dear inSiters:
hopefully this letter would have been just to say hi to you and send best wishes, unfortunately there are as well other reasons i am writing this for:
in a luggage check at the denver international airport, the tsa/ immigration found both a 'tijuana calling' brochure and a copy of the game that anne-marie and me produced for inSite. they searched the insite website and all of its links and loaded the game and made me play it for them, they found that the game as most of the projectsnwere posing a threat to the us national security and that they were'antiamerican', in speaking about illegal crossings and trafffic, in their own words. one officer even told me to watch out who we were working for. i explained that the game as well as the other pieces of art had been commissioned by an art institution whose objective is to gain deeper cross understanding about life in the mex- us border, for both the peoples of mexico and the us, they said they didn't believed it and discredited the festival, evidently ignoring what art is. when i told them that the organisation was run by us citizens, they replied that not all us citizens are prone to like the government and its policies and that actually a lot of them were working against it.
the incident costed me a deportation, a night in a detention center, 5 years of denied entry to the us (where my wife lives and works) and interestingly a talk to an FBI agent, part of which i have written down:
after identifying himself as an fbi agent, an asian man (no accent) in a semi expensive suit with two mont blanc pens sticking out of his shirt asked me this:
q-do you know what a terrorist is?
a-yes
q-did you made a game about a secret tunnel in the mexico- us border?
a-yes
q-do you know of any terrorist activities in the border?
a-no
q-do you know how transborder tunnels work?, have you been at one?, or how else did you conceived that game?
a-from divulgative information found on newspapers, the game is a piece
of art.
q-are you sure you dont know of any tunnels? how come they appear at you game? do your game portrays any specifical location of a tunnel?
a-i am sure i have never been in such tunnels, the location was chosen by chance
q-art is for sharing significant things with other people, why do you put the border and the people of the us at large in risk?
a-i am not putting anyone in risk, again, the information the game is based on comes from public sources
q-did anne-marie schleiner worked with you in the game?
a-yes
q-can you write both, yourself and anne-marie's addresses in mexico city/ boulder with phone numbers?
a-yes (i do write the information)
q-have you been contacted by any terrorists that want to use your game for training?
a- no
q-are you sure about this? no suspicious mail been received lately?
a-no
q-if you are contacted by anyone trying to use your game as a terrorist weapon, lets say 'ahmed ahmud',or some mohammed or something like that, will you contact the mexico city office of the fbi?
a-yes, you can give me your card and i will contact you
fbi- that won't be necessary, just call the local branch since i am a denver- assigned officer.
Can you help us with any kind of legal advice, being it civil rights and/or immigration, facing the problem that this episode has aroused.
thanks, all the best
luis hernandez galvan
Project
Corridos
Anne-Marie Schleiner & Luis Hernandez (This is the artist that has been arrested).
Anne-Marie Schleiner & Luis Hernandez (This is the artist that has been arrested).
This is the Brochure that was found: