'Las Madres' artist honors all mothers through her own

A mother's abiding concern for her child is unconditional and unending, perhaps the most powerful loving force among all living things.

Amado artist Valarie James came across a diaper bag abandoned in the desert near her small ranch three years ago, pondering the plight of the woman and her baby as she stared at the original birth certificate she found in the bag and brought back to her studio.

“It was like a crime scene, and I wondered what was their story,” she recalled asking herself.

“Since 2004, my neighbors and my colleagues and I have recovered over 35 embroidered cloths from the desert near my ranch in southern Arizona,” she wrote in Carino Mio; Art from the Migrant Trail, a piece for a national art magazine, “cloths created by nameless women, whose personal stories we will never know.”

Heirloom quality

Many are of heirloom quality, she says, lost by migrants struggling across the desert, stitched with words in Spanish of remembrance and love for mothers left behind when sons risk their lives for work.

“How similar this is to the work of own mothers and grandmothers,” she said. “It is the universal language of art.”

In a building next to the house, they hang on the wall above piles of backpacks, burlap bags, and bandages; shoes and shirts and mittens; pills and potions; kids' drawings and family photos; bits of Bibles and holy candles; a note to a father that says simply, “We want you to come back”—all remnants of faceless, nameless family members torn apart by the modern border struggle we all refer to as “the immigration problem.”

Dragging that diaper bag back, she found a small bottle of Johnson's Baby Shampoo, with the familiar No Mas Lagrimas-No More Tears brand.

It left an indelible impression on James, a former art therapist who left her parents' Alaska home to cross the country, as many teenagers did then, caught up in the turbulent generational conflicts of the 60s and 70s.

“I know what it is to be hungry, to be on the outside looking in,” she said as she recalled her own struggle then and still tries to imagine the pain her mother, a widow who now lives in Green Valley, must have endured as well.

They have long since reconciled, she explains.

“We've become the best of friends. My mother and I have managed to come to a sweet place.”

Featured in an article titled “Transforming Tragedy Into Art,” in last month's Tubac Villager, James has, since those discoveries, dedicated her craft to depicting the fragmented lives affected by the border-crossing crisis, specifically the relationship between mother and child.

Remarkably, the multi-media artist is “recycling” the discarded man-made items left in the desert, mixing them with grasses, mesquite, yucca, and other plant materials to get a “paper look,” sealing them with encaustic natural resins to create spectacular and heart-rendering images of this human struggle, notably the Las Madres project, which includes three life-sized sculptures she set with three other local artists in 2005 behind Pima Community College's Tucson campus that depict mothers concerned for their children's safety.

Those and more information about the project can be seen at www.lasmadresproject.org., and those interested in more of her work can find her at www.divinaarts.com.

Discarded artifacts

Particularly fascinating are her assemblages, part of the “Window Series,” hanging on her studio walls, each with its own story told through the discarded artifacts of thousands of Sonoran Desert immigrants.

“Ocotillo Rose” features old Ace bandages used to wrap injured feet, dyed with cochineal and wound around thorny ocotillo, eerily though unintentionally reminding one of the Crucifixion crown of thorns.

“Tea Leaves” combines a young woman's faded photo with tabs of birth control pills, depicting the tragic prediction that some may face sexual assault and so protect themselves from pregnancy prior to crossing.

“Doing this work helps me transform my feelings of powerlessness every time I meet migrants for whom I can do little more than offer food and water,” said James, who learned to embrace cultural differences early traveling the world as a Navy man's daughter, though she bristles at the mention of the complicated politics of the illegal immigration issue, emphasizing how it has divided us.

“I just reveal what I see,” she says, “ and art is learning to see.”

Grinding grasses and flowers to make pigments at age 3, digging clay from the Bay of Anchorage as a pre-teen to sculpt Indian heads, and weaving flowers and barks into tapestries were her earliest recollections of a developing passion for creative expression that eventually culminated in a successful art career as curator, manager, teacher, promoter, and skilled therapist.

National grant

Her work has been shown all over the country and earned her a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He pieces can be found among high profile collectors, corporations, and are part of the U.S. Embassies American Art Collection in South Africa and New Guinea.

In addition to the Las Madres Project, dedicated to her mother, James and two other producers are putting together “A Trail of Thread,” a documentary about her process of integrating natural elements and the trash she finds, and she's planning a border arts exhibit for September at El Ojito Gallery in Tucson.

Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson has commissioned her to do a “living memorial,” created from the distinctive tire treads soles from discarded migrant shoes. She hopes to complete it in August.

Seeking volunteers

Since moving to Amado three years ago to be closer to her students, she continues to look for volunteers to help with Las Madres as well as “Heirlooms in the Sand,” a new project to design and distribute cards and calendars that reflect her desire to help be a voice for all those mothers whose children are forced away by these kinds of economic pressures they face each day, as proceeds from their sale will benefit family-run handicraft businesses created on both sides of the border that she hopes will ease the burden that pushes fathers and sons to cross the desert to feed their families.

She's putting a lot of love into a clay rendition of her colleague and friend, the model for Las Madres, Antonia Gallegos, a migrant mother from Eloy who was reunited after 30 years with her kidnapped daughter.

More important to her, it seems, than any of her past accomplishments, projects in progress, or need to chronicle in her work the controversial great migration with no solution in sight, is the renewed and cherished bond with her own mother.

She's still moved to tears when she talks about that teenage time away from her when she was searching for herself.

James declared in the guest book on her Web site, “Las Madres Project is dedicated to my mother, who knows what it's like to lose a child before their time (her younger brother), and to all the other mothers who have lost their children in the desert.”

Much like the old Jewish proverb that states,” God can't be everywhere, so he invented mothers,” the work of this gifted artist, inspired by the woman who never gave up hope for her daughter's return, reminds us all that, regardless of our cultural and political differences, we were all once children, nourished by the most enduring love on earth.

Mike Touzeau is a freelance writer