Invader No. 1, the first in an ongoing photographic series, confronts notions of nativeness and invasion in the context of land ownership, ecology, and labor. Centering on the inherited erasure of identity and the assimilated image of the immigrant, this work positions the idea of the “invader” as both the white European and the non-white foreigner. By redeploying the conventions of 19th-century portrait photography, the work makes use of the visual iconography of “nativeness” constructed by white Americans during a period of increased immigration and fervent, reactionary nationalism.
In doing so, it seeks to undermine the reductive binaries developed to determine and represent the terms of inclusion and acceptability imposed on non-white immigrants to the United States. As part of an ongoing photographic project, this image and the others in its series specifically interrogate how the Eurocentric discourse of the native continues to affect the conditions of possibility for a lived experience of local ecologies available to the generations of non-white, primarily hispanic, immigrants whose relationship to the land rarely involved ownership.
In doing so, it seeks to undermine the reductive binaries developed to determine and represent the terms of inclusion and acceptability imposed on non-white immigrants to the United States. As part of an ongoing photographic project, this image and the others in its series specifically interrogate how the Eurocentric discourse of the native continues to affect the conditions of possibility for a lived experience of local ecologies available to the generations of non-white, primarily hispanic, immigrants whose relationship to the land rarely involved ownership.