Passports are small works of literature — they tell a story of a place . Pilar Castillo ’ s handmade , hyper-real rendition of an American passport is a confrontation , an act of rebellion against what the artist deems an anesthetized version of American history . Her decolonizing design eschews the Americana of the U . S . passport . Instead , in this scathing counter-narrative , Castillo redesigns its pages with archival photographs and quotes that conjure the dark stains of America ’ s history . Tracing a chronology of trauma , a flip through this ersatz passport unfurls a timeline of the harm done to Indigenous peoples , immigrants , enslaved Africans , the vulnerable seeking refuge , and the disenfranchised . The archival images depict Native American children at a boarding school ; a Japanese-American internment camp ; Chinese immigrants in a detention center ; enslaved Africans working cotton plantations and laboring on prison farms in the American South ; the working conditions of Mexican migrant farmworkers — among others .
In other subversive acts , Castillo mimics the passport security feature , the wavy pattern that overlays all pages of the document , by superimposing a chain-link fence over the images . On the identity page , the artist digitally inscribes a portrait of a woman whose gaze is turned away from us . She is Hopi — one of the oldest living cultures in documented history . But in this passport , she is branded “ Immigrant Foreigner .” Castillo ’ s PASSPORT is a form of protest , compelling us to question the ( missing ) stories we tell of a nation .
Castillo ’ s PASSPORT is an exercise in radical truth-telling that resists revisionist histories and the hegemony of statesanctioned erasure . In this work , historical memory privileges and centers people of color who have fought valiantly to dismantle systems of inequity and oppression in a country that would prefer to forget them .
— Amanda Elena Brito Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies , Art History
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