Public Art and Visual Rhetoric from the El Paso Borderlands
Presentation Room
Blumberg Auditorium, Library Room 111
Presentation Type
Plenary Session
Start Date
24-4-2026 9:45 AM
End Date
24-4-2026 11:00 AM
Abstract
The display of public art undoubtedly plays a highly influential role in shaping how communities imagine their history, belonging, heritage, and identity. In the border city of El Paso, Texas, these representations often reflect what Frank Perez and Carlos Ortega describe as a “fantasy heritage”; a hegemonic cultural framing that privileges sanitized and deceptive narratives of the region while obscuring the layered histories and social and cultural tensions that also reside here. Such representations and narratives are visible in monumental art and heritage projects that continually reproduce safe, heroic imagery while downplaying the borderlands’ complex Indigenous, Mestizo, Chicanx, minority and working-class histories. Therefore, my presentation asks: how might alternative forms of public art challenge these dominant “fantasy” narratives and produce rhetorical knowledge from within the margins? My research draws on Marcela Gómez-Barris’s concept of “submerged perspectives” from The Extractive Zone (2017), where I examine the work of El Paso surrealist sculptor Ho Baron, whose open-air sculpture garden (located in his home within a historic El Paso neighborhood named Manhattan Heights) offers a striking counterpoint to official sanitized narratives. Baron’s sculptures, which he describes as “gods for future religions,” depict surreal and hybrid figures that resist conventional heroic iconography. Methodologically, this project reads Baron’s sculptures through a decolonial borderland visual rhetoric and places them in dialogue with scholarship on heritage, politics, activism, and community art on the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. I also situate Baron’s work within broader discussions of muralism and activist visual culture in South Central El Paso, where folklore and Indigenous iconography have long functioned as tools of cultural resistance. Ultimately, my presentation argues that Baron’s surreal public art functions as a borderlands rhetorical practice that disrupts hegemonic heritage narratives and opens alternative space for imagining, place, and memory. Through Gómez-Barris’s framework of submerged perspectives, these garden sculptures reveal how artistic practices emerging from everyday community spaces can challenge dominant representations and reclaim the borderlands as a site of creative decolonial possibility.
Public Art and Visual Rhetoric from the El Paso Borderlands
Blumberg Auditorium, Library Room 111
The display of public art undoubtedly plays a highly influential role in shaping how communities imagine their history, belonging, heritage, and identity. In the border city of El Paso, Texas, these representations often reflect what Frank Perez and Carlos Ortega describe as a “fantasy heritage”; a hegemonic cultural framing that privileges sanitized and deceptive narratives of the region while obscuring the layered histories and social and cultural tensions that also reside here. Such representations and narratives are visible in monumental art and heritage projects that continually reproduce safe, heroic imagery while downplaying the borderlands’ complex Indigenous, Mestizo, Chicanx, minority and working-class histories. Therefore, my presentation asks: how might alternative forms of public art challenge these dominant “fantasy” narratives and produce rhetorical knowledge from within the margins? My research draws on Marcela Gómez-Barris’s concept of “submerged perspectives” from The Extractive Zone (2017), where I examine the work of El Paso surrealist sculptor Ho Baron, whose open-air sculpture garden (located in his home within a historic El Paso neighborhood named Manhattan Heights) offers a striking counterpoint to official sanitized narratives. Baron’s sculptures, which he describes as “gods for future religions,” depict surreal and hybrid figures that resist conventional heroic iconography. Methodologically, this project reads Baron’s sculptures through a decolonial borderland visual rhetoric and places them in dialogue with scholarship on heritage, politics, activism, and community art on the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. I also situate Baron’s work within broader discussions of muralism and activist visual culture in South Central El Paso, where folklore and Indigenous iconography have long functioned as tools of cultural resistance. Ultimately, my presentation argues that Baron’s surreal public art functions as a borderlands rhetorical practice that disrupts hegemonic heritage narratives and opens alternative space for imagining, place, and memory. Through Gómez-Barris’s framework of submerged perspectives, these garden sculptures reveal how artistic practices emerging from everyday community spaces can challenge dominant representations and reclaim the borderlands as a site of creative decolonial possibility.
Comments
Panel 1: Rhetoric from the Margins