Mexican Cement Sleeping Man With Sombrero Folk Art Statue
Artifact: The Sleeping Mexican
AKA: Pancho, Pedro, Ramón, the Lazy Mexican, the Sombreroed Dozer, the Dreamer, the Resting Worker, the Siesta Motif
SIZE: Various
FOLKLIFE: Occupational Folklife, knickknack, stereotypes, cultural icon, borderlands, Chicanoculture, indigeneity, Mexico
Story past Kimi Eisele
Photographs by Kathleen Dreier
As the rhetoric about "dangerous migrants from the southern border" gets increasingly vitriolic, and as we caput into the summertime—when the desert oestrus becomes mortiferous for those traveling across information technology—I've been thinking a lot about the Sleeping Mexican.
You know him. Or her. Usually male person, but not always. Also known as Pancho, Pedro, or Ramón, the Sleeping Mexican may just be the quintessential–if not infamous–icon of the US Southwest and Mexico.
For many, the icon brings up memories of life in the idyllic Mexican countryside–the campesino who rises early and goes to work in the milpas, thus well-deserving of a quick "power nap" mid-afternoon. Nevertheless others cannot help simply cringe when confronted with the image, which seems to multiply advertising infinitum all over the Southwestern United States and beyond.
Pancho sits, aptitude knees, head lowered, shaded under a broad-brimmed sombrero. He wears sandals, loose pants, and a sarape, or striped coating or poncho, and is oft depicted leaning against a saguaro cactus, the other famous icon of the Southwest. If you live in the borderlands, he's nearly certainly close past. But if you don't, he'due south probably in your town or city, too—equally a figurine in a thrift store, on an one-time t-shirt, or on the sign of your favorite Mexican restaurant.
In Tucson, he leans against a cactus on a brilliant sign over El Minuto Café, a pop restaurant nearly downtown, and sleeps in neon to advertise the Siesta Cabin. And there are over 2,000 other examples of him in a Tucson drove kept and studied by Dr. Maribel Alvarez, a folklorist at the Academy of Arizona and ane of the nation'south leading scholars on the icon.
Alvarez was gifted the majority of the items from hobby collector, Jill Janis, who started collecting the icon in 1978. She'd find them in austerity stores, by and large, Alvarez says, in every course possible: as table salt and pepper shakers; figurines of plaster, woods, ceramic, tin, onyx, and plastic; napkins; placemats; dish towels; dishware; ashtrays; bookends; candy dishes; jars; planters; picture frames; and and then much more.
I wondered what kind of perspective the Panchos–in all their familiar, stereotypical, and aesthetic forms–might offer present-day debates on immigration in the borderlands and beyond. So I recently accompanied Alvarez to visit them.
Todos los Panchos
Inside the mid-town Tucson storage unit, near every inch of the hand-built shelves is covered with Sleeping Mexicans. The showtime one Alvarez picks up is printed on a ballcap. He wears a bright xanthous hat and is sprawled out, leaning against a green cactus. The words "100% Borracho," bladder to a higher place him. Spanish for "100% Drunk."
"That's really blatant, correct? Information technology's assumed that he's drunk. It's supposed to be funny. Information technology'south too a racist sense of humor, the kind that is always on the edge of making you lot uncomfortable," Alvarez says. "If you ask around, the average American would tell you lot it's but a cute figurine, nothing to be alarmed most; there'south a widespread disavowal of the negative messages that could be implied. But things that are funny to some are offensive to others."
As often the case with indigenous symbols that circulate widely through popular culture, the Sleeping Mexican is caught in a web of conflicting interpretations. And there many dimensions to its history, use, and significance that circumvent the racist ideology that surrounds information technology.
Like aesthetics, for instance. Alvarez picks up a ceramic white dish, porcelain, made in Italy. "Look how far and off the path of the Southwest these things get," she says.
Pancho faces forward, sitting cantankerous-legged, his lap forming the dish. She notes the painted gilt of the serape pattern. "What a beauty. "There'due south a composition. The sitting position is more than meditative."
"Compared to this," she picks up the drunken ballcap over again. "There's only so much rationalization yous tin can do. Everyone gets the joke, but how funny is information technology?"
The Sleeping Mexican has drawn enough of ire over the years, peculiarly from Chicano and Mexican intellectuals and activists, Alvarez says, who accept interpreted the icon as derogatory, ane that suggests laziness, drunkenness, and apathy.
