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

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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 allegory, 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 stories 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 subcultures 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 identity" 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 appropriated 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 elements 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 installation 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-making 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 his later expansion of the border to encompass "the World." This shift is clearly evident in several essays he published in U.S. arts media during the period immediately prior to and following his break with BAW/TAF In his 1988 essay "Doc- umented/Undocumented," for example, G6mez-Pefia referred to the

The Portable Border 63 process of world "borderization," but he also privileged the deterritorial- ized perspective of the (U.S.-Mexico) border artist, which allowed him or her to act as facilitator of intercultural dialogue among ethnic groups.17In his 1989 "Multicultural Paradigm," G6mez-Pefia extended the role of "border crosser" to all North Americans and all readers of his work:

Today,if thereis a dominantculture, it is borderculture. And those who still haven'tcrossed a borderwill do it very soon. All Americans(from the vast continentof America)were, are or will be bordercrossers. "All Mexicans," says TomasYbarra-Frausto, "are potential Chicanos." As you readthis text, you are crossinga borderyourself.18

Gomez-Pefia's next step was to make the border global. "From Art- mageddon to Gringostroika," an essay published in 1991 in High Perfor- mance, found him speaking of many geographical borders, from the Americas to the iron curtain. But geographical borders were all but upstaged in this essay by a new, temporal threshold. G6mez-Pefia wrote, "We stand equi-distant from utopia and Armageddon, with one foot on each side of the border, and our art and thought reflects this condition."19 This apocalyptic look toward the next millennium, signified by a vertigi- nous time-space compression, has since become a major theme of G6mez-Pefia's work, and I will discuss it in relation to the Bordertown series later in this essay. I would like first, however, to discuss how G6mez-Pefia's incremen- tally expanding border has impacted upon his visual work. As I stated earlier, the release of the video version of BorderBrujo in 1990 can be read as a signpost of the shift in his thinking about borders in relation to place. In some ways the video is an anomalous conclusion to his involvement with BAW/TAF, for it was released just as the collective was in the throes of reorganization and shortly before Gomez-Pefia denounced border art alto- gether in several highly publicized articles in 1991.20 Isaac Artenstein, a Mexican-born filmmaker well known for his movie Break of Dawn (1988), about the rise of Spanish-language radio in Los Angeles, produced and directed Border Brujo after G6mez-Pefia had successfully toured the performance for two years (1988-90) in North America and Europe.21 The publicity for Border Brujo describes it as a performance "in which Guillermo G6mez-Pefia transforms himself into 15 different per- sonas to exorcise the demons of dominant cultures. In English, Spanish, Spanglish, Inglefol and Nahuatl-bicameral." People familiar with BAW/ TAF's previous work would note immediate continuities of theme, cos- tume, iconography, and sets between Border Brujo and previous BAW/ TAF projects. This was also not the first time that a BAW/TAF member had used video to record a performance.22For the most part, BorderBrujo privileges documentation of G6mez-Pefia's performance over experimen-

Claire F Fox tation with the video medium itself. Its camera movement and editing are relatively nonintrusive; other than alternation between medium shots and close-ups of G6mez-Pefia, the camera only cuts for brief moments to extreme close-ups of the props that comprise the altar-set. There is one sequence in which Artenstein's camera work breaks markedly with this tendency. In the "Casa de Cambio" sequence, Gomez-Pefia plays a Tijuana barker who advertises the various transformations of personal identity available to those who dare to cross the border.23 The video rapidly cuts from camera positions to the left and right of G6mez-Pefia, establishing an imaginary line that actually bisects his body. This tech- nique represents a drastic departure from the way that Hollywood editing has used an imaginary borderline in narratives set in the U.S.-Mexico border region, namely, as a structuring device that segregates rather than integrates opposing elements of "cultural identities." The piece's transformation from performance to video was marked by additional features, however, which suggest a shift in the way Gomez-Pefia conceived of his mass media audience. For one thing, in the earlier in situ versions of the piece, he interacted with the audience during the performance. He would shine a flashlight on them and interrogate them in a parody of a Border Patrol agent, for example, and at the end of the performance, he collected items from various members of the audience which he added to his altar-set for future performances or buried on the U.S.- Mexico border. The video does not portray an audience at all, nor does the camera ever cut to give a point-of-view shot from G6mez-Pefia's perspective. In the live versions, G6mez-Pefia often changed portions of his script to include the name of the place where he was performing and other site-specific information. Three published versions of the script, for example, include a great deal of material about California, specifically about San Diego-Tijuana.24 In the video version, on the other hand, there are fewer references to the location of the performance, and at one point G6mez-Pefia refers to "Sushi," the performance space-gallery that supported the video's production. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Gomez-Pefia ultimately deleted from the video version almost all of the large chunks that were in Spanish, as well as some of the more politically pointed critiques in English.25 It is worth remarking that many of these outtakes were eventually recut into another, much shorter piece, entitled Son of Border Crisis: Seven VideoPoems (1990). The latter video is a sort of alter ego to the former. It contains more material in Spanish, and because its roughly fifteen minutes of footage is broken up into seven segments, the pace is aphoristic rather than sermonic. It even opens with an exterior shot of Gomez-Pefia in front of Sushi, pitching the show to potential spectators through a mega- phone. This video was released largely due to demand from Chicano and

