Texas Tech University

Icons & Symbols of the Borderland

Art from the US-Mexico Crossroads

Curated by Diana Molina
Featuring the Juntos Art Association

February 15 – August 17, 2025

Borderline (2016) by Oscar MoyaBorderline (2016) by Oscar Moya

In an age where visual representations are fundamental to communication and lifestyle, icons and symbols are the key to ethical precepts, inspirations, and beliefs; they provide a framework for ideals, emotions, philosophy, and, ultimately, patterns of behavior. Icons and Symbols of the Borderlands exhibition is an embodiment of the landscape and cultural legacy of the U.S./Mexico borderland.

The symbolism of a monarch butterfly, Cerveza XX and popular icons like Pancho Villa and La Virgen de Guadalupe are represented in an array of interpretations by JUNTOS artists. Conceptually, each image, each work of art, carries its own story or commentary on memory, ritual, nature, socio-political issues, and personal experience.

Corazón Espinado (2015) by Diana MolinaCorazón Espinado (2015) by Diana Molina

Mesoamerican, Spanish, Mexican, and Native American elements are blended with the modern American cultural terrain and its consumer trends. The artistic renditions in this collection provide a regional context by which viewers can reflect upon their roots, bridge connections to their cultural and environmental landscape, and envision their place within a global community.

Serving as an external repository of accumulated memory built over the vastness of centuries and continents, these works of art shape a shared regional consciousness of place and time. Strung together, these works synthesize and collide in a creative depiction of the contemporary borderland.

Artists include Cesar Martínez, Ricky Armendáriz, Antonio Castro, Mark Clark, Socorro Diamondstein, Gaspar Enríquez, Chris Grijalva-García, Benito Huerta, Ilana Lapid, Diana Molina, Delilah Montoya, Oscar Moya, Miguel Valenzuela, Romy Sáenz Hawkins, Victoria Suescum, Andy Villarreal, Lydia Limas, Roberto Salas, Alejandro Macias, Wopo Holup, Priscilla Garcia, Jose Rivera, Tina Fuentes, Angel Cabrales, Gina Gwen Palacios and Jesus Treviño.

Exhibit Topics include:

Environmental Landscape
Within a distinctive bi-lingual region, symbols exemplify an inherited culture and a shared regional consciousness of communities that shape the American Southwest. While humans create culture, the land itself has a direct influence in that creation. The borderland geography, with its proximity to Mexico and unique natural features, unify the experience of place; they give shape to a unique identity, a collective character—unified but not homogenized. The artworks feature the result of a blended relationship between people, land, and culture. Renditions reflect centuries of accumulated expression while they incorporate attributes and identifying features and concerns of modern life at the crossroads of two countries.

Infrastructure
While the fortification of the border is a key argument in the emotionally charged immigration debate, artworks in this section reflect on topics brought to light through the course of that deliberation.

Coctél de Fruta, 2013 by Victoria SuescumCoctél de Fruta (2013) by Victoria Suescum

Food and Drink
Food, the sustenance of life, has the power to express beliefs, values, and culture like no other iconic image. In this exhibition, food expresses celebration, status, and the plight of the people on the border. The food ways in this collection are intertwined with social commentary, inspired by everything from consumer trends, U.S./Mexican history, and street vendors.

The Sacred and the Profane
Sometimes that which is held sacred is, to others, profane. At the intersection of human migration across millenniums, cultural divides are deep-seated and often tied to religious beliefs, political convictions, and economic structures. Christian Iconography, with origins in the Middle Ages, has been repeated in many forms to inculcate in every mind the moral aims and fundamental dogmas of the Christian religion. The Sacred Heart is an example of a cultural icon that is embedded in the religious fabric of Chicano culture. This baroque religious symbol expresses shared cultural religious patterns that connote a syncretism in the relationship between European Catholicism and Aztec philosophy. In the Americas, the sacred heart is an icon that resulted from an encounter, not purely Indian in content and never completely European in its form. Rather, it is a hybrid of two diverse cultures that clashed and bonded at a particular historic moment and created the foundation for religious fusion. In the present-day junction of diversity, battles ensue, still, personified by icons and symbols.