VI.1.1 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1065568
This is Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s contribution to the catalogue for the exhibition The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s organized in 1990 by the Studio Museum in Harlem, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the now-defunct Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art (MoCHA) in New York. The Mexican-born writer and performance artist—who helped establish San Diego’s Border Arts Workshop in 1984—declares that U.S. culture is becoming increasingly and fundamentally multicultural. Furthermore, Gómez-Peña states that the “border experience” has refashioned the United States into a pluralistic entity without a discernible dominant culture. In his critical texts and art performances of the 1980s and early 1990s (“Border Culture” included), he articulated key concerns of a new generation of Latino artists in the United States. Primarily, they demanded that mainstream culture rethink its outdated and limited understanding of Latin American and Latino art. In this essay, Gómez-Peña signaled an unprecedented effort to encourage Latino artists to align themselves with other minorities in the promotion of Multiculturalism. The present version comes from the essay’s original publication [Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “Border Culture: The Multicultural Paradigm,” The Decade Show, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, 1990), 93–103].
It’s 1989 in this troubled continent accidentally called America. A major paradigm shift is taking place in front of our very eyes. The East Coast/West Coast cultural axis is being replaced by a North/South one. The need of United States culture to come to terms with the Latino American “cultural other” has become a national debate. Everywhere I go, I meet people seriously interested in our ideas and cultural models. “The art, film, and literary worlds are finally looking south.” To look south means to remember, to recapture one’s historical self. For the United States, this historical self extends from the early Native American cultures to the most recent immigration from Laos or Guatemala. It’s 1989 in this troubled country mistakenly called America. The current Latino and Asian immigration to the United States is the direct result of international conflicts between the so-called “First” and “Third Worlds.” The colonized cultures are sliding into the space of the colonizer; and in doing so they are redefining its borders and its culture. (A similar phenomenon is occurring in Europe with African immigration.)
The First and Third Worlds have mutually penetrated one another. The two Americas are totally intertwined. The complex demographic, social, and linguistic processes that are transforming this country into a member of the “Second World” (or perhaps Fourth World?) are being reflected in the art and thought produced by Latinos, blacks, Asians, Native Americans, and Anglo-Europeans. Unlike the images on television or in commercial cinema, depicting a mono-cultural middle-class world existing outside of international crises, contemporary United States society is fundamentally multicultural, multilingual, and socially polarized. So is its art.
Whenever and wherever two or more cultures meet—peacefully or violently—there is a border experience.
In order to describe the trans-, inter-, and multicultural processes that are at the core of our contemporary border experience as Latino artists in the United States, we need to find a new terminology, a new iconography, and a new set of categories and definitions. “We need to re-baptize the world in our own terms.” The language of postmodernism is ethnocentric and insufficient. And so is the existing language of cultural institutions and funding agencies. Terms like “Hispanic,” “Latino,” “ethnic,” “minority,” “marginal,” “alternatives,” and “Third World,” among others, are inaccurate and loaded with ideological implications. They create categories and hierarchies that promote political dependence and cultural underestimation. In the absence of a more enlightened terminology, we have no choice but to use them with extreme care.
My artistic sensibility as a de-territorialized Mexican American artist living a permanent border experience cannot be explained solely by accepted historical notions of the twentieth-century Western vanguard (from Dada to techno-performance). I am as Western and American as Laurie Anderson or Terry Allen. Yet my primary traditions are Chicano and Latin American art, literature, and political thought. We must realize that the West has been redefined. The South and East are already in the West. And being American today means participating in the drafting of a new cultural typography.
Let’s get it straight: America is a continent not a country. Latin America encompasses more than half of America. Quechuas, Mixtecos, and Iroquois are American (not United States citizens). Chicano, Nuyorrican, Cajun, Afro-Caribbean and Quebecois cultures are American as well. Mexicans and Canadians are also North Americans. Newly arrived Vietnamese and Laotians will soon become Americans. United States Anglo-European culture is but a mere component of a much larger cultural complex in constant metamorphosis. This pluralistic America within the United States can be found among other places in the Indian reservations and the Chicano barrios of the Southwest, the black neighborhoods of Washington or Detroit, or the multiracial barrios of Chicago, Manhattan, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Miami. This sui generis America is no longer part of the First World. It still has no name or configuration: but “as artists and cultural leaders, we have the responsibility to reflect it.”
