Ernesto Yerena

This piece is the work of Ernesto Yerena, a graphic design artist who has a unique identity and perspective as someone who was born in the U.S. and attended school in the U.S., but who spent a lot of his everyday life in Mexico as he was growing up. I believe that this bicultural perspective lends his work credibility and authenticity.

One of the things that I liked about this piece as I was looking through Yerena's work was how it grabbed me. The child's face is central and the stripped blue lines ensure that your eye goes straight there. On further consideration of the piece, I began to feel however, somewhat emotionally manipulated. The words "We are human" printed on the child's hat, in conjunction with "Stop the raids" printed on the child's chest I think force the viewer into coming to a conclusion they might not agree with. There is no room for disagreement on this poster without "losing face" and perhaps more importantly, no room for the audience to come to any conclusion on their own - all of the answers are already there. No person viewing this poster is going to contend that immigrant children and the children of immigrants are not human, and since the statement "I am human" is tied to the call to "stop the raids", agreeing with the first statement assumes agreement with the second, an assumption that may cause resentment among some viewers. People don't like to feel manipulated, or caught, or forced into agreement.

That said, I think that might have been part of the artist's intent with this piece, and I think that it is effective, and a risk that many artists must take. I think that this poster is emotionally manipulative, but isn't that one of the goals of the artist - to elicit emotion. And this poster forces the viewer to confront the dehumanizing system that is our immigration system and ask themselves how a human being, a child, can be an "alien".

By Kate Pritchard