In U.S. jurisprudence, the term “alien” refers to “any individual who is not a US citizen or national.” Chicano artist Eric García (b. 1977) uses this expansive “alien” concept to critique historical frameworks of the Americas in his 2022 work, Space Invaders. Beyond the exactitude of U.S. legalese, “alien” connotes extraterrestrial life, or life beyond this planetary world. Garcia believes the U.S.’s application of “alien” to non-citizens has a dehumanizing approach to people. Despite the country and hemisphere’s colonial past, there is a collective neglect of identifying the colonial invasion that took place in the 15th and 16th centuries CE, with the arrival of Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) and Hernán Cortés (1485-1547), as that of an alien invasion. García draws inspiration from science fiction, Chicanofuturism, Mesoamerican histories, and the Americas’ colonial conquest, using these themes to challenge the boundaries of the term “alien” and pose a simple question: “Who is from the Americas, and who is not?” He argues that the colonial conquest of the Americas was analogous to an alien invasion, a “war of the worlds.”¹
Space Invaders was part of García’s solo exhibition at the Roswell Museum, as a culmination of his Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program (RAiR) in 2022. Roswell, New Mexico, is known amongst alien and government conspiracy theorists due to the 1947 teletype that described a “flying disc.”² The city embraces its place in alien popular culture, featuring highlights such as an annual UFO festival and the Roswell UFO Museum.³ Surrounded by the environment of alien Americana, García chose to reflect on the historical conquests of the Americas to probe this colonial past from an Indigenous conceptual lens.
Installation view of Space Invaders exhibition at the Roswell Museum, 2022.
García’s oeuvre is defined by his graphic explorations of imperialism, the military-industrial complex, and colonial histories. He is part of a legacy of Chicano artists who embrace these themes, such as Malaquías Montoya (b. 1938), Rupert García (b. 1941), and Jesse Treviño (1946-2023). This community of artists draws on their past military experiences to critique U.S. invasion, dominance, and exploitation, as well as their own complex personal experiences of combat and service. García’s Space Invaders continues his creative journey, focusing on specific militaristic histories and alternative viewpoints, such as the invasion of the Americas.
Space Invaders is a multimodal installation featuring alien reinterpretations that highlight significant moments of colonization in history. The main centerpiece consists of canvas topsails, forming a deconstructed Spanish galleon, a multi-deck sailing ship. The sails are decorated on both sides, with one side displaying a set of projections: a looped, projected animation of UFOs, Spanish ships, and extraterrestrials on the bottom, and a reimagining of the strategy computer game Oregon Trail (1971) alongside the classic arcade shoot ‘em up game Space Invaders (1978) on the top.
Installation views of Space Invaders exhibition at the Roswell Museum, 2022.
This frontal side presents a nostalgic pedagogical framework of late 20th-century media, including classroom projectors, endless slide carousels with looped images, and pixelated arcade screens. In each of these projected spaces, the images and information create an amalgamation of alien space and unknown territorial invasion. The sails present a refined interpretation of the science fiction phrase “we are not alone,” embracing extraterrestrial consciousness, scientific inquiry, and coexistence in a more nuanced reflection of malevolence and aggression when civilizations fatefully collide.
The reverse sail is a painted set of dense figural scenes in a magenta, luminous hue. While at the residency, García experimented with the tuna (prickly pear) found on cacti autochthonous to Roswell. He wanted to counter the overwhelming alien imagery with organic Indigenous material and engaged his desired ink consistency as though it were a “scientific trial.” The result was a creative linear interpretation and visualization of the cactus, which was significant to the area.⁴ Through this medium, García brought forth the land and rendered it a form of agency in a conversation about coloniality. Often, the environment is an absent variable despite its centrality in war. The tuna, as García’s ink, was part of an ongoing practice to reject the Western art world’s hierarchical preference for oil on canvas. His medium was the message to reject further facets of Western colonization.
The painted topsail side reconfigures Space Invaders, replacing the icons with Mexican conquest symbols, such as churches and cannons. The lower sail unveils an elaborate rendering of the historic meeting between Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes and Moctezuma II, the Aztec emperor, outside the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán on November 8, 1519.⁵ The interaction is an infamous assembly and would eventually lead to the fall of the Aztec Empire. García renders this moment through the concept of Chicanofuturism. Coined by Catherine Sue Ramírez, she argues that Chicanofuturist work utilizes the “tropes of speculative fiction ... to excavate and retell histories of contact,” from a Chicanx and decolonial perspective.⁶
García compacts the monochromatic scene with a panoply of UFOs, Aztec temples, satellites, comic book characters, and contemporary portraits, such as Ernesto “Che” Guevara. There is a maelstrom of Chicanidad that reads like a panel from comics and sequential art. In those forms of art, translating speech and sound, often in the form of onomatopoetic graphics, is central to reading the action. As an avid graphic novelist, political cartoonist, and sequential art historian, García uses the sail as a central comic panel featuring a significant action in the form of alien civilizations meeting one another.
