VI.1.5 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 809385
In this essay, Chicano curator Patricio Chávez discusses the sociopolitical and cultural conditions that led to the conception of the exhibition La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience at Balboa Park in San Diego in 1993. Here, he addresses both the problem of Multiculturalism and the institutionally entrenched prejudices that fuel “culture wars” and make genuine, balanced Multiculturalism impossible. A unique collaboration between a large mainstream museum and a small community cultural center, this exhibition countered the prevailing trend (during the late 1980s and into the 1990s) of major museums co-opting Chicano border art and turning “the border” into strictly a metaphoric, non-political concept [SEE THE WRITINGS OF GÓMEZ-PEÑA IN THIS REGARD, MAINLY DOCUMENT VI.1.4]. Though not exclusively comprised of Chicano/Latino artists, La Frontera/The Border exhibition maintained the focus on the frontier as a geographical site in-between and on its sociopolitical reality. This excerpt is from the text’s original publication [Patricio Chávez, “Multi-Correct Politically Cultural,” La Frontera/The Border: Art About Mexico/United States Border Experience, exh. cat. (San Diego, CA: Centro Cultural de la Raza/Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 1993), 3–11].
SELF-DETERMINATION, INDEPENDENCE, migration, immigration, domination, and the flourishing of the human spirit through the creation of art are the themes addressed by La Frontera/The Border: Art about the Mexico/United States Border Experience. This exhibition and catalogue bring together art by Chicano, Mexican, Asian, and Euro-American artists and writers who create their works about a historically complex region and subject in a time of turbulent hemispheric and global change. But La Frontera/The Border is about more than border art. It is also about the process and politics of institutional collaboration between the Centro Cultural de la Raza and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and about coming to terms with the meaning of multiculturalism for the arts in the United States. In the 1990s, we face the challenges of negotiating and controlling cultural identity and knowledge, both powerful “commodities” in our society. What do we need to know about cultural and institutional collaboration to understand this exhibition? What do we need to know about the history and reality of the border to understand border art? We will look at these questions, and some possible answers, in the pages to follow.
Currently, there is a great deal of debate in the cultural and educational communities about what multiculturalism really means. Unless we address the realities of institutional racism and the historic inequities in the arts, education, and our society at large, there can be no genuine multiculturalism. The last decade has been an especially hostile time for artists and cultural organizations. One of the extreme Right’s most vocal representatives, Pat Buchanan, has declared that there is a “culture war” taking place in the U. S., and that the attacks on the arts, many of which he has spearheaded, are part of the larger battles taking place in many areas of American society. Attacks on gays, lesbians, the poor, immigrants, progressive thought, and the rise of racism, bigotry, and intolerance are part of the extreme Right’s strategy—“friendly fascism,” as Bertram Gross calls it—all under the guise of God and Country: “Pat Buchanan, former director of communications in the Reagan White House, summed up the New Right’s position clearly in the August 1991 issue of his publication, From the Right. Declaring that there was “a rising demand on campus for black studies, for black fraternities, and multi-cultural education,” Buchanan concluded by quoting an official from the American Immigration Control Foundation that “the combined forces of open immigration and multiculturalism constitute a mortal threat to American Civilization.”1
Buchanan is correct to frame the attacks as “culture wars.” These assaults are all about the extreme Right’s quest for domination, power, and control over our experience, both in how we define our reality and in the tools we use for understanding our shared experience in this society. These battles require access to resources, money, and information. They also involve manipulation of television, film, radio, newspapers, magazines, education, history, and the arts. These media and disciplines are all part of the validation of ourselves and our cultures. These “hearts and minds” battles—a phrase coined during the Vietnam War for U.S. government propaganda efforts—continue today in other ways: art = pornography; public funding = support of pornography, multiculturalism = attacks on America.
