11 Bk Reviews 150-162
Books References Chinoy, Helen Kritch, and Linda Walsh Jenkins Women in American Theatre. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Coven, Brenda American Women Dramatists of the th Century: A Bibliography. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Eagleton, Terry The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Johnson, Claudia American Actress: Perspective on the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: Nelson-Hall. Kritzer, Amelia Howe Plays by Early American Women, –. Ann Arbor: University of Michi- gan Press. Mason, Jeffrey D. Melodrama and the Myth of America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McConachie, Bruce Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, –. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Smith, Susan Harris American Drama: The Bastard Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Karen Laughlin is Associate Professor of English at Florida State University, where she teaches classes in modern and American drama, film, humanities, and women’s studies. She is the coeditor of Theatre and Feminist Aesthetics (Fairleigh Dickinson, ), and has published articles and book chapters on dramatic literature and literary theory in Modern Drama, Women and Performance, and elsewhere.
Culture Across Borders: Mexican Immigration & Popular Culture. Edited by David R. Maciel and María Herrera-Sobek. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, ; pp. $..
Engaging in Latino studies requires dealing with in/visibility. The encour- aging number of studies that have been published in the past year show schol- ars trying to conjure up and stabilize a category of “Latino” only to see it disintegrate before their eyes: Latino and Chicano? Latino as opposed to Chicano? Does the umbrella term Latino create a false sense of affiliation be- tween say, Nuyoricans and U.S. Cubans, occluding historically established links, such as those built between Nuyoricans and African Americans? In other words, does the term “Latino” create a pan-Latinoness that transcends, and ultimately disappears, the very groups it theoretically represents? This is just one of the scenes in which “Latino” pulls a disappearing act. But there are other scenes of in/visibility. Where, I ask, in New York’s largest Barnes and Noble, is your Latino section? “Huh? Oh yeah. Over there, between Asian and Native American. There, behind the post.” And there, behind the post, past the three walls that house African American studies, I find two shelves housing books on Latin America, U.S. Latino studies, plus the odd glossy coffee- table guide to Mexican tiles and a book on Iroquois Indians. But this poor show- ing on the bookstore shelf bespeaks a different kind of erasure for there are, in
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fact, an increasing number of important books analyzing issues raised by Chicana/o, Puerto Rican, Nuyorican, U.S. Cuban, i.e., Latino/a studies. Culture Across Borders, edited by David R. Maciel and María Herrera-Sobek, is one of a number of important Latino studies books to be published this past year. The special contribution that Culture Across Borders makes to this impor- tant body of scholarship is that it focuses specifically on issues of Mexican im- migration. The six essays (plus the introduction) explore the impact and representation of immigration on U.S., Mexican, and Chicano films, narratives, border art, corridos, jokes, and other forms of popular culture. Rather than sim- ply gloss over immigration as a primal moment in the newcomer’s past, the volume looks at immigration as a process that affects populations on both sides of the Mexico/U.S. border in very particular ways. By examining the represen- tation of immigration in mainstream, Chicano/a and Mexican popular culture, these essays explore the many tensions, disconnections, and refractions stem- ming from the various perspectives. Not surprisingly, populations affected by immigration in both countries have significantly different takes on the problem. Mexican depictions of immigration, Alberto Ledesma notes in “Undocumented Crossings: Narratives of Mexican Immigration to the United States,” stress the dangers and humiliations associated with these crossings. The threats and depra- vations faced by immigrants in their efforts to improve their economic situation far outweigh any possible benefits. They feel isolated from the pochos (a deroga- tory word for working-class Mexican immigrants who stay permanently in the U.S.). They are hounded by the migra (or border patrol). They face merciless exploitation at the hands of coyotes (who traffic in humans) and employers. These immigrants, living in loneliness, danger, and indignity, dream of return- ing to Mexico: “Suddenly, they must learn how to live in the shadows, not knowing the language that is spoken to them, uninformed about any rights they may have, and unable to protest their plight” (). Chicano/a immigration narratives, on the other hand, take the experience of immigration as the starting point of a new life leading to the adaptation of the newcomer into U.S. society. Interestingly, most of the crossings in these works are legal, rather than illegal (as in the Mexican bracero novels). These narratives stress the hardships these in- dividuals/families experienced in the old country, and trace the gradual differ- entiation of the new Chicana/os from the now “former” Mexicans. Still, differences between Chicana/os and pochos exist, as Ledesma notes in these narratives, for “even though Chicanos tend not to go back to Mexico, it is clear that they maintain a sense of cultural loyalty toward their homeland and they resent that pochos do not feel the same” (). David R. Maciel and María Rosa Garcia-Acevedo’s essay, “The Celluloid Immigrant” tells a similar story. Mexican films from onward send would-be immigrants the same admonishing message: “if you emigrate to the United States, only heartache, disappointment, and oppression await you” (). Most of those who decide to cross-over end up returning to Mexico. These messages, the article points out, were an extension of official emigra- tion policies in Mexico. Films produced by Hollywood—which are consistent with U.S. anti-immigration policies and sentiments—tend to criminalize the immigrants without acknowledging the systemic contradictions that lure them here. The economy needs hands to pick, backs to lift, and arms to push the strollers, without accepting the human beings attached to those hands, arms, and backs. These films, according to Maciel and Garcia-Acevedo, are usually action films, focusing on a strong U.S. male protagonist and sending a clear warning: Protect our southern border! Victor Alejandro Sorell’s “Telling Images Bracket the ‘Broken-Promise(d) Land’” explores, in a somewhat rambling but ultimately rewarding way, the ways in which Chicana/o visual artists critique former and current immigra-
