Transcendental Train Yard: A Collaborative Suite of Serigraphs

By Norma E Cantú and Marta Sánchez

Transcendental Train Yard is a collection of color serigraphs accompanied by bilingual poems, in Spanish and English, inspired by the artwork. Transcendental Train Yard provides the reader a glimpse of the role the railroad and the carpas (itinerant vaudeville troupes) played in the Mexican American community. Artist Marta Sanchez and poet Norma Elia Cantú collaboratively render images and words that poignantly reflect specific periods in that history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781609402280

Book preview

$22.95

The importance of trains and train yards as an enduring image in American culture at large is undeniable. But to the Latina/o community, especially to Mexicans and Mexican Americans, that image is fraught with both death and hope. El tren de la muerte, the Death Train known as La Bestia, is the best-known conveyer of tragedy, carrying hundreds of thousands of migrants north. Along the way they suffer rape, robbery, and murder.

Yet trains also are symbols of hope and memory. As Dr. Tomás Ybarra-Frausto writes, trains have become vehicles for meditations on absence and return, labor and celebration….

Artist Marta Sánchez has been fascinated by trains and train yards her entire life. Even as a child, the nearby train yard provided her with images of … a landscape alive with mysteries.

Poet and scholar Dr. Norma E. Cantú also grew up beside the tracks on both sides of the border, raised on her grandfather’s stories of traveling to exotic and racist towns as a railway worker during the Depression. Her poetry explores Sánchez’s images using her own memories as a map.

The visual and literary texts collectively produced by Marta Sánchez and Norma E. Cantú in the Transcendental Train Yard suite affirm the centrality of the railroad in Mexican and Mexican-American history and culture. Their expressionistic, dreamlike representations bring to consciousness reservoirs of feelings and primordial images from the Mexican collective unconscious…. Ultimately, trains became vehicles for meditations on absence and return, labor and celebration, rootedness and uprootedness, homeland and immigration, and the human desires to belong and to find completion. This is what Tanscendental Train Yards does; it invites us to reminisce, to meditate on these issues and to dwell in our memories.

—Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, Ph.D.

For Marta Sánchez, trains and train yards are sites of struggle and wonder and dreams. They are transcendental loci, and it is through her journey and her art that she shows us the possibilities of discovering the nature of divinity and joy in the environment that surrounds us.

—Constance Cortez, Ph.D.

In the work of Marta Sánchez and Norma E. Cantú, both the carpa and the railyard emerge as reoccurring dream images in which personal pleasures and collective traumas repeat themselves.

—Peter Haney, Ph.D.

All artwork is by Marta Sánchez and is used by permission of the artist.

First Edition

Hardback Edition ISBN: 978-0-916727-97-0

ePub ISBN: 978-1-60940-228-0

Kindle ISBN: 978-1-60940-229-7

Library PDF ISBN: 978-1-60940-230-3

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