Well before the most recent attacks from the Right, artists and organizations of color had great difficulties obtaining support and resources in the arts. I believe it is no accident that the assaults on the National Endowment for the Arts [NEA] are directly related to the gains organizations and artists of color, gays, and lesbians have made at the Endowment. One of the cynical manifestations of the ongoing struggle over multiculturalism is the tendency of mainstream institutions and funders to go “multicultural.” The resources stay in the loop because the same one-million-dollar-a-year-plus institutions continue to get funded, but now it is for “outreach” and “multicultural” programming. Organizations which have been doing committed ethnically-specific or multicultural community-based programming for years get passed by because of the same institutional barriers—institutional racism, prejudice against smaller or mid-sized organizations, and the basic ignorance regarding non-mainstream groups—that have existed all along. Historically, the pattern has been: those who have, get. The status quo is thus maintained, and efforts to assert cultural identity are co-opted.
The Centro Cultural de la Raza came into being as part of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement 23 years ago. The Centro was established in 1970 after a group of Chicano artists demanded a working exhibition space from the city of San Diego. This “demand” was in the context of many other issues then confronting the Chicano community in San Diego. The history and foundation of the Centro set the tone for its approach to La Frontera/The Border and the collaboration with the MCA, both literarily and philosophically. . . . Los Toltecas en Aztlán, represented by Salvador Torres and Luis Espinoza, presented a three part proposal stating: “1) That the Ford Building be turned over to the Toitecas en Aztlán board of directors to be converted into a Centro Cultural de la Raza. 2) That in the event another building is offered by the city, such a building must be of comparable size to the Ford Building and be located in Balboa Park. 3) That the city commits itself to match the funds that the Toltecas are able to raise with an equal amount.”2
The community prevailed. Thus was born the Centro Cultural de la Raza, founded on principles of self-determination, mutual self-respect, and self-sacrifice—setting aside personal differences for the greater good of the organization. In 1989, the then La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art’s Dos Ciudades/Two Cities project was funded by the NEA Special Artistic Initiatives program. The Dos Ciudades/Two Cities project, of which La Frontera/The Border is a part, consisted of several components, including exhibitions, publications, billboards, public arts projects, and lectures and symposia. Previously, the MCA had mounted one exhibition of the Border Art Workshop—911: A House Gone Wrong,—and also exhibited the works of several individuals, as well as purchased a modest number of works for its permanent collection.3
. . . When I arrived at the Centro in the Fall of 1989, one of the first decisions I was involved in was how to, or whether or not to, participate in the Dos Ciudades project, which included a border art exhibition and catalogue. Members of the BAW/TAF [Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo] and the Centro’s Visual Arts Advisory Committee, however, questioned the appropriation of language and ideas about border art by the MCA, and we felt it necessary to continue the dialogue established between Hugh Davies, Director of the MCA, and the previous Acting Director of the Centro, Victor Ochoa. Ochoa had reviewed and advised on the initial NEA proposal submitted by the MCA. Still, for some, at issue was: the appropriation, the commodification, and the exploitation of border art by the art mainstream.
The situation presented a difficult challenge for us. The Centro had been dealing with issues facing the border community since its inception. We debated as to the most appropriate action for us to take, given our concerns. Should we simply maintain a position of neutrality and let a project take place that dealt with issues of art on the border and raise our concerns from the outside, or demand equal participation from within the project? The Centro’s Visual Arts Committee (which included several members of the BAW/TAF), the Director of the Centro at the time, Ernesto Guerrero, and I, decided to participate if certain conditions were met that would make it a meaningful and equitable collaboration. The two organizations developed a statement of understanding in the summer of 1992. The basic outline of the agreement was the following: that there would be shared and administrative decision-making in the border art show and catalogue, a shared curatorial fellow, a philosophical statement about the collaborative nature of border art, and that the BAW/TAF support the Centro’s participation.
The collaboration between the Centro and the MCA represents a search for an enlightened model of institutional collaboration. How do we overcome the historic inequity and oppression that is part of the foundation and fabric of U.S. society so that all may share in the basic rights and opportunities for all human beings? How do we bridge the gaps between those who have and those who do not, as represented in our distinctly different institutions, when the very premise of some institutions and their support system is to continue to prop up historical amnesia and the erasure of whole cultures? Our collaboration is an attempt to establish and address a true multicultural agenda. I believe these basic premises are the most important factors in collaborations: financial or resource equity, fair division of input and responsibility, and equal participation in the full development of a project from its inception. . . .
