At the International UFO Museum in Roswell, New Mexico, a group of grey-skinned, silver clad extraterrestrials stand rigid under a metal flying saucer that periodically emits a cloud of vapor from its base. The ground under the aliens’ feet is made to look like rocky desert soil, with plastic cacti and yucca plants interspersed with real rocks and fake rocks, while a replica of a juniper tree partially obscures the metal stand that holds the spaceship aloft. The photo backdrop, instead of depicting the local scenery of Roswell, where the High Plains of the Llano Estacado drop off into the Chihuahuan Desert, erroneously places the figures in the Sonoran Desert, indicated by the presence of a few tall saguaro cacti.
Museum exhibits recount the story of the purported UFO crash in 1947 in a field just outside of Roswell and the subsequent theories of military coverups, alien autopsies, and actual top-secret government surveillance programs. A kind of 20th century folklore unfolds in the chronicling of close encounters of the first, second, and third kind: flying saucer sightings around the globe, reports of strange psychological effects and missing gaps of time, and (wildly) various sketches of alien lifeforms that people claim to have seen.
Outside the museum, one encounters little green men everywhere. On benches, in restaurants, on signs and lampposts.
Before the UFO Museum opened in the 90s the Roswell Incident mythology lay somewhat dormant, staying alive only in the inquisitive imaginations of the UFO obsessed. The museum now welcomes thousands of visitors a year, the linchpin of the city’s new identity as a mecca for alien tourism.
Artist Eric J. García came to Roswell for a year-long stay at the Roswell Artist-in-Residence program and found the critical mass of aliens “seeped” into his brain and started showing up in his artwork. “I started questioning, who’s the alien? Who’s from here, not from here?”
García, who is known for his graphic style and political cartoons, grew up in Albuquerque and got his BFA from the University of New Mexico with a minor in Chicano Studies, and then his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Before that, he served in the Air Force for four and a half years.
He emerged from his service in a state of disillusionment. By that I mean he became aware of the “illusion” that the U.S. projected abroad and to its own citizenry. “Texas, the Alamo, the West, the idea of the cowboy, the frontier, [other] iconic Americana myths, these are super embedded,” he says.
The myth-building was on display in Roswell in an extremely conspicuous way: in the form of flying saucers and alien caricatures, all in service of tourism to the small Eastern New Mexico city. But it was all a grand distraction from the real truth, García found. Aliens were here, and they had in fact colonized the place.
In Roswell, I used to see these tourist shirts with an alien wearing a sombrero and serape, indicating that people from south of the border are not from here, are alien, are not human. Whereas there are many people crossing that border speaking Indigenous languages…They are from the Americas but now we’re calling them aliens.
In García’s video Alien Juxta (2021), he blends popular science-fiction images of extraterrestrials with “actual aliens”—juxtaposing Alf with Christopher Columbus, flying saucers with colonial ships. Even the language sounds sci-fi: the New World and the Old World. The Final Frontier.
Working with artist and video game designer Rafael Fajardo, García adapted the classic arcade game of Space Invaders, replacing the space aliens with cowboys, cannons, and cathedrals—symbols of American colonization. As the game player, you are an Indigenous person, shooting the invaders with a bow and arrow. “I want people to understand these perspectives,” García says, “that the colonial powers were not always here. There were a people here before you.”
To impress his message, García utilizes tactics of humor, satire, subversion, and a graphic style reminiscent of cartoons and the nostalgia of early video games. In his ink drawings, he often breaks down an image into basic geometric blocks, mimicking 8-bit graphics, a super-simplification of image and idea.
These tech-y icons, however, García renders in an ancient and Indigenous medium—cochineal ink, made from insects that inhabit the nopal cactus. When the Spanish brought cochineal back to Europe from the Americas, it became a phenomenon—carmine red. García also makes his own ink from the fruit of the nopal, the bright violet-pink of the prickly pear tuna, which is vivid and pretty, but unstable and lends itself to erasure if exposed to sunlight.
In Game Over (2023), García employs blood-red cochineal ink to depict the 1945 detonation of the first atomic bomb, the Trinity test, in the Tularosa Basin of New Mexico. Departing from the blocky 8-bit motif, a cloud billows up and away from the X on the map, indicating the lasting effects of fallout drifting across the surrounding region and up into the atmosphere. The moment the world entered the Anthropocene, according to some. GAME OVER, indeed.
During his service in in the Air Force, “working in the belly of the beast,” García came to learn the global extent of the U.S. military presence. He reflects on the pervasive myth of the benevolence and judiciousness of the U.S. empire, and how embedded the military-industrial complex actually is in our society:
I grew up completely militarized. I played G.I. Joes, I read G.I. Joe comics, I watched Rambo action movies, I played military video games, I was constantly being exposed to militarism, right here in Albuquerque with the Kirtland Air Force Base. Every day around six o’clock the Air Force chopper would fly over like clockwork. I was constantly bombarded.
His brother joined the military before him. It was understood that military service was a way out and a way to get to college. He says, “It was inevitable that I would join.”
Aim High is a recruiting slogan for the Air Force, but it also refers to García’s ultimate target when it comes to his artwork. He has his sights set on the biggest forces in the game: imperialism, colonialism, militarism, white supremacy.
With satire and wit, García exposes the construction of reality proffered by the powerful, the alien empire embedded in this land. Their narrative has evolved over the centuries, from the Doctrine of Discovery, to Manifest Destiny, to Make America Great Again or Build Back Better. But, with a blast from a ray gun, an arrow from a bow, or a stroke of the pen, García blows their cover, explodes their myths.
Eric J. García: Mythbuster, published as a fold-out gallery text on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition at Texas Tech University’s Landmark Gallery, February 17 - April 21, 2024.
0 notes