Arleene Correa Valencia

Arleene Correa Valencia is a Mexican artist living and working in Napa, California. In 2020 she received her MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Correa Valencia was awarded a regional Emmy award for her feature "REPRESENT" by KQED Arts. She is a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which she has used to work and study since 2012. Correa Valencia is one of four children originally from Arteaga, Michoacán, Mexico. Her family migrated to the United States in 1997 and established themselves in California’s wine country, Napa Valley. Her upbringing and migration narrative are the inspiration behind her practice which she uses to explore her identity as a registered “illegal alien. ”

Image courtesy of Julia Kokernak

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in June 2021.

GM: What was your path to becoming an artist?

ACV: I think part of what makes my work so powerful and special is that I talk about my family, my own history, and my relationship with my father a lot. I am a Mexican immigrant and grew up in a low-income household. Access to the arts is very limited for undocumented people of color, but my father always had an eye for art and color theory. One of his very first jobs when he came to the United States was being a house painter, and regardless of his limitations of not having access to fine art or paintings, he always implemented this notion that we had to be connected to paint. I grew up in a household where we had to be connected to understanding the colors of the Earth, the patterns between colors, and the color of our skin. So I’ve always had a passion for really devoting my life to this idea of art. As I grew older, I realized that I had something to say in terms of who I am in this country and who the government and certain administrations have made me out to be. Being undocumented has played a huge role in limiting my education. I graduated from high school, but didn’t have access to higher education because I was not yet a Dreamer and didn’t have a social security number. I single handedly paid for Napa Valley College, where I took every single painting or art class because I was so infatuated with becoming an artist and expressing myself. Eventually, Obama signed DACA into law, and with that I was able to apply to art school. I went to CCA and had a really hard time coming out as undocumented. It felt like this big reveal of who I was. But I realized it was really what I needed to do in order to have some peace of mind and some understanding of who I am, as well as a release of shame. So I got rid of this cloak that I had been wearing - hiding myself, feeling less than, wanting to be invisible all because I was drenched in this “undocumented” shame. We feel like we commit a crime every single day because we’re here illegally. So the trajectory of me becoming an artist really came from my father planting the seed in [my family] and hoping that we would see the world in a different way, as well as be being a curious, adventurous person.

GM: Why is your specific medium a powerful way for you to amplify your identity?

ACV: I wanted so badly be an oil painter because I thought that if I mastered this European idea of the translation of our reality, then I would be the greatest and would be successful. I really pushed for that, but I never felt connected to my ancestors or myself [through that]. About two years ago, I dove into really understanding ancestral practices of embroidery, textiles, sewing, and the history that Latinx women have played in fashion and textiles. My mother-in-law, who is from El Salvador, is an amazing artist who does these incredible embroideries and knows all about the sewing machine. I considered her my point of reference because I felt that I needed to learn these practices. (Continued)

The textiles from my people and Salvadorian people are very similar, as we all come from the same lineage of Native people. After talking with her, I started to put things together in terms of breaking apart fabrics that carry so much of our energy. I took my family’s old clothing and started cutting it up. It was essentially repurposing clothing and thinking about this idea of recycling energies, and taking apart fragments of each of my siblings and my parents, and putting them back together to create these large textiles that became portraitures of my family.

GM: Are these portraits what you’re currently working on?

ACV: Yes. I’ve been talking about families being torn apart through the use of glow in the dark thread. Essentially, the children in these images disappear and the parents appear, and when the children appear, the parents disappear. There’s a really big play on visibility, who gets to be in the limelight, and when. If we’re looking at my portraits in a completely dark room, you’ll only be able to see children. But if we allow light to come in, you’ll see the parents with the outline of a child.

"The River That Sings" (2021) by Arleene Correa Valencia, repurposed fabric on black canvas. Courtesy of the artist There are all these layers of investigating the relationship between child and parent, which is really important to me because I came to the United States at three years old. There’s a large conversation to be had about migrating families and the separation that occurs at the border. These portraits are the most honest and raw part of myself and my family in a way that doesn’t reveal identity, nor adopt this Eurocentric idea of art. It’s genuine to the history of my ancestors and my family, and it’s all about love and the continuation of our existence through our children. I’m really proud of it and feel that it’s my best work so far.

GM: How do you center on Latinx themes in your practice?

ACV: One of my goals in my practice is to make sure that there’s a moment of reflection in seeing our resilience and our power. So much of the media and the arts focuses on these negative ideas of who we are, what we do, or what the world thinks we’ve come to do in this country. Some of those are misconceptions and appropriations of others speaking on behalf of the migrant. For example, a white person discussing the migrant experience [of a person of color]. That’s where the mistranslation happens; instead of honoring who we are, we have this perpetuation of stereotypes. We see Home Depot workers and instead of amplifying their voices or celebrating who they are, we’re perpetuating this idea that we’ve come here only as laborers and only as these people who are waiting for an opportunity. We’re more than our labor and not just a tool for this country, we’re human beings! If we don’t see people from a genuine and honest perspective, then we’re only perpetuating negative stereotypes, which doesn’t do any good for our children or future generations. For me, these themes come from my heart and wanting to express my experience.

GM: What could art spaces do to better represent Latinx and Latin American artists on a systemic and programming level?

