Crossings

In New York City, I enter a hardware store on an errand and I hear the clerk say a few words in Spanish. I recognize that it is Salvadoran Spanish and I say a few words to him. Soon we are talking about his village, Usultan, where I have been. I wonder, "was he a guerilla?" At his age, he would surely have been recruited. Or was he sympathetic to the right? What has he seen or experienced of the death squads? He has a past that he carries inside of him wherever he lives-- New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle-- as a kind of invisible wound.

- Introduction for exhibition of Crossings at The Art Institute of Chicago, 1990