The Portable Border 65 Latino film festivals in the U.S., and also from festivals in Latin America and Spain, for a sample of Artenstein and G6mez-Pefa's project that fit in well with the time constraints of short-subject programming.26 As Gomez-Pefia was moving toward a solo career based in New York and gaining access to a broader "alternative art" audience through his video, he was simultaneously attacking the co-optation of the border-art G6mez-Pena, movement by major museums and galleries in the press.27 A key com- plaint on his part was that BAW/TAF, which had in some sense brought who has border art to the attention of the national arts community, was now being ignored by that same community. He criticized the La Jolla Museum of consistently Contemporary Art (now the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego) for raising half a million dollars to "bring big names from out of town" for called attention a four-year border-art project.28 Perhaps for G6mez-Pefia, being "deter- ritorialized" from the U.S.-Mexico border region itself provided him with to the already the rationale for abandoning an "art of place" in favor of the more general "New World "borderized" state (B)order." The New World (B)order is a 1992-93 performance written and of U.S. cultures, directed by Gomez-Pefia and performed by G6mez-Pefia and Coco Fusco. An essay by the same name and closely following the text of the subverts the idea performance has also been published in High Performance,and a script was recently published in the Drama Review.29The format of the perfor- of an Anglo mance is loosely based on a news or radio broadcast in which the two characters, El Aztec High-Tech (G6mez-Pefia) and Miss Discovery majority in North 92(93) (Fusco), alternate in presenting their descriptions of the new world. As in BorderBrujo, each character actually comprises many differ- America by ent voices and personae. The New World(B)order was conceived as part of a larger, year-long project relating to the quincentenary, entitled The Year asking: What if of the White Bear, which included a trilogy of performances, as well as and radio broadcasts. Gomez-Pefia assembled a team of NAFTAlifted essays Mexican, Chicano, and Caribbean artists from the East and West Coasts to collab- barriers to orate on various aspects of the productions.30Like BorderBrujo, The New World(B)order was adapted for television by filmmaker Daniel Salazar; it immigration was scheduled for distribution in fall 1994.31 Rhetorically speaking, The New World (B)ordertakes up a strategy on the continent? which Gomez-Pefa has identified elsewhere as common in border art. In the piece he plays with role reversals in order to "adopt a position of What if the roles privilege and speak from a position of privilege even though we know it's a fictional position."32 Gomez-Pefia creates these hypothetical situations between Gringos out of contradictions presently operative in U.S. political discourse. One such contradiction is the of a united North America advo- and Mexicans promotion by cates of free trade even as the continent's national populations remain were reversed? juridically segregated from one another. G6mez-Peia, who has consistently called attention to the already "borderized" state of U.S. cultures,

66 ClaireF Fox subverts the idea of an Anglo majority in North America by asking: What if NAFTA lifted barriers to immigration on the continent? What if the roles between Gringos and Mexicans were reversed? Following the arrival of "Gringostroika"33to the North American continent,

geo-politicalborders have faded away.Due to the implementationof a Free Raid Agreement and the creation of a Zona de Libre Cogercio34the nations formerly known as Canada, the United States and Mexico have merged painlesslyto createthe Federationof U.S. Republics.FUSR is controlledby a MasterChamber of Commerce,a Departmentof Trans-nationalTourism and a MediaJunta.35

Laggard, separatist Gringos in turn have flocked to the former U.S.- Mexico border and have become the next wave of low-wage maquiladora and fast-food workers. Gomez-Pefia's fin de siecle continent is no utopia, despite the dissolution of the Anglo-dominated state and the adoption of Spanglish and Gringofiol as the official languages. Even as the FUSR promotes an official commerce-oriented version of multiculturalism through its gigantic media apparatus, a flurry of separatist nationalisms demand sovereignty: "Quebec, Puerto Rico, Aztldn, Yucatan, Panama, and all Indian nations have managed to secede from the new Federation of U.S. Republics. Inde- pendent micro-republics are popping up everywhere in the blink of an eye."36 Gomez-Pefia also devotes considerable attention to describing the youth of the New World (B)order, whom he divides into two camps: robo-raza I and robo-raza II. The former, "the new citizens of horizontal nothingness," are technophilic mall rats who lack the consciousness and passion to become engaged in any type of "cause." On the other hand, robo-raza II, together with former artists, form part of the resistance movement known as Arteamerica Sociedad Anonima:

Everyblock has a secretcommunity center where the runawayyouths, called robo-razaII, publishan anarchisticlaser-xerox magazine, edit experimental home videos on police brutality(yes, police brutalitystill exists) and broadcast pirate radio interventionsover the most popular programsof Radio Nuevo Orden.37

Robo-raza II are presented as a nonsectarian bright spot in this otherwise bleak scenario of transnationalist/nationalist binarisms. Their role as the hope for the future is underlined by Gomez-Pefa's contrasting and derogatory treatment of the retrograde "Mafias" at the essay's (and performance's) conclusion. The Mafias are ethnic and nationalist purists, such as the "Chicano Aristocracy from East L.A." and the "Real African

The Portable Border 67 Nation," who "cling to the past in order to experience an optical illusion of continuity and order."38 In interviews, G6mez-Pefia now refers to himself as a "cross-cultural diplomat,"39and one notes in his recent work an ever-increasing faith in the political effectivity of art and artists. BAW/TAF conceived of its artistic projects as working in concert with other activities such as journalism, education, and political activism. That is, art projects were but one aspect of the group's site-specific work. In a recent essay, in contrast, Gomez- Peiia argues, following a prophecy of Joseph Beuys from the 1970s, that art became politics and politics became art by the second half of the 1980s.40 He proceeds to create a continuum of "Performance Politics or Political Performance Art,"41under which he assembles many artists and activists in the U.S. and Latin America, based upon their common use of performative strategies to achieve political goals. To this new breed of grassroots artist-politician, G6mez-Pefa contrasts certain conservative forces that have on several occasions appropriated performance art and progressive popular-culture icons in order to bolster state power. The idea of the performance artist's power transcending that of the "nonaesthetic" political activist is identified in several sources with a trip G6mez-Pefia took to the Soviet Far East as part of a binational human rights commission, when he realized that "the artist as intercultural diplomat is able to cross many borders that political activists are unable to."42The idea is consistent with a trend in the work of many of the postmodern theorists, such as Henry Giroux, lain Chambers, and D. Emily Hicks (former BAW/TAF collaborator and ex-wife of G6mez-Pefia), who highlight certain professions as those which facilitate "border crossing." In texts by the latter theorists, "cultural workers," identified as artists, writers, educators, architects, and lawyers, among others, are portrayed as having "primacy"43 in processes of social transformation, because their jobs give them a unique position from which to "dialogue" with "Others."44 There are other reasons, however, which may account for the ease of such border crossings by professionals and intellectuals. The U.S.-Mexico border has rarely presented itself as a hindrance to artists, intellectuals, and tourists, for example, but then again, these crossings are not demo- graphically representative of other large-scale flows of border traffic which currently characterize the region, such as that of undocumented workers northward and that of U.S. capital southward. The de facto emergence of the metropolis as the site of border crossings in the work of postmodern theorists, in the wake of allegedly collapsed national boundaries, has in a sense made it possible for these intellectuals to conceive of crossing borders while remaining in the same place, simply by carrying out the duties of their profession.

