Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization

Introduction: Contesting the Counter-Revolution: A Latina/o Literary Geography of the Neoliberal Era

1 introduction Contesting the Counter-Revolution A Latina/o Literary Geography of the Neoliberal Era Maps have been of no use because I always forget that they are metaphors and not the territory; the compass has never made any sense—it always spins in crazy circles. —Guillermo Verdecchia, Fronteras Americanas/American Borders (20) “To break” has surely been turned into a verb without yesteryear’s magic. Deferred to the past and to the future, it is also deprived of the present. —Martín Hopenhayn, No Apocalypse, No Integration (53) Among literary representations of relations between Latin and North America, and the Latinos negotiating the upheavals and inequalities defining them, Guillermo Verdecchia’s Fronteras Americanas/American Borders stands out for its virtuosity. The play tracks the ascendancy of neoliberalism , the deeply contradictory political project and economic theory that has been the underlying narrative guiding North-South relations over the past four decades. The Latino-Canadian Verdecchia first performed his one-man play in Toronto in January 1993, but as he explains in the published version’s preface, Fronteras Americanas “began as a long letter to a close friend” on a 1989 visit to his native Argentina (13). Early in Act 1, the character Verdecchia enters the stage and addresses the audience warmly: “Here we are.” Even as he stutters to express his excitement, repeating “Here we are,” it becomes apparent that the simple deictic, here, and the following pronoun, we, are unclear. Questioning where “here” is and who “we” are, he informs the audience that he has in mind not only 2 • Introduction the Tarragon Theater but also “America,” a term he reconstructs for them: “And when I say america I don’t mean the country, I mean the continent. Somos todos Americanos. We are all Americans” (19–20). After disorienting the Canadian audience’s understanding of the term and, undoubtedly, teasing its tendency to oscillate between inferior and superior relations to the empire to the south, he confesses that he is “lost,” which he attributes to his proximity to “the border,” “a tricky place” rendering maps and compasses inoperable. Yet Verdecchia also supposes the audience “ended up here, tonight” because they, too, are lost (20). This collective condition of inter-American dislocation necessitates a trip into the territory of North American misconceptions about Latinos, Latin America, and the Americas within Canada and the United States. For this trip to “the border,” Verdecchia hires a “translator” to guide and teach the audience. Also played by Verdecchia, the self-proclaimed Wideload McKennah, whose given name is Facundo Morales Segundo, enters the stage to simulated gunshots (21–23). As a pan-Latino tour guide, trickster, and minstrel, Wideload probes what he calls the audience’s “estereotypes ” (56) by enacting images and languages associated with Latina/o cultures, including the pachuco, his controlling type. Because the border is a “minefield of cultural misunderstanding,” as Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña describe it, Wideload uses it as a pedagogical tool. Yet whereas Gómez-Peña suggests that proximity to the border equates to greater Latino “control over the possibilities of cultural misunderstanding” (“Bilingualism” 149), Wideload teaches by spinning misunderstandings out of control. Wideload challenges stereotypes and corporate appropriations of Latino and Latin American cultures by parodying them. He uses the audience as a control group to test the idea of “a third-world theme park” in Canada (24). He calls the white audience the “Saxonian community ” to transpose the typology “Latino,” which effaces cultural, political, and class differences between diverse Latino groups. And he provokes. On the theme park, Wideload declares, “You people”—the Saxonians, laughing uneasily—“love dat kinda shit” (40, 25).1 As the brash, hyper-masculine Wideload teaches the audience about Latino cultures by inverting class, ethnic, and epistemological hierarchies, his alter ego, the brooding, melancholic Verdecchia, a struggling actor, sets out for the Southern Cone, visiting Argentina and Chile in 1990. But he leaves the audience with a caveat: “I myself will walk backwards so that it looks like I’m heading north” (21). This image alludes to Walter Benjamin ’s “Angel of History” backing into the future as wreckage piles up at her feet and to Juan Felipe Herrera’s figure of uneven North-South gazes. Contesting the Counter-Revolution • 3 By disorienting relations between North and Latin America, it mocks narratives of “progress” and “backwardness” that have structured North-South epistemologies. Under these conditions...