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Border Art as a Political
Strategy
By Antonio Prieto
The cultural production of the México/U.S. borderlands
has been very diverse and prolific throughout history. However, the emergence
of an art that deliberatlely addresses political issues, or even of art
as a political strategy, is relatively recent in the region. Up
to the seventies, culture of the borderlands could be classified as basically
"popular," that is, culture usually produced and enjoyed by
the working class. This is hardly surprising considering that the region
has been home to indigenous peoples, campesinos and vaqueros
(cowboys), among others. At the borderlands many folk traditions --basically
from México-- have thrived since the beginning of this century,
from the corridos (ballads) to the popular theater forms of carpa.
It was not until the early eighties that art emerged at the borderlands
that explicitly addressed border politics. As opposed to folk
artists, the new generation belongs to the middle class, has
formal training and self-consciously conceives itself as producer
of "border art." Moreover, their art is politically
charged, and assumes a confrontational stance vis-à-vis
both Mexican and U.S. government policies. This generation was
directly influenced by the Chicano artistic production of the
seventies, which often navigated the limits of high and popular
culture.
Chicano Art on La Frontera
While the first examples of Chicano art in the late sixties took
up issues of land, community and opperession, it was not until
later that graphic artists like Rupert García began to
explicitly depict the border in their work. García's 1973
silkscreen "¡Cesen Deportación!," for
example, calls for an end to the exploitative treatement of migrant
workers who are allowed to cross the border and are then deported
at the whim of U.S. economic and political interests. The image
boldly highlights the barbed wire that spanned most of the borderline
(sturdier walls have been erected since then). The wire's black
thorns over a solid red backround becomes a symbol of unfair
violence towards the Mexican immigrants, and also evokes the
colors used in Mexican strike flags, as well as César
Chávez's UFW banner. Silkscreens by Chicano artists like
García, Malaquías Montoya and Emanuel Martínez
were widely distributed among grassroots activists as posters
and flyers.
Also in 1973, El Teatro Campesino produced a play called La
Frontera, which can today be viewed in Jesse Treviño's
unique documentary Somos Uno. The play depicts the drama
of an unnamed Mexican campesino who must cross the border into
the U.S. to find a better life. What he finds, however, is corruption
at the borderline, where he has to bribe both Mexican and U.S.
agents. He immediately enters a desperate cycle of exploitation
at the hands of the coyotes (people who help immigrants
across for a fee) and the farmowners. When the campesino attempts
to return to México, his boss won't allow him. He's finally
drafted to Vietnam where he dies in battle. The play, in true
spirit of the early Teatro Campesino "actos," is full
of parody, stylized acting, and is narrated in the form of a
traditional corrido, thus acknowledging the popular roots
of the intended audience.
Chicano productions such as these, while addressing the boder
as a locus of violence, were mainly concerned with the immigrants'
plight beyond the borderline. A decade later, the border itself
became a central issue for a host of very talented artists from
both sides of the dividing line. Many were Chicano, but it is
important to note that a great number were also Mexican and Anglo-American,
signalling a new concern with cross-border and interethnic alliances.
Conceptual Art at the Border
One of the first groups to emerge was the San Diego-based Border
Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF), founded in
1984 by a binational group of artists, activists, journalists
and scholars. The founding members were David Avalos, Sara-Jo
Berman, Víctor Ochoa, Isaac Artenstein, Guillermo Gómez-Peña,
Michael Schnorr and Jude Ederhart, many of them linked to San
Diego's Centro Cultural de la Raza, a Chicano arts center founded
in 1970. Although based in San Diego, many of the group's projects
were carried out in Tijuana, or at the borderline itself. From
the beginning, the group established its interest in addressing
"the social tensions the Mexican-American border creates,
while asking us to imagine a world in which this international
boundary has been erased." (quoted in Grynsztejn 25)
This double task --being critical while at the same time proposing
a utopian borderless future-- was undertaken with the tools of
conceptual art. This kind of art emerged within the Euro-American
avant-garde of the sixties, and focuses on the intellectual process
behind a work of art, rather than on the object's aesthetic qualities.
Artists with political concerns have used conceptual art's techniques
of parody and visual subversion to provoke the viewer into questioning
the given state of affairs. In the case of Mexican and Chicano
conceptual artists, their visual idioms have been informed by
popular or rascuache (see Ybarra-Frausto) aesthetics.
