COLUMBIA
JOURNALISM
REVIEW
SPRING
2021:
J ack
H errera 3 5
Showing Up The revelatory art of Minerva Cuevas
by Jack Herrera Photo courtesy Art21 Inc.
A
few years ago I was reporting in Mexico, traveling from shelter to shelter along the United States border. In a refuge in central Tijuana, a group of children played on a dusty concrete porch. The shelter, built for asylum seekers coming from the southern part of the country and Central America, had been running at almost twice its capacity; a single room hosted some three dozen people. At the door, I interviewed a father from Nicaragua who said he’d spent close to a year there with his daughter. As he spoke, my eyes wandered to the children. It was afternoon; leaves from a laurel tree fell into a long shadow and a breeze carried the clean, cool smell of the Pacific Ocean. Almost all of
the children had chicken pox. After the man finished, I thanked him; went home, to San Francisco; submitted my article, in English, to an American publication; and felt a pang of dissatisfaction with what I had not been able to convey in my dispatch. There were some things, it seemed, that one could not carry out of a place, like the force that puts people in motion to migrate over barbed wire and between iron beams, through illness and discomfort. Then I went to the Museum of Modern Art in downtown San Francisco and, for the first time, stood in a room with the work of Minerva Cuevas. The piece was called Río Bravo Crossing. On a wall, a projector showed images of a woman standing in a large river. As gray-blue water lapped