The current dramas of racism, national identity, migration, immigration, cultural self-definition and determination, and economic violence are the results of the inherited relationships, systems, and structures of institution building in politics, culture, and the arts. This exhibition, the collaboration between the Centro and the MCA, and border art itself are a direct result of these conflicts and the attendant realities. The United States’s mind is a young one with a short memory. The border, as it now exists, is very new. We are still shaping our national identity and culture next to Mexico, a nation that is also negotiating its own past, present, and future.
By virtue of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in 1848 after two years of war between Mexico and the United States, Mexico lost the territory that is now California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Texas, and parts of Wyoming, Colorado, and Oklahoma. During the negotiations, many in the U.S., both public officials and private individuals, argued that it was the “Manifest Destiny” of the U.S. government to acquire these lands, and some advocated the taking of all of Mexico. Several arguments were put forward both to acquire all of Mexico or territories that included Baja California and much of the Mexican mainland. Some said that the U.S. government would be willing to forgive the massive Mexican debt were Mexico to surrender Baja California. Even then, some politicians, concerned about slavery, race, and other issues, opposed the acquisition of Mexico and the granting of U.S. citizenship to Mexicans.4 The region that was created—the Mexico/United States border region—put the so-called first and third worlds in collision, conflict, and competition. The people of the border region have developed a unique and complex culture—language, food, economy, politics, and art,—all specific to this confluence of cultures. Each area along the border has its own character and challenges, but there is always the reality of La Linea [the line], which artificially divided—and continues to divide—communities and families.
The Tijuana/San Diego border is the most traversed border checkpoint in the world, and the Mexico/United States border, at 1,952 miles, is currently the longest international border. The border is the last psychic frontier of the American West, where perceptions of the so-called first and third worlds thrive: the conquerors and the conquered, the rich and the poor, the “civilized” and the “uncivilized.” This psychic frontier is expressed by the oversized Marlboro Men billboards and the huge U.S. flags flying all along the border, reminding residents who is in charge. In El Paso, Texas, a local bank lights up dozens of floors at night in the image of the U.S. flag, facing Ciudad Juárez, Mexico a few hundred yards away.
The creation of art about the border is one result of both the psychic and literal border crossings that occur every day. Globally, millions of people are adjusting to the tectonic border shifts of the 1980s and 1990s that are re-configuring whole nations and national identities. La Frontera/The Border seeks to stimulate discussion on the meaning of the border, for people regionally, nationally, and internationally. Public sentiment, official and unofficial U.S. government policy, and Mexican government collision regarding the presence and migration of Mexican people to the U.S. has changed with the ebb and flow of U.S. economic needs. Through programs such as the Bracero Program during World War II, massive numbers of Mexican workers migrated to the U.S. More recently, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act—and now the North American Free Trade Agreement—officially limit the migration and immigration of Mexican people into the U.S.
Since the nineteenth century, Mexican workers have heavily subsidized the U.S. economy, often doing those jobs that U.S. workers would never touch. Historically, people of color and poor European immigrants provided the labor that built the United States into the most powerful nation in the world, and provided the middle and upper classes a standard of living higher than anywhere else. Mexican people have picked our food, cleaned our homes, raised our children, built our buildings, landscaped, and worked in maquiladoras [factories on the border owned by the U.S. or other countries], working for less than a dollar an hour. Yet, when hard times hit, they become a favorite target, scapegoats blamed for every social ill from lack of jobs to disease and overpopulation. In some instances, the forced repatriation of Mexican people some of whom never lived in Mexico to begin with—has taken place.
The social and economic pressures that influence immigration policy also have been manifested in violence against Mexican people, much like that against immigrants of other countries. In the summer of 1943, as a result of the hysteria whipped up in the media against “Zoot Suit Hoodlums” and “Pachuco gangsters,” hundreds of U.S. military personnel went on the rampage for weeks in Los Angeles, cruising the city in taxicabs, attacking any brown person they saw. These sailors, none of whom were arrested, concentrated on Zoot Suiters, primarily Chicanos, who adopted a particular style of dress. These events came to be known as the Zoot Suit riots.