Simply for others—the grouping of Mexican American parents and Mexican immigrants Alvarez recently spoke to at a school on Tucson'due south south side, for instance—there'south a dissimilar interpretation. "When I showed them the icon, they said, 'It's pretty obvious information technology's a campesino who woke upwards early on to piece of work and is taking a rest.'"
And when she mentioned the stereotype of drunk and lazy, "They looked at me, like 'What kind of perverted mind would think that? That's a total contradiction. When have y'all ever seen a Mexicano who's not working?'"
Indeed.
"That's the interesting thing, how something that is so factually reverse to the reality Mexicans live in the United States can proceeds such traction as an ideology. Mexicans accept always been workers in these lands. And they continue to be the primary source of cheap labor for the United states, from every eatery, part edifice, and field. And yet this is this prevailing value imputed to them."
None of this makes whatsoever sense, she says. "Unless one accounts for a larger, more perverse reality of ability and empire, intent on devaluing exactly the ones who add most value to your society."
From United mexican states to the World
Deeper into the shelves, we notice a plaster figure big plenty to fit into two hands. It's different from the other Panchos somehow.
"I always like to enquire, 'What are the essential elements that take to be for the icon to exist recognized?' Alvarez says, and then points out the blanket, the seated posture, the lid.
Dissimilar others, this figure's face up looks upwards, his hat brim not hiding his face. "This slice is the prototype in many ways," she says.
The original Pancho? Who was he?
"He is the peon from the Porfiriato era in United mexican states, where the formation of the haceindas brought in a lot of farmhands and workers agricultural workers form the ethnic communities to work in less than ideal conditions," Alvarez says.
Descriptions of indigenous Mexican workers appear in early on xixth century travelogues and photographs. Those references were neutral, merely noting the presence of workers in the plaza, say, taking a rest. Just every bit the epitome traveled due north, it entered a context of political and economic injustice, and began to be read and presented differently, Alvarez says.
We footstep further into the stack to find a pair of salt and pepper shakers fabricated of clay. "Based on the material and style, these are probably from Guadalajara in the 1940s," she says.
Effectually this time, Mexico begins to utilize the Sleeping Mexican in its hospitality industry. "Information technology's a way of evoking a sense of residue, a identify of relaxation, a place where you tin can become away from the hustle and bustle. That becomes part of the narrative of Mexican tourism, which of form benefits United mexican states and artists and artisans and handicraft markets," Alvarez says.
For a time, Pancho appeared on the label for Kahlua, Mexican coffee-flavored liqueur, though he later on was removed.
Nosotros look closely at a set of tea cups painted with a pastoral Mexican scene, consummate with Pancho, the cactus, pottery, and mountains in the distance. "These valuable cups and saucers get part of an era of nostalgia for the rural at height of industrialization and modernity. Mexico becomes properties for romantic, rural, accurate. Yous might come across these in a fine home of someone who maybe went to Mexico and can avowal of traveling."
Alvarez picks up a ceramic figurine and shows me the bottom, reading aloud. "Made in Occupied Japan."
"This is perhaps the well-nigh interesting of them all," she says. Subsequently World War II, from 1947 to 1952, at that place was an explosion of handicrafts with an "ethnic" aesthetic in American society. And Japan becomes the producer of the items and images that helped modern Americans display that.
"Middle grade white Americans begin to fill up their homes, their garage, the area on top of the television ready, the shelves in the living room with these representations of foreigners," Alvarez says. "You meet the Negress. You come across the Chinaman. You see the little Chinese boy and girl, ceramics. These are all very collectible."
This curiosity can be read as gauche or insensitive, just it also signified a desire for worldliness, Alvarez says. "This was a sort of working-grade artful of trying to demonstrate to your friends that you did take the openness to be internationalist. There was that sentiment of wanting to come across other cultures and feel that you were honoring them somehow. It's very twisted… and complicated."
Pancho Loses His Context
The story of the Sleeping Mexican icon and its various interpretations feels eerily familiar. The difficult-working laborer travels far from home and finds a measure of acceptance, in some places, but also enters territory where he's profoundly misunderstood.
I of the strategies that advances whatsoever stereotype is what Alvarez calls "a strategy of disavowal."
Decontextualizing the image makes opportunities for misunderstanding, caricature, and fifty-fifty harm. "So much of the meanings of dominant civilization are based on strategies of extraction. You extract the context of hospitality, of conviviality, of restfulness, of enjoying 'el placer de la vida' and then y'all turn all of that fabric into something negative," she says.
