We Were Here First

The topic of immigration and immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, is incredibly politicized and there tends to be a lot of harmful and xenophobic rhetoric. It is discouraging to see so many ignorant people pin the nation’s foundational problems on immigrants and justify it under the guise of patriotism, reducing all immigrants into a single unit and often stripping us of our humanity. Our national origin and legal status dictate a great deal of our existence in this country and when considering America’s history, it’s hypocritical to think that immigration is the problem rather than America’s racism. Although my ancestors were not originally from Chicago, the Midwest, or even the modern United States, they were among the first peoples of North America. We were here first, before the imaginary borders, the made up countries and states, before the racial caste systems. Before the arrival of Columbus, there had been first peoples in the Americas for thousands of years and today, their descendants are criminalized for crossing made-up borders drawn on land our ancestors used to occupy freely. The reality is a significant majority of Mexican and Central American immigrants are of at least partial Indigenous descent. We may have committed the crime of crossing borders unauthorized, but does it truly compare to the brutal colonization of our land and savage genocide of our people? How are we illegal trespassers on our own land? This is the topic of my poster series titled “We Were Here First,” comprised of 16 risograph typographic protest posters featuring original and sampled imagery. Posters have a long history of being used as mediums for protest, outcry, and self-expression, often utilizing more vernacular typography or imagery lacking the rigidity of design rules. In my poster series, I express my conflicted emotions of being an undocumented immigrant in the US as an individual of mixed-race Indigenous ancestry to provide a perspective not commonly presented to humanize the issue and put a human face to the topic