This section shows that Homeland is not just a physical land and bordered territory, but also the memories and even an imagined home where borders cease to exist. The many artists, who were affected by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the fluctuating immigration policies in the decades to follow, experienced the complex change in cultural experiences as their homes were dictated into different territories. The Mexican Cession in 1848 enabled the United States to purchase Mexican boundaries between Alta California and Baja California and Sonora for $15 Million USD. Most Mexicanos that remained in the area became US citizens on paper.(1) Soon the gold rush sparked one of the first of many migrations to California by Latin American people. Martin Ramirez was one of the many people who came to us for employment and working on the Californian railroads between 1925-1930. They faced extreme racism and violence from both institutional laws and fear due to xenophobia. The turn of the 20th century saw many leave either due to not wanting to bear with the xenophobia or, more commonly, deportation campaigns. However, World War II later reversed this, with millions of immigrants coming into the states as part of guest worker agreements with the US. “By 1970, 7.6 million people of Latin American heritage lived in the mainland states, a more than three-fold increase since 1940.” (1) Often, the immigrant experience is not bound to the geographical location where they would or should call home. With their changing positions on the map, home is a place where their mixed- cultural identity has been created. Without the privilege nor the opportunity to have a western art education, some turned to creating art to document their home and their experiences but without the means to show them to the outside world.
Stevn Mintz and Sara McNeil, "Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo," Digital History, 2018. http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu.
James Gregory, "Latinx Great Migrations - Migration History 1850-2017," America's Great Migrations Project, University of Washington, 2015, https://depts.washington.edu/moving1/latinx_migration.shtml.
Aside from his concentrated images of trains in tunnels and riders on horseback, Martín Ramírez also depicted landscapes of often surreal nature during his near life-long confinement. In this artwork resembling a scroll, it had almost every motif that was favored by the artist – trains in underground tunnels and cities, catholic iconographies as representations of his faith, and collages of horses in countryside. Ramírez created this scroll of different architecture across space and time, and between pre-modern cultures and modern technologies. Below the bustling modern city is a mystical underground world that connects the outsider with a large tunnel. The cars and the buses, but also the train would travel down below through different tunnels. Depicting automobiles juxtaposed with fantastical creatures and folk religious symbols. (1) Martín Ramírez created a world of contradictions that is also harmonious. It is something akin to his personal utopia, and perhaps that it would connect with the outside world as well, uniting the modernized world of California and his pastoral homeland together. Martín Ramírez missed his family and what he loved back when he was home, but decades in confinement the world had moved on without him, and his home is no longer how it was when he left. Soon after Ramírez left for America, the Cristero Rebellion devastated the rural regions he resided in. His families were forced to reside elsewhere and armed conflicts forced the destruction of places of catholic worship. What Ramirez missed about his home is not an existing scenario or situation, but a world created from his fond memories and what he hoped for in a world of his particular Mexican-American identity. Ramírez's nephew José Gómez visited him in 1952 shortly after his re-evaluation, and said that Ramírez preferred to stay at Dewitt than going back to Mexico, still in conflict with his wife over the assumption of her supposed participation in the Cristero Rebellion. (2) The scarce amount of notes included in his medical file had suggested that Ramírez was trapped under his mental illness label, and the regimented daily routine imposed by the institution. (3)
“Martín Ramírez: American Folk Art Museum,” Martín Ramírez | American Folk Art Museum. Accessed May 2021. https://folkartmuseum.org/exhibitions/martin-ramirez.
Victor M. Espinosa, “Martín Ramírez: Framing His Life and Art,” in Martín Ramírez: Framing His Life and Art (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 89.
Martín Ramírez was a Mexican artist who left his family and country to come to America, working on the railroads in California for around five years before he found himself homeless and penniless. (1) This, coupled with him not being able to speak English, caused him to become institutionalised in a number of mental hospitals in California for the better part of his life, never able to see his family again, and diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia, a condition that has been disputed but ultimately cannot be proven or disproven by scholars long after his death. (2) Ramírez taught himself art during his stay at DeWitt State Hospital out of the materials available to him there, depicting figures and animals on a backdrop of concentric lines, creating scenes that combined the modernisation of the time period with images of Mexican folk traditions. His works were noticed by Tarmo Pasto, a visiting professor, as well as Dunievitz, the medical director of DeWitt at the time. (3) Now, long after his death in 1963, Ramírez's legacy lives on, and he has become known as one of the greatest examples of ‘Outsider Art’ of all time.
