The Museum of Señor Babyhead
Analisa Raya-Flores
August 9, 2025
The Museum of Señor Babyhead was an installation and immersive physical theater performance by writer, performer, and visual artist Analisa Raya-Flores. The gallery was filled with pâpier-maché “artifacts” — reproductions of items found in the Sonoran Desert (water bottles, broken rosaries, the skulls of hawks and goats). In the live show, Señor Babyhead reenacts his journey across the desert, sharing his encounters with mirages, spirits, and saguaros. Who is Señor Babyhead, you ask? Only Mexico’s most washed-up famous sitcom star, desperate to stay relevant and avoid becoming an artifact, himself. It’s an hour of crooning, crawling, and implicating the audience in a dangerous game.
More about the two series of artifacts:
Series 1: LEFT BEHIND is a group of objects found in the Sonoran Desert. Some items are left behind by migrants in a desperate attempt to shed weight, others are tossed into the landscape by Border Patrol refusing to collect belongings, and some items are found deep in canyons, having been moved by scavengers and local wildlife, such as hawks and bighorn sheep.
Series 2: TECNOLOGÌA is based on items sold at the US/Mexico border to migrants preparing to cross the desert. The artist has taken liberties with certain items–the sombrero that reflects back into the sky full of drones– but others are very real, such as the shoe that erases your steps. Though most migrants consider the shoe ridiculous, other things are viewed as necessities, such as the Gatorade bottle painted black to avoid drone detection.
Since the 1990s, it is estimated that nearly 5,000 migrants have gone missing in the Sonoran Desert. This is a direct result of the US Government’s Prevention Through Deterrence program. For further info, the artist encourages folks to check out the following: Radiolab’s Border Trilogy, Jason De León’s book The Land of Open Graves, and undocumentedmigrationprojection.com
