BORDERBUS
Poem by Juan Felipe Herrera
Prints by Felicia Rice
Introduction by Carmen Giménez Smith
About the book
Review in Parenthesis 37, Autumn 2019
Review in Latino Book Review, August 2019
Article in UCSC NewsCenter, February 2019
BORDERBUS is a rendering of one long poem by Juan Felipe Herrera. The poem takes place on a U.S. Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bus. Two women have been detained while trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, and are being transported to a detention center. They speak in English and Spanish, whispering to avoid the attention of the guard. The text is embedded in prints by the artist/publisher and interpreted in audio recordings of the poem.
BORDERBUS began out of necessity, an urgent need to generate work that points to one of the most difficult issues of our time: the conditions experienced by refugees at our borders in the face of nationalistic extremism. It is the sixth book in the LITERATURA CHICANX/LATINX SERIES from Moving Parts Press which began in 1991. These works of contemporary Chicano/a/x artists and writers in translation are the result of a close collaboration between writer, artist, and book artist Felicia Rice.
About the poem
In the introduction to the book, Carmen Giménez Smith writes, “As a vehicle, metaphorical and literal, the bus changes forms throughout the poem. First it is hope, battered by the often-torturous trip to the States, weary but holding on to a thin sliver of hope. And to the nameless American nationalist obstructionist mobs and patrols, it is the alien vessel carrying encroaching human beings, often unwilling exiles forced out of their country because of ruinous U.S policy. This does not quell the tide, nor does it dampen the persistent optimism of the migrant. The poet writes:
No somos nada y venimos de la nada
pero esa nada lo es todo si la nutres de amor
por eso venceremos
We are nothing and we come from nothing
but that nothing is everything, if you feed it with love
that is why we will triumph
We are everything hermana
Because we come from everything.
About Juan Felipe Herrera
Juan Felipe Herrera is a poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist. In 2011, Herrera was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Herrera was the 21st United States Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, the nation’s first Chicano/a poet laureate.
Herrera’s experiences as the child of migrant farmers have strongly shaped his work. Community and art have always been part of what has driven Herrera, beginning in the mid-1970s, when he was director of the Centro Cultural de la Raza, an occupied water tank in Balboa Park that had been converted into an arts space for the community.
Herrera’s publications include thirty collections of poetry, prose, short stories, young adult novels and picture books for children. The poem “Borderbus” first appeared in Notes on the Assemblage in 2015 from City Lights Books.
Herrera was awarded the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for Half the World in Light. In 2012, he was appointed California Poet Laureate by former Gov. Jerry Brown. Herrera lives in Fresno, CA.
About Felicia Rice and Moving Parts Press
Felicia Rice is a book and performance artist, typographer and letterpress printer, printmaker, publisher, and educator. A student of the history of the book and printing, she also utilizes digital technology to produce limited edition artists books. Rice has collaborated with visual artists, performance artists, and writers under the Moving Parts Press imprint since 1977. Work from the Press has been included in exhibitions from New York to Mexico DF to Japan. Her books are held in library and museum collections worldwide and she has been the recipient of many awards and grants, from the NEA to the French Ministry of Culture.
Rice writes, “As a printer, my job is to confront complex issues and render my response to them in book form. As an artist, my job is to do so with profound integrity. As a publisher, my job is to make these issues public. As printers have done every decade since Gutenberg, I’m here to respond to the ongoing tragedy of dehumanization and to argue for a more just society.”
CRAFT IN AMERICA: VISIONARIES
In December 2017 Rice celebrated the 40th anniversary of Moving Parts Press with an exhibition in downtown Santa Cruz. The crew for PBS’s award-winning documentary series, Craft in America, filmed in the exhibition space and the next day in her letterpress studio. The segment, featuring the making of BORDERBUS, appears in the episode “Visionaries,” which aired on PBS stations nationwide in December 2018. The episode is available online here. A complete list of links to”Visionaries” and its related shorts is on this site here.
