by Bobby Zabin
How does photography define American identity? Whether it’s a rippling of red, white, and navy fabric in the wind, the shadowy figure of cowboys against an apocalyptic orange backdrop, or a migrant mother’s piercing eyes staring into the future, these iconic photos and motifs form a distinctive visual canon, recognizable foundations in our collective heritage as Americans. But who gets included in this American collection? In a photograph from Mexican-American photographer and educator Kathya Landeros’s collection West, a man in a cowboy hat takes a call in front of La Milpa Lavandería, the laundromat glowing soft green as the sun sets into lilac. The loneliness and casual intimacy of the figures almost suggests Edward Hopper’s iconic American painting Nighthawks, but exchanging Hopper’s urban dead of night for a desert twilight and his white characters for a Latin cast. Landeros is inviting us to reconsider our understanding of what it means to live in America by including people not often seen in the national iconography.
Landeros’s photography expresses a desire to represent Latin communities by broadening mainstream depictions of migrants. She’s not just photographing poverty and the Trump-era fixation on the hardships of immigrant life. In a lecture presenting her work, she explains, “When we do think of the Mexican immigrant population, it’s always defined by the border.” To do her work, she asks herself, “How do I shift away from that?” (“Latinx” 17:20). In her earlier collection, Verdant Land, Landeros’s still lifes of natural landscapes stress the strong “hand people have had in cultivating this land,” and her portraits of people dressed in similar colors as the plant life of the region suggest that they belong to the environment itself (“Latinx” 27:13). In both Verdant Land and West, she represents the solid bond Latin Americans have with this country where some might only consider them as migrants—a richer and more nuanced representation of a topic often treated simplistically.
West showcases predominantly Mexican American communities, primarily in the states of California and Washington (“Latinx” 31:13). Landeros’s website features fifteen of West’s images, all horizontal, emphasizing the pastels of the sky and the desaturated greens of fields and farms. Seemingly unrestrained by borders, the landscapes are marked with human traces. These can be nestled houses, parked cars, or faces lit up with expression or stoic gazes. Her compositions often consist of a single focal point of a person or group, tiny against the vastness of the landscape. A man’s weathered hands harvest apples against the infinite sky; a young boy with black hair stands before a vast arid valley; two girls converse in the shadow of olive-colored mountains. There is a distinct integration between person and country, unusual yet perhaps more accurate in its portrayal of the terrain. And the landscape is also—strikingly—full of Spanish. She captures advertisements in Spanish to send money to Latin America, directions to a discoteca, and multiple restaurantes. Her approach depicts Latin Americans not just as immigrant labor and agricultural hands, but as essential and lasting contributors to the landscape: a side of the West largely invisible in our country’s iconography.
While the term ‘West’ evokes, in standard American lore, the image of cowboys, renegades, and open plains, Landeros makes visible a uniquely Latin world. She’s interested in redefining prevailing beliefs about American identity to include an otherwise unseen Latin perspective. Landeros jokingly describes a picture of a stern-looking Latin couple as “[her] version of the American Gothic” (“Latinx” 32:32). Landeros’s photos update iconic parts of our collective American visual identity. She urges us to see that this Latin community in the West is as quintessentially American as any wide-open town with cowboy hats and a frontier spirit.
In one photo of a man surrounded by goats, Landeros subverts the traditional image of gunslinging white cowboys on horseback with a different human-animal relationship. This candid moment of an older man tending to his animals amid rolling green-brown hills gives Landeros’s expansive work a spark of life. The goats nestle their heads at the man’s waist, and the sun highlights his crow’s feet, perhaps evidence of a lifetime of smiling. From the middle of his gray sweater, an image of a stag framed against the American flag peeks out, again centering a sense of coexistence between country and life, nationality and belonging.
This photo serves as a high point in West, encapsulating Landeros’s aim to present the ideal of a picturesque landscape inherently connected to the people who inhabit it, and simultaneously reinterpreting the West’s common hypermasculine connotations. The photo of the goatherd seems to converse with another photo in the collection, one of a young boy gazing across endless dry and grassy hills, both of which challenge existing archetypes. The goatherd, more grounded than the roving cowboy or outlaw, could function as a model for young men. This role is still masculine, yet by emphasizing community rather than individual glory it helps redefine the standards of masculinity in the American west. If the smiling goatherd replaces the romantic (and mythologized) silhouette of a cowboy on horseback in the collective imagination of the West, the young boy can be read as a revision of the runaway teenage cowboy character prevalent in Westerns. By updating our narratives of this region, Landeros invites us to reconsider and ask ourselves: Is the West a place where men go to prove themselves for glory’s sake, or where communities can take root in kinship?