68 Claire F Fox G6mez-Pefia's periodization of the art-politics merger in the late 1980s is concomitant with the emergence of an oppositional "artist- administrator" figure that Grant Kester has identified as characteristic of the "alternative arts" sphere in the U.S. during the same period.45 Artists whose work was deemed controversial or obscene by the NEA and other government-supported art-funding agencies during the Reagan-Bush era were often publicized as victims of censorship stemming from racism, sexism, or homophobia. On a thematic level, these artists linked their own victimization at the hands of the right wing to other forms of oppression such as poverty and homelessness. According to Kester, many "alternative" artists who gained notoriety during this period based their artwork upon a declared solidarity between artists and "the oppressed" and posi- tioned themselves as spokespersons, if not as members, of their avowed constituencies. G6mez-Pefia's self-presentation as a shaman in performances such as BorderBrujo has clearly been read by academics, journal- ists, and others as that of a spokesperson for all border crossers. His descriptions of "border consciousness," for example, appear repeatedly in a recent article by an anthropologist about a transborder migration circuit of undocumented workers between Aguililla, Mexico, and Redwood City, California, but at no point in the article does the author quote his own informants regarding their lifestyle and consciousness.46

The Mass Media Border: The Bordertown Series

G6mez-Pefia's recasting of the border as a global and temporal zone was in part a reaction to the border hype already generated on a national level, not just by major U.S. art museums but also by popular culture, as in Taco Bell's "Make a Run for the Border" ad campaign, which featured Latino musicians and celebrities.47 Within popular culture, however, there have also appeared progressive attempts to portray border zones, such as that of the Bordertown series. In contrast to G6mez-Pefia's point of departure in San Diego-Tijuana, these narratives take as their starting point G6mez-Pefia's present global border perspective. That is, the border of the fantasy stories is already non-site-specific, futuristic, and urban. The authors claim that their models for Bordertown are any num- ber of world cities where they have lived. It is difficult, therefore, to read Bordertown as an allegory of one particular geographical referent, although the type of globalism in the stories remains very U.S.-centered, as suggested by the youth cultures as well as the range of ethnicities portrayed.48 The creator of the Bordertown series, Terri Windling, is a writer and painter who through her experience as consulting editor for Ace and Tor

The Portable Border 69 (both sci-fi and fantasy imprints) is credited with having developed and promoted "contemporary urban fantasy" literature and with having con- tributed to the current boom in shared-world anthologies.49 Demograph- ically speaking, the books in the series are aimed at sixteen- to eighteen- year-olds who watch MTV, although an active fan culture exists among adults as well. Windling and the writers of the series affirm that the development of strong characters is central to the narratives, and that the prin- cipal border of the series is to be understood as psychological rather than geographical-it is the border between childhood and adulthood, between dreams and reality.50The stories are meant to be "narrativesof empower- ment" which show adolescents confronting obstacles and making deci- sions without the intervention of adults. The externalization of the adolescent psyche in the physical and social environment is what interests me about Bordertown, especially since the characters are quite often explained as the products of their "environment" in the first place.51 The stories are set sometime after "the Change," that is, the relatively recent reemergence of the Faerie king- dom (after several centuries' hiatus), which has witnessed the rise of racial animosity between elves (a.k.a. Truebloods) and humans. Elves speak Elvish among themselves, a language inscrutable to humans and largely untranslatable into English, and they speak English with an accent. They are portrayed as cool, dispassionate, and formal in contrast to sloppy, neurotic, and emotional humans. Physically, the elves are exceptionally tall, with extremely pale skin and white hair. Capable of magic and often wealthy, they appear to be dominant over the humans, but each race is both attracted to and repulsed by the other to some degree. The elves, for example, are often shown to be dependent upon human subcultures, which they tap for musical, literary, and artistic inspiration.52The humans, on the other hand, are attracted to elvin beauty and magic. Elfland and "the World" remain relatively isolated from one another with the exception of Bordertown, a contact zone disparaged as culturally deracinated by both "centers" but serving as a magnet for fortune hunters, dissidents, misfits, and runaways from both cultures. Here, transgression of boundaries through smuggling, encroachment on one another's turf, or interracial sex is commonplace but not generally con- doned. The series focuses on one particular neighborhood called SoHo, inhabited by teenage runaways from both cultures.53Most of Bordertown youth culture is violent, separatist, and organized around various street gangs. This environment is especially difficult for Bordertown's "halfies," the offspring of elves and humans, who are usually forced to "pass" if they want to survive. But the heroes of Bordertown's vignettes are always those youths who dare to establish nonsectarian communities amidst the

Claire F Fox omnipresent danger of the streets. These brief utopian moments usually occur at narrative closure. Several authors have acknowledged diversity within this imaginary world, which looks largely to Anglo-Saxon and Celtic folklore as its founding texts, by introducing new ethnic geographies into the city, such as Dragontown, a Japanese neighborhood, and Tintown, a barrio, and by developing black, Native American, and Mexican characters. One imper- ative remains constant throughout the Bordertown stories: moments of cultural understanding, be they between humans or between humans and elves, take place on a cultural plane, that is, through group activities around bands, dance clubs, used-book stores, bohemian communes, the production and distribution of underground newspapers, and so on. As I have argued with regard to G6mez-Pefia's New World(B)order, an intel- lectual-lumpen alliance enacted through collaborative cultural projects is held up in the series to be the antidote to racism and other types of oppression. The Bordertown writers have tacitly refused to address the reasons for Elfland's return and the events that precipitated "the Change" in any comprehensive way.54We do know that Bordertown is a "trade zone," set up by elves for the purpose of commerce with humans. Elfland is repeatedly described as being situated to the World's north. The city itself is demarcated by two salient geographical features-an enormous wall sep- arating Elfland proper from the World, and a red river whose fish are con- taminated (by magic) and whose water turns humans into brain-dead junkies. Only elves have the privilege to pass back and forth from Elfland to the World through a gate staffed by elvin customs agents. Humans may only dream about what lies on the other side. All of this should sound vaguely familiar to North American readers: a trade zone, humans lured to the north by promises of magic, a wall, a toxic river, immigration restrictions, customs officials. ... As Border- town is fleshed out in successive works, it more and more closely resem- bles an export processing zone. Though the Bordertown writers have not consciously modeled their imaginary world on the U.S.-Mexico border region, their elaboration of the border as a trade zone and an area of cultural integration would probably have been unimaginable before the mid- 1960s. Urban, industrialized national borders are a relatively new and growing phenomenon in the world economic system, especially in the emerging trade blocs of North America and Europe, yet this type of border is rarely represented in U.S. popular genres. Instead, the border continues to be portrayed as a no man's land or a war zone. The Bordertown writers recognize these traditional readings of the border in their work, yet they try to imbue this familiar dystopian space with more positive aspects.

