The Pastoral or Arcadian State, Illegal Alien's Guide to Greater America

Teeming with hyperbolic and grotesque imagery, this work illustrates the fraught relationship between American soil and the people who live, work, and feed upon it. Compositionally and thematically, the lithograph parodies George Caleb Bingham’s famous painting The Jolly Flatboatmen, a romanticized landscape in which all of the subjects are white, charmingly bucolic frontiersmen. In mocking imitation, Chagoya’s subjects morph, contort, and slink into spectacle. The man at the center flaunts a body without skin—he is all bloody muscle and bone—and yet, despite the crudity of his condition, he continues to dance. A large sombrero towers atop his head, marking him as “other,” but also, per his exaggerated, seemingly desperate dance performance, as a “fraud.”

Historically, the terms “pastoral” and “arcadian” have been used to describe settings that are abundant, peaceful, and pure—untouched by the coarseness of law and industry. In artworks like Bingham’s, the evocation of pastoralism serves to paint western expansion as something natural and virtuous. Yet, we know today that expansionism did not come without its costs, most notably the violent usurping of land from indigenous peoples and the reinforcement of unjust racial and economic hierarchies.

Chagoya’s reference to pastoralism, however, is ironic. His subjects are no more “at peace” with the American landscape than they are accepted by Bingham’s vision of America. Rendered as if superimposed onto a stock image of the Great American West, the subjects in Chagoya’s print beg the question: for whom does the ideal of an American arcadia serve, and who does it exclude?