As Landeros reinterprets masculinity and national identity in the American West, celebrated Chicana author Sandra Cisneros’s observations reassess the region’s very history. In a review of West for Aperture Magazine, Cisneros offers an important historical layer for understanding Landeros’s efforts. Cisneros asserts that “[t]he people in these photographs, the descendants of the survivors of conquest, land appropriation, and ethnic cleansing, continue to migrate across arbitrary borders.” With ‘arbitrary borders,’ Cisneros reminds us that the West was already a frontier (or frontera) before it came under Anglo domination. In fact, the Latin community Landeros depicts might have simply been born on the “wrong” side of the border after the Mexican-American war, which saw Mexico lose what became the states of California, Utah, and Nevada, as well as parts of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming (Bennett). Once the new borders were drawn following the Mexican-American war, 100,000 Mexicans were left on the American side (Anzaldúa 7). Today, as immigration at the US southern border takes prominence in American political battles, Landeros adds a necessary human dimension, inviting a broader reevaluation of migration itself. If these lands were previously inhabited and governed by Spanish-speakers, why is it such a visceral problem in our contemporary politics that Latin Americans are returning?
While the ‘frontier’ has now shifted to the imaginary line at the Río Grande, the West still remains a battleground for the identity of a nation. The towns Landeros portrays, built by and for Latin Americans, seem to exist in a state of in-between, representing an island of serene stability in the heat of not just political discourse on the place of immigrants in our country, but of the history of warfare for control of these areas. This notion of borders within American national consciousness is a complicated one, as influential Texan Chicana poet and scholar Gloria Anzaldúa writes in her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Combating the “transgressor” and “alien” identity Anglo Americans assign to Latin migrants arriving from the southern border, she writes in the first chapter: “Today we are witnessing la migración de los pueblos mexicanos, the return odyssey to the historical/mythological Aztlán (3). This time, the traffic is from south to north” (Anzaldúa 11). Anzaldúa describes Aztlán as existing somewhere in the American Southwest, the “Edenic place of origin” of the Aztecs before they migrated to Mexico and Central America (Anzaldúa 4). This mythical migration of Indigenous peoples has been corroborated by linguistic analysis. The ancient Nahuatl language of the Aztec Empire is part of the Uto-Aztecan language family; other Uto-Aztecan languages are spoken along the Western side of North America from Oregon to Mexico (“Nahuatl language”). In a sense, the immigration of Latin Americans from the south is not an invasion, but more like a continuation of an ancient tradition of “long walks” back home (Anzaldúa 11). Reading Anzaldúa, it’s possible to imagine that the people Landeros photographs have even more of a “claim” to the land of the American West than Anglo Americans. Or to understand just how arbitrary the desire to claim land for a single people is when the history is longer and more multilingual than the stories being told. Spanish was spoken in the West long before English.
In her photography, Landeros is responding to the increasingly pervasive narrative that migrants don’t ‘belong here.’ West, which tenderly represents agricultural immigrant communities nestled in the hills of California and Washington, exposes the contradiction of such an assertion. Through monumental horizontal frames portraying these people as firmly rooted in the land, Landeros broadcasts the fragility of the viewpoint that questions their belonging. Landeros whispers that people not only deserve to cross the border into the US, but she also echoes the views of prominent Latin thinkers who assert the inherent right of Latin Americans to return and reclaim the land.
West is more than a depiction of belonging or an imaginatively utopian portrayal of peaceful integration; it is an expansive correction of a foundational but excluded part of American history about Latin presence in this country. Is the current immigration from the southern border an ‘invasion’ or a continuation of centuries of movement predating these contrived borders? While Landeros does not answer this question definitively, she seems to pose an alternative response. Does it matter? Landeros redefines an American collective self-image, displaying a community deeply linked with the land they’ve built upon, no matter how they arrived.
Works Cited
Anzaldúa, Gloria. “The Homeland Aztlán / El otro México” Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987, pp. 1-13.
Art Institute Chicago. “Nighthawks.” The Art Institute of Chicago, 2009, www.artic.edu/artworks/111628/nighthawks.
Beatty, Joshua, et al. “Manifest Destiny.” The American Yawp, vol. 1, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2019, pp. 315–343.
Cisneros, Sandra. “Kathya Maria Landeros: West.” Aperture, vol. 226, 2017, p. 90, issues.aperture.org/article/2017/1/1/kathya-maria-landeros-west.
Landeros, Kathya. Verdant Land. 2010-2013. kathyalanderos.com/verdant-land.
Landeros, Kathya. West. 2011. kathyalanderos.com/west.
“LatinX Visiting Artist Lecture with Kathya Landeros” YouTube, uploaded by Anderson Ranch Arts Center, 15 February 2024, www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMvJrWIgNXE.
“Nahuatl Language.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 22 Mar. 2016, www.britannica.com/topic/Nahuatl-language.