Toward a De-Colonial Performatics of the US Latina and Latino Borderlands

Introduction Toward a De-Colonial Performatics of the US Latina and Latino Borderlands Chela Sandoval, Arturo J. Aldama, and Peter J. García Latinas and Latinos represent the largest and fastest-growing ethnic community in the United States after “non-Hispanic” Whites (14 percent of the US population, approximately 55 million people in 2010).1 Yet the cultural impact of US Latina and Latino aesthetic production has yet to be fully recognized within the US nation-state and beyond. This book moves beyond the by now de-politicized and all-too-familiar cultural theory of the twentieth century and beyond so-called “radicalized” ex- amples of aesthetic production to unravel how culture is performance. Moreover, the following chapters travel beyond the linguistic surfaces and aesthetic limitations of “Latina and Latino” cultural production to reveal the less familiar and unexplored performance terrains of the “Borderlands.” Indeed, Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands is a book that challenges readers to engage those profound intercultural, psychic, social, and transnational effects that are being generated through US Latina and Latino testimonio, theater, ceremony, ritual, sto- rytelling, music, dance, improvisation, play, nagualisma-o, call-and- response, spoken-word, visual, body, digital, and sculptural enactments. Each contributing author introduces readers to performance topics, performing artists, and performative enactments that comprise the field of Borderlands Performance Studies. This field is identifiable through its commitment to an alter-Native cultural engineering, the technologies of which we editors identify as “de-colonizing performatics,” and the mestizaje, the hybridity, the bricolage, the rasquache interventions orga- nized around de-colonization that we call “perform-antics.” Join us then 1 2 · Chela Sandoval, Arturo J. Aldama, and Peter J. García as we set the academic stage where complex scholarly engagements are linked with the entertaining, enlightening, and emancipatory aesthetics of Borderlands Performance Studies.2 Borderlands Performance Studies Each chapter develops a method that explores and reveals a borderlands approach to the still-emergent field of Performance Studies. Border- lands Performance Studies rises from an insistent intercultural methodology that appears in many modes across theoretical terrains, artistic disciplines, aesthetic philosophies, and geographic hemispheres.3 This method codes and re-codes performance activities by utilizing diverse “performatic” techniques from a multiplicity of Latina and Latino sources including 1) what linguistic scholars call “code switching,” a toggling between world languages and their mixtures; 2) rasquachismo, the development of parodic-pastiche, hybrid, bricolage aesthetics for generating myriad possibilities for expression; 3) “theater of the oppressed” enactments designed to connect the body/mind/affect matrix in order to liberate the colonized personality through “games,” “exer- cises,” and “performances” of a particular kind; and 4) “haciendo caras,” “la conciencia de la mestiza,” and “conocimiento,” activities for remaking the self through negotiating and shifting identities in situational and culturally specific ways. However diverse, these techniques are drawn together under the rubric of this method we alternatively call “de-colonizing performatics” or, in their specificity as action, “de-colonizing perform-antics.”4 We contend that the diverse performatics developed across the fields of Indigenous, Chican@,5 Asian, Latin@, African, Feminist, and Cultural Studies contribute to a particular approach that expands the developing field of Performance Studies and that is a specific intercultural performance methodology. In brief, this performance methodology understands and deploys “acts” in order to intervene in and arbitrate among sign systems with the aim of inviting difference to the realm of egalitarianism. Within the purview of what we identify as Borderlands Performance Studies, then, such acts work as de-colonizing, interven- tionary deployments that become systematically linked and raised to the level of method through practitioners’ shared understanding of per- Introduction · 3 formance as an effective means of individual and collective liberation. De-colonizing performatics generate a pause in the activity of coloniality; their activity discontinues its ethos. Before clarifying their function further, we now break for a brief intermission.6 Introducing the Characters The impetus for this volume was an academic panel called No“ Somos Criminales: Latina/o Musics as Decolonizing Practices” in the 2008 En- joy Music Pop (EMP) conference in Seattle, Washington, where scholars from ethnomusicology and performance, film, visual, religious, and