The Portable Border 71 Though the Bordertown stories do not explore the contradiction between the free flow of goods and the restricted flow of people which is central to G6mez-Pefia's New World(B)order, one recent Bordertown text, Will Shetterly's novel Elsewhere, touched on this issue. It deals with a conspiracy of "liberal" elf operatives working undercover in Bordertown. One of them discloses his mission to a human friend at the end of the novel:

"Forthe Lords of Faerie,the Borderis an inconvenientnecessity. It permits trade,and it keeps out humans,and it allowselves to pass throughat only a few locations.All of these things are seen as desirable. "But there are those who think Faerie and the Worldshould have greater knowledgeof each other."He glancedat Wiseguyand smiled."Strider and I are of that party."55

In this fantasy of role reversal, Elfland occupies the position of a neo- colonialist power, and humans in turn become exploited "Third World" subjects. Bordertown, however, downplays national identity in favor of racial and cultural divisions. The nation-state has disappeared in the series, and the U.S. cities from which Bordertown's human runaways flee are now simply places in the World.

Technology and Postnationalism

At one point in "The New World (B)order," G6mez-Pefia self-reflexively recalls his former identity as a border artist and in so doing evokes the image of a nationally coded space, now defunct:56

A techno-shrine to Juan Soldado, Holy Patron of border-crossersand migrant workers,now stands on what used to be the San Ysidro border checkpoint. With multi-imageprojections, the old bordersaint reminds people of what once was a commonyet dangerousexperience, crossing from the Third to the First World,from the past to the future.Remember?57

His question, "Remember?" asks his audience to recall the site-specific focus which has all but disappeared from his recent work, replaced by bicoastal and multinational networks of fellow "cross-cultural diplomats." G6mez-Pefia continually relies upon long-distance communication and electronic media to produce and distribute his work. The Bordertown writers, geographically dispersed throughout the U.S. and Canada, meet for dinner once a year to discuss problems of continuity among various episodes in the series and the directions they would like Bordertown to

Claire F. Fox take; otherwise, they communicate to one another informally at confer- ences and via fax, newsletters, and e-mail.58 The mode of production of these artistic projects differs markedly from the worlds they depict. In terms of production, this contradiction finds the artists using international publishing and museum circuits, and video distribution, precisely in order to advocate local, community-based art movements, whose leadership they displace from themselves onto youth cultures.59 On the thematic level, the cyberpunk hallmark of coun- terpointing high-tech and low-tech is met with ambivalence by the Bor- dertown writers and G6mez-Pefia, whose "future worlds" are hardly more technologically advanced than present-day U.S. society.60 For his part, G6mez-Pefia has repeatedly shunned artists who are fascinated with technology for technology's sake. This tendency has two antecedents, as he explains it. The first is from the performance-art- monologue movement of the late 1980s, associated with Eric Bogosian, Spalding Gray, Karen Finley, and Tim Miller, who sought to "rescue the spoken word" from pyrotechnic spectacles.61 The second comes from a respect for the lack of access to technology under which many Chicano, Mexican, African American, and Native American artists must operate.62 In the Bordertown series, the bias against technology is even more pronounced. Elvin magic tends to make human technology go haywire, although magic itself is pretty unreliable in Bordertown. Almost every type of electric or gas-fueled device, from motor scooters to refrigerators to burglar alarms, has become operable through hybridization-now they are powered by eco-safe "spell boxes." The Bordertown economy is often represented as informal (street vendors, artists, musicians) or illegal (thieves, smugglers) and focuses on barter rather than on the exchange of currency (given that elves can fabricate precious metals). The introduction to the first anthology offers several possible accounts for the Change by recalling the folklore concerning the disappearance of Faerie in the first place: "Some say it was industrialization and the use of iron that drove the elvin folk away, some say the spread of Christianity."63In other words, the return of Faerie is in some sense predicated upon the return of a preindustrial past. The arrest of technological "modernization" in these texts is linked to the disappearance of other political and social institutions such as the state, army, and police force.64 As I have pointed out, the first pass in creating the New World (B)order and Bordertown is the obliteration of the U.S. nation-state through the processes of Gringostroika and the Change, respectively. The result is that the most salient remaining geographical units of analysis are cities, which increasingly resemble one another through cultural contact.

