In Other Words
Drawing on Anger: Portraits of U.S. Hypocrisy by Eric J. García
In Eric J. García’s first collection of political cartoons, the most frequently recurring figures are one very dysfunctional couple: a scheming, self-mutilating Uncle Sam and his long-suffering conscience, Lady Liberty. In one panel, Sam sits on a hospital bed, stabbing himself in the leg with a bloody machete marked “WAR.” An angry surgeon, “VA,” frantically tries to mop up the gore — labeled “VETS” — as Lady Liberty looks on in horror, limply proffering a Band-Aid. “HELP US HELP YOU,” a balloon ironically proclaims. Like much of García’s work, the image is visually incisive, provocative, and arresting.
Since 2004, when García’s cartoons began to appear in the University of New Mexico’s Daily Lobo, the autoplaying telenovela of political shenanigans and social injustices on the national stage has provided a steady stream of inspiration for the artist. The targets of Drawing on Anger: Portraits of U.S. Hypocrisy are in perpetual motion as the book’s timeline, organized by year from 2004 to 2017, marches forward — from Donald Rumsfeld’s legalized torture of prisoners of war to the femicide of Mexican maquiladoras, from the abuses of the U.S. Border Patrol to the leaky Keystone XL oil pipeline.
Born and raised in Albuquerque’s South Valley, García is a Chicago-based graphic artist, muralist, and educator who has published cartoons in a variety of venues. In the book’s epilogue, Theresa Avila situates García in the tradition of Mexican graphic artist José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913), who projected the issues of his day onto satirical, grinning calaveras. Of García’s unmistakably Chicano point of view, Avila writes, “Mainstream media in the U.S. typically narrates current events for an audience who is assumed to be the ‘average’ citizen or Anglo Saxon or white and conservative. Negotiating his own perspective and position, García (re)figures Latinos within U.S. history and freshens contemporary issues through a view distinct from what is typically found in U.S. mainstream media.”
The collection is aptly titled: García’s pen is wrathful. Some of his most striking images are free of dialogue: a gnarled eagle wrapping its claws around a nest lined with an arsenal of machine guns, for instance, or Lady Liberty attempting to pop a pus-filled pimple labeled “GITMO.” The sequential cartoons showcase the recurring and unresolved problems of the past 14 years: illegal immigration, veterans’ issues, student loan debt, genocide and torture abroad, and cops with itchy trigger fingers. The state of New Mexico rears its head from time to time, as García depicts Sandía and Los Alamos lab personnel urinating into a Río Grande filled with toxic nuclear waste, or a well of “N.M. WATER” being stalked by a trio of usurpers: a portly cat in a three-piece suit smoking a cigar, a prospector marked “GOLF COURSES,” and an Intel company miner.