Cristopher Ruiz Martinez (He/Him/His)
Cristopher Ruiz Martinez (He/Him/His) is an undergraduate student at the University of California, Davis double majoring in International Relations and Communication (expected 2022). As an immigrant from Mexico City, he is highly interested in the role that civics and legislation play in ensuring the rights and protections of immigrant communities in the United States. Cristopher currently volunteers with Paper Airplanes as an ESL tutor for refugees and other conflict-affected individuals. Additionally, he has worked as a research assistant to professor Raquel Aldana at the UC Davis School of Law for the initiative “Compassion In Immigration.” He is currently preparing to study abroad as a recipient of the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship (U.S. Department of State) before finishing his undergraduate degree. In his role as a beginning artist, Cristopher is continuing to explore the various ways in which his work has the ability to make audiences question and challenge the status quo in hopes of reforming the social structures that sustain racial and ethnic inequality.
"Genocide" calls for social justice in immigration as a result of allegations made in late 2020 about the unnecessary sterilization procedures that immigrant women were coerced into under the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It serves as a reminder of the continued use of government agencies that target specific ethnic and racial minorities to perpetuate their oppression. Puerto Rican women, Black women in the South, Latinx immigrants, Asian immigrants, and Indigenous people were unknowingly subjected to hysterectomies at the hands of the U.S. government in the twentieth century. In modern times, this kind of biological genocide continues to be sustained by the racist and xenophobic ways of ICE. Much like the tape in a VHS cassette, ICE continues to run despite constant pressure for a severe reform of the system, giving way to a replenishing cycle of institutionalized racism and human rights abuses. The cassette's clear shell serves as a call for transparency from government institutions surrounding the treatment of migrant populations; the yellow tape calls attention to the need for a total dissolution of the system.
Cristopher Ruiz Martinez (He/Him/His) Genocide, 2020 Sculpture, Mixed Media 4" X 7.5" X 1”
Cristopher Ruiz Martinez (He/Him/His) Genocide, 2020 Sculpture, Mixed Media 4" X 7.5" X 1”
Disciplining Fertility into Genocide by Maria Elena Vargas, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies, Sacramento State
The transparency of the VHS cassette directs the attention of the audience to the black text written on the center of the cassette in capital letters, “FORCED STERILIZATION IS.” As the audience follows the text, they are led to the spine of the cassette that reads “GENOCIDE.” FORCED STERILIZATION IS GENOCIDE is engraved into the imagination of the audience that is only left with yellow reels of a tape engulfed in absences. The audience is left with a sharp pain invoked by the missing names, images and voices of the immigrant women who were forcible sterilized by ICE officers in the United States. The yellow tape invokes the cruel and inhumane history of how racialized, gendered and classed systems impose reproductive restrictions to discipline poor, foreign and vulnerable bodies. Drawing from Foucault’s concept of biopower, immigrant women’s bodies have been subjected to regulatory and disciplinary action in order to exterminate their “out of control” and pathological reproduction (146, Whatcott). Immigrant women’s bodies have been the target of nativist groups who used racializing and gendered discourse to construct a population control and immigration restriction rhetoric infused with eugenics logic (99, Gutierrez). The genocidal logic constructed through the overlapping of immigration policy and population policy resulted in a terrifying formula that calculated the nations annual total births versus the number of immigrants arriving in the U.S. and the children that they would have once they settled down in the U.S. (2008, Ehrlich et al.). Public concern for the rising number of immigrants crossing the border and their high fertility rate produced racial anxiety for Americans (white) because they imagined that immigrants were bringing with them a future mass of “alien” children that would outnumber them. Such activists aimed at legitimizing population control to exterminate all life that threatened the natural resources and health of the white middle class citizen (147, Whatcott). Nativist rhetoric was already rooted in genocidal tendencies that would become desensitized to more brutal forces such as sterilization for the purpose of birth control. In the midst of so much absence and yellow tape, Ruiz Martinez uses a clear cassette instead of the traditional black cassette to visualize a radical claim for transparency of state control of reproductive sterilization that challenges the impunity of medical racism and immigration enforcement. The yellow tape is covered in the cry, “ABOLISH ICE” that inserts agency by calling for a social movement committed to dismantling white supremacist, patriarchal and capitalist structures that perpetuate different manifestations of genocide as seen in the reproductive injustices occurring currently in detention centers around the borderlands. The call for justice written in the very same yellow tape soaked in the inhumanity of state actors that enforce their brutality on the most vulnerable is itself a contradiction that demands action and reminds the audience of the threatened humanity of the most innocent, an unborn child who was given no chance to live. The disappearance of life before its conception in a womb signifies the extreme and brutal cycles of genocidal histories.
WORKS CITED
Ehrlich, Paul R, Loy Bilderback, and Anne H. Ehrlich. The Golden Door: International Migration, Mexico and the United States. Cambridge, Ma: Malor Books, 2008. Print.
Gutiérrez, Elena R. Fertile Matters: The Politics of Mexican-Origin Women's Reproduction., 2008. Print.
Whatcott, Jess. "No Selves to Consent: Women’s Prisons, Sterilization, and the Biopolitics of Informed Consent." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 44.1 (2018): 131-153. Print.