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The Portable Border: Site-Specificity, Art, and the U. S.-Mexico Frontier Author(S): Claire F

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The Portable Border: Site-Specificity, Art, and the U. S.-Mexico Frontier Author(S): Claire F The Portable Border: Site-Specificity, Art, and the U. S.-Mexico Frontier Author(s): Claire F. Fox Source: Social Text, No. 41 (Winter, 1994), pp. 61-82 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466832 Accessed: 21/10/2010 18:56 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=duke. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Text. http://www.jstor.org The Portable Border SITE-SPECIFICITY, ART, AND THE U.S.-MEXICO FRONTIER All major metropoli have been fully borderized.In fact, there are no Claire F. Fox longervisible cultural differences between Manhattan, Montreal, Wash- ington, Los Angeles or Mexico City. They all look like downtown Tijuanaon a Saturdaynight. -Guillermo G6mez-Pefia,"The New World(B)order"' Its exact locationis problematical;the awkwardfact is, Borderlandcan apparentlybe found by heading for the ruins of just about any large twentiethcentury city. This reporterfound it in the rubbleof Detroit. -Life on the Border2 Today, "the border" and "border crossing" are commonly used critical metaphors among multicultural and postmodernist artists and writers. According to Chon Noriega, these terms were first employed in the 1960s and 1970s by Chicano and Mexican scholars to refer to the experience of undocumented workers from Mexico crossing to the United States.3 Indeed, in Chicano arts and letters, "Borderlands" has replaced Aztlin as the metaphor of choice to designate a communal space.4 But even though the U.S.-Mexico border retains a shadowy presence in the usage of these terms, the border which is currently in vogue in the U.S., both among Chicano scholars and among those theorists working on other cultural differences, is rarely site-specific.5 Rather, it is invoked as a marker of hybrid or liminal subjectivities, such as those which would be experienced by persons who negotiate among multiple cultural, linguistic, racial, or sexual systems throughout their lives. When the border is spatialized in these theories, that space is almost always universal. "The Third World having been collapsed into the First,"6 as the argument goes, the border is now to be found in any metropolis-wherever poor, displaced, ethnic, immigrant, or sexual minority populations collide with the "hegemonic" population, which is usually understood to consist of middle- and upper- class WASPs. In this essay, I shall examine two sets of aesthetic texts in which the border figures prominently as a space of fantasy and sociopolitical alle- gory, with a view toward challenging the project of expanding borders and the types of experiences understood by the term border crossing, which I have outlined above. The first group of texts is documentation relating to two performances by Guillermo Gomez-Pefia, Border Brujo (1988-90) and Year of the White Bear: The New World (B)order (1992-93). Emphasizing the Gomez-Pefia, a former member of the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF), made U.S.-Mexico border issues a central social and theme of his work from the mid- to late 1980s. The video version of Bor- der Brujo marked a shift in G6mez-Pefia's thematic concerns; its release in cultural dimen- 1990 roughly coincided with the artist's decision to deemphasize the U.S.-Mexico border region while nevertheless retaining the border sions of the metaphor as a means to address general issues of cultural imperialism. The second of texts is a of fiction which has U.S.-Mexico group subgenre speculative been termed "contemporary urban fantasy" by one of its creators.7 Cur- border over rently there are a dozen or so writers in the U.S. and Canada who have collaborated in creating an imaginary metropolis called Bordertown.8 topographical Their shared world has been elaborated in three collections of short sto- ries and three novels;9 at the time of this writing, another anthology was ones immediately in press. An active fan culture has sprung up around the Bordertown series which ranges from raves held in Los Angeles warehouses, where gave border guests re-create "The Dancing Ferret" (a Bordertown nightclub), to dance troupes in several U.S. cities which derive inspiration from Bor- consciousness a dertown's "Horn Dance" commune. Bordertown's various fan subcul- tures promise to become more mainstream in the near future, as one of certain mobility. the Bordertown novels is presently being adapted as a two-hour TV pilot for NBC, and world for the stories were just negotiated. As a phenomeno- rights Both G6mez-Pefia's work and that of the Bordertown collective con- logical category, form with the type of "global border consciousness" I have outlined above; neither claims to be exclusively about the U.S.-Mexico border. If I the border was am rather perversely trying to tie them to this particular geographical region, it is indirectly, through the common issues that these aesthetic something that projects share with popular mass media coverage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Like the news media, the former texts carried people are grappling with ways to broach the subject of "North American iden- tity" in light of NAFTA's putative threat to national identities. In the U.S. within them- and Mexico, national news and documentary sources constantly represent the border as a of the nations it divides.10 That is, selves, in addition synecdoche develop- ments on the border are perceived to be symptomatic of the overall status of U.S.-Mexican and the of border events is to being an relations, importance presented from the point of view of national actors rather than local external factor inhabitants. Most recently, NAFTA's advocates and detractors appropri- ated this way of seeing the border in order to cast it as "the future" or structuring their "the cutting edge" of what would occur throughout the North American continent if NAFTA were ratified. The Bordertown stories and G6mez- perceptions. Pefia's recent work also place their border zones in a not-too-distant, apocalyptic future, a future which nonetheless incorporates many ele- ments from our immediate present. 62 ClaireF Fox Globalizing the Border: Guillermo G6mez-Peha In his recent work, Guillermo Gomez-Pefia, Chica-lango performance artist," has increasingly unmoored his border from the "transfrontier metropolis" of San Diego-Tijuana, where he was a founding member of BAW/TAF in 1984.12 BAW/TAF was, and still is, a group of Mexican, Anglo, and Chicano artists who engaged in collaborative multimedia and interactive art projects specifically about the U.S.-Mexico border region.13 BAW/TAF artists were both present-minded and oppositional, insofar as their work responded critically to border issues such as immigration, human rights violations, and racism, and they were utopian in that they asked their audiences to "imagine a world in which this international boundary has been erased."14Site-specificity-not just in terms of instal- lation but also in terms of audience address and thematic issues-became a guiding principle of the group. Jeff Kelley described BAW/TAF's project as an "art of place": An art of place is concernedless with the phenomenaland geologicalaspects of a place than with the cultural,historical, ethnic, linguistic,political, and mythologicaldimensions of a site. To some degree, of course, site and place are matters of interchangeableperception. Thus, we see site-specific art transformedinto a place particularpractice which represents the domestica- tion and/orsocialization of the '70s site, and definesapproaches to art-mak- ing in which a place, a condition,or an occasion is seen and workedas the materialsof human or social exchange.A place is not merely a medium of art, but also its contents.15 For G6mez-Pefia, as for other BAW/TAF members, the border was always much more than a line demarcating national space. Emphasizing the social and cultural dimensions of the U.S.-Mexico border over topographical ones immediately gave border consciousness a certain mobility. As a phe- nomenological category, the border was something that people carried within themselves, in addition to being an external factor structuring their perceptions. G6mez-Pefia's endeavors in performance art prior to forming BAW/TAF (e.g., with Poyesis Genetica)16 suggest that he was already working through ideas about liminal subjectivities before he attached them to the San Diego-Tijuana region. Emphasizing subjectivity as predomi- nant over social geography, however, facilitated
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