The playful juxtaposition of Mexican and American popular cultures
(as in Cantinflas vs. Mickey Mouse) is a way of addressing the
coexistance of these realities on both sides of the border. These
are themes common in the work of Enrique Chagoya, Guillermo Gómez-Peña
and Rubén Ortiz-Torres, all California-based artists born
and raised in México City. As the cliché goes,
culture knows no borders. However, what these artists do is to
challenge the pretenses of nationalist xenophobia that would
guard a society against pollution from things "foreign."
The Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo pioneered
tackling the political tensions of the borderlands, at a time
when the region was gaining increased attention from the media
due to the NAFTA debates. The contradiction of the border opening
to the free flow of capital but simultaneously closing to the
flow of immigrants provided the opportunity to address other
long-existing conflicts within the region. Thus, the BAW/TAF
set out to "reconceptualize social relations throught the
application of extraordinary art practices" (Avalos 67).
These "extraordinary" artworks were everything from
installations that made viewers interact with objects and artificial
environments, to site-specific performance art. Between 1985
and 1988, the group worked on a series of four installations
called "Border Realities" that were based on the mythical
labyrinth. As the Greek legend goes, at the heart of the labyrinth
lives the Minotaur, a hybrid half-human/half-bull, that in this
context symbolizes the menecing otherness of the immigrant. The
installation "La Casa de Cambios/The Money Exchange,"
for example, was assembled as a labyrinth into which the audience
would enter to encounter several "conceptual environments"
such as the customs office, the passport bureau, and the "mexican
curios" shop. The images made an ironic juxtaposition of
immigration policies with the tourist industry.
The BAW/TAF continues operating today with its combination of
art and activism, although its members have changed over the
years. Gómez-Peña, arguably the most famous co-founder,
went on tour to exploit his "Border Brujo" character,
and thereafter wrote and performed around his utopian/apocalyptic
"New World Border" (for a critique see Fox 119-130).
Several of the women members such as Emily Hicks went on to form
a feminist border group called Las Comadres.
In a 1997 interview, co-founder and current BAW/TAF member Michael
Schnorr told me that today "art as a pretext for social
and community action is stronger than ever." The group has
recently been engaged in a collaborative project called "No
Human is Illegal" with the San Quintín community
near Tijuana, an area largely settled by immigrant Mixtecs form
Oaxaca.
Also during the mid-eighties, Tijuana saw the appearance of several
artists such as Carmela Castrejón, Jaime Zamudio, Benjamín
Serrano, Hugo Sánchez and Gerardo Navarro. The modernist
Tijuana Cultural Center was inaugurated in 1985, and independent
centers such as El Nopal Centenario and Asociación Cultural
Río Rita became gathering points for young experimental
artists.
Most of these artists have performed at the border fence itself,
or at the customs offices. When a 13-mile long steel fence was
built in 1991, Carmela Castrejón hung on it a long row
of blood-stained garments. Given that it was the year of the
Gulf War, the artist sought to represent "the dead in the
Middle East, as well as those over here, victims of another type
of slow war, silent and without any truce." (Eraña
96) Artists and activists at the time called attention to the
fact that this fence was being built with leftover materials
from the Gulf War, which in itself seemed a powerful metaphor
for the U.S. policy of militarizing the border.
Borderlands 1994: NAFTA, Zapatistas and Godesses
1994 was a particularly explosive year. On January 1, the Zapatista
uprising was strategically timed to coincide with the implementation
of NAFTA. That electoral year in México was followed in
March by the tragic assasination of the PRI's presidential candidate
Luis Donaldo Colosio during a campaign trip to Tijuana, and two
months later by the assasination of the PRI's Secretary General
in México City. Meanwhile, xenophobic sentiments were
rekindeled in California by Pete Wilson's Proposition 187.
All these events informed the artistic production around the
Tijuana/San Diego borderzone, and cultural/political activity
reached an intensity unmatched before or since. Perhaps the most
important project to be carried out, in terms of visibility,
scope and influence, was the inSITE '94 exhibition during September-October.
The exhibition was made up mainly of installation pieces shown
in galleries and public spaces of San Diego and Tijuana. Installation
art uses a mixed media of objects, sometimes video, and ad hoc
environments, usually providing a three-dimensional and interactive
experience to the viewers. The title "InSITE" is a
play on words that refers to the site-specific nature of the
installations, as well to their being openly displayed (in sight).
The binational project, which had its first exhibition in 1991
and a more recent one in 1997, brings together artists from México,
the U.S. and Europe. Over 80 artists participated, most of them
Mexican and Latino.