Martín Ramírez represents his world through his recognizable patterns and multicultural and religious iconography. Each piece tells a small bit of the story of his life, portraying two separate countries and cultures as sewn together in his mind through the use of collage and repetition. His drawings are highly detailed and share common motifs throughout the body of his work (such as trains, Madonnas, Catholic imagery, et cetera), often placed on several frames, or stages, constructed by his patterns. Ramírez created art with what he had, creating a vast amount of multimedia works, using mediums such as watercolour, ink, coloured pencil, crayon, chalk, and collage, on surfaces such as wrapping paper and letters. These pieces serve not only as pieces of art, but as a collection of memories gathered to create the image of one man and how he views the world around him.
This collage piece is a prime example of his use of colourful patterns and repetitive mark-making, with iconography from both Mexican and Californian American culture scattered prevalently throughout the work, such as the San Francisco postcard and the railroads dominating the top and bottom half of the frame while imagery similar to houses found in Rincón de Velázquez, Tepatitlán, Jalisco, Ramírez's hometown, in nestled in the middle. (4) There’s a frantic sense of longing, reflecting the utter culture shock and pressures Ramírez experienced during his time working in America. A man on a horse, similar in style to the saddles and outfits found in Jalisco, inhibits the centre of the ‘stage’ he has set as a bright red train approaches behind him, indicative of his time working in a construction crew on a railway before his institutionalisation. The strong, dark, straight lines expand outward, bringing fast movement to the piece as well as the feeling that the train is hurtling towards the viewer. The lines then separate the main focus of the collage from the rest, descending down into a softer, colourful pattern that fades into imagery of a sepia-toned town, ending in imagery of California, particularly imagery of one approaching California, as seen through the San Francisco postcard pasted to the bottom as well as outside shots of different buildings. The concept of Homeland can be found in many aspects of this piece, presenting itself in the concept that one’s home, no matter how faint the memory, will always exist in one’s core.
“Martín Ramírez | Milwaukee Art Museum,” Milwaukee Art Museum, 2007, mam.org/exhibitions/details/martin-ramirez/bio.htm.
Gisele Regatao, “An Anonymous Psych Patient Is Now Acclaimed as a Master Artist of The. Immigrant Experience,” The World , August 24, 2017, www.pri.org/stories/2017-08-24/anonymous-psych-patient-now-acclaimed-master-artist-immigrant-experience.
Mario Naves, “The Return of Martín Ramírez.," The Observer, October 21, 2008, observer.com/2008/10/the-return-of-martn-ramrez..
“Martín Ramírez | Milwaukee Art Museum,” Milwaukee Art Museum, 2007, mam.org/exhibitions/details/martin-ramirez/bio.htm.
Martín Ramírez, Untitled (Horse and Rider with Trees), c. 1952, crayon and pencil on pieced paper, 48 x 36 inches. Collection of George and Sue Viener. Courtesy Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia.
Untitled (Horse and Rider with Trees) Dandara Rimbaud
When referring to the term “outsider art,” it is essential to acknowledge that it is art in its purest and rawest state. Without outside influence and formal education for the arts, it allows an artist to produce more intuitively especially when it is made with cultural purpose and origins.
Martin Ramirez, born in Tepatitlán, Mexico, decided to move to the United States in order to pursue employment for his family. In the process of doing so he had to sacrifice leaving his then pregnant wife and three children. (1) For a short time he had worked with railway construction crews and on the railroads in California until he became too consumed with unjust societal pressures that led to being detained and institutionalized by the police. He was soon diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, and spent over 30 years being institutionalized in California mental hospitals. The DeWitt State Hospital in Auburn near Sacramento is where he began to make most of his drawings and collages that he is well known for. His work consisted of available materials such as examining table paper, brown paper bags and even pasted together with adhesive made from potatoes and saliva to assemble his memories. His artwork was collected and saved by Tarmo Pasto, who was a visiting professor at the time that supplied him with needed materials and helped organize shows for the public to reach Ramírez’s work.
Ramírez’s drawings are composed of repeating patterns and visuals of the Mexican Madonnas, trains, cowboys, and animals which demonstrate his alluding memories and migration. In Ramírez’s artwork Horse Rider with Trees, the jinete horseback rider is presented between a spiraling border and floral motifs that discuss the expected notions of the Mexican machismo and masculinity. (2) Imported to the New World, he was linked to values of bloodline, honor, family, and defense of the Church. From the confines of the psychiatric hospital, such an evocation of a traditional figure belonging to a culture in the process of extinction may stand for Martín Ramírez’s own persona. The jinete figure and Ramirez’s identification with his past come together in this piece and demonstrates his disappearing identity, as the jinete describes life and death and holds the power to life and death within his own hands.
"Martín Ramírez," Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, https://americanart.si.edu/artist/martin-ramirez-3930.
Víctor Zamudio-Taylor, "Untitled (Horse and Rider with Trees)," Martín Ramírez, American Folk Art Museum, 2007, https://folkartmuseum.org/content/uploads/2014/08/Ramirez_walltext.pdf.