Despite the great cultural mirage sponsored by the people in power, everywhere we look we find pluralism, crises, and no synchronicity. The so-called dominant culture is no longer dominant. Dominant culture is a meta-reality that only exists in the virtual space of the mainstream media and in the ideologically and aesthetically controlled spaces of the more established cultural institutions. Today, if there is a dominant culture, it is border culture. And those who still haven’t crossed a border will do it very soon. All Americans (from the vast continent America) were, are, or will be border crossers. “All Mexicans,” says Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, “are potential Chicanos.” As you read this text, you are crossing a border yourself.
The social and ethnic fabric of the United States is filled with interstitial wounds, invisible to those who didn’t experience the events that generated them, or who are victimized by historical amnesia. Those who cannot see these wounds feel frustrated by the hardships of intercultural dialogue. “Intercultural dialogue unleashes the demons of history.” [The New York-based artist] Arlene Raven once told me, “In order to heal the wound, we first have to open it.” In 1989, we are just opening the wound. To truly communicate with the cultural other is an extremely painful and scary experience. It is like getting lost in a forest of misconceptions or walking on mined territory. The territory of intercultural dialogue is abrupt and labyrinthine. It is filled with geysers and cracks, with intolerant ghosts and invisible walls. Anglo-Americans are filled with stereotypical notions about Latinos and Latino American art. Latin Americans are exaggeratedly distrustful of initiatives toward bi-national dialogue coming from this side/otro lado. Bicultural Latinos in the United States (be they Chicanos, Nuyorricans, or others) and mono-cultural citizens of Latin America have a hard time getting along. This conflict represents one of the most painful border wounds, a wound in the middle of a family, a bitter split between two lovers from the same hometown.
Fear is the sign of the times. The 1980s were characterized by a culture of fear. Everywhere I go, I meet Anglo-Americans immersed in fear. They are scared of us, the other, taking over “their country,” their jobs, their neighborhoods, their universities, their art world. To “them,” “we” are a whole package that includes an indistinct Spanish language, weird art, gang activity, drugs, “illegal aliens,” and potential terrorism. They don’t realize that their fear has been implanted as a form of political control: that this fear is the very source of the endemic violence that has been affecting this society.
Border culture can help dismantle the mechanisms of fear. Border culture can guide us back to common ground and improve our negotiating skills. Border culture is a process of negotiation towards utopia: but in this case, utopia means peaceful coexistence and fruitful cooperation. The border is all we share: La frontera es lo único que compartimos.
My border colleagues and I are involved in a tripartite debate around separatism. Some Chicano nationalists, who still haven’t understood that Chicano culture has been redefined by the recent Caribbean and Central American immigrations, feel threatened by the perspective of intercultural dialogue and Pan Americanism. Meanwhile, sectors of the Mexican intelligentsia, viewing themselves as “guardians of Mexican sovereignty,” see in our proposals for bi-national dialogue “a disguised form of integration” and pull back. Ironically, the conservative Anglo-Americans, who are witnessing with panic the irreversible multiculturization of the United States, tend to agree with Chicano and Mexican separatists who claim to speak from the left. The three parties prefer to defend their identity and culture, rather than to dialogue with the cultural other. The three parties would like to see the border closed. Their intransigent views are based on the modernist premise that identity and culture are closed systems, and that the less these systems change, the more authentic they are.
In 1989, we must realize that all cultures are open systems in constant process of transformation, redefinition, and re-contextualization. What we need is dialogue, not protection. In fact, the only way to regenerate identity and culture is through ongoing dialogue with the other. Then, the question is, what does dialogue mean. Some thoughts in this respect include the following:
“Dialogue is a two-way ongoing communication between peoples and communities that enjoy equal negotiating powers.”
Dialogue is a micro-universal expression of international cooperation. When it is effective, we recognize ourselves in the other and realize we don’t have to fear.
Dialogue has never existed between the First and Third Worlds. We must not confuse dialogue with neocolonialism, paternalism, vampirism, tokenism, or appropriation.
Dialogue is the opposite of national security, neighborhood watch, racial paranoia, aesthetic protectionism, sentimental nationalism, ethnocentrism, and mono-linguality.
In order to dialogue, “we must learn each other’s language, history, art, literature, and political ideas.” We must travel South and East, with frequency and humility, not as cultural tourists but as civilian ambassadors.
Only through dialogue we can develop models of coexistence and cooperation. Only through an ongoing public dialogue in the form of publications, conferences, and collaborative intercultural art and media projects, can the wound effectively heal. “It will be a long process. It might take thirty to fifty years. We cannot undo centuries of cultural indifference, domination, and racism overnight.” All we can aspire to is beginning a dialogue. This document is a humble contribution. I ask you to join in. A whole generation of artists and intellectuals has begun the dialogue. It is mostly artists, writers, and arts administrators (not politicians, scientists, or religious leaders) who are leading the effort. And from these people, the most vocal and enlightened are women. In the late 1980s, the true cultural leaders of our communities were women.