At the center of the scene is a woman figure that recalls Star Trek’s character, Uhura. This character was a communications officer tasked with speaking different alien dialects. The sci-fi callback parallels the Indigenous woman Malintzin (Malinche) (1501-1529 CE), who acted as the translator for Hernán Córtes during the Mexican conquest. Given her role in the conquest, a common pejorative is to refer to one as a “Malinchista,” or a person who has a non-Mexican culture infatuation. In contemporary Chicana art and literature, feminist Chicanas have uplifted and reclaimed her as a heroic figure rather than a traitor. Garcia continues this subversion, having Malintzin multitask and translate, attempting to prevent inevitable chaos.
Other features of Space Invaders include the “Little Green Men” series featuring colonial portraits of figures like Captain Joseph Calloway Lea (1841-1904 CE), an ex-confederate general who owned most of Roswell’s land in the late 19th century.⁷ García zoomorphizes this historical icon, making him the gorilla general from Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), General Ursus. The exhibition also features a radical tour guide that navigates viewers through Garcia’s claimed “alien artifacts,” including the Roswell Museum’s collection of Spanish conquistador artifacts, such as helmets, weapons, and uniforms.
García’s Space Invaders is an intergalactic decolonial mission of graphic satire that challenges every aspect of hemispheric history. Through science fiction, military investigations, and local histories of Roswell, García retells the story of the Spanish conquest and invasion of the Americas from a Chicanofuturist perspective. The journeys and portraits of American explorers are reimagined as cinematic aliens and futuristic beings from another world. The artist subverts history by prioritizing the Indigenous point of view and the aggression and fear that colonists may have encountered during their subjugation and removal. By championing this approach, García reclaims these historical interpretations for what they were: alien abductions. In doing so, he urges us to recognize that we have survived an alien invasion, though many did not. Through Indigenous inks and graphic narration, García paints a new historical resource for us to challenge our perceptions of the past and our vision for the future.
¹ Eric García, “RAiR Artist Talk Eric García,” lecture, Roswell Art Museum, Roswell, New Mexico, recorded March 11, 2022, Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/rmacroswell/; “Artist Feature: Eric J. García (RAiR 2021-22),” posted July 10, 2022, by The RAir Foundation, YouTube, 4 min. 18 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xg4SuEvihSs.
² FBI Records: The Vault, “Roswell UFO,” https://vault.fbi.gov/Roswell%20UFO.
³ For more, see UFO Festival, https://ufofestival.com/ and the International UFO Museum and Research Center, “About Us,” https://www.roswellufomuseum.com/about-us.
⁴ Eric J. García, “The Real Space Invaders,” June 12, 2022, https://hyperallergic.com/720471/the-real-space-invaders.
⁵ CJ Rogers, “Malintzin as a Conquistadora and Warrior Woman in the Lienzo De Tlaxcala (c. 1552),” The Historical Journal. 2021; 64 (5):1173-1197; Camilla Townsend, Camilla. Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019), 106.
⁶ Catherine Sue Ramírez, “Chicanafuturism,” https://catherinesramirez.com/research/chicanafuturism/.
⁷ “Our History,” Roswell, New Mexico, https://roswell-nm.gov/654/Our-History.
Eric J. García received his BFA with a minor in Chicano studies from the University of New Mexico, Eric Garcia went on to complete his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a core member of the printmaking collective, Instituto Gráfico de Chicago, one of the newest member’s of the Justseeds Cooperative, a part of the emerging Veteran Art Movement, and is a dedicated teaching artist. Garcia has exhibited nationally and his work can be found in the collections of the National Museum of Mexican Art, the National Hispanic Cultural Center, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Claudia E. Zapata earned their Ph.D. in art history at Southern Methodist University’s RASC/a: Rhetorics of Art, Space, and Culture program. Their dissertation is titled “Chicano Art is Not Dead: The Politics of Curating Chicano Art in Major U.S. Exhibitions, 2008-2012.” They received their BA and MA in art history from the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in Maya art from the Classic period (250-900 CE). Their research interests include curatorial methodologies of identity-based exhibitions, Chicanx and Latinx art, digital humanities, BIPOC zines, and designer toys. Zapata was the curator of exhibitions and programs at the Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin. They curated several Texas exhibitions, including A Viva Voz: Carmen Lomas Garza (2009), Sam Coronado: A Retrospective (2011), and Fantastic & Grotesque: José Clemente Orozco in Print (2014). From 2018-2022, Claudia was the curatorial assistant of Latinx art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, working on the award-winning exhibition, ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965-Now.