As part of National Hispanic Heritage Month, La Casa de Amistad is celebrating a new art gallery at its South Bend headquarters.
Love and peace. They’re simple words, yet they carry the weight of the world within them.
That’s the sentiment expressed by Gilberto Cardenas and Delores Garcia. The avid art collectors have donated more than 120 pieces themed around love and peace to La Casa de Amistad, Michiana’s leading nonprofit Latino advocacy group.
The couple for years have been giving La Casa art to display on its walls and sell. This new gallery finally brings all the art together in one space.
La Casa executive director Juan Constantino says art plays a huge role in Hispanic culture. One of his favorite paintings by Sandra Fernandez is titled “Caution: Dreamers in/on Sight.” It depicts young Hispanic faces looking straight into the viewer’s eyes, against a background of a map of the Texas-Mexico border. There are two CAUTION street signs, one showing the silhouettes of three children running, and the other showing the silhouettes of three bigger children walking in graduation caps and gowns.
Constantino says the piece puts the word “illegal” into some context.
“It’s a good reminder of the advocacy and stories that we can share around our experiences to hopefully change hearts and minds around this,” Constantino says. “I came here when I was five. And I’ve been here my entire life. I’m now 31. And to still hear some of the negative rhetoric around Dreamers, it hurts.”
“Dreamer” is a term sometimes used for those whose parents are undocumented immigrants who brought them into the country after their birth. It’s named for The DREAM Act — Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors, a federal bill similar to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals that Congress has yet to pass.
But Constantino doesn’t let that dampen his enthusiasm for this new gallery. His face lights up when I ask him what kind of role art plays in Hispanic culture.
“Art allows us to express our Latinidad, our identity, who we are as Latinos,” he said. “It also tells a story in a number of different ways. It allows us to express ourselves differently. And I think, by and large, art also can archive history for us. There are so much history from our indigenous roots as Latin American folks from all parts of Latin America. It’s a beautiful way to express ourselves differently.”
