Yehimi Cambrón Álvarez

I first encountered discarded leather at the warehouse where my family builds custom commercial furniture in Atlanta. Left over from a project, I found it stashed within plastic shopping bags, collecting sawdust in a corner where they had set it aside for me. The scraps revealed evidence of my family’s touch coming together with the animal: black sharpie marks and straight sliced edges cut for upholstery patterns combined with the organic curves of the hide. This set of uniquely disfigured shapes were the discarded remains of luxury—odd shapes of skin deemed useless for their commercial purpose. They speak of my family’s artistry and labor, of undocumentedness, and of the animalization that sets the stage for this country to criminalize, invisibilize, and disappear undocumented people for their profit.

For hide to become leather, the skin must be removed from the animal and defleshed. Once the surface is clean and white, a tanning process permanently alters the protein structure of the skin to make it more durable. The materiality of this leather and its process of becoming resonated with me as an extension of my family’s and my own experience with undocumentedness and the violent systems intended to break us, forcing the formation of our very own thick, durable skin.

I wanted to mend the skin, to envelop it with softness. I began crocheting around its edges and invited my mother to help me make the discarded leather precious again. The meditative aspect of counting interlocking loops to weave an extensive collection of patterns became an act of healing. Embracing the discarded leather with a network of care echoed the power of individual actions that build collective movements. I adopted a ritual of crocheting around leather while listening to Angela Davis’ Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. I was stunned as she outlined the connections between the apartheid wall in Palestine, the Mexico-US border wall, and the profit-driven imprisonment of undocumented people in the US. This realization enraged me, and I cemented that rage into crocheted text embedded in the porous border of FUCK YOUR WALLS, marking the first site in my work where my undocumentedness is the thread that intertwines my struggle with other movements for liberation.

Yehimi Cambrón is a multidisciplinary artist, activist, and public speaker born in Michoacán, México. She immigrated to Georgia at age seven, grew up undocumented in Atlanta, and has been a DACA recipient since 2013.

Cambrón’s work explores the multiplicity of the undocumented experience and its thread in the movement toward collective liberation. Through public art, she has served as a monument-maker asserting the humanity of immigrants in Atlanta, claiming barren walls to paint landmarks that belong to undocumented people. Her work institutes a space for immigrants within the South’s dominant racial binary. From her first mural on Buford Hwy to her mural at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, she confronts the idea of who is worthy of public celebration in the home of the largest Confederate monument in the nation. She has worked to complicate the immigrant narrative through her solo exhibitions at the University of South Carolina’s Upstate Art Gallery (2022) and Oglethorpe University Museum of Art (2023), and has exhibited at MOCA GA, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and Agnes Scott College’s Dalton Gallery.

Cambrón received a B.A. in Studio Art from Agnes Scott College (2014), fully funded by the Goizueta Foundation. In 2015, she became an educator and one of the first Teach for America DACAmented Corps Members placed in Georgia. Two years later, she returned to Cross Keys High School, her alma mater, to teach art. In 2019, Cambrón left the classroom to pursue art full-time. She is completing her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a recipient of the 2023 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.

Yehimi Cambrón is a DACAmented artist, activist, public speaker and entrepreneur born in San Antonio Villalongín, a small town in Michoacán, México. She became undocumented at seven years old when she immigrated to Atlanta, where she was raised. Cambrón’s work elevates the stories of immigrants, celebrates their humanity, and has a special focus on the experiences of Undocumented Americans. She has painted landmark murals in Atlanta that unapologetically assert the presence of immigrants, depict the intersectionality, diversity, and complexity of their stories, and challenge the white male-centered history of who is worthy of a public, monumental celebration. She is currently partnering with El Refugio to shed light on the stories of those who are being harmed by the Stewart Detention Center, a for-profit immigration detention center located in Lumpkin, Georgia. This public art project will educate and call the public to action to advocate for the closing of the immigration detention centers in Georgia.