Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands ed. by Arturo J. Aldama, Chela Sandoval, Peter J. García (review)

In this book, editors Aldama, Sandoval, and García have compiled an extensive and interdisciplinary group of essays as part of a larger project dedicated to the opening up of a new field of inquiry: Borderlands Performance Studies. Situating this field among a variety of contemporary scholarly schools of thought associated with “emancipatory aesthetics” (2), the editors first seek to outline a theoretical framework that is in conversation with what they see as the contemporary de-politicization of cultural studies, the limitations of a confined focus on Latin@ cultural production, and a lack of intercultural epistemological considerations within the field of Performance Studies. Their theoretical introduction leads into an academic performance of this new field in the essays that follow, which are conceptually organized into four “Actos” that seek to exhibit and analyze various modes of de-colonial performatics.

In their introduction, Sandoval, Aldama, and García root Borderlands Performance Studies in an intercultural methodology that self-consciously uses certain kinds of performance practices to intervene in, arbitrate, and disrupt colonizing social realities. These “de-colonial performatics” are techniques based in a variety of Latina and Latino sources—from code-switching to rasquachismo—that highlight both the knowledge and the kinds of acts, or the “de-colonial perform-antics,” that make possible greater egalitarianism, liberation, and societal transformation. Two terminological expansions become theoretically important in this introduction: the use of the term “Latin@” to encapsulate the diversity of the Western Hemisphere and the term “Borderlands Performance Studies” as an intercultural/transcultural diversification of Performance Studies. This expanded theoretical field defies both academic and popular classifications and is the methodological basis for the essays that follow.

Throughout the four Actos, one sees that the de-colonial performatics engaged in by the authors are intertwined with questions of visibility, acts of witnessing, and a “Borderlands consciousness” (20). Whether focusing on the public manifestation of inner work through performance or on transformative forms of reading, witnessing, and spectatorship, Acto I seeks to demonstrate how liberation can occur as inner work becomes public emancipatory action. In Acto II, ethnographic analyses of scholars of Chicana/o Studies, feminist theory, and ethnomusicology seek to provide de-colonizing representations of borderlands communities. While Acto III continues to consider borderlands spaces, the essays specifically seek to evoke spaces of “nepantla,” liminal spaces in which old beliefs about gender, race, and culture can be questioned, reshaped, and transformed. Finally, the essays in Acto IV present “outlaw” (8) de-colonizing performances that both challenge and provoke criminalization in their pursuit of justice.

Across these Actos, several essays effectively highlight the way that the inter- and trans-disciplinary perspective of Borderlands Performance Studies opens the way for the activation of de-colonial performatics in both artistic and academic practices. For example, by performing a transnational reading that compares the use of indigeneity in the works of Mexican performance artist Jesusa Rodríguez and Chicana performance artist Celia Herrera-Rodríguez, Díaz-Sánchez’s chapter underscores the way that pan-indigenous rituals and aesthetics become de-colonizing as they embody an interrogation of the power of their cultural inheritances. Transnational readings of Chelo Silva’s boleros as part of urban nightclub culture in Broyles-González’s chapter and of distinct Los Angeles and Barcelona productions of Josefina López’s play Real Women Have Curves in López’s chapter respectively illuminate the way that the expanded lens of Borderlands Performance Studies reveals performance strategies that can open up discursive space for the interrogation of sexual identities and highlight transnational resonances with Chicana activist modes. Additionally, Chabram-Dernersesian’s reading of… Y no se lo tragó la tierra from a critical public health perspective illustrates both the way that health issues are informed by gendered social relations and the way that Chicana/o literature is a performative practice that produces anti-normative understandings of these social realities that can lead to...