Alvaro Enciso: The Tucson artist on a mission to honor migrants through contemporary art

By Olivia Krupp

Like so many others, Alvaro Enciso arrived in the U.S. from Colombia in pursuit of the American

dream. The 78-year-old immigrated in the 1960s, served in Vietnam, and went to college in the

States - but years later still found himself with an internal question. Is he still a migrant, even

after all of these years? What happens after the American dream? Was there ever one at all?

Asking these questions birthed the start of Enciso’s ongoing art project, “Donde Mueren Los

Sueños,” a tribute to migrants who have passed in an effort to cross the desert for a better life.

Inside his Tucson home, Alvaro makes and paints countless wooden crosses, which he later

places them in the desert each week at the site of various migrants deaths to honor their lives

and identity. “When I learned that people were dying here, I needed to develop a conceptual art

project. To mark the locations where people died, to sort of alter the landscape to put something

there that doesn't belong in the desert but is there to point fingers. To show that inside of this

beautiful landscape, the Sonoran Desert, it has a secret,” said Enciso.

By marking a cross at each location of death in the desert, he is able to give the migrants a

presence - one they may never have gotten before. For Enciso, his art is an effort to honor what

we do not know. When a migrant passes away in the desert, sometimes all he knows is the

name or maybe even the age. The outsider does not know where the person came from, their

story, or their family - most of the time the individual just remains a red dot on a map.

Through his art, Enciso is not only able to shed light on what is happening to migrants crossing

the border, he is also able to honor and dignify them as well. For him, it’s all about making the

invisible, visible.

With the New York Times featuring a photo of one of his crosses, or documentaries about his

work being shown in Japanese or Italian, Enciso has created a ripple effect throughout the

entire world through his art. The fulfillment he has gotten from “Donde Mueren Los Sueños” is

immense, as the project has given him a sense of purpose in his later years of life while

simultaneously shedding light on the Sonoran Desert’s secret. “As you get older, I learn that you

tend to disappear from view. No one sees you anymore because you are old. But now, people

know me,” he said. Enciso is a famous artist and is very well known for his humanitarian and

activist work. “So, that gives me a little bit of presence. At the same time, it gives me great

satisfaction that my work has been shown all over the world.”

While the story of migration is both vast and ongoing, it seems as if Enciso has made a notable

dent in the fight for awareness. To him, the cross is an alteration on the landscape, an artistic

intrusion on the desert. It symbolizes something that maybe shouldn’t be there, but it is.

While Enciso hopes to one day be able to take them all out, the artist will continue to make and

place them throughout the desert to honor all of those who have come and passed. Through

each cross, Enciso has unraveled a bit of the Sonoran Desert’s secret.