This billboard is The Migrant Body: deconstructing the experience of Latino immigrants in the US. The placement of this billboard is particularly salient. It's positioned right next to Mexican muralist, Jose Clemente Orozco's Prometheus inside Frary Dining Hall. The first modern fresco in the entire country. Placing this piece by such a landmark migrant-made mural highlights the valuable contributions migrants have made to the US.
Additionally, the billboard contains a drawing of a goddess Pomona, the namesake of this college and the town bias, bringing our focus to our geographic location, LA County. LA's population is 45% Latino. This piece asks us to be conscious of a relation between this art and the migrants who embody this experience around us. Labor, a central tenant of a migrant identity has a looming presence in the billboard. The background contains a scene of farm workers in the strawberry field, a profession typically linked to Latinx immigrants through the Bracero Work Programs of the 20th century.
The scrapbook nature of a foreground contrasts these faceless working figures with an intimate dissection of migrant soul. Connecting these mediums is an abstract mapping of a migrant's journey from Central America into the US. The collage contains an Aperture magazine cover, titled Latinx, a Polaroid from Spanish Harlem taken by Milan, and a protest scene from public domain. It also includes four drawings all by Milan, an unraveling American flag in gray scale, a blue tulip representing the Tulip Mania Market Crash in the 17th century, the aforementioned drawing of Pomona, and a drawing of Sisyphus's Mountain.
The mountain is also used in the female body. It's the only repeated medium between the five billboards, drawing a point of comparison between the experience of women and migrants in the US. The migrant experience is certainly Sisyphean. Everyday migrants wake up to social and legal barriers, impeding their right to exist, and must endlessly fight to have her humanity respected and unchallenged.
–Elias Diwan ’25