Growing up on the border will always be associated with light for Julio César Morales.
Morales is an artist and curator now based in California, but, he spent a good chunk of his career in Arizona as the curator of the Arizona State University Art Museum as well as the executive director of MoCA Tucson. That time in Arizona history, just as SB 1070 and Sheriff Joe Arpaio were riling the nation, changed his work.
Now, he’s out with a new exhibition that’s sort of a mid-career survey at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UCDavis. It encompasses much of his body of work — and says a lot about his childhood on the border.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: I want to begin with the backstory here … your story. You grew up on the border kind of in between the U.S. and Mexico, going back and forth a lot. And it sounds like that was interesting in lots of ways, but tell us about what it felt like from your point of view.
JULIO CÉSAR MORALES: Well, it was interestingm, because I lived in the city of Tijuana, and we lived in a place called Zona Norte. And that’s really as close as you get to the border wall. And so I always joke that we moved a block and, literally we moved a block because at the border everything’s built to the edge.
And so when I was a kid, maybe around 10 years old, we moved to San Ysidro, which is literally a block away. And … the majority of the family stayed in the Mexican side. And so back then it was a lot easier to cross. So, we would basically go back and forth many times per week up until high school.
And so that was sort of my upbringing between both cultures and, you know, learning English and speaking Spanish and thinking in English and speaking in Spanish or speaking Spanish, thinking in English. So it was this bicultural sort of upbringing that I experienced.
GILGER: Was that good, bad, challenging?
MORALES: I think a bit of everything. It was good, bad, a bit of a challenge as well. You know, if you go to Mexico and people ask you, “Where are you from?” And you say a border city like Tijuana, they’re like, “Oh, that’s not Mexico.” And essentially, you know, any border town because of the influence of the United States is not considered real Mexico in that sense. So, I grew up in this unauthentic Mexican way in that sense.
GILGER: Yeah. So let’s talk about this current exhibition you have up now in California, not here, but it’s a mid-career survey of your work. New pieces, but a lot of work that you’ve done throughout your career. How do you go through a career of work and put it together?
MORALES: I think you as an artist, you work with a curator. And then so we kind of went through my idea, which was very straightforward, is, why don’t we start in grayscale and go to color? Referring to the work itself, where there’s a lot of work that is just black and white. And then it goes into this burst of colors.
And I approach art making very much like if I was making a song, like musical terms. And I always say that I’m a musician, but my instrument is visual art.
“tomorrow is for those who can hear it coming” by Julio César Morales.
GILGER: So, I want to ask you about a couple of the pieces that I’ve seen from this show. You have one that’s sort of the front image, right, which is a neon sign that really stands out. It reads, “tomorrow is for those who can hear it coming.” Tell us about this and why you kind of go back to now neon often in your work.
MORALES: Well, because I grew up in the red light district in Tijuana. I was always surrounded by neon, whether that’s signage for grocery store or for a liquor store or for a nightclub. And it’s always been around me. And somehow I was always attracted to light.
My mom told me the story when I was a kid, I climbed out of my crib, and I went towards the light, which was an old heater that was a glass heater. And I put my hands on it, and it was very hot, so my hands got stuck, and my mom pulled my hands back. And the skin of my hands stayed on the glass itself. And so she told me, I didn’t talk for about a year after that or say anything.
GILGER: Wow.
MORALES: And so this attraction to light, somehow, and also being in San Ysidro and being bombarded by Border Patrol helicopters and lights coming into my bedroom almost every day, and waking me up at night. And then the work that you’re mentioning is the borderline between Mexico and the United States.
And there’s actually in the exhibition at the Shrem Museum, there’s four of them. We go back to 1640, before the arrival of Europeans, and then to 1844 before the Mexican-American War, and then the current border line. And then it finishes with the premonition of 2028, with a secession of California and New Mexico leaving the United States as we know it.
GILGER: Tell us about the why, I guess, behind the work that you do. Like, it sounds like you are addressing some of the things that you experienced as a kid and this sort of in between existence of growing up on the border. Is it therapeutic? Does it feel healing to create work like this?
MORALES: I think it does. I mean, I didn’t really think about it as being therapeutic. In essence, I was trying to empower more the image of the immigrant and what my role is in this current social climate and cultural climate that we have now. And so I think by doing this work, it does have a reflective sense to it. And I think it does help me heal, — I guess, if that’s the correct word — some of the trauma of what people go through living on the border on a daily experience and what they experience.
GILGER: Yeah. Let me ask you about your time in Arizona. You spent many years here as the curator at the ASU Art Museum, among other things in Tucson as well. What did that do to your work? How did that make you see maybe immigration, maybe the border a little differently?
MORALES: I think the view from a different state, specifically Arizona, is very different than California. And before I took the job, I actually wrote to the director of the museum, and my wife said, “Don’t. Don’t send that letter.” And I wrote a letter, and I said, “If I take this job, why do I want to go from one of the most liberal cities in the United States to one of the most oppressive?”
GILGER: Oh, wow. Yeah.
MORALES: You know, and that was during the whole SB 1070 and all that and Arpaio. And essentially I said, this is the kind of work that I want to do at the museum. And if you don’t like it, then don’t hire me, essentially. And —
GILGER: But they did.
MORALES: And he told me, no, I love that letter. That’s what I want you to do.
And so I created a lot of exhibitions as a curator, working with artists that addressed current conditions in Arizona, the border. And so we did a lot of really interesting socially-based exhibitions that really looked at the current conditions of migration and immigration in Arizona.
GILGER: So, we’re in another moment now, right, where immigration tensions are really high. We’re seeing ICE raids and arrests all over the country in record numbers under the Trump administration. What do you think art’s role is right now in artists like you, curators like you? What can you do now to speak life into that moment?
MORALES: I think what we need to do, and as a whole as well, is that we need to kind of turn the tables around in media literacy in regards to what we’re seeing, what’s being pushed in media and the current administration about migrants, that migrants are bad, and we have so many other strengths.
And essentially, this nation has been founded on immigrants. And so I think what we need to do is work together to create a larger understanding and appreciation of immigrants and their labor and give them equality as well.
“Line Cutters” by Julio César Morales.
KJZZ’s The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ’s programming is the audio record.
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