Sanctus Sonorensis is a book of border ‘beatitudes’. This work comments on the complicated attitudes of Americans on illegal immigration from Mexico. The cover shows a photograph of the area of Southern Arizona which is the most active in terms of migration across the Sonoran desert, and where thousands have lost their lives in the deadly desert heat. The interior pages show the progression of a typical high-desert day from dawn to sunset, mimicking the sky above an immigrant during a day’s desert passage, and accompanied by a single line of text on each two-page spread.


“I had the germ of an idea for the book, and did some little preliminary sketches for it, during my sabbatical in 2003-2004. I was in a year-long residency at the Border Art Residency in La Union, New Mexico. I was taking a lot of photos of the incredible skies in New Mexico and Arizona while there, and they made their way into a lot of the work that I made during my year there. Living right on the border I was also very aware of the crossing of illegal Mexican immigrants, especially in a section of the Sonoran desert near Why and Ajo Arizona which I visited several times. In December of 2004, I was driving back into the United States from Mexico through the Lukeville border crossing. As I was traveling through the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument just inside Arizona, I was stopped for a couple of hours by several groups of uniformed men. Each group consisted of a large number of heavily armed Border Patrol agents on some sort of special operations. The agents eventually lead out of the desert scrub a large number of illegal immigrants who had been hiding in the mesquite and cactus as they attempted to head north through the park. They clearly weren’t drug smugglers. They looked too poor and were unarmed. They made for a rather moving and pathetic sight, and looked disheveled and dejected. I had never seen an operation like this up close and it was rather upsetting, and got me thinking about the life these people were trying to make for themselves and the efforts that we in the United States make to prevent them from coming here. Sanctus Sonorensis was a work that eventually came out of this experience. 
 
The starkness of our immigration law in regards to undocumented workers was made evident again when I almost got my camera confiscated by the Border Patrol while I was taking photos of several busloads of undocumented Mexican workers being transported by agents back across the border into Mexico in Agua Prieta. The disparity between the unhappy apprehended Mexicans being returned back across the border and the reality of the fact that there are 460,000 undocumented Mexican workers in Arizona alone, seemed glaring. Most of them pay taxes while they are here and usually fill unpleasant and difficult jobs that most Americans will not take.
(…)

I wanted to really try to push the missal-breviary-beatitude idea by making it look like a sort of very high tech version of those Catholic book forms. I added gilded edges, the rounded corners and the gold-foil stamped titles to have a visual association with a religious book like a breviary or missal. The text is meant to be read out loud as if by priest or an acolyte standing in front of a congregation (and maybe even repeated back by their flock), and I wanted the book to have the right kind of look (or bling) for that task. This was a big improvement I think over the pigmented inkjet version that I had completed in 2006. I grew up in a very Catholic family and although I personally rejected Catholicism in my early teens, I think it is deeply burnt into my psyche.


The use of the cloud images, which follow the progression of a day from dawn to nightfall, was meant to visually represent the sky overhead as the immigrants trudge through a typical hot desert day. The first rays of light of day continue into hot mid-morning, to an early afternoon thunder storm followed by clearing skies and sunset. The beauty of the southwestern skies belie the dangers from the ambient heat and lack of available water.”
- Philip Zimmermann

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Philip Zimmermann is an American artist, who works primarily with the medium of artist’s books. He attended architecture school at Cornell University for two and a half years then transferred to the fine arts program there, receiving a BFA from Cornell in 1973. He received his MFA in visual and photographic studies from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY in 1980. In 1979 he founded the Spaceheater Editions.


Philip Zimmermann taught at Purchase College, SUNY from 1984 to 2008. He is a Professor Emeritus there. Since 2008 he has taught at the University of Arizona in the Graphic Design and Illustration Department (formerly the Visual Communication area), where he is professor.