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Rasquache Baroque in the Chicana/o Borderlands
Katherine Austin
The Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
McGill University, Montreal
April 2012
A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy
© Katherine Austin 2012
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Table of Contents
Abstract i
Résumé iii
Resumen v
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction. Rasquache Baroque in the Chicana/o Borderlands 1
Introducing the baroque 6
Persuasion and engagement 7
Nearly 100 years of baroque modernity 14
Baroque revalorization 14
The New World Baroque as a response to European dominance 16
The New World Baroque as an expression of Latin American identity 18
Deconstruction and reconstruction of identity and culture 19
Criticism of the established order and the invention of alternatives 21
Conclusion 27
The Chicana/o borderlands 27
Chicana/o cultural production: six observations 35
Chicana/o cultural production takes a political stance. 35
Chicana/o cultural production addresses and produces subjectivities and
identities. 37
Chicana/o cultural production privileges public and quotidian spaces. 38
Chicana/o cultural production employs rasquache techniques 39
Chicana/o cultural production articulates hybrid processes. 43
Chicana/o cultural production appropriates and transforms. 44
The baroque border 46
A colonial baroque historical foundation 46
Living in the crack between two worlds: the Chicana/o baroque experience 47
Rasquache baroque 49
Strategies for entering into the future 52
Conclusion 54
Chapter 1. Ana Castillo’s Xicanista Baroque: Allegory, Hagiography, and the
Supernatural in So Far from God
55
Allegory in So Far from God 61
Martyrs of unpopular causes: modern day saints on the margins 74
Extraordinary events in So Far from God 87
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Ay, corazón, no sufras más. 92
Chapter 2. Robo-baroque: The Performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and
his Pocha Nostra
95
Allegory 105
Hagiography 115
Ethnography 122
Baroque spaces 130
Conclusion 146
Chapter 3. Amalia Mesa-Bains’s Domesticana Baroque 149
Amalia Mesa-Bains and her domesticana baroque 150
Der wünderkammer: baroque knowledge in the works of Amalia Mesa-Bains 152
Vanitas: Evidence, Ruin, Regeneration 153
The Library of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 161
The Curandera’s Botánica 167
The mirror 174
Venus Envy I: First Holy Communion before the End 176
Sor Juana’s Mirror 186
The Cihuateotl’s Mirror 194
The fold 203
Fold #1 First Holy Communion before the End 204
Venus Envy II: The Harem and Other Enclosures 207
The Study of Sor Juana 212
Venus Envy III: Cihuatlampa: Land of the Giant Women 213
Conclusion 215
Conclusion 220
The future 239
Bibliography 242
Appendix 1: Copyright Release 257
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ABSTRACT
The Chicana/o borderlands have generated their own barroquismo which, having
thrived on the fruits of a colonial Mexican heritage, intensified within the unique cultural
climate of the Southwest US. As second-class citizens, Mexican-Americans have been
excluded from the metanarratives of the nation. However, this position as outsiders has
granted them a unique vantage point from which to see a multifaceted and contradictory
reality. Living in the socio-cultural margins, a certain way of thinking emerged which
allowed for contradictions, ambiguity, and plurality: essentially, a baroque way of
thinking. This particular consciousness combined with a colonial baroque cultural
foundation produced rasquachismo, a sensibility which mirrors the baroque in many
ways. Operating on a constant interrelating of the baroque with Chicana/o thought and
aesthetics, this dissertation will create points of suture so that the two may inform and
enrich each other.
All the works treated in this dissertation participate thoroughly in rasquache
baroque sensibilities, citing baroque history and summoning the ghosts of the colonial
past while generating inclusive structures, impure hybridities and juxtapositions,
flamboyance, excess, bold transformations, and critical humour for the purpose of
negotiating an adverse and complex reality and for culturally arming oneself against
hegemony, in an attempt to ensure cultural survival and resistance.
