Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture

3 The Politics of Representation: Queerness and the Transnational Family in Luis Alfaro’s Performance

The Politics of Representation Queerness and the Transnational Family in Luis Alfaro’s Performance I am an activist who became an artist. . . . I have always felt that art picked me to use my work to create social change. —Luis Alfaro, Out of the Fringe When we tell our stories we are not just entertaining, we are empowering . I can’t begin to tell you how many Latinos or queers have come up to me after a show and said, “I had never seen myself on a stage before.” This type of work derives its political implication , not because we preach, but because we expose or act as voices for a community that was once invisible. Who do I want to connect to? The people that can hear those stories and see a piece of themselves in them. —Luis Alfaro, personal communication with author, July 1992 The Chicano community is familia. . . . There’s this very protective thing around it: you can’t see it, but it’s there. When you break the mold—by being gay and brown and Catholic—it makes people uneasy . —Luis Alfaro, Los Angeles Times, July 21, 1991 Marisela Norte was not the only performer in black garments and red lipstick to transfix the audience in the Michel De Certeau Room that autumn night in 1991 with her downtown glamour. Luis Alfaro, another of the guest performers at the “Speaking Experiences” event that also featured Norte and Chicano Secret Service, electrified the crowd with his stories of life on the edge of downtown Los Angeles, in “the shadow of the Hollywood sign.” Alfaro powerfully moved the crowd with his tales of 3 81 fall and redemption, his desire for inclusion in the Latino community despite his Queer sexuality. He was one of the first male solo performers to claim a Chicano, Queer, and Catholic subjectivity—using his body as a prop, as a vehicle for expression, Luis performed sections from his solo performance “Pico-Union.” Each of Alfaro’s poetic gestures—a slap, a shove, a kiss, a flex of his forearm—transported us from the seminar room at the tony La Jolla campus into downtown Los Angeles’s bustling immigrant streets, his family’s Pico-Union district home, West Hollywood Queer clubs, the bowels of downtown Los Angeles’s Federal Building, and his heart. This was six years before Alfaro won a MacArthur “Genius ” award for his stunning solo performance art that almost ecclesiastically captured the pathos and hope of downtown L.A. and its Chicana, as well as Central American and Mexican immigrant, residents. I had actually met Alfaro just a few weeks earlier after his performance of “Pico-Union” at the Los Angeles Theater Center. “Pico-Union” was part of a solo performance event called True Lies, which featured Chloe Webb (who played the infamous punk diva Nancy Spungen in Alex Cox’s film Sid and Nancy) and Rocco Sisto. Mesmerized by Luis’s performance, 82 | The Politics of Representation Luis Alfaro and Marisela Norte at Union Station, San Diego (1992), after a performance at the University of California at San Diego. Photograph by Michelle Habell-Pallán. (Reprinted with permission.) I did not want it to conclude. It was the first time I had seen any artist capture the spirit of a post-1980s, postpunk, urban Chicana and Chicano experience . It wasn’t necessarily Alfaro’s Queer take on Chicano culture that drew me in; it was the style in which he represented the intersections of popular culture, spirituality, class, and Chicano life in Los Angeles. Alfaro articulated a critique of racism, a critique of homophobia, a critique of sexism, a critique of forces of impoverishment, with a punk-inflected sense of raw, stripped-down emotion, with a voice very familiar to me, a voice with a rhythm, pace, and lilt that marked him as a child of Los Angeles . What was so moving about Alfaro was his defiance and his hope, his unending search for communion and healing in a “city of hurt, a city of pain.”1 Flash-forward to the present. Alfaro is one of the best-known and most highly esteemed Chicano solo performers, playwrights, and directors of his generation, as well as one of the most influential person-ofcolor arts administrators in the nation. He is currently the director of New Play Development for the Mark Taper Forum and Ivy Substation...