Pastoral or Arcadian State:
An Illegal Alien's Guide to Greater America
Enrique Chagoya
San Francisco, California
Pastoral or Arcadian State: An Illegal Alien’s Guide to Greater America, 2006
Color lithograph
In this work, Enrique Chagoya places stereotyped characters and comic-like text balloons in a lush landscape that echoes images of the American West in the time of the cowboy. His title directly references Thomas Coles’ 1834 painting, The Pastoral or Arcadian State, for his series The Course of Empire, which portrays an idealized vision of shepherds in a natural environment. For his central group of figures, Chagoya directly borrows from George Caleb Bingham’s 1846 painting The Jolly Flatboatmen which celebrated Westward expansion. Chagoya casts himself without skin as the central dancing figure wearing a Mexican sombrero.
Chagoya’s ironic use of wildly stereotyped figures –for example, three border patrolmen in Indian headdresses carrying off a white woman in a Border Patrol canoe –is humorous and absurd. The seeming contradiction of American pop culture symbols and pre-Columbian iconography conjures the hotly-debated immigration struggle in the United States.
Bio
Drawing from his experiences living on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border in the late 1970s, and also in Europe in the late 1990s, Enrique Chagoya juxtaposes secular, popular, and religious symbols in order to address the ongoing cultural clash between the United States, Latin America, and the world. He uses familiar pop icons to create deceptively friendly points of entry for the discussion of complex issues. Through these seemingly harmless characters, Chagoya examines the recurring subject of colonialism and oppression that continues to riddle contemporary American foreign policy.