About the prints
Felicia Rice’s relief prints layer saturated color fields, fingerprints, photographs, drawings, type, and reflective surfaces in a polychromatic sequence of eight page spreads. The silver ropes of type present the whispered conversation between the two women on the bus. Rice’s sketches of the women’s faces are drawn from videos documenting the journey from Central America to the United States, Maria en Tierra de Nadie by Marcela Zamora and De Nadie by Tin Dirdamal.
About the deluxe edition
The deluxe edition of BORDERBUS is made up of eight copies of the book housed in an illuminated case designed by Felicia Rice and built by Gary Combs. The case is mounted on a base etched with the final lines of the poem, “We are everything hermana / because we come from everything.” This treatment presents the book as an enduring marker of the many who have made el viaje, the journey from the south to the U.S.-Mexico border.
About the audio recording
A usb drive included with BORDERBUS contains two audio versions of the poem, “Borderbus.” The first is a moving reading of the poem in two voices, by Marisol Baca and Gabriela D. Encinas, directed by Juan Felipe Herrera and recorded by Curtis Messer. The second is a recording of Herrera reading the poem.
Giménez Smith writes in the Introduction, “Herrera’s written poem is one level of material life for the poem, and the voices challenge the reader/listener to consider the real human bodies navigating the treacherous voyage to the States.”
Rice first explored the artists book as an integral part of performance with the collaborative artists book DOC/UNDOC. The artists book published in 2014 includes disks of the video and sound elements of the project, and the deluxe edition includes an interactive electronic case. In 2018 the trade edition of DOC/UNDOC was co-published with City Lights Books. A USB drive of the video and sound is included inside the back cover of this paperback.
In BORDERBUS the poem appears first as expressive typography embedded in relief images, then as straightforward roman type, and finally as an audio rendering. As Carmen Giménez Smith writes in the book’s Introduction, “…the voices challenge the reader/listener to consider the real human bodies navigating the treacherous voyage to the States.”
BORDERBUS brochure
In Spring 2019 members of the Laureate Lab Visual Wordlist Studio developed a brochure in response to the artist’s book, BORDERBUS. LaLab fellows worked together to create a collaged representation of textures that presents reactions to the lasting impact of BORDERBUS. Juan Felipe heads up the LaLab, located in Fresno, CA at California State University, Fresno. The LaLab serves as an experimental art, writing, sound, and movement space centered around creativity, collaboration, and free expression.
We’re happy to share this brochure with you as a digital file: Borderbus Trifold. If you would like to receive a print copy in the mail, please send your mailing address to frice@movingpartspress.com.
Acknowledgements
A very special thanks to those who helped with the process of making this book. Beau Beausoleil and Casey Walker contributed at critical points in Rice’s writing for the book. As always, Jim Schoonover, Rice’s life partner, gave valuable counsel on many aspects of this project, particularly the binding structure. “I doubt there would be a Moving Parts Press without him.”
BORDERBUS
Poem by Juan Felipe Herrera
Prints by Felicia Rice
Letterpress printed using Garamond, Meridien, and Ultra types from photopolymer plates on Rives BFK paper. Binding by Craig Jensen of BookLab II.
8 x 13 inches (extends to 17 feet)
Edition of 42 signed and numbered copies, with audio recording:
Standard edition of 34 in cloth-covered slipcase $2500 out of print due to 8/20 fire
Deluxe edition of 8 in lighted case $3200 out of print
10% of the proceeds from book sales will be donated to support
humanitarian aid projects at the U.S.-Mexico border.
www.movingpartspress.com/publications/borderbus
From the CHICANX/LATINX SERIES Artists’ Books
This series explores the intersection of cultures, disciplines, and book structures. These works of contemporary Chicanx/Latinx artists and writers in translation are issued in both limited and trade editions. Each book is the result of a close collaboration between writer, artist and the book artist, Felicia Rice.