Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture

1 From the Shadows of the Spanish Fantasy Heritage to a Transnational Imaginary

From the Shadows of the Spanish Fantasy Heritage to a Transnational Imaginary Images flash on the six-by-six-foot screen. The ear-splitting theme from Black Rain, the 1980s Orientalist film about a white American cop in pursuit of the Japanese Yakuza (Japanese mafia), screeches. The three performers on the stage run in horror to hide from the larger-than-life images of found icons from everyday life in Los Angeles: Virgen de Guadalupe candles, Taco Bell® logos, Mission® tortillas, a neon burro-riding campesino (peasant), a piñata, fake Mayan ruins, and former California governor Pete Wilson. The juxtaposition of the images—particularly the campesino—with the terrified artists is striking. In this powerful performance piece, entitled Deep in the Crotch of My Latino Psyche, Luis Alfaro , Monica Palacios, and Albert Antonio Araiza illustrate how they work in the shadow of the enduring popular images that they and other Chicanos and Chicanas negotiate in their everyday lives.1 The artists’ attempt to run from these images illustrates their desire for their work to be contextualized by more than these one-dimensional images of Mexicanidad/Mexicanness and Mexican Americanness and Latinidad . The work of all of these artists, whether performance or writing, seeks to construct new images of Chicano/a subjects by commenting or signifying on those sometimes hated, sometimes loved, and often wornout representations. For example, rather than trying to escape the romantic “colorful” pastoral images informed by a mythic California past and articulated by the discourse of the Mission Revival,2 a reimagining of the Southwest’s past passed on the perceived influence of the Spanish Fantasy Heritage. This Fantasy Heritage “evokes the lost world of Spanish aristocrats and their haciendas, Spanish friars and Indian Missions, as well as alluring señoritas and the Anglos who came to possess them.”3 1 15 Absent from this fantasy heritage are Mexicans, without whom California ’s twentieth-century agribusiness industry would not have flourished. “Anglo Californians used the cultural material of the Spanish colonial past to mask the presences of mostly poor, mixed-race, immigrant Mexicans in their midst.”4 Alfaro and Palacios, as well as the artists Marisela Norte, El Vez (Robert Lopez), and Jim Mendiola, incorporate them, with irony, into their work. The performance piece just described perfectly captures the main goal of this book: to situate recent performance and writing within the larger context of images, sounds, and performance forms. This opening chapter traces how scholarly representations of the Spanish Borderlands history shaped mainstream images of Mexican Americans , Mexicans, and Hispanics—images that Chicana and Latina artists negotiate and/or contest in their work—that began to circulate throughout the popular imagination. As we shall see, popular images of Mexicans in the United States link, in complex ways, to a discourse of nation building that began before the transfer, in 1848, of what is now the U.S. 16 | From the Shadows of the Spanish Fantasy Heritage Publicity photo of Beto Araiza, Monica Palacios, and Luis Alfaro for Deep in the Crotch of My Latino Psyche. Photograph by Becky Villaseñor. 1993. (Reprinted with permission from Monica Palacios.) Southwest from Mexico to the United States. This link is important, since, whether or not the artists and audiences are conscious of this legacy, as part of the popular imagination, it shapes the reception of Latino popular culture. Mission Revival/Spanish Borderlands Context The mission literature depicted the history of race relations as a pastoral ritual of obedience and paternalism: “graceful Indians, happy as peasants in an Italian opera, knelt dutifully before the Franciscans to receive the baptism of a superior culture, while in the background the angels tolled from a swallow-guarded campanile, and a choir of friars intoned the Te Deum.” —Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles Mike Davis’s description of mission literature captures the essence of the Spanish Fantasy Heritage. Although the territories that would become Mexico were colonies under the Spanish crown, Spain did not heavily populate the land it called Baja and Alta California. Spain attempted to strengthen its claim to the territories in 1761, when it dispatched friars from Mexico City to establish Catholic missions along the California coast, beginning with San Diego. While the mission culture was one of the most palpable impositions of Spanish social order, it was executed by criollo and mestizo colonial subjects from Mexico. The cruelty...