Like laziness. Or drunkenness.
Elizabeth Eklund, a doctoral student in the University of Arizona's department of anthropology who is helping Alvarez annal the materials, says she's seen plenty of examples in the drove that uphold those stereotypes—or worse.
"Some of the objects are extremely problematic, with overt comments well-nigh drinking, being drunk, or strong imagery of bottles, to reinforce that view. Some of the stereotypes are horrifying, with overly large toes … others with cartoonishly big easily. Other stereotyping implies face and head exercise not matter, where Pancho has no face—he'due south a faceless man," Eklund says.
But for every negative stereotype in Alvarez'due south collection, there is a positive icon. Eklund says within the collection are appliqués or stickers that appear again and again on plates, wooden plaques, and photograph albums, "implying this is a way an individual wanted to decorate or convey some aspect of self."
For Eklund, the most individualized pieces—peradventure ironically—come as simple, rough-hewn piece of woods, cutting with a bandsaw or jigsaw. "These works may not match the fine craftsmanship of Japanese ceramics, but they were not likely meant to sold in the starting time place. Instead, someone, perchance a student, made it for themselves or their family, and a piece of them is carried in that handicraft."
Re-interpreting Pancho
Artists and activists accept played with the Sleeping Mexican icon, shifting or re-visioning the aspects of the figure every bit a way of debunking stereotypes. Judy Baca's Pancho Trinity, for case, captures the dangers and sacrifices of Mexican migrant journeys to the Usa on the body of the effigy itself. "She's attempting to recapture that body as a canvas of history of social retention. That work is pretty powerful and very compelling," Alvarez says.
During the Unidos motility in Tucson, which protested the elimination of ethnic studies at Tucson High School, students wore T-shirts of the Sleeping Mexican. "But this 1 had his head in a volume, and you run across that what he's reading is one of the banned Raza studies books," Alvarez said.
Tucson printmaker Alex Jimenez's print "Trabajadores" depicts the Sleeping Mexican and the diverse types of labor he or she might exist engaged in. For her, the name "Sleeping" or "Lazy Mexican" has never felt correct. "Either interpretation is incongruous with the reality of the hardworking Mexican laborers I run into around me and in my family."
Jimenez says she designed the print to feel active, drawing the eye from ane thing to the next. "The viewer tin can feel the rhythm of 'piece of work-rest, work-residual, piece of work-residue' that flows through the piece," she says. "On a deeper level, the icons I chose represent the many forms of domestic labor that immigrants are employed in, labor they take on so their wealthy employers can 'rest'."
The Real Pancho
If we follow the history of real traveling Mexican workers, i of the places we terminate up is the Bracero Programme (in Spanish bracero means "one who works with his arms"). This joint program of the Country Department, the Department of Labor, and the Immigration and Naturalization Services brought Mexican laborers to the U.S. from 1946 to 1964 to address labor shortages primarily in the agricultural industry. Though arguably information technology created economic opportunity for millions of Mexican workers, the program was rife with inequities and injustices, including sub-standard housing, lack of food, and low wages. Many workers never received total payment for their work. These challenges eventually led to the creation of United Farm Workers, which sought to improve those conditions and wages.
Mexican immigration into the U.S. today looks different than it did during the 2d one-half of the xxth century, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Many new immigrants from United mexican states have college educations and speak English. Apprehensions at the border are lower than they have been in 40 years. More than immigrants from Mexico are returning to their home country than are coming to the US.
Nonetheless, were Pancho to head north from the agronomical fields or universities of Mexico today, he would find himself at the edge of a "crisis," pushed up confronting a proposed wall conceived and designed to keep out thugs, rapists, and criminals—all of which might represent a similar decontextualization, a similar strategy of disavowal.
Before we leave the storage unit of measurement, Alvarez retrieves a tiny Sleeping Mexican made of forest. She opens her palm to show me. "'It'southward just a piffling figurine,' people say. Only no thing is just the thing itself. Everything is complicated."
In reality, Alvarez says, Pancho "is a multi-dimensional being."
Resources
An interview with Maribel Alavarez about the Sleeping Mexican by the author was broadcast on KXCI's The Saguaro Minute podcast in September 2016.
Latino USA did a radio story on the icon in March 2016.
Gustavo Arrellano's slice almost Pancho, Alvarez, and Janis in the April 12, 2012 edition of the Tucson Weekly offers much history.
Source: https://borderlore.org/artifact-the-sleeping-mexican/
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