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tion laws and policies. Artists such as Armando Rascon, Guillermo Gómez- Peña, Emily Hicks, Elizabeth Sisco, Enrique Chagoya, Amalia Mesa-Bains and many others use public art installations, mural painting, poster campaigns, border performances, ofrendas (altar offerings) to challenge the violence and hypocrisy of border policies. Beginning with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of , to NAFTA (), to Proposition (), the politics around immigration have attempted to strip Mexicans and Mexican Ameri- cans of their land, rights, language, and human dignity. The border is now a militarized zone. Sorell cites a report documented by Donna A. Demac en- titled “Alien Terrorists and Undesirables: A Contingency Plan” that calls for “new detention sites to be identified by the military for the imprisonment of persons of targeted nationalities.” No wonder, as Sorell notes, “the border has emerged as a remarkably charged expressive zone, with artists negotiating its troubled waters through a plethora of barbed images” (). The essay “Jokelore, Cultural Differences, and Linguistic Dexterity” by Jose R. Reyna and María Herrera-Sobek looks at the bilingual humor of border jokes that attempt to deal with the confusion and the anxiety of border-cross- ing. The crossing itself has become a mainstay of the joke tradition. Linguistic misunderstandings, double entendres, the bilingual play on words—all help add humor to the experience of geographic and cultural displacement. One of the more interesting points in this essay is the connection between this oral tradition of border jokes and the rasquachi aesthetics of recycling and resemanticizing undervalued objects. In , Tomas Ybarra Frausto wrote “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility,” defining the aesthetic as “an outsider viewpoint [that] stems from a funky, irreverent stance that debunks conven- tion and spoofs protocol” (:). In a rasquachi move, Reyna and Herrera-Sobek argue, “Chicanos/Mexicans have learned to laugh at our own poverty—to transform life’s daily inequities and the pain they cause into sources of humor” (). While the essay does look at issues of aggression in relation to joke telling, I think it understates the misogyny and the macho performance of some of them. These jokes, to my mind, belong to a tradition of relajo (a humorous and subversive form of acting out) and chingaderas that Mexican thinkers such as Jorge Portilla and Octavio Paz attribute to Mexican humor. Humor, here, as Paz notes, functions as part of the performance of macho self-affirmation and works as “an act of revenge” (:). So, while I agree with the authors that a folklore performance is a communicative event that has both a “prescriptive function and a cathartic function” (), I think that the interesting conversation of the role of jokes in the context of the traumatic context of Mexican immigration is only just beginning. Culture Across Borders is an important contribution to Latino studies not only in that it looks at the warring representations of the immigration experience being waged on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border. It also adds a much needed specificity to the very discussion of borders. Borders, as this volume shows, separate nation-states. There is always a performance attached to bor- der-crossing—whether one sneaks across in the dark of night or walks cau- tiously, “legally” toward the immigration officer. In Latino studies, “border” has come to signify everything from geographic to metaphoric traversals. Now you see it, now you don’t. But the Mexican/U.S. border reminds us that the border can be a very real, very dangerous marker separating US from THEM. We cannot understand Mexican-U.S. relations without understand- ing the nature of that highly militarized, intensely politicized space. Culture Across Borders helps us understand this densely signified zone.
—Diana Taylor
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Diana Taylor is Professor and Chair of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU. She is the author of Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (University Press of Kentucky, ), which won the Best Book Award given by the New England Council on Latin American Studies and Honorable Men- tion in the Joe E. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama, and of Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Duke University Press, ). She has edited three volumes of critical essays on Latin Ameri- can, Latino, and Spanish playwrights. Her articles on Latin American and Latino per- formance have appeared in TDR, Theatre Journal, Performing Arts Journal, Latin American Theatre Review, Estreno, Gestos, and other scholarly journals. She has directed and participated in staging Latin American and Latino theatre in Mexico and the United States.
Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art and the s. By Kathy O’Dell. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, ; pp.; illustrations. $. paper.
During the s, Chris Burden was often lampooned the “Evel Kneivel” of performance art, his daredevil “acts”—hiring a marksman to shoot him in the arm (Shoot, ), lying in the street within inches of traffic (Deadman, ), crucifying himself across the back of a Volkswagon ()—were dis- paraged as opportunistic spectacle. Considered antithetical to substantive art practice, Burden’s seeming desire for notoriety meant his masochist perfor- mances were rarely taken seriously. Moreover, though clearly engaged in the evolving aesthetic discourses of their time (including body and time-based art), his performances were generally seen as anomalous. In her book Contract with the Skin, Kathy O’Dell challenges the singularity of Burden’s work by placing it alongside that of Vito Acconci, Gina Pane, and the collaborative duo, Ulay/Abramovic—a group of artists who, she argues, formed a distinct strain of s performance art. Focused exclusively on the masochistic practices of these five performance artists, O’Dell links their work through a shared set of concerns: “the mechanics of alienation in art and ev- eryday life; the psychological influences of the domestic site; the sensation of being both a subject and object; the function of metaphor in art; and the rela- tionship between art and audience” (). The book is divided into five loosely corresponding chapters, each of which is conceptually framed by an introduc- tory description of one of the above artists’ performances. Through a deconstruction of these and other performances, O’Dell attempts to reveal their political import and therein establish what she deems “the social rel- evance of masochism”:
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