The first chapter, “Ana Castillo’s Xicanista Baroque: Allegory, Hagiography, and
the Supernatural in So Far from God,” explores how this novel continues the colonial
baroque traditions of allegory, hagiography, and miracles. The second chapter, “Robo-
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baroque: The Performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his Pocha Nostra,”
investigates the colonial baroque legacy which saturates the performances of Guillermo
Gómez-Peña and his performance group, La Pocha Nostra. This legacy is demonstrated
by a layering of baroque conventions—allegory, hagiography, and the wünderkammer—,
as well as by an intensely baroque spatial and temporal ordering which harnesses the
powers of decentralization, pluralism, coextensive space, and seriality. The third chapter,
“Amalia Mesa-Bains’s Domesticana Baroque,” looks at the installation works of Amalia
Mesa-Bains, investigating how these installations use the conventions of the
wünderkammer and vanitas along with the concepts of the mirror and the fold to speak of
baroque knowledge systems, female and non-Western identities, and feminine interior
spaces. Finally, the conclusion relates the works studied in this thesis and elaborates on
the benefits of Chicana/o baroque thought.
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RÉSUMÉ
Les frontières chicanas ont généré leurs propres barroquismos qui, ayant fait
pousser les fruits de l’héritage colonial mexicain, se sont intensifiés dans le climat
culturel unique du sud-ouest des États-Unis. En tant que citoyens de seconde classe, les
Mexico-Américains ont été exclus des méta-récits de la nation. Cependant, cette position
extérieure leur a accordé un point de vue unique, d’où l’on pouvait percevoir une réalité
multiforme et contradictoire. De l’habitation des marges socio-culturelles, une certaine
façon de penser a émergé, permettant la coexistence de contradictions, l'ambiguïté et la
pluralité: une manière de penser essentiellement baroque. Cette thèse se base sur une
constante interrelation du baroque avec la pensée et l’esthétique chicanas, créant des
points de suture entre ces derniers de manière à ce qu’ils puissent s’éclairer et s’enrichir
mutuellement.
Toutes les œuvres traitées dans cette thèse participent profondément aux
sensibilités baroque-rasquaches, en citant l'histoire baroque et en évoquant les fantômes
du passé colonial tout en générant des structures inclusives, des hybridités impures et des
juxtapositions, de la flamboyance, de l’excès, des transformations audacieuses, et un
humour critique afin de négocier les termes d’une réalité complexe et défavorable et de
s’armer culturellement contre l’hégémonie de manière à assurer la survie culturelle et la
résistance.
Le premier chapitre, “Ana Castillo’s Xicanista Baroque: Allegory, Hagiography,
and the Supernatural in So Far from God,” explore la manière dont ce roman poursuit les
traditions baroques coloniales de l'allégorie, de l'hagiographie, et des miracles. Le
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deuxième chapitre, “Robo-baroque: The Performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his
Pocha Nostra,” examine les legs colonial-baroques qui saturent les performances de
Guillermo Gómez-Peña et de son groupe de performance, La Pocha Nostra. Ce legs se
traduit par une superposition de conventions baroques —l’allégorie, l’hagiographie, et le
wünderkammer— ainsi que par une organisation spatiale et temporelle intensément
baroque, qui exploite les pouvoirs de la décentralisation, du pluralisme, de l’espace
coextensif et de la sérialité. Le troisième chapitre, “Amalia Mesa-Bains’s Domesticana
Baroque,” se penche sur les œuvres d’installation d'Amalia Mesa-Bains, enquêtant sur la
manière dont ces installations utilisent des conventions du wünderkammer et du vanitas,
à travers les concepts du miroir et du pli, afin de parler des systèmes de connaissances
baroques, des identités féminines non-occidentales et des espaces intérieurs féminins.
Finalement, la conclusion relie les œuvres étudiées dans la thèse et explique les avantages
de la pensée chicana-baroque.
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RESUMEN
Las tierras fronterizas chicanas han generado su propio barroquismo que, después
de haberse nutrido de los frutos provinientes de la herencia colonial, se intensificó dentro
del clima cultural único del suroeste de los EE.UU. Como ciudadanos de segunda clase,
los mexicano-americanos han sido excluidos de los metarrelatos de la nación. Sin
embargo, esta posición exterior les ha otorgado una posición ventajosa desde la que
pueden ver una realidad multifacética y contradictoria. Al vivir en los márgenes
socioculturales, emergió cierta manera de pensar que aceptó la convivencia de
contradicciones, de ambigüedades y de pluralidades: en esencia, una forma de pensar
barroca. Esta conciencia combinada con una base barroca colonial produjo el
rasquachismo, una sensibilidad que se parece mucho al barroco. Funcionando en una
constante interrelación entre el barroco y el pensamiento y la estética chicanos, esta tesis
doctoral creará puntos de sutura para que los dos puedan informarse y enriquecerse
mutuamente.
