Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture

Epilogue: “Call Us Americans, ’Cause We Are All from the Américas”: Latinos at Home in Canada

Epilogue “Call Us Americans, ’Cause We Are All from the Américas”: Latinos at Home in Canada I’m twenty years old and I still look at myself in the mirror every morning wondering who the hell I am. Am I Mexican? Am I Canadian ? Am I just plain Latino? Am I Mexican-Canadian? Am I Latin-Canadian? —¿Qué Pasa con la Raza, eh? Well I’ve never been to Spain / So don’t call me an Hispanic /. . . that name, refuse it / Never going to choose it / I just can’t use it. —El Vez and the Memphis Mariachis don’t call us hispanic, ’cause we ain’t never been to spain . . . if anything, call us americans, ’cause we are all from the americas. —¿Qué Pasa con la Raza, eh? As post-9/11 xenophobic discourse justifies the increased surveillance and militarization of the territory that divides the United States and Mexico for the sake of security, support for the demilitarization of the border for the sake of human rights receives little attention in the mainstream media.1 General public debate about the need for undocumented migrant labor to support local economies of many regions throughout the United States has been stymied by a post-9/11 nativist impulse. In this context, we come to realize the value of the cultural production discussed throughout this book, as examples of public culture. Crucially, the artists in this study contribute to public, if not mainstream, debates about these issues in the most unexpected forms of popular culture. 205 The particular Chicano and Latino performance discussed in these pages are important because they construct transnational imaginaries within the Americas that are shaped by a particular historical moment, politics, and humor. Ultimately, Chicana and Latina artists deeply rooted in a local context invent and advance a critical transnational and translocal imaginary via performative modes of humor. In this book, I have located a remarkably untapped reservoir of materials that treat the dynamics of race/ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality by critically analyzing experimental forms and sensibilities of Chicana/Latina popular culture. I have contextualized these experimental forms (performance , feminist standup comedy, as well as D.I.Y. film, popular music, and spoken word) by exploring the practices of early-twentieth-century U.S.based Latino performance, as well as the legacy of the Spanish Fantasy Heritage, to demonstrate how contemporary artists challenge them. I have also suggested that the artists’ innovative use of noir and punk sensibilities explode stereotypes that would forever locate Latinas and Latinos in a mythic, pastoral past, making way for the emergence of new representations that locate us in the present and the future. In my treatment of artists who possess a deep commitment to progressive social change and who, through their work, strive to create a more equitable world, I have argued that the notable cultural production of Marisela Norte, Luis Alfaro, Marga Gomez, and Jim Mendiola is seriously playful, yet deeply moving. Humor, whether ironic, sarcastic, sincere , or campy, is their weapon of choice. Their work pokes fun at the idea that the current status quo is fixed and immutable and guides us to places we’ve never been. These artists show audiences how to implant, into the matrix of popular imagination, critiques of sexism, racism, homophobia , and anti-immigrant hostility through humor. In our post-9/11 climate of fear, humor opens up desperately needed public sites of critical dialogue. Their use of humor as an aesthetic strategy becomes an important tool to work through moments of crises and to re-imagine status quo power relations within and beyond national borders. I have also demonstrated that Chicana/Latina popular culture is important for the labor it performs when it travels throughout, and outside, the United States. In looking back to the future, I would like to consider a broader notion of diasporic Latino cultural work by bringing the Canadian and Mexican borders into conversation in terms of Latino cultural production. 206 | Epilogue By examining the play ¿Qué Pasa con la Raza, eh?, performed by the Latino Theater Group in Vancouver, British Columbia, this epilogue illuminates the new hemispheric and local connections that the interventions of Chicana cultural production make between unlikely communities and audiences, as well as the actual connections among various artistic scenes. This chapter suggests that particular forms of local Chicana/o brands of humor resonate hemispherically, because they captures the mechanics...