ACV: I’ve been asked in the past to join boards and committees of local arts organizations. In my opinion, they want some “diversity” , and that gets problematic really quickly because then I become the point of reference for all Latinx people, as well as tokenized! (Continued)

"Mexicali" (1997) by Arleene Correa Valencia, repurposed clothing on black canvas with glow in the dark thread, True Farm, Charlottesville, Virginia. Courtesy of the artist

I haven’t trusted any of these institutions that came out with “Black Lives Matter” support statements [during the summer 2020 protests] because in my head I’m thinking, “Where have you been?” People of color have been working in these institutions and have been trying to make changes, and you haven’t listened to us. So now when there’s a social movement you want to jump on board? Now you want to claim you’ve been supporting POC this whole time? No, that’s absolute bullshit. […] A couple of years ago, I was brought in to give advice on how to diversify an institution, and the first thing I suggested was language accessibility. You can’t expect brown people to come into a space where they can’t read a single word. If “welcome” does not say “bienvenidos” , then nobody is going to come in, especially when you’re talking about communities of undocumented Latinx people. And the response was that they didn’t have the budget to change the signs, and I questioned why I was even there. These sorts of things are so frustrating; I’m at the point in my career where I cannot be the point of reference for undocumented people of color because I’ve had it. As women of color especially, we have to make our voices so much stronger and demand things. It’s taken me such a long time to find power in my own voice and understand that it's okay to decline things because I feel uncomfortable, or because the person requesting is white and in more power than me. Taking a stance on our beliefs and demanding the bare minimum for ourselves is so important.

GM: What was your experience participating in the 2020 YBCA exhibition,

“Come To Your Census: Who Counts in America?” It was originally an in-person exhibition, but due to COVID pivoted into a digital experience.

ACV: There were two components to my involvement with the exhibition. My glow in the dark portraits were in the physical exhibition that was never seen by anyone! (Laughs) I did the other component with my friend, Ana Teresa Fernandez; we created the “SOMOS VISIBLES (We Are Not Invisible)” hoodies, which we used as an incentive to target communities of color and undocumented communities all over the Bay Area to register them for the 2020 U.S. Census. We asked people if they had signed up [for the census], and if they didn’t know what it was, we educated them and they signed up right then and there. Then we gifted them these hoodies, which have bright, bold colors that reflect construction wear colors. Ana Teresa and I thought of how to use the colors of labor to empower visibility in communities of color and go against this idea that undocumented people of color are invisible or living in the shadows. We spun that and said that we were going to be visible in the census. There were these beautiful moments where people wanted to be visible, but they lacked the information or didn’t know how to read or write. (Continued)

“SOMOS VISIBLES (We Are Not Invisible)” (2020Ongoing) by Ana Teresa Fernandez and Arleene Correa Valencia, Morenita Market, Napa, California. Courtesy of the artists

So they would hand us their ID’s, and we became these tools of accessibility and the driving force for getting these people counted in the census. For me, that was the most empowered I’d ever felt in my work, because it’s one thing to make a painting and see it go out in the world, but it’s another to know that you’re doing something important in physically bringing in money for communities of color that are so underfunded. Ana Teresa and I were just on the ground running, and we didn’t stop until the census was officially over, even with the Trump administration trying to end it early. […] We’re working on different iterations of the project now, but the hoodies have been embraced by a lot of people and can be used as a catalyst to dismantle this idea that invisibility defines our identities. But I do love that I was a part of an exhibition that never got viewed; it’s one of those COVID stories that we’ll tell our grandchildren! (Laughs)

“SOMOS VISIBLES (We Are Not Invisible)” (2020Ongoing) by Ana Teresa Fernandez and Arleene Correa Valencia, Napa Vineyards, California. Courtesy of the artists

Image courtesy of Reilin Serrano

GM: Did the past presidential administration’s xenophobic and racist laws against people from Latin American countries, especially immigrants, affect your practice?

ACV: Obviously, Trump did far more damage than Obama did. But when we look at the impact that both administrations had on Latinx people and migration, I don’t think that one is better than the other. Obama is responsible for so many deportations, began family separation, and was the beginning of children in cages. I will stand by that criticism [of him], regardless of him giving me DACA, because it’s not about me. My practice and everything that I do is about community and making sure that we all are represented, not just myself. Although I do have DACA, I feel like it’s at the cost of hundreds of thousands of other people that, like my parents, will never have an opportunity to seek a pathway to citizenship. I personally live with this guilt of feeling like I was gifted an opportunity at the cost of blood, sweat, and tears of other people, and to me, that’s not fair. Obviously, I took it and I ran with it, and it’s why I’m here today and have so much success, so I’m grateful. […] It’s extremely stressful to think about where the money will come from to renew my permit every two years, and when Trump was in office, [that worry started happening] every other month. We wondered if we were going to be able to renew or not, if we would get deported, and if we would have a job, or if our jobs would terminate us because we wouldn’t have a legal permit anymore. I was in graduate school and wondering if they were going to take my scholarship away because I wouldn’t be able to renew my permit. Obviously Trump had more a negative personal impact on my life, which then affects the work. I’m not at all defending Trump because I think that he is by far the absolute worst human being on the face of the planet, but the reality is that he was just fearless in expressing his sentiment for people of color. But I’m more wary of someone like Obama, who played us so hard. When you have any administration that is focused on power, money, and capitalism, there is a lack of humanity and empathy. For people of color, Obama was a huge deal; I get that and totally support that. I’m grateful that he was in office because I have what I have today because of him, but it comes at such a cost that is so painful.