United States Latino culture is not homogeneous. It includes a multiplicity of artistic and intellectual expressions—rural and urban, traditional and experimental, marginal and dominant. These expressions differ from one another according to class, sex, nationality, ideology, geography, political context, degree of marginality or assimilation, and time spent in the United States. California Chicanos and Nuyorricans inhabit different cultural landscapes. Even within Chicano culture a poet living in a rural community in New Mexico has very little in common with an urban cholo-punk from L.A. Right-wing Cubanos from Miami are unconditional adversaries of leftist South American exiles. The cultural expressions of Central American and Mexican migrant workers differ drastically from those of the Latino intelligentsia in the universities, ad infinitum. Even this document, which attempts to present multiple voices and concerns, cannot possibly reflect all sectors of our communities. There is no such thing as “Latino art” or “Hispanic art.” There are hundreds of types of Latino American art in the United States. Each is aesthetically, socially, and politically specific.
The United States suffers from a severe case of amnesia. In its obsessive quest to “construct the future,” it tends to forget or erase the past. Fortunately, the so-called disenfranchised groups who don’t feel part of this national project have been meticulously documenting their histories. Latinos, blacks, Asians, women, gays, experimental artists, and nonaligned intellectuals have used inventive languages to record the other history from a multicenter perspective. “Our art functions both as collective memory and alternative chronicle,” says [San Francisco-based Chicana artist] Amalia Mesa-Bains. In this sense, multicultural art, if nurtured, can become a powerful tool to recapture the desired historical self. The great paradox is that without this historical self, no meaningful future can ever be constructed.
Métier is being redefined. In Latin America, the artist has multiple roles. He/she is not just an image-maker or a marginal genius, but a social thinker, educator, counter-journalist, civilian-diplomat, and human rights observer. His/her activities take place in the center of society and not in specialized corners. So-called minority artists in the United States have also been forced to develop multidimensional roles. In the absence of enough institutions that respond to our needs, we have become a sui generis tribe of community organizers, media interventionists, and alternative chroniclers. And the images, text, and performances we produce are an integral part of these activities. The models are much more pertinent to our times than those of the established art world.
“Unlike modernist times, today’s avant-garde has multiple fronts,” or, as Steven Durland has stated, “the avant-garde is no longer in the front but in the margins.” To be avant-garde in the late 1980s was to contribute to the decentralization of art. To be avant-garde means to be able to cross the border, back and forth between art and politically significant territory, be it interracial relations, immigration, ecology, homelessness, AIDS, or violence toward disenfranchised communities and Third World countries. To be avant-garde means to perform and exhibit in both artistic and non-artistic contexts, to operate in the world, not just the art world.
According to [border artist] Emily Hicks “nothing is intrinsically marginal. Margins are constantly shifting. What today is marginal tomorrow becomes hegemonic and vice versa.” In order to articulate our present crises as multicultural artists, we need to constantly invent and reinvent languages. These languages have to be as syncretic, diversified, and complex as the fractured realities we are trying to define.
Postmodernism is a crumbled conceptual architecture, and we are tired of walking among someone else’s ruins.
Border artists use experimental techniques and performance-derived practices to intervene directly in the world. The permanent condition of political emergency and cultural vulnerability we live in leaves no other choice. “If our actions are not daring, inventive, and unexpected, they won’t make a difference, and border reality, with its overwhelming dynamics, will supersede us instantly.” In this sense, the experimental nature of border art is informed more by political and cultural strategies than by postmodernist theory. Like artists operating in other politically sensitive parts of the world, border artists understand that “formal experimentation is only worthwhile in relation to more important tasks” such as the need to generate a bi-national dialogue, the need to create cultural spaces for others, and the need to redefine the asymmetrical relations between the North and the South and among the various ethnic groups that converge in the border spiral. Confronted with these priorities, the hyper specialized concerns of the art world appear to be secondary.
Much of the contemporary work produced by the Latin community is often regarded as anachronistic and traditional by the art world. Why? Innovation for innovation’s sake. New York’s art obsession doesn’t really make sense to us. “Innovation is not a value per se in our culture.” What we consider avant-garde or original generally deals with extra-artistic concerns or concerns related to our traditions and the historical moment. Because of this, our art never seems experimental enough to a mono-cultural observer.
