
Suddenly, Judge Thompson found himself an unwitting patron of Latin protest art The attention immediately surrounding David Avalos was a kind of golden spotlight that artists might kill for. Newspapers nationwide noted that kooks generally don’t determine who is allowed to exercise their First Amendment right of expression Art critics began to look more carefully at Avalos and his group of San Diego and Tijuana colleagues, known as the Border Art Workshop/Taller del Arte Fronterizo Outraged by the censorship, the reviewers concluded that these people are not just political advocates but also sophisticated artists who reject abstraction in favor of political forms
“I don’t see the characterization of art as political as being valid,” argues David Avalos He and Guillermo Gomez-Peña, a writer and performer, are driving down Interstate 5, to meet the rest of their colleagues at the sandy intersection of Mexico, the United States, and the Pacific He is slightly uncomfortable about his work receiving its greatest attention after it was removed from
public view “It’s social: a social creation that connects me, a social animal, with the rest of the community Noncontextual expressions of art as pure ideal have reached a dead end.”
Avalos is a burly mestizo, wearing steel-rimmed glasses and a stretched gray sweatshirt, with his long hair tied back in a ponytail What grips him about the border is that everyone is in this together Not just Caucasians, Chicanos, and Mexicans: The border is also a symbol for blacks, who are North America’s mestizos, and for Orientals, who have been called a yellow peril by both countries - the ultimate aliens The aesthetic challenge is to convey this unification and take advantage of the cross-pollination
Gomez-Peña is from Mexico City, but now roams between Tijuana and San Diego His sonorous actor’s baritone turns his thoughts into a musical incantation of the energy being released through cultural nuclear fusion along the border When he and David converse, it is like Greek monologues and answering choruses
“We have to be mapmakers, man,” he sings, “topographers, redefiners of the parameters of reality, reinventors of landscapes to redraw the borders of the world This is tierra incognita There’s a world to be renamed, its real borders to be discovered We are creating artistic, political, and anthropological cartography.”
David ponders the tierra incognita They are in the Dodge van belonging to dancer-choreographer Sara-Jo Berman, hauling probs and a portable generator down to the beach The tableau they are about to enact is largely the creation of Avalos and Michael Schnorr, a printmaker and art professor at San Diego’s Southwest College. “Yeah,” Avalos finally replies, “but western aesthetics always exalts the weird If we present the border as strange, people will put it up on the shelf with the African masks It’s like the Third World is okay, as long as it stays in museums It has to be made both beautiful and everyday.”
It is a delicious task, Guillermo thinks, to resolve the intersection of two pop cultures that superimpose Clint Eastwood and Pancho Villa, punk and salsa, Jesus and E T , disco and mambo The border is priceless for exploring relationships. Artists here can feed off the vigor of two new cities unencumbered by an artistic tradition, with an ear to both North and South America They can experiment and watch the gears of two societies begin to mesh within the machinery of the future
“This will be a mecca one day,” he predicts “A new culture in creation, like New York after World War I. Not a regional culture, like western painting, but culture with something to show the world about how rich and poor will merge like two continental plates The border is finding its own voice It’s learning how to sing, to write, to act Once it can explain itself, this will be Mecca ”
Two miles above the border, they leave the interstate and follow a road that cuts across the ripe-smelling Tía Juana River estuary It leads to Border Field State Park, a manicured lawn set like a green toupée on a bluff overlooking the ocean Except for the helicopters buzzing overhead, it is empty On one end, a fence rolls in from the canyons and hills to the east Just beyond it are a lighthouse and Tijuana’s Bullring-by-the-Sea.
At the bluff’s edge, the rigid mesh is cut to fit around a marble pagoda, the marker established by the first boundary survey in 1849 Just below, the fence stops thirty feet short of the water Beachcombers and joggers casually pass beyond it, wandering between the Americas.
The other artists are waiting With Michael Schnorr’s students manning the props, they begin the tableau It is part theatre, part sculpture, part representational art, and part political cartoon On the Mexican side, puzzled onlookers gather at the fence. A border patrolman, cruising the park, sits on the stone retaining wall and watches, although from behind he cannot tell what they are doing
He would probably not be pleased They have positioned three large masonite caricatures in the sand, depicting a terrified Hispanic youth, a demonic border patrolman gunning him down, and a black silhouette of a helicopter that has nose-dived into the beach Sara-Jo Berman is dressed like a Tijuana whore and is flirting with the cutout of the migra David Avalos is on his knees with his hands behind his head, in submission to a knife-wielding cholo portrayed by Guillermo Gomez-Peña. Behind them, a stepladder appears to span the fence; filmmakers Isaac Artenstein and Jude Eberhard confront each other at the top in impenetrable leather masks Artenstein, a Mexican, and Eberhard, a native of Trinidad, have teamed up on documentaries that have earned a blue ribbon at the American Film Festival and Academy Award nomination
Hanging from the ladder in tortured suspension is Schnorr In front of him, two-foot letters outlined in blinking light bulbs spell out the word hell Amidst all the psychological violence, Victor Ochoa sits impassively on a folding chair, engrossed in the static coming over a
portable television Ochoa is responsible for much of the art in San Diego’s Chicano Park, a drive-in museum created by muralists on pillars under the Coronado bridge When he was a boy in Los Angeles in 1955, his father was thrown back into Mexico during Operation Wetback Victor helped support the family by selling seat cushions in the bullring that looms over the wicked scenario he and his colleagues have created at the end of the border.
It is hardly an attempt to build bridges of understanding between the protagonists of border life But neither is the clipping that David Avalos has been steaming over all week: a photograph in the San Diego Union showing a silhouetted horseback border patrolman in a cowboy hat and three wets with their hands behind their heads, walking in front of him. “The simple, nineteenth-century solution to the problem The hunter stalks the lawbreakers and brings them to justice The law they broke was merely wanting to live ”
The border snaps like a taut band. Its ends fly together and converge into this single issue. Aliens are guilty for invading the United States to earn dollars Employers are guilty for encouraging them Congressmen are guilty for failing to pass laws that punish employers for doing this And everybody is guilty for wanting cheaper vegetables
Mexico, too corrupt to share its wealth among its own people, is perhaps guiltiest of all. But Mexico blames a legacy contaminated by dictators, churches, kings, viceroys, and Aztec emperors, whose centuries of behavior aren’t easily eradicated overnight Besides, it reminds critics, American corporations and U S Marines crated the same kind of plutocracies in a chain of banana republics, which in turn produce more hungry, invading aliens The United States inherited this disregards for native populations from its own brutal history of manifest destiny
Everyone-our ancestors and ourselves-is guilty No law or fence will contain the hungry, devastated people we bring into this world, if there are too many of them to subdue Blaming this on the communists will not help It is equally doubtful that visions of nineteenth-century cowboys will solve things, either
photo by Jay Dusard via La Frontera The United States Border with Mexico
photo by Andrea Aleman