Todas las obras tratadas en esta tesis participan profundamente de las
sensibilidades barroco-rasquaches, ya que citan la historia barroca y convocan a los
fantasmas del pasado colonial, a la vez que generan estructuras inclusivas, hibridaciones
impuras, yuxtaposiciones, formas extravagantes, excesos, transformaciones audaces y un
humor crítico. El propósito de estas prácticas es negociar una realidad adversa y compleja,
armarse culturalmente contra la hegemonía e intentar asegurar la supervivencia cultural y
la resistencia.
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El primer capítulo, “Ana Castillo’s Xicanista Baroque: Allegory, Hagiography,
and the Supernatural in So Far from God,” explora cómo esta novela continúa la tradición
barroca colonial de la alegoría, de la hagiografía y de los milagros. El segundo capítulo,
“Robo-baroque: The Performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his Pocha Nostra,”
indaga la herencia colonial barroca que satura las performances de Guillermo Gómez-
Peña y su grupo, La Pocha Nostra. Este legado se demuestra por su uso de convenciones
barrocas—la alegoría, la hagiografía, y el wünderkammer—, así como por una
ordenación espacial y temporal intensamente barroca que se apodera de la
descentralización, del pluralismo, del espacio coextensivo y de la serialidad. El tercer
capítulo, “Amalia Mesa-Bains’s Domesticana Baroque,” contempla las instalaciones de
Amalia Mesa-Bains, investigando cómo éstas utilizan las convenciones del
wünderkammer y de las vanitas junto con los conceptos del espejo y del pliegue para
hablar de los sistemas del conocimiento barroco, de las identidades femeninas y no
occidentales, y de los espacios interiores femeninos. Finalmente, la conclusión relaciona
las obras estudiadas en esta tesis y explica en detalle los beneficios del pensamiento
chicano-barroco.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to express my deepest thanks to my supervisor, Dr. Jesús Pérez-
Magallón, for all of his support. As an academic figure and as a human being, his life is
nothing short of inspirational.
I would also like to extend my gratitude to Dr. Juan Luis Suárez from the
University of Western Ontario who, through the brilliance and determination befitting of
an evil genius, won a Major Collaborative Research Initiatives grant from SSHRC and
established the Hispanic Baroque research project. The Hispanic Baroque has financed
the Conflicting Identities research stream headed by Dr. Jesús Pérez-Magallón, who has
generously supported me through his MCRI grant.
To the examiners and the defence committee, I would like to express my
appreciation for the time, effort, and feedback that they contributed in the final stages of
this venture. Their generous comments have warmed and envigorated my spirit,
encouraging me to continue my academic pursuits despite the current foreboding job
makret.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge the support received through my partner,
Pejman Salehi. Together, we navigated through our doctoral experiences with the help of
the wine and laughter we shared.
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Rasquache Baroque in the Chicana/o Borderlands
Glossy surfaces, sumptuous forms evoking movement, down-cast eyes lost in
semi-mystical contemplation: the figures from Amalia Mesa-Bains’ Guadalupe exude a
baroque religiosity (fig. 1). At first glance the viewer can easily mistake this 17th
-century
anatomical model for a religious statue, and rightly so, seeing as the original sculptor
decided that the body of Eve would best serve as the vessel for representing the inner-
working of the female body. In this anatomical statue we can see how baroque scientific
rationality seamlessly fuses not only with the plastic arts, but with an emotive religious
sensibility. The opening of the abdomen to reveal the woman’s organs is analogous to the
statues of saints in which glass windows allow the viewer to see the heart inside the
hagiographic body. Fusing the morbidity of the reliquary with the curiosity of the
wünderkammer, this anatomical statue provokes a response in the viewer which is both
intellectual and emotional. Amalia Mesa-Bains plays with the idea of a spiritual
physiology in her print, Guadalupe. The artist has taken the image of the original 17th
-
Fig. 1. Amalia Mesa-Bains, Guadalupe. (Chicana
Badgirls, Las Hociconas 22)
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century anatomical manikin and has mirrored it, producing a second image whose organs
have been replaced with the Virgin of Guadalupe. The work makes evident four
intertwined subjects: the body, gender, spirituality, and identity. Though the
interpretations of this piece could be multifold, I will attempt to limit myself to only one.