The Portable Border 73 The conjunction of antitechnology, antinationalist, and futuristic discourses within these works is at first puzzling, given that in much mainstream science fiction an antitechnology bias is often associated with reactionary political ideology.65 Current discourses about the future of North America again help to clarify how the position of G6mez-Pefia and the Bordertown writers could so recently have been recoded as a Through their "progressive" stance. In Mexico, NAFTA was sold to the public by the ruling PRI party as a plan to modernize the country. Former President advocacy of Carlos Salinas de Gortari even recuperated the figure of prerevolutionary cultural border tyrant Porfirio Diaz, painting him as the leader who brought Mexico into the twentieth century, in order to underwrite his own neoliberal economic crossing and program. Mexico's century-long drive toward a modernization supposedly culminating in NAFTA has had strong affinities with Gomez-Pefia's fin de transgression siecle apocalypticism. In the U.S., competitivenessand efficiency, rather than modernization, are the buzzwords of NAFTA coverage, but as in of borders, Mexico, they are being used to justify a program of massive dislocation, privatization of state-supervised sectors, and increased R&D spending in G6mez-Peia high-tech industries. For Gomez-Pefia and the Bordertown writers, all of whom are in a historical in which state and tech- and the working period power nological advancement are so often coarticulated, opposition to NAFTA's Bordertown vision of the future may find a logical counterrepresentation in an alternative world where there are no United States and no advancement of writers call technology, but instead an efflorescence of cultural production. Through their advocacy of cultural border crossing and transgres- attention to a sion of borders, Gomez-Pefia and the Bordertown writers call attention to a major oversight of NAFTA negotiations-immigration rights. Fear of major oversight Mexican immigration to the U.S. was invoked in the U.S. by both Demo- crats (the Clinton administration included) and Republicans who resorted of NAFTA to coded (and at times explicit) racism in order to justify and denounce NAFTA. In the media coverage of NAFTA debates prior to the congres- negotiations- sional vote in November 1993, free trade proponents argued that exporting low-wage jobs to Mexico would keep Mexicans from "stealing" U.S. immigration jobs, while protectionists simply wanted to dig trenches and build walls to Mexicans out.66 From the of view of and the rights. keep point Gomez-Peiia Bordertown writers, culture and immigration are closely related, since the flow of media and people is largely responsible for the diffusion of culture. G6mez-Pefia's recent call for a "Free Art Agreement" seems to challenge the fact that cultural issues were downplayed during the NAFTA debates and that cultural industries were given cursory mention in the treaty itself. All of this has taken place against the backdrop of an ongoing drive throughout the continent to privatize cultural industries, which is bound to have its most profound effects on smaller arts organizations, the very ones most likely to promote the work of minority populations.

74 Claire F Fox Theorizing "the Change": NAFTA and the Exportation of Culture

While G6mez-Pefia and the Bordertown writers confront some of NAFTA's black holes, they also have one feature in common with U.S. media coverage of the treaty. All three neglect the fact that the deleterious effects of economic restructuring will be felt in some geographical areas more than in others. NAFTA is only a recent step in a three-decade-long process toward economic globalization. It is difficult to forecast how swiftly or severely the effects of this particular treaty will be felt. Many activists who work on trade-related issues, however, view the treaty as the mere standardization of many already existing trade arrangements. Among North American regions, the U.S.-Mexico border so far has witnessed the most drastic transformations as the result of North American free trade. The flight of U.S. and foreign industries to Mexico in the wake of the world financial crisis of the early 1970s and Mexico's own financial crisis in 1982 has brought to the border region heightened labor abuses, environmental degradation, and shortages of housing, water, food, and medical care. The uneven development fostered by free trade is marked within the U.S.-Mexico "transfrontier metropolises" themselves. Social scientists have for years insisted that from a cultural perspective, the border should be viewed as a semi-autonomous social system because the twin cities straddling the border have more in common with one another than with U.S. and Mexican cities of the interior.67But the industrialization of the border through the maquiladoraprogram has made the cities extremely heterogeneous economically even as it has increased binational ties. This heterogeneity, in turn, has given rise to artistic and literary production concomitant with the boom in industrial parks.68In most border cities, however, institutional support for local artists and writers remains very modest. Although border art is produced under much more comfortable conditions than TVs and other consumer products are, it too is subject to exportation, as G6mez-Peiia asserted when he repudiated the genre. When an "art of place" finds itself decontextualized and distributed for mass consumption on a national or international level, it becomes all the more important to differentiate between two borderized cities like Mata- moros and New York;often the distinction not only is spatial and national but also divides production from consumption and distribution. The glob- alized border of postmodern theorists misses the specificity of regions such as the U.S.-Mexico border, where nation-states continue to enforce differences within urban space. The border as global metaphor of oppositional discourse to NAFTA also falls prey to facile appropriation by an

The Portable Border 75 equally globalizing U.S. nationalist expansionism. A recent headline in the New York Times, proclaiming northern Mexico to be "America's Newest Industrial Belt" and referring to Mexico as "the 51st State" in terms of the U.S. economy, illustrates how easily the border can be assim- ilated by U.S. industrial interests. There still is a border between "us" and "them," according to the logic of the Timesarticle; it has simply been displaced southward.69 Seemingly in defiance of the way that their own works collapse this distinction between production and consumption, the Bordertown writers and Gomez-Peiia continually denounce the process of cultural appropriation. Another part of the Year of the White Bear project was the well- known "Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit .. ." performance, in which Gomez-Pefia and Fusco, from inside a ten-by-twelve-foot cage, presented themselves as indigenous inhabitants of an island in the Gulf of Mexico. The idea for the piece was based on the colonial practice of exporting Native Americans, Asians, and Africans to Europe for "aesthetic contem- plation, scientific analysis and entertainment."70Fusco and G6mez-Pefia exhibited themselves in public areas in Europe, North America, and Aus- tralia, where many spectators mistook them for "authentic" natives, in spite of their eclectic costumes and props such as a laptop computer.71 Fusco and Paula Heredia subsequently produced a video about this interactive performance, entitled The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey,in which they recorded the reactions of many unsuspecting view- ers, who did not realize that what they were witnessing was a performance. This Eurocentric way of perceiving "native" populations is by no means obsolete along the U.S.-Mexico border, and those who commit offenses are not individual spectators but nationally and internationally recognized cultural institutions. I was a research fellow at the Center for InterAmerican and Border Studies in El Paso in 1992-93, when repre- sentatives from a major U.S. museum came to the city to find material for a border art exhibition. One of their ideas was to export a group of cholos to the exhibition site to paint a mural. Another was to ship a group of maquiladoraworkers to the exhibition for the purpose of displaying them in a maquiladoraset. But the mere aestheticization of the maquiladoraand the colonia begs the question of what possibilities for productive interac- tion could possibly arise from such an encounter between these U.S. spectators and Mexican "performers." In the summer of 1991, a labor group called the Tri-National Com- mission for Justice in the Maquiladoras (TCJM) staged a similar "exhibition" of maquiladoraworkers at a conference on NAFTA held in Kansas City.72But in this case, the maquiladoraworkers were also active partici- pants in the conference; furthermore, Canadian and U.S. workers illus-