The misunderstanding increases when the art world discovers that most of us aren’t that interested in the gratuitous use of high technology or in the creation of special effects as an end in itself. Our rejection of unnecessary technology is seen as an underdeveloped attitude rather than a political stance. There are, in fact, many Latino artists working in computer art, media art, video, audio, and sophisticated multimedia languages, but they use technology in a socially responsible manner to reveal the contradictions of living and working between a preindustrial past of mythical dimensions and a postindustrial present in permanent states of crises.
When validating contemporary Latino artistic expressions (and this can also apply to black, Asian, and Native American art), Anglo critics must take off the ethnocentric glasses of innovation and approach the work within its own framework. To understand this framework, they have to do their homework. Artistic quality is also relative. Hegemonic centers like New York, Paris, and Mexico City have manufactured sacred canons of universality and excellence that we are expected to follow to break out of regionalism or ethnicity. But these dogmas are crumbling. The multicultural process that the United States is presently undergoing implies a shift of center, a decentralization of aesthetic canons and types, and therefore a multiplication of validating criteria.
In 1989, we must always use multiple repertoires to analyze and appreciate a work of art or literature, especially if it comes from a non-Anglo-European source. Cultural multiplicity and aesthetic relativism must be familiar notions to contemporary curators, critics, journalists, arts organizers, panelists, and funding agents. [As the Cuban-born, New York-based writer Coco Fusco states:] “When the opportunity opens, and we jump in so quickly, what are we doing to ourselves?”
What exactly is the “Latino Boom”? The artists’ answer
A. A kind of smoke screen to hide reality.
B. A prestidigitation act to distract us from politics.
C. The green light for us to become rich and famous.
D. A major opportunity to infiltrate and speak from within.
E. A contemporary version of the “good neighbor” policy toward Latin America.
F. The logical result of the Chicano and Nuyorrican movements.
G. A caprice of a Madison Avenue tycoon.
(Choose one of the above answers.)
In 1987, just like 1492, we were “discovered” (rediscovered to be precise). We have been here for over 2,000 years; yet, according to Time magazine and many other publications, we “just broke out of the barrio.” Today Latinos are being portrayed as the new “up and coming” urban sofisticados. We are suddenly in, fashionable and grantable, and “our ethnicity is being commoditized.” Why?
According to [the theoretician] Gayatri [Chakravorty] Spivak, “otherness has replaced postmodernism as the object of desire.” We are undetermined “objects of desire” within a meta-landscape of Mac Fajitas, La Bamba crazes, MTV border rock, Pepsi ads in Spanish, and Chicano art with thorns. In the same way the United States government needs and wants a cheap undocumented labor force to sustain its agricultural complex without having to suffer Spanish language or unemployed foreigners in their neighborhoods, the contemporary art world needs and desires the spiritual and aesthetic models of Latino culture without having to experience our political outrage and cultural contradictions. What the art world wants is a “domesticated Latino” who can provide enlightenment without irritations, entertainment without confrontation. “They don’t want the real thing. They want microwave tamales and T-shirts of Frida Kahlo.” They want ranchero music sung by Linda Ronstadt not Lola Beltrán [(the “queen” of Mexican-ranchero music)],” the mexicorama look of Milagro Beanfield War and not the acidity of Chicano experimental video.
We must politely remind the art world that image is never a substitute for culture. It is reality that must be addressed, no matter how painful or complex it might be. Like the border graffiti says, “Simulacra stops here” (at the border).
In this Faustian moment of perplexity and sudden attention given to “Latinos” by major cultural institutions and mainstream media, we are concerned about the way “Latino art” is being presented and represented. “We feel that some mistakes have been made and there is still time to correct them.” Some frequent mistakes include homogenization (“all Latinos are alike and interchangeable”); de-contextualization (Latino art is defined as a self-contained system that exists outside Western history and political crises); curatorial eclecticism (all styles and art forms can be showcased in the same vent as long as they are “Latino”); folklorization and exoticization (needless to explain)…
Latino artists are being portrayed as “magical realists,” pre-technological “bohemians,” primeval creatures “in touch with ritual,” hypersexual entertainers, “fiery revolutionaries,” or “amazing success stories.” Our art is being described as “colorful,” “passionate,” “mysterious,” “exuberant,” “baroque”—all euphemistic terms for irrationalism and primitivism. These mythical views only help to perpetrate the colonizing notions toward the South as a wild and exotic pre-industrial universe ever awaiting to be discovered, enjoyed, and purchased by the entrepreneurial eye of the North. It is mainly the artists who voluntarily or unknowingly resemble the stereotypes, who end up being selected by the fingers of the Latino boom; but where are the voices of dissent who delineate the boundaries of the abyss? Where are the artists experimenting with the new possibilities of identity? Where are the sharp-edged conceptual artists working in performance, video, or installations, the more political ones? And where are the Latinas? Women have been instrumental in the creation of a Latino culture in the United States. Why are all these key artists being left out of the blockbuster Hispanic shows and the all-encompassing Latino festivals?
