About this Piece

Sin Tierra Sin Voz (Without land, without voice) is inspired by the “500,000 Mexican Americans Deported” panel from The Great Wall of Los Angeles. This panel depicts the Mexican repatriation, which occurred during the Great Depression. Many Mexican Americans were deported because of their perceived burden on public infrastructure and the US economy (sound familiar?).

This panel, along with the other panels that depict field workers in California, resonated with me because of my experience growing up in Fresno. Since I was young, I worked in the fields and packing houses, similar to my parents and grandparents. This experience is reminiscent of a song called “Jaula de Oro,” which depicts the life of an undocumented migrant worker who can make money while working in the states but feels alienated and trapped due to fear of being deported, effectively making the US a “golden cage.”

In this panel, I noticed three main “characters”:

1. The rich fat white man. I saw indifference in his eyes as he profits from the terrible circumstances of the Mexican Americans in the background. There is also a newspaper near him that reads, “Officers hurl back...alien horde”—language that is very similar to how certain media outlets talk about ICE and their shenanigans. It is common rhetoric/propaganda used toward migrants in the US to justify and make people complicit with the injustices that are committed toward them. This character is represented by rumbling slams from the low end of the piano and clumsy low brass lines.

2. Mexican Americans. I noticed the price tags that represented their dehumanization and the reduced ticket cost they were offered for self-deporting. I also noticed their faces and how some are looking back, portraying a sense of reluctance to leave what they consider home. Their sentiments are reflected throughout the piece by a pensive melody first introduced by the flute early in the piece. Broken, clunky piano chords show the falling apart of their current livelihoods. The chaos brought into their lives, often in response to the rich fat white man and the train, is represented by franticness throughout the orchestra.

3. The train. With the train, I looked back at previous panels, like “Chinese Build the Railroad,” in which the faces of the Chinese workers can be seen in the train’s smoke emissions. The train is depicted in two main ways. One way is by the percussion with a scurrying snare drum and train bell sounds. This is often heard alongside the rich fat white man to highlight the connection between profit and plight of others. The second way is with irregular oscillating string harmonics to represent the braking of the train.

All of these elements make their way into Sin Tierra Sin Voz to create a temporary fluid musical interpretation of the panel, the historical baggage that comes with it, and how it relates to other panels and today. The US has proved to be fickle with its welcome to migrants, tapping their energy when it serves the country’s economic needs only to discard them when this energy has been exhausted or xenophobia rises to blur better judgment. You can see this cycle at work in historical events like the Mexican repatriation, when hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans were deported during the Great Depression, followed by the Bracero Program, when the US government brought millions of Mexican citizens to the country on temporary visas to fill the labor gap left by World War II. With the juxtaposition/combination of the different musical ideas that represent these elements in Sin Tierra Sin Voz, I aimed to reflect the clear symbolism shown in “500,000 Mexican Americans Deported” and the emergence of these themes in the mural as a whole.

—Estevan Olmos