In the 1990s, anti-Mexican sentiment in the border region is rising dramatically. The primary reasons given for recent federal reinforcement of the border are drugs and crime. In 1992, a thirteen-mile steel fence was installed from the Pacific coast inland by the U.S. military and the U.S. Border Patrol. This fence is made of [Operation] Desert Storm landing material. Two years ago, citizens groups, such as “Light up the Border,” made up primarily of the local white middle class and formed by the promotion and endorsement of a popular AM radio talk show host—indicted ex-Mayor Roger Hedgecock—met weekly on the border to protest the “flood of illegal aliens” into the U.S. At dusk, they pointed their vehicles toward Mexico, their lights on, with the goal of bringing attention to “illegal aliens,” who; in their view, bring disease, crime and drugs, overcrowd schools and hospitals, take jobs from U.S. citizens, and contribute to the national debt. In opposition to these activities, many organizations and individuals formed a coalition to protest what they saw as an over-simplified and racist anti-immigration movement. Arts groups such as The Border Art Workshop and Las Comadres [Godmothers, Old Wives, Neighbors] participated with community groups in counter protests, with large banners carrying statements such as “Another Berlin Wall?,” “No Apartheid on the Border,” “Our Prosperity Depends on Their Poverty,” and “Stop Militarization of the Border.” . . .
Chicanos are among the heirs to the 500-year history of conquest in this hemisphere. By blood, Chicanos are the descendants of the Europeans and Indigenous people of the Americas, and by nation-state power politics, the conquered inhabitants of an occupied homeland. Land is—and always has been—the basic struggle of Indigenous people in the U.S. The importance of the land and the relationship to the land are themes woven throughout much of the work in La Frontera/The Border, from aesthetic and spiritual inspiration to the more direct interpretation of the sociopolitical issues on the border.
The history of conflict in the establishment of the Mexico/United States border revolves around the struggle over land. Territory that originally was home to a large and diverse Native population now supports Americans of myriad backgrounds. It is important to speak of Native people in the context of the border because they have lost the most. The Mexico/United States boundary cuts right through the lands and communities of many people who have lived in the region for millennia. Yet, since the initial displacement and attempted destruction of the Native people of the Americas and Africa through genocide, disease, slavery, forced relocation, reservations, and the establishment of nation-state boundaries, Indigenous peoples have struggled to survive. In taking the land, the U.S. used a divide-and-conquer strategy to pit Mexican people against Native people. However, loyalties based on homeland, blood, or nations still guide indigenous and Mestizo peoples. Today, throughout the U.S. Southwest, there are contemporary indigenous and Mestizo cultures flourishing in spite of continued systematic abuse and neglect.
In the interior of the Centro [Cultural de la Raza] there is a large mural entitled La Dualidad [The Duality]. This mural, which emerged out of a search for self-identity, represents part of the roots of the Chicano and Mestizo consciousness. It recognizes both the positive and negative aspects of life, the elements (fire, water, air, and earth), and the reality of the mixed-blood heritage of the conqueror and the conquered, the victim and the oppressor, the European and the indigenous. This duality is a key to how Chicanos approach and experience their lives, and this ability to work within two worlds is what has enabled Chicanos to survive. . . .
This movement from the center (dominant culture) to the margins (so-called minority cultures) eliminates the use of the language of margins and centers. The border region then becomes the place of confluence exemplifying America’s (as in all of the Americas) cultures. A similar duality characterizes the experience of the La Frontera/The Border collaboration and border art itself. . . .
1992 represents a paradigm shift, a turning point in the consciousness of people the world over. Columbus no longer benignly “discovered” America. He invaded a world already populated by highly developed cultures. Through these awakened post-Columbian eyes, the Mexico/United States border—seen in the global context of border redefinitions—represents a prism through which we have the opportunity to analyze honestly the spectrum of our contemporary reality. History can begin to mean something to all of us as we shed the states of personal, institutional, and historical denial. . . .
1
Nancy Murray, “Columbus and the USA: From Mythology to Ideology.” Race and Class: The Curse of Columbus (London: The Institute of Race Relations, 1992), 55. Emphasis added by Chávez.
2
Philip Brookman and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, eds., Made in Aztlán (San Diego, CA: Centro Cultural de la Raza, 1986), 19 and 21.
3
For more details about the history of border art at the MCA, see the catalogue foreword.
4
See Oscar J. Martinez, Troublesome Border (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1988).