Some people think that these questions are an expression of our permanent dissatisfaction and ungratefulness. My response to them is simple. By asking out loud, we are merely trying to clean the mirror of true communication.
Many of us are ambivalent about the effects of the boom. On one hand, it has opened doors to many talented artists whose work was practically unknown outside the Latino milieu. On the other, it has brought foreign values to our milieu. Those who are chosen are pressured to become more slick, professional, individualistic, competitive, and to produce twice as much as they used to. The result is devastating: museum-quality art framed by cultural guilt and spiritual exhaustion. And on top of that, it has produced a confused community, divided by those who were chosen and those who weren’t. Those left behind are slowly poisoned by jealousy and defeat. Many of us don’t aspire to make it in Hollywood or New York. We want something even more ambitious. And that is to be in control of our political destiny and our cultural expressions. What the boom has done is to provide us with a handful of opportunities to “make it” at a very high spiritual cost. But is has not contributed to the betterment of the conditions of our communities.
There is a fatal discrepancy between the colorful image of prosperity broadcast by the boom and the bloody reality that no one wishes to address. Today, Latinos have the highest school dropout rate. We are the largest population in the prisons of the Southwest. The majority of babies born with AIDS are Latino and black. Police brutality, alcoholism, drugs are quotidian realities in our communities. Even our physical space is being threatened. Gentrification is pushing our families and friends outside our barrios as we witness with melancholy and impotence the arrival of real estate lords, insensitive yuppies, trendy restaurants, and commercial galleries. So, what exactly is booming?
The Latino boom is clearly a media-produced mirage, a marketing strategy designed with two objectives: to expand our consumer power and to offer exotica to the American middle class. Our participation in national political and cultural processes remains restricted to token individuals who are generally conservative. “We want understanding, not publicity.” We want to be considered intellectuals, not entertainers; partners, not clients; collaborators, nor competitors; holders of a strong spiritual vision, not emerging voices; and, above all, full citizens, not exotic minorities.
We are living a paradoxical moment. At the peak of the Latino boom, we witness in utter perplexity the most arrogant behavior of the current administration perpetrated against minorities, immigrants, and Latin American countries. In the very moment Eddie Olmos, Luis Valdez, Ruben Blades, and Los Lobos are becoming national celebrities, the United States government is threatening to dismantle bilingual education and affirmative action and proposing to build a ditch on the United States–Mexico border.
Just as my colleagues and I are being asked to perform and exhibit in the main spaces of Manhattan and San Francisco, the border patrol is dismantling labor camps in North County (San Diego); and the California police are declaring open warfare against Latino gangs. On the same TV channels that show us glamorous commercials for Taco Bell, Colombian coffee, or Mexican beer, we also witness sensationalist accounts of Mexican criminals, drug dealers, and corrupt politicos on the evening news. The current media war against the Latino cultural other is intercut with eulogies to our products. Blood and salsa, that’s the nature of this relationship.
It’s all very confusing, but we are determined to find the underlying connections between these facts. For these connections can reveal important information about the way contemporary United States culture deals with otherness. In this abrupt context, my colleagues and I encourage our fellow artists, writers, journalists, curators, and cultural organizers to participate in this continental project, to collaborate (truly collaborate) as much as possible with the cultural other, inside and outside our borders, and to learn to share decisions and power with people of non-Anglo European descent. Only through a continuous and systematic rejection of racism, sexism, and separatism can we come to terms with otherness. From within, we must help the United States become an enlightened neighbor in this continent and respectful landlord in its own house.
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Author’s Note: The following text was drafted after conversations with over thirty artists and cultural leaders from around the country. Quotes by colleagues are intertwined with my own views on the historical moment we are living as “Latinos” in the United States. Given the vertiginous speed with which contemporary culture metamorphoses, this document carries the risk of soon becoming outdated. The quotes that appear without attribution are apocryphal statements found in the chaotic pages of my traveling notebooks. I don’t remember who said them, yet I feel that it is important to keep them as quotes to emphasize the paradigmatic and consensual nature of the text. Border culture is a culture of recyclement. “The multicultural paradigm” will appear in different formats and contexts, including newspaper, magazines, performances, conferences, arts, and political events. What matters is to keep the debate rolling and slowly help to dissipate the smog. These are times of debate. We all are preparing ourselves for the 1990s.