Mexican artist gives voice to the forgotten dead

When death came, they must have imagined that their voices, too, would be extinguished.

How could they have imagined that one day in a one-bedroom Newport Beach, Calif., apartment their lives would be resurrected by an artist named Laura Siqueiros.

It was almost as if these voices of the dead called out to her. The voices of the Mexican migrants who lay their heads down for the last time on the hot, desolate desert floor. The voices of the 90 soldaderas, the female soldiers of the Mexican Revolution, who were captured and killed by Pancho Villa. The voices of the Mexican families who struggled centuries ago to recover land that was once theirs but died on borrowed land.

Changing direction

As a teenager in her hometown of Guadalajara, Siqueiros dreamed of becoming a lawyer. She had even received a law scholarship and headed off to college.

Yet today, if you walk into Siqueiros' living room, you'll see her bookshelves aren't crammed with law books but with art and history books.

Instead of a living-room set, she and her husband, Xavier, make do with a tiny couch. They sold the dining-room table, too. She needed the room to tell the stories of her people.

She needed the living to know about the dead who had been forgotten, like the migrants who perished crossing the U.S.-Mexican border and whose bodies lie unclaimed in unidentified graves.

It troubled her every time she saw the rows of white crosses tacked onto the fence of the border in Tijuana.

So she labored and through her paintings honored the dead. "Who Will Raise the Shadow?" depicts a custom in Mexico in which a dead body is temporarily placed on a cross made of sand until a coffin is built. Once the body is placed in the coffin, the family performs a ritual to raise the body's "shadow" and help the soul depart.

"For me it's as tragic as you can get, as sad as it can be," says Siqueiros, 35. "I wanted to lift the shadows of the unidentified people who didn't get to have their shadows raised."

It's been only seven years since Siqueiros decided to dedicate herself to her art, encouraged by Xavier, who told her when they married in 1996 that even if they had to scrimp, he'd support her on his salary to give her the chance to pursue her passion for painting.

And while it might seem like a detour from her original intent of becoming a lawyer, she's actually traveling down the same path. It wasn't the money or the prestige that attracted her to law but a longing to reach out to those in need.

"I thought maybe I could help people," says Siqueiros, who had loved drawing as a child but took her first formal art class at 28.

Which is why, even when she left her law studies, disillusioned with the corruption in Mexico, she always remembered her original intent: to help people.

It's a passion she's carried inside of her most of her life — this drive to protect the fragile. Looking back, it may have been a sensitivity she developed as a 4-year-old as she watched her mother struggle with her health for three years before dying of a brain aneurysm.

"It's just the fragility of human beings — we're so little, so tiny, so nothing. That's what moves me the most — people," says Siqueiros, the youngest of eight siblings.

"Right now for the last eight years it has been the most wonderful life that anybody can wish for," Siqueiros says. "I'm as happy and lucky as anybody can be."

Exhibit spans history

Her coming exhibit (only her second) at The Second City Council gallery in Long Beach, Calif., is titled "Laura Siqueiros: A Mexican." An apt description for all the subjects she covers: from the 17th-century land struggles of the Mexican indigenous to the infamous Massacre of Tlatelolco, where the Mexican government launched an attack against student protesters in 1968.

Most of all they are stories that are often overlooked, like the legend of the 90 soldaderas who fought on the side of Venustiano Carranza and were captured and killed by the forces of his opponent Pancho Villa.

"The soldaderas were so incredible. They left everything behind and chose to fight right next to their husbands," Siqueiros says. "They were maids, they were mothers, they were wives, they were lovers. They were everything for the man and they're rarely mentioned, barely mentioned in the history books."