Scholars Mind

The Migrant Caught In-Between

Some artists, too, explore the liminality of the migrant. Whether between home and the unfamiliar, or legal and “alien” status, how does each of them treat the state of being in-between?

On a rickety bus bench, Frida Kahlo lines up a whole society in transit: a housewife, a worker, a barefoot Indigenous mother nursing her baby, a money-bagged gringo — strangers thrown together between stops.

Key concepts

The Border Crossed Me
A way of flipping the question 'who moved?'. When a border shifts over people who stayed put, calling them outsiders gets the story backwards: they never crossed the line, the line crossed them.

Every work — at a glance

  • The Bus — Frida Kahlo (painting)

    Frida Kahlo's 1929 painting lining up a whole 1920s Mexican society on one bus bench — and her own wreck too: a streetcar hit her bus in 1925, one of what she called the two grave accidents of her life.

+ 10 more works explained inside

What to know

  1. 01
    These artists treat in-betweenness across the full emotional range — Zeppelin makes it conquest, Fiddler heartbreak, Genesis humiliation, Los Tigres defiance — so the migrant's liminality isn't one mood but a space each fills with whatever they most need to say.

+ 1 more insight inside

Across subjects

This Art topic runs straight into language and law: in U.S. statute 'alien' was the official word for a noncitizen for over a century — a legal category that

Theme connection

"Are We There Yet?"

You can cross every border and still be in-between: 'alien' status suspends you between belonging and abandonment. Kahlo's bus and Lawrence's panels hold whole communities mid-transit, none about arriving. Is the in-between a wound to end fast (Fiddler's ache, Borderlands' desolation) or a power, in Led Zeppelin's roar and Los Tigres' defiance, where a stronger self is forged?

Practice — a sample

ARTLawrence wrote all sixty captions first, then painted every panel at once, one colour at a time. This MOST strongly supports reading it as —

  • A A protest at one city
  • B A record for an archive
  • C A study for a mural
  • D A story told in parts
  • E A portrait of one family

Sign in to answer and see why each option is right or wrong.

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