Claire F. Fox trated their working conditions for the Mexican workers, and all three national groups were united in the cause of changing the system under which they lived. For this group, visual spectacle and cultural understanding were not ends in themselves. Rather, they were communication strategies to mutually achieve a greater level of social and economic equality. Locally based art movements linked to activist agendas, as exempli- fied by BAW/TAF and the collaborations of Louis Hock, Deborah Small, Elizabeth Sisco, and David Avalos, are still relatively rare on the U.S.- Mexico border; meanwhile, border art flourishes in national arts media.73 One cannot see this phenomenon in terms of a simplistic opposition of site-specificity to mass media, as though incursions into mass media immediately signified inauthenticity and co-optation. Indeed, many grassroots organizations currently engaged in cross-border organizing employ communication strategies similar to those used on a smaller scale by Gomez-Pefia and the Bordertown writers, including video, fax, and e- mail.74 In contrast to professional artists, however, the grassroots organizations do not necessarily isolate their videos, installations, and the like from the rest of their activities, as "aesthetic" artifacts. Perhaps, then, the emphasis in promoting an art of place should be less on the formal or thematic qualities of a given work than on the supposition that performers and spectators alike are potential actors in a common social struggle once the performance or exhibition is over.

Notes

I would like to thankDudley Andrew,Charles Hale, Tom Lewis, KathleenNew- man, Chon Noriega, and Andrew Ross for their valuablesuggestions as I was writingthis essay. I would also like to express my thanksto TerriWindling and Midori Snyderfor the wealthof informationthat they providedto me about the Bordertownseries. Portionsof this essay were deliveredat the SixteenthAnnual WhitneySymposium on Art and Culture,New York,May 1993. 1. GuillermoG6mez-Pefia, "The New World (B)order,"High Performance 15 (summer-fall1992), 60. 2. TerriWindling, ed., Lifeon theBorder (New York:Tor, 1991), 8. 3. Chon A. Noriega, "This Is Not a Border,"Spectator 13 (fall 1992), 6. 4. See, e.g., Hector Calder6nand Jose David Saldivar,eds., Criticismin the Borderlands:Studies in ChicanoLiterature, Culture, and Ideology(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991); Gloria Anzaldua, BorderlandslLaFrontera: The New Mestiza(San Francisco:Spinsters/aunt lute, 1987). 5. The followingis a partiallist of recent scholarlywork which featuresthe border metaphor: D. Emily Hicks, Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text (Minneapolis:University of MinnesotaPress, 1991); lain Chambers,Border Dia- logues:Journeys in Postmodernity(London: Routledge, 1990); Henry Giroux, Bor-

The Portable Border 77 der Crossings: Cultural Workersand the Politics of Education (New York: Rout- ledge, 1992); Trinh T. Minh-ha, When the Moon WaxesRed: Representation,Gen- der, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991); Maggie Humm, Border Traffic:Strategies of ContemporaryWomen Writers (New York: St. Martin's, 1991); Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon, 1989). The border metaphor also appears in semiotic and poststruc- turalist critical theory. See Jacques Derrida, "Living On: Border Lines," trans. James Hulbert, in Deconstructionand Criticism, by Harold Bloom et al. (New York: Seabury, 1979), 75-176; "The Parergon," October9 (summer 1979), 3-41. See also Thomas G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1986). 6. E.g., Giroux writes: "In the postmodern age, the boundaries that once held back diversity, otherness, and difference, whether in domestic ghettoes or through national borders policed by customs officials, have begun to break down. The Eurocentric center can no longer absorb or contain the culture of the Other as something that is threatening and dangerous. As Renato Rosaldo points out, 'the Third World has imploded into the metropolis. Even the conservative national politics of containment, designed to shield "us" from "them," betray the impossibility of maintaining hermetically sealed cultures'" (Border Crossings, 57-58). 7. Terri Windling, letter to the author, 24 April 1992. 8. The area is also called "the Border," "Borderland," and "Borderlands" in these texts. 9. A shared-world anthology is one in which parameters for an alternative universe are created by several authors who then collectively contribute stories to the series. In the case of the Bordertown group, each author is associated with a character or group of characters, but they may borrow other authors' characters with permission. For a general history of shared-world anthologies, see Peter S. Beagle, "Authors in Search of a Universe," Omni 10 (November 1987), 40-41. 10. This is an idea which I am developing in my doctoral dissertation. I begin my study of this pattern of spectatorship with the U.S. Punitive Expedition in Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. 11. The term is G6mez-Pefia's neologism for half Chicano, half Chilango (i.e., Mexico City native). 12. The term transfrontiermetropolis is used by Lawrence A. Herzog, Where North Meets South: Cities, Space, and Politics on the US.-Mexico Border (Austin: Center for Mexican American Studies, University of Texas, 1990). See also Lawrence A. Herzog, ed., Planning the International Border Metropolis, Mono- graph 19 (La Jolla, Calif.: Center for United States-Mexico Studies, 1986). 13. BAW/TAF's membership varied from 1984 to 1989, although a core of founding members remained. In 1989 many new artists joined the collective, and only one original member stayed. G6mez-Pefia discusses the dissolution of the group's core in "A Binational Performance Pilgrimage," Drama Review 35 (fall 1991), 39-40; and "Death on the Border: A Eulogy to Border Art," High Perfor- mance 14, no. 2 (spring 1991), 8-9. 14. Guillermo G6mez-Pefia and Jeff Kelley, eds., The BorderArt Workshop: Documentation of Five Years of Interdisciplinary Art Projects Dealing with U.S.- Mexico Border Issues, 1984-1989 (New York; La Jolla, Calif.: Artists Space Museum of Contemporary Art, 1989), 20. 15. Ibid., 18-19. 16. G6mez-Pefia, "Binational Performance Pilgrimage," 27-32.