Two of the more interesting installations were those by Mexican
artists Silvia Gruner and Helen Escobedo. Gruner created an evocative
piece titled "A la mitad del camino/The Middle of
the Road." The installation is made up of a series of replicas
of the Aztec godess of fertility Tlazoltéotleach resting
on a small wooden stool. The pieces are all attached to the border
fence at a favorite crossing point for immigrants. The godess
is depicted on her haunches, her face contorted in pain at the
moment of giving birth. She symbolically gestures to the pain
of departure for immigrants, and the hope of a new life.
Escobedo's piece, titled Marea
Nocturna, consists of three boats made
form wire and resting on a Tijuana beach right next to the border
fence that, as of 1991, extends into the ocean. The boats evoke
the three ships Columbus used in his voyage to the New World.
Their aggressive mission is highlighted by three catapults that
emerge out of each, with coconuts as absurd missiles poised to
strike Fortress U.S.A. Placed on a sand promontory, the boats
appear to have run aground and been abandoned by their crew.
However, they somehow maintain a proud and confrontational stance
before the steel fence. Third world art and technology here stages
a symbolic challenge to the militarized border.
1994 also saw the production of two important films focused on
border issues. One was the feature-length Mexican-Canadian coproduction
El jardín del Edén (The Garden of Eden),
directed by María Novaro. The film is moderately successful
in portraying the lives of several characters' search for identity
and livelihood on the other side of the fence; some to the U.S.,
others to México. The three main characters are women
(Mexican, Chicana and American), allowing a rarely acknowledged
female point of view within border-crossing narrative.
The other film is an experimental documentary called Fronterilandia
(Frontierland), coproduced by Rubén Ortiz Torres and Jesse
Lerner. The uneven film shifts from interviews, sequences that
argue the disappearence of cultural borders, to conceptual scenes
featuring performance artists Guillermo Gómez-Peña,
Roberto Sifuentes and Hugo Sánchez. This latter artist
was arrested by Mexican police during the filming of one of his
performances in front of a public monument in Tijuana. He was
wearing a charro hat over a mask similar to the ones used
by the Zapatistas of Chiapas. He also wore a Mexican flag over
his shoulders, used as an excuse by the police to accuse him
of "desecrating the national symbols." Ironically,
since Sánchez was found to have an American passport (as
happens with many Tijuana residents), he was treatened with deportation
to the U.S.! (see Gómez-Peña for a fuller account)
A younger generation of conceptual artists is represented by
Sergio de la Torre, Domingo Nuño and Julio Morales. The
three began their careers in Tijuana/San Diego, and later moved
to the Bay Area where they joined up as The Tricksters. Their
work has addressed the intersections of colonialism and tourism
in the borderlands.
Conceptual art staged in politically charged areas is subject
to controversy and sometimes even violence. The artists mentioned
above seek to draw attention to the issues that concern them,
and deliberately challenge the viewer. In a way, this is what
makes border art a participatory, collective endeavor, since
it closely engages a given political geography, as well as those
who live in it.
Click on the following links to go to web sites on the work of
some of the artists and projects described above.
Centro Cultural de la Raza
http://www.sddt.com/features/balboapark/museums/centro.html
Helen Escobedo
http://www.arts-history.mx/artecon/helen/helen.html
Guillermo Gómez-Peña
http://www.telefonica.es/fat/egomez.html
This site contain's the artist's biographical sketch, and his
essays "The Virtual Barrio" and "The Other Frontier."
InSITE 97
http://www.insite97.org/
BAW/TAF Artist Víctor Ochoa
http://www.chicanopark.org/fuerza/ochoa/bawtaf.htm
References
Avalos, David, "A Wag Dogging a Tale,"
in Kathryn Kanjo (coord.) La Frontera/The Border: Art About
the Mexico/United States Experience. Centro Cultural La Raza
and the Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego, 1993.
Eraña, María, "From a Border
of Canyons and Sand," in Kathryn Kanjo (coord.) La Frontera/The
Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Experience. Centro
Cultural La Raza and the Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego,
1993.
Fox, Claire F., The Fence and the River. Culture and Politics
at the U.S.-Mexico Border, Minneapolis, U. of Minnesota Press,
1999.
Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, "The Artist as Criminal,"
The Drama Review, vol. 40, num. 1, Spring of 1997 (pp.112-118).
Grynsztejn, Madeline, "La frontera/The Border," in
Kathryn Kanjo (coord.) La Frontera/The Border: Art About the
Mexico/United States Experience. Centro Cultural La Raza
and the Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego, 1993.
Ybarra-Frausto, Tomás, "Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility,"
in Richard Griswold del Castillo, et. al. (eds.), Chicano
Art. Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985. Los Angeles,
Wright Gallery, UCLA, 1991.
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