Deportation paved the way to art for this Mexican painter
By Liliana López Ruelas
Summary: The Kino Border Initiative helped Jose Luis Sotero find a new path to peace and discover a hitherto unnoticed dream.
“María y José Huyendo”, oil painting created in 2021 by Mexican artist Jose Luis Sotero. “I painted this one thinking of the mother of Christ,” he said. “Many times they had to flee when being persecuted, like migrants”.
Tucson, AZ- Jose Luis Sotero had never painted once before stumbling upon to the Kino Border Initiative in Nogales, Sonora. When he attempted to cross the Arizona-Sonoran Desert twice in 2015, he had no clue that deportation would reveal itself as one of his greatest blessings in disguise.
The native of Michoacán, Mexico, only wished to get into the United States to work hard and recover the peace he had lost back home, in a land that he described as a dire war zone.
“You can't have absolutely anything (in Michoacán),” Sotero said on a mid-October afternoon while scanning a room dimly lit, but bursting with art and passion in Nogales, Sonora, a few steps from the Mariposa port of entry.
“You can't have a good business; you can't have a quiet life. In Michoacán, everyone is forced to pay a permit in order to be able work,” he said. “You have to pay the government, and you have to pay to the organized crime.”
After walking for eight hours through the desert in the Sonoita, Arizona, area, Sotero was arrested by Border Patrol agents. He spent the next year of his life in prison in Eloy, Arizona, and was deported to Mexico in 2016. In the fiscal year of 2016, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency carried out 240,255 deportations, a figure similar to the more than 249,000 deportations of the fiscal year of 2022.
The attempt to settle in the United States had failed, but Sotero’s life changed when he asked for humanitarian assistance at the Kino Border Initiative in Nogales, Sonora. The Catholic nonprofit organization provides assistance to migrants and advocates for fairer public policies for displaced people.
Sotero found in the Kino Initiative a new path to peace and discovered an until then unnoticed dream: to paint and use his art to spread personal healing and economic relief to other migrants.
Jose Luis Sotero talks about the painting workshop offered by the Kino Border Initiative to immigrants who receive their services in Nogales, Sonora. Sotero said that this workshop, part of the Projecto de Vida program, changed his life.
Photo by Liliana López.
“When I came here, to Nogales, this is what fed me,” Sotero said.
This was possible thanks to Proyecto de Vida, a program of the Kino Initiative that offers sewing and embroidery, baking, and painting workshops with the hope that migrants can earn money and become independent.
“I learned everything here,” the self-taught artist said. “Or watching YouTube, or here. Now I exhibit in museums, and in important galleries.”
The power of migrants
Despite never having set foot on American soil again, Sotero has been able to exhibit his paintings in various places in the United States, including the University of Arizona and the Mexican Consulate in Tucson. The Nogales Museum of Art represented his first great showcase, and the spark for many other opportunities.
Sotero's pieces portray the desert, desolation, U.S. law enforcement, and death. Many have been purchased by art admirers and collectors.
In one of the paintings, a woman cries in the desert next to the corpse of a man. “She is longing to have something to support her, someone, when her partner or her family member is no longer there. She can't do anything for him anymore,” Sotero described.
In another one of his paintings, a Border Patrol agent points his gun at a man fallen on the desert floor: Christ.
A constant element in Sotero's work is the portrayal of the gallons of water carried by migrants or left out in the desert by aid and rescue groups. “For me, they made a lot of difference in my walk,” said the Kino artist who is now the main painting workshop volunteer.
Sotero lives off his art in Nogales, Sonora, and has no intention of returning to Michoacán or the United States.
He is currently working on planning a large public mural in Nogales, for which he is raising funds, including donations from organizations and individuals.
His purpose is to raise awareness on the topic of migration through his paintings. “The deaths that happen in the desert, why do they happen? How do they happen? This is what I am dealing with in my artwork,” he said.
“Migration is trauma, it is rupture.”
In this painting by Jose Luis Sotero, the message “We are not illegal” is on one of the train cars that running migrants are trying to reach. A man without a leg is supported by a minor and a crutch.
Photo courtesy of Jose Luis Sotero
The trauma of forced migration
Kino's workshop program, Proyecto de Vida, became a cooperative.
The pieces made by the migrants are sold through the cooperative to the Kino Initiative itself, which then puts them on sale among members of the community and institutions that frequently visit the organization, such as schools, parishes and donors, explained Pedro De Velasco, director of Education and Advocacy at Kino Border Initiative.
In addition to paintings, Kino migrants create jewelry, napkins, tablecloths, and embroidered blouses. They also bake bread, cookies, cakes, and pizzas.
De Velasco said that the purpose of the cooperative is to generate not only a temporary and expeditious income for migrants but a possible path to emotional and financial stability, which is part of the philosophy of “empowerment” of people in transit that distinguishes the institution.
“We want a person to be emotionally strong and well-informed to make decisions,” De Velasco said.
Someone who is forced to leave his place of origin and his people must heal, said De Velasco.
“Migration is trauma, it is rupture. Migrants must leave their family behind,” he said.
Especially now that violence is the main cause of expulsion from their countries of origin, “migrants come with trauma and are stuck (in Nogales, Mexico), because current public policies prevent them from reaching their destination,” De Velasco, explained.
From January 1 to October 31, 2023, the Kino Initiative served 8,302 people within its shelter, dining room, medical care, legal advice, and psychological support services, in addition to its education and advocacy work.
More than 75% of the migrants who have arrived in Kino this year are Mexicans, mainly from Guerrero and other states in the south of the country, because they are the ones who have the best chance of taking a bus and reaching the border without being intercepted by organized crime in their attempt to request asylum in the United States through the Customs and Border Protection CBP One app. A large part of these migrants are women with children.
Unlike the Initiative Kino, where Mexican migrant families are the majority, in Nogales, Arizona, and other cities in the state and Sonora, many migrants of other nationalities can be seen, and that´s because Mexican organized crime intercepts them before reaching the border and offers them – or forces them – to cross into the United States, De Velasco said.
His dream was not the American Dream
Like many migrants, Jose Luis Sotero claims that if he had been able to live in peace in Michoacán, he would never have left his land.
“The United States is not a place that I like,” said the artist, who has previously had the experience of living and working in the U.S. for a short period of time.
“I tried to reach the U.S. because the first thing people tells you is 'go to the United States, you'll be calmer and better there', but it wasn't like I wanted to go to the United States. I already knew what it was like to be in the United States. It is a life of slavery. You work from 4:00 in the morning and take a shower at 10:00 at night,” Sotero said about the lives of many hardworking immigrants in the States.
“That's not life.”
For Sotero, misinformation – often intentional – is the main evil that afflicts migrants who, like him, seek to reach the United States through the desert.
“If I had known what asylum was and that I could apply, I don't know, to Canada or another country, I would not have crossed the desert on foot, walking eight hours or however long,” Sotero said.
“I would have been better off looking for asylum somewhere else, honestly.”
Either way, Sotero is currently very grateful for the trip that changed his life.
“The Kino Initiative caused a radical change in my life,” said the painter. “It showed me that I could seek another lifestyle with art, and that´s how I rebuilt my life from scratch.”
Liliana López Ruelas is a bicultural journalist and editor and a graduate student at University of Arizona´s Bilingual Journalism Program. She is the main web editor of Beyond the Wall: A Journey Between Life and Death.