78 Claire F. Fox 17. Guillermo G6mez-Pefia, "Documented/Undocumented," in The Gray- wolf Annual Five: Multi-Cultural Literacy, ed. Rick Simonson and Scott Walker (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf, 1988), 130. 18. Guillermo G6mez-Pefia, "The Multicultural Paradigm: An Open Letter to the National Arts Community," High Performance12 (fall 1989), 21. 19. Guillermo G6mez-Pefia, "From Art-mageddon to Gringostroika," High Performance14 (fall 1991), 21. 20. See note 13. BAW/TAF responded to G6mez-Pefia in "ErrataHistorica" (Unpublished manuscript, December 1991). Recently, David Avalos, founder of BAW/TAF, published his own recollection of the early BAW/TAF years, in which he responded to many of G6mez-Pefia's claims about the demise of border art: "A Wag Dogging a Tale/Un meneo perreando una cola," in La Frontera/TheBor- der: Art about the Mexico-United States Border Experience (San Diego: Centro Cultural de la Raza, 1993), 52-93. 21. For more background on the production of Border Brujo, see G6mez- Pefia, "Binational Performance Pilgrimage," 40-42; Jason Weiss, "An Interview with Guillermo G6mez-Pefia," Review: Latin American Literature and Arts 45 (July-December 1991), 8-13. 22. Other examples include Border Realities (1986), I Couldn't Reveal My Identity (1988), and Backyard to Backyard (1988). 23. The character of Border Brujo was "born" at a BAW/TAF installation entitled "Casa de Cambio." See Shifra Goldman's review essay of the installation in G6mez-Pefia and Kelley, BorderArt Workshop,8-9. 24. G6mez-Peiia, "Binational Performance Pilgrimage," 49-66; Guillermo G6mez-Pefia, "Border Brujo," in Being America: Essays on Art, Literature, and Identity from Latin America, ed. Rachel Weiss, with Alan West (Fredonia, N.Y.: White Pine, 1991), 194-236; Guillermo G6mez-Pefia, "Border Brujo," in War- rior for Gringostroika:Essays, Performance Texts, and Poetry (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf, 1993), 75-95. The script was often modified in performance. 25. For example, he has deleted the voice of a member of the Latin Ameri- can oligarchy, a Central American war victim, and many of the transvestite's lines. He has also left out a part about affirmative action and the critique of Chi- cano nationalism and radicalism at the end of the piece, which greatly changes the tone of the ending. 26. I am grateful to Chon Noriega for providing background information about Son of Border Crisis. 27. G6mez-Pefia subsequently relocated to Los Angeles in 1993. 28. G6mez-Pefia, "Death on the Border," 9. 29. Guillermo G6mez-Pefia, "The New World Border: Prophecies for the End of the Century," Drama Review 38 (spring 1994), 119-42. The quotes from The New World(B)order which appear in this essay are taken from the High Per- formance essay, with the understanding that the live version has varied greatly from performance to performance. 30. Weiss, "Interview with Guillermo G6mez-Pefia," 11. 31. G6mez-Pefia, "New World Border: Prophecies," 120. 32. Kim Sawchuck, "Unleashing the Demons of History," Parachute 67 (July-September 1992), 29. 33. Defined by G6mez-Pefia as "a continental grass roots movement that advocates the complete economic and cultural reform of U.S. capitalism" ("New World (B)order," 65). 34. A play on Zona de Libre Comercio.Coger means "to screw" in Mexico.

The Portable Border 79 35. G6mez-Pefia, "New World (B)order," 60. 36. Ibid., 61. 37. Ibid., 63. 38. Ibid., 64. 39. Weiss, "Interview with Guillermo G6mez-Peia," 11; see also G6mez- Pefia, "New World (B)order," 63. 40. G6mez-Pefia, "Art-mageddon," 24. 41. Ibid. 42. G6mez-Pefia, "Binational Performance Pilgrimage," 43; Weiss, "Inter- view with Guillermo G6mez-Pefia," 10. 43. Giroux, Border Crossings,224. 44. On the importance of "dialogue" with "Others," see Chambers, Border Dialogues, 50, 76, 104-5; Giroux, Border Crossings,28-35. On reading and writing as border crossing, see Hicks, "Introduction: Border Writing as Deterritori- alization," in Border Writing, xxiii-xxxi. See also G6mez-Pefia, "Multicultural Paradigm," 21; and his quote of Carlos Fuentes in "Binational Performance Pil- grimage," 44. 45. Grant Kester, "Rhetorical Questions: The Alternative Arts Sector and the Imaginary Public," Afterimage20, no. 6 (January 1993), 13. 46. Roger Rouse, "Mexican Migration in the Social Space of Postmod- ernism," Diaspora 1 (spring 1991), 8-23. 47. G6mez-Pefia, "Multicultural Paradigm," 27. 48. In an ironic reversal of G6mez-Pefia's trajectory, series creator Terri Windling recently relocated to Tucson, Arizona, and she told me that the newest anthology in the series may include elements that reflect her proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border. Midori Snyder and Windling suggested that SoHo was modeled on squatters' neighborhoods in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Ams- terdam, and London. See Snyder, interview with the author, 30 March 1993; Windling, letter to the author, 26 March 1993; Windling, interview with the author, 28 April 1993. 49. Bordertown is not the only example of an alternative universe set on "the border." Several popular role-playing games such as Rifts and Shadowrun explic- itly develop a postapocalyptic U.S.-Mexico border region, although they adhere more closely to traditional representations of the border: a war zone without the "multicultural" alternative. 50. Snyder, interview with the author, 30 March 1993; Windling, letter to the author, 26 March 1993. 51. I am referring to statements such as "'He's got a lot of anger,' Mickey said. 'It isn't easy growing up a halfie in Bordertown"' (Will Shetterly, Elsewhere [New York: Tor, 1991], 134). 52. Bordertown elves are differentiated from Elfland elves by their accent or by social class. In Bordertown, class and race are not always coterminous. For example, lower-class elves may dye their hair so that they can look more human. And Bordertown has its own upper-class neighborhood, Dragon's Tooth Hill, which is divided into elf and human sides. 53. SoHo is literally "South of Ho Street." 54. Each writer in the Bordertown series has his or her own opinion on the matter. Terri Windling says that the interdependence between elves and humans, which we see on a cultural level, may be grounded in something as basic as the elves' need for "raw materials" (interview with the author, 28 April 1993). 55. Shetterly, Elsewhere,229.

