I have been asked to reprint this image many times over the years, but it feels very much needed going into this year:
The original photo is Migrant Mother, 1936.
The photo is by Dorothea Lange.
A mother and her three children, she was a pea picker, a migrant worker... Florence Owens Thompson. The Mona Lisa of the 1930's.
Back then, the fear was the great depression. Back then, migrants were poor and white.
Today: we are in a depression
Today: migrant workers pick our food, are used and deported.
Today mothers are torn from their children.
Today we have #ICE
Today we have Migrant Mother's...just as this famous photo is entitled.
Today the Migrant Mother, the Madre Migrante, is Mexican. She is Palestinian. She is Indigenous. Today her children may be taken from her and never seen again. Nearly a century later.
This piece was made in reponse to the treatment of Mothers in 2018, being separated from their children at the border. It is now 2025. And the worlds mothers are in migration patterns from devastating world events. This piece is dedicated to mothers.
"First they took away the children from the women, now they are trying to erect borders on land that had always been our home.
Indigenous people have always migrated on our traditional lands. Oral history tells of the many ways we traveled in the four directions, across turtle island, rising from the ground, returning like birds...
Only now do they call us immigrants on our Homeland.
Only man made borders change a migration to an immigration.
Only now do they make the word 'migration' something dirty.
Animals migrate for survival. They migrate based on electromagetic fields on the earth. They migrate to survive. Plants migrate, seeds travel, it's how rebirth happens and a species carries on. We are the same as the earth, the plants, the animals. We are not beyond it or above it, butt within it.
Man cannot stop nature with walls and wire fencing and guns.
Man cannot play god and force a people off their own homelands again.
Our histories are borderless.
The world is watching at this gratuitous display of egotism, racism, and ignorance.
The people traveling are mothers and fathers and children. Their skin is brown like the earth that they've lived on since time immemorial.
This piece covers conversation from 1531, when an Indigenous Nahuatl man first saw that apparition of "mother of the very true deity" to the forced removal and separation of Native children over the last 500 years through the rise and colonization of the Americas. Now it speaks to Palestine. Now it speaks to all mothers of violent systems.
Immigrant. Migrant. To travel. Nomadic. Mother. But we have always been here. And so we are not visitors. We are caretakers. We are mother's. We are creators of future generations. We are more powerful than you know. We are keepers of this resiliency that will not die.
Migrant Mother
Weshoyot Alvitre
2018"
This is an 11 x 14 giclee print.
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$50.00Price
expected to ship mid to late Feb 2025
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