Chicano Interneta: The search for intelligent life in cyberspace

[A Glossary of Borderismos]

[Mexicans] are simple people. They are happy with the little they got. . . . They are not ambitious and complex like us. They don’t need all this technology to communicate. Sometimes I just feel like going down there & living among them.

—anonymous message on the World Wide Web

Fighting My Own Endemic Technofobia

I venture into the terra ignota of cyberlandia, without documents, a map, or an invitation at hand. In so doing, I become a sort of virus, the cyberversion of the Mexican fly: irritating, inescapable, and, hopefully, highly contagious.

My “lowrider” laptop is decorated with a 3-D decal of the Virgin of Guadaloupe, the spiritual queen of Spanish-speaking America. It’s like a traveling altar, an office, and a literary bank, all in one. Since I spend 70 percent of the year on the road, it is (besides my phone card, of course) my main means of keeping in touch with my agent, editors, and performance collaborators throughout many cities in the United States and Mexico. The month before a major performance project, most of the technical preparations, last-minute negotiations, and calendar changes take place in the mysterious territory of cyberspace. Unwillingly, I have become a techno-artist and an information superhighway bandido.

I use the term unwillingly because, like most Mexican artists, I have a paradoxical, contradictory relationship with digital technology and personal computers: I don’t quite understand them, yet I’m seduced by them; I don’t want to know how they work, yet I love how they look and what they do; I criticize my colleagues who are acritically immersed in las nuevas tecnologías, yet I silently envy them. I resent being constantly told that as a “Latino,” I am “culturally handicapped” or somehow unfit to handle high technology, yet once I have the apparatus right in front of me, I’m tempted and uncontrollably driven to work against it, to question it, expose it, subvert it, and/or imbue it with humor, radical politics, and linguas polutas such as Spanglish and Franglais.

Contradiction prevails. Two years ago my collaborator, Roberto “Cybervato” Sifuentes, and I bullied ourselves into the hegemonic “space” of the Net, and once we had been generously adopted by various communities (Arts Wire, Chicle, and Latino Net, among others), we suddenly started to lose interest in ongoing conversations with phantasmagoric beings we had never met in person—which, I must say, is a Mexican prejudice: if I don’t know you in person, I don’t really care to converse with you. Then we started sending poetic-activist techno-placas in Spanglish. In these short communiqués we raised some tough questions regarding access, identity politics, and language. Since at the time we didn’t quite know where to post them to get the maximum response, and since the responses were sporadic and unfocused, our interest began to dim. It was only through the gracious persistence of our technocolleagues that we remained seated at the virtual table, so to speak.

Today, although Roberto and I spend a lot of time in front of our laptops—when not on tour, he’s in New York, and I’m in San Francisco or Mexico City—conceptualizing performance projects that incorporate new technologies or redesigning our Web site, every time we are invited to participate in a public discussion about art and technology, we emphasize its shortcomings and overstate our skepticism. Why? I can speak only for myself. Perhaps I have had some computer traumas or suffer from endemic digital fibrosis.

Confieso: I’ve been using computers since 1988; for the first five years, however, I used my old Mac as a glorified typewriter. During those years I probably deleted accidentally, here and there, over three hundred pages of texts that I hadn’t backed up on diskettes and had to rewrite from memory. (Some of these “reconstructed texts” appear in my first book, Warrior for Gringostroika.) The thick and confusing “user-friendly” manuals fell many times from my impatient hands. As a result, I spent many desperate nights...