Letters from the Road: A Selection of Performance Chronicles

I have always been interested in looking for ways to operate as an artist in the public sphere. This is particularly difficult in the U.S., a society that confines artists and intellectuals to the rarefied realms of the art world and academia. National Public Radio is the closest I've ever gotten to the public sphere. I've been involved with NPR since the mid-1980s, first in Enfoque Nacional, then in Crossroads, and later, in the '90s on All Things Considered and Latino USA. In my radio chronicles I have explored various genres, but always from the positionality of a performance artist. What follows is a selection of these chronicles. "Dual Citizenship" was recorded for Latino USA, and the other texts for All Things Considered. An earlier version of "Tattooed Brown Body" appeared in my book Dangerous Border Crossers (Routledge, 2000). The version that appears here was considerably rewritten for radio. The other pieces are being published for the first time.

Touring in Times of War (2001)

I am a brown-skinned Latino performance artist, and I've been told many times in recent weeks that I happen to "look Arab." Since September 11th, my never-ending tour to the outskirts of Western civilization has been bumpy to say the least. When the tragic attacks occurred I was in Northern Spain, paradoxically performing a piece on the violent side-effects of globalization. After a nerve-wracking week of waiting for airspace to reopen, my wife and I finally made our journey back home, and that's when an unprecedented adventure began for me.

It started at JFK airport in New York. After going through the final security check point, my exhausted wife hugged me with relief. "Ahh, we made it back, amor mio," she whispered into my ear, sliding her hands into the pockets of my pants. We were immediately surrounded by five screaming policemen: "What did you put inside his pocket?" "Cariñito," she responded, meaning "a little tenderness." They were more than serious. We raised our hands like surrendering Hollywood bandits. One cop made me empty the contents of my pockets with the ferocious certainty I would produce a weapon. I complied in extreme slow motion. The sole, pitiful item—a snotty handkerchief—made them feel embarrassed. But to save face they sent me to secondary inspection. There I experienced the longest ethnographic inspection of my identity ever: a bizarre initiation ritual to the other "war on terror," the one Americans are fighting inside their psyche.

As a migrant artist and a Chicano veteran of "mistaken identity," I now have to deal with new fears of T-W-A-L (traveling while Arab-looking). I am not scared so much of Muslim fundamentalists or airplanes. I'm more afraid of the entire country becoming a huge "neighborhood watch program" where anyone who looks or acts different comes to be seen as suspicious in the name of "high security." During my next trip, my fears were confirmed: At the Raleigh Durham airport, I was singled out, along with a young Pakistani couple. The airline agent tried to persuade the three brown passengers that we "simply had no reservations." After showing him my tickets—and explaining that Mexico was not in the Middle East—I was finally allowed on the plane. But the other passengers looked visibly scared of me. In their fearful eyes, I probably looked like the lead singer of Sammy Ben Latin & the Tali-vatos.

Clearly, my new dilemma was how to avoid ethnic profiling on the road. Performance provided me with an expedient semiotic solution: I would simply intensify some of the friendly stereotypes Americans already have about Latinos. I developed three traveling looks: the gallant mariachi with my sombrero in hand, the Tex-Mex rocker, and the Native dandy.

It didn't help much. Five times during the next eight trips I was "coincidentally" chosen for "random security checks." And as my tour progressed, the contents of my trunks (mainly "ethno-techno" props and "robo-Mexican" costumes) began to diminish: Some, like my 19th-century Sevillian...