cultural studies came together to discuss how Latina and Latino identity is performed.7 Even though these fields have unique genealogies, meth- odologies, and theoretical foundations, we found that today they over- lap in terms of shared critical vocabularies, research applications, and concerns about how identity, memory, and culture are internalized and enacted in formal public, social, ritual, and private settings. This volume challenges Performance Studies scholars to consider what performance means in alternate cultural genealogies grounded within US Indigenous, mestiz@, African@, and Spanish-language traditions and epistemologies of dance, food, music, clothing, language, religions, styles, and identities.8 More fundamentally, this book is informed by the materiality of those cultures that remain misunderstood and criminalized and that live on lands literally colonized and dispossessed by Anglo-driven westward colonization and the imposition of Euro- and white American–centric cultural norms. There is a methodology of the oppressed that emerges from this materiality that opens the field of Performance Studies to the de-colonizing Borderlands approach to theory and action.9 United States Latin@, Chican@, African@, Asian mestiz@, and In- digenous communities have dynamic histories of performance activism that are steeped in similar political aims and border crossings, such as those generated by Teatro Campesino, the Nueva Cancíon movement, the pedagogy and theaters of the oppressed, and spoken word performances as enacted by radical performance artists and ensembles including ASCO, Culture Clash, Monica Palacios, TENAZ (El Teatro Nacional de Aztlán), Teatro Luna, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Luis Alfaro, Marga Gomez, Coco Fusco, El Vez, Xela, Alma Lopez, Mujeres de Maíz, and 4 · Chela Sandoval, Arturo J. Aldama, and Peter J. García Carmelita Tropicana, among many others. These performers, performance works, and performance strategies are similarly motivated by a de-colonizing effort that pushes their works beyond the boundaries and limits of colonial meanings. The scholarship in this book recognizes this shared de-coloniality of meaning as it affects the topics of indigeneity; place; cultural citizenship; immigration; equity; de-colonization; mestizaje; the construction of the self; and race, class, spirituality, sex, and gender compositions. A note regarding terminologies: In engaging the de-colonial prom- ise of this book, the editors realize that the terms “Latina” and “Latino” must be interrogated. When the US government asks Latinas or Latinos about their ethnic identity, they might refer to themselves as Mayan, Afro-Latina/o, Chilean, Chicana/o, Xican, Mexican, Boricua, Puer- torican, Cuban American, Tejana/o, Hispana/o, Dominicana/o, Asian Latin@, Nuevo Mexicana/o, Caribbean, Guatemalan, Indigenous, Tewa, Pueblo, and so on, depending on their specific ethnic origins. In this book, we use the term “Latin@” as an umbrella term for linking a di- versity of cultures, ethnicities, and genders across this hemisphere. This naming seeks connection among people who differ in nation, ethnicity, gender (thus the technological @ ending), race, and class but who nev- ertheless share a similar de-colonial relationship to western European imperial histories—that is, to the current global neo-colonial cultural and economic forces of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.10 In part, imperializing powers work through the denigration and re- placement of indigenous languages with European languages (including English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese) and through the cultural and economic relocation of all “Latin@” bodies, perceptions, and presences to a subservient status in relation to the colonizing Eurocentric gaze and apparatus. This book thus historically, philosophically, and culturally interrogates the terms “Latino” and “Latina” for their at once liberating and confining applications. What emerges through this interrogation is the conflation of another global, and dissident, constituency the editors of this volume describe as an Indigenous/Chican@/Latin@/African@ mestizaje: This is a radical “Latinidad” that is unique to the Américas. This de-colonizing and conflated presence is what generates the relative interculturality of Borderlands Performance Studies.11 Each chapter in this volume speaks to complex politics of discourse, representation, and the body. Yet what makes this volume unique is Introduction · 5 that each chapter aims to analyze not just the most valorized, famous, commercial, or popular aesthetic productions but the psychic and com- munal practices that arise at the margins of a marginalized community. This means, for instance, that contributing scholars

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