Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture

Introduction

Introduction The only hope for a Revolution, lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara. —Phil Ochs via El Vez In the summer of 1995, El Vez, the “Mexican Elvis,” along with his backup singers and band, The Lovely El Vettes and the Memphis Mariachis , served as the master of ceremony for the first show ever of its kind to take place at the Mark Taper Forum: Diva L.A.: A Salute to L.A.’s Latinas in the Tanda Style.1 Directed by Diane Rodríguez and Luis Alfaro , the codirectors of the Mark Taper Forum’s Latino Theater Initiative, the show brought a variety of Latina artists to an enthusiastic audience. The tanda was a long overdue public acknowledgment of local Latina talent .2 The likes of Marisela Norte, Diane Rodríguez, Rita Moreno, Hilos de Plata/Silver Threads (a Mexican folk dance group whose members range in age from sixty-six to eighty-eight years), and others graced the stage designed by the well-known Chicana artist Patssi Valdez. The night was remarkable because the directors not only acknowledged the Latino performance past by invoking and translating into English the tanda form, so popular with Spanish-speaking audiences before World War II, but also honored the present by centering women artists on stage, while recognizing an approaching future of Latino performance by including María Fatal, a popular Los Angeles-based rock en español band. This performance, and others like it, lies at the core of this book. It is the lens through which an examination of contemporary transnational social dynamics comes into focus. Using Chicano/a and Latino/a popular culture (spoken word, performance art, comedy, theater, and music), in the following pages I argue that the role played by this work in the construction of new cultural forms and identities is considerable. The increasing circulation and reception of Chicano/Latino popular culture 1 within and beyond the hemisphere, in places like Vancouver, British Colombia, Mexico City, London, and Berlin, demonstrate a growing appeal that cannot be overlooked.3 Moreover, an analysis of Chicana/Latina popular performance culture is crucial to understanding the impact of globalization on contemporary national and local culture and constitutes “part of an emerging paradigm of local histories” within Latinos studies, “whose raison d’être is to deal with global (epistemic) designs.”4 It addresses some of the most compelling social questions of our historical moment , those regarding shifting conceptions of national culture, citizenship , sexuality, and identity. This book is a study of themes across genre. As one reads it, it becomes clear that an analysis of ethnicity/race or nation cannot be fully achieved without an account of power relations structured by gender, sexuality, and desire. This analysis advances, in important ways, the theoretical foundations built by Chicana and womenof -color feminist theorists, whose pioneering work on theories of intersectionality is very much engaged with this scholarship. The particular Chicano/a and Latino/a performance texts selected for this study are important because they construct transnational imaginaries within the Americas that are shaped by a particular historical moment, politics, and humor. In addition, the talented artists discussed have produced their work with an artistic sensibility animated by the creative and critical energies fueled by punk D.I.Y. (Do-It-Yourself) aesthetics. Punk aesthetics and its counterpart, hip-hop, emerged, in part, as a response to the crushing privatization of neoliberal economic policies. The strain of punk aesthetics illustrated in this book can be seen as a direct response to the neoconservative queer bashing and anti-immigrant hostility that the artists discussed in these pages have faced in their everyday lives. The interdisciplinary frame of this study allows for an exploration of the ways in which Chicana and Latina diasporic performances and resignifications of the subject-citizen and noncitizen reproduce or alter national identities . Each of the artists included is U.S.-born (except for those in the Canadian Latino Theater Group), and much of their work illustrates the differences and negotiations that exist between U.S.-born Chicanos and Latinos and recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America. This analysis of popular performance culture serves as a launching point to examine the way that the themes, iconography, and sounds of Chicana/o and Latina/o cultural practices resonate in both the northern and the southern reaches of the hemisphere within the framework of a critical transnationalism. This critical transnationalism considers what 2 | Introduction [18.116.24.105...