80 Claire F Fox 56. In the published script, this part continues: GP and CF: (Horny and agitated) The crossing from the Third to the First World; from the past to the future, remember? El cruce, el bordo,el abismo, el sismo, la migra, the spiderweb, the TV cam- eras, my old performances, your oldest prejudices, the original migration, your great mojado grandparents. Remember? (Blackout.) (G6mez-Pefia, "New World Border: Prophecies," 138). 57. G6mez-Pefia, "New World (B)order," 64. 58. Snyder, interview with the author, 30 March 1993. 59. G6mez-Pefia continues to express faith in young and newcomer artists in his recent work: "The teenagers have tremendous things to teach us; they have fewer hang-ups about race and gender, they are much more at ease with crisis and hybridity, and they understand our cities and neighborhoods better than we do. In fact, if there is an art form that truly speaks for the present crisis of our communities, this form is rap" ("The Free Art Agreement/El Tratado de Libre Cultura," High Performance16, no. 3 [fall 1993], 63). 60. The most "technologically advanced" artifacts in Bordertown are aging "pre-Change" videocassette decks, most of which no longer work because they are too close to Faerie's magic. G6mez-Pefia has always combined popular mass- produced icons from U.S. culture (Mickey Mouse, boom boxes, etc.) with hand- made "folk" icons from Mexican culture (e.g., Dia de los Muertos calaveras), as he does in Border Brujo. He has also commented on the need to distinguish between popular culture and mass culture for U.S. and Mexican contexts. In the U.S., he argues, there is a superimposition of folklore and technology, given that popular culture usually refers to commodities such as video games and Holly- wood movies, which have their origin in the U.S., while indigenous and ethnic cultures are either co-opted or invisible to the mainstream. Mexico, he cautions, is moving in the same direction through the creation of large media conglomer- ates such as Televisa (Marco Vinicio Gonzalez, "Guillermo G6mez-Pefia," Sem- anal de La Jornada 117 [8 September 1991], 20). In The New World(B)order, his descriptions of technology are perhaps more prominent; however, they are still dystopian (e.g., the giant media conglomerate Reali-TV and robo-raza I's technophilia). 61. Weiss, "Interview with Guillermo G6mez-Pefia," 12. 62. Speaking of the U.S. Latino arts community, G6mez-Pefia wrote: "We come from a culture which doesn't venerate irreflexively the principle of newness, or better said, a culture which considers that an apolitical reverence for original- ity carries dangerous ideological implications. What we consider 'avant-garde' or 'original' generally deals with extra-artistic concerns and precisely because of this, it never seems 'experimental enough' for the art world" (G6mez-Pefia and Kelley, BorderArt Workshop,57). See also his piece in Lilly Wei, "On Nationality: Thirteen Artists," Art in America 79 (September 1991), 159. 63. Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold, eds., Borderland(New York: Tor, 1992), vii. The first edition of this collection appeared in 1986. The "wild elves" depicted in the series still have an aversion to iron. 64. Bordertown does have a police force, called the Silver Suits, but they have little jurisdiction in SoHo and are portrayed as ineffectual. In the New World (B)order, "the role of the presidents is now restricted to public relations and the role of the military has been reduced to guarding banks, TV stations and art schools" (G6mez-Pefia, "New World [B]order," 60). 65. Douglas Kellner and Michael Ryan, for example, argued that technology

The Portable Border 81 was opposed to "family values," human intimacy, and the private sphere in several Reagan-Bush-era science fiction film productions ("Technophobia," in Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn [London: Verso, 1990], 58-65). Charles Ramirez-Berg pointed out in his study of aliens and Hispanic imagery that films like The Terminatorenvisioned a confrontation between an embattled human race and superhuman technology- the corollary being that only a eugenics in the present, which would eliminate "the weaker races," can create a humanity fit for survival ("Immigrants, Aliens, and Extraterrestrials: Science Fiction's Alien 'Other' as [among Other Things] New Hispanic Imagery," CineAction! 18 [fall 1989], 3-17). 66. The 1992 U.S. elections witnessed a very strange spectrum of positions on NAFTA, which did not neatly correspond to party lines. The extreme right wing of the Republican Party, such as Pat Buchanan and David Duke (one advo- cated building a great wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and the other partici- pated in a "Light Up the Border" vigilante photo-op), shared the protectionist camp with Ross Perot and "Rust Belt" and pro-labor Democrats, while the center-left and -right of the two major parties tended to be pro-NAFTA. For an excellent overview of the U.S. political parties' stances on free trade, written from a liberal pro-NAFTA position, see Alan K. Henrikson, "A North American Community: 'From the Yukon to the Yucatan,"' in The Diplomatic Record, 1991-1992, ed. Hans Binnendijk and Mary Locke (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1993), 70-95. 67. Robert A. Pastor and Jorge G. Castafieda, "The Border," in Limits to Friendship: The United States and Mexico (New York: Vintage, 1989), 283-313. 68. San Diego-Tijuana in particular has seen a rise in artistic production, which may be due to several factors. Buffered by poorer cities like San Ysidro, San Diego is wealthy in comparison to other U.S. border cities, which gives it a relatively large art-consuming public. Secondly, the city has a history of militant Chicano art movements dating from the late 1960s. Finally, both San Diego and Tijuana have universities with strong arts and humanities emphases. For an overview of the San Diego visual art scene, see David Joselit, "Report from San Diego," Art in America 77 (December 1989), 120-35. 69. Louis Uchitelle, "America's Newest Industrial Belt," New YorkTimes, 21 March 1993, late ed., sec. 3, 1. 70. Sawchuck, "Unleashing the Demons of History," 27. 71. Ibid., 22. Coco Fusco also wrote an essay in which she vividly described her experiences while performing the piece at different venues, as well as the critical reception of the project ("The Other History of Intercultural Performance" Drama Review 38 [spring 1994], 143-67). 72. Jack Hedrick, UAW Local 249 and TCJM, telephone interview, July 1992. The set in this case included a maquiladora and a colonia, complete with drums of spilled "toxic waste." 73. As this essay was going to press in fall 1994, in SITE94 a large-scale exhibition of site-specific art was being planned by San Diego's Installation Gallery. Works by local artists were to be installed in public places around the San Diego-Tijuana metropolitan area. 74. Many of those organizations are listed in Ricardo Hernandez and Edith Sanchez, eds., Cross-BorderLinks (Albuquerque, N. Mex.: Inter-Hemispheric Education Resource Center, 1992).

82 Claire F Fox