The anatomical manikin is an artefact which visually demonstrates man’s struggle to
understand the hidden mechanics of the (female) body, especially those concerning the
miraculous reproduction of human life. Her double has been opened to reveal la
Guadalupe, an icon denoting not only a spiritual understanding of the female reproductive
experience but also, considering la Guadalupe’s role as a symbiotic mediator between
Spanish and indigenous cultures, a deep mestiza core identity and consciousness.1 The
print affirms both a universal womanhood represented by reproductive organs as well as a
racially and culturally-defined female identity represented by an internal Guadalupe. The
two figures are joined at the wrist, reminiscent of Frida Kahlo’s Las dos Fridas,
indicating that these women are two parts of the same person. Chicana/o firsthand
experience effects the realization that identities are multiple and, as much as Mesa-Bains
is a woman, she is also a Chicana woman, carrying within her a legacy beginning in
colonial times and continuing into the present.
Guadalupe by Mesa-Bains serves as an emblematic entrance into this dissertation
as the piece references the 17th
century, colonial hybridity, identity, the Mexican past and
1 Alma López notes how scholars view Guadalupe as a syncretisation between the Mesoamerican Goddess,
Tonantzin, and the Virgin Mary. Though these scholars see this syncretisation of the indigenous and the
European as a European stratagem for accelerating the conversion to Christianity, López instead sees
Guadalupe as an indigenous symbol of masked rebellion which promoted cultural preservation. According
to López, Guadalupe functions as disfrasismo: an icon which presented the image of Catholic devotion and
obedience, while hiding referents to a pre-Conquest spiritual past which resisted against European
colonization (256-258). The Virgin of Guadalupe is not only a symbol for negotiating between cultures, but
is also a representation of a covert oppositional identity.
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a Chicana/o present all the while exuding a baroque sensibility. The purpose of this
introductory chapter is to first, present a summary of baroque thinking in the Americas;
second, to provide a summary of Chicana/o theory and aesthetics; and finally, to create
points of suture between the two, in an attempt to relate the baroque with Chicana/o
thought so that the two may inform and enrich each other.
Chicana/o culture has continued the sensibilities and practices of the colonial
baroque. Given the mid 19th
-century American expansion into Mexico and the subsequent
racial and class-based oppression endured by the Mexicans who had suddenly found
themselves in US territory, US Mexicans underwent a second colonization. While the
labour of a 17th
-century indigenous miner in San Luis Potosí benefitted a white,
criollo/Spanish upper class, the labour of 20th
-century mestizo farm workers in the
Southwest profited a white, Anglo ruling class who delegitimized Mexican/Chicana/o
culture, language, and human rights. As second-class citizens in a land where their
people’s history has been excluded from the national narrative the case for the
Chicanas/os as well as the colonized of the Americas, a consciousness begins to form
which can only be granted to the inhabitant of this interstitial space. When excluded from
the center, one has the distance necessary to better perceive a world full of contradictory
truths and realities. This vision, incapable of presenting any fixed or stable conception of
the world, produces ambiguities and perpetual uncertainties. For Gloria Anzaldúa, this
consciousness involves a flexible, divergent, and inclusive way of thinking which allows
for the entrance of plurality, the coexistence of contradictions, and ambivalence (101). A
third element emerges out of this ambivalence: a mestiza consciousness, whose creative
dynamism “keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each paradigm” (Anzaldúa 101-
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02). Similarly, in the Spanish colonies, the encounter and collision between Occidental
and indigenous worldviews produced instability and ambiguity for both parties. Walter
Moser associates the ideological instability resulting from this cultural contact with the
weakening of a paradigm and has connected this period of weakness with a resurgence of
baroque power (110).
However, despite the similarities in the cultural dynamics of colonial Latin
America and the Chicana/o homeland, the cultural environment of the Southwest has
changed significantly in the past few decades. Instead of being limited to the colonial
relations between Spanish, Native, and African peoples, the Southwest of today is also
home to Filipinos, Koreans, Armenians, Chinese, Iranians, as well as nationals of various
Latin American countries. The coexistence of so many competing worldviews constitutes
a recipe for border consciousness and for the weakening of any paradigm lacking the
strength and complexity necessary for supporting such an environment. This is where the
baroque comes in: as a robust paradigm capable of accommodating the ambiguities and
heterodoxies of this brave new world. However, Chicana/o culture offers its own baroque
paradigm which, unlike the baroque historically defined by 17th
and 18th
-century
phenomena, is alive and active at this very minute. Chicanas/os have documented their
experiences in this climate of rupture, providing insight into the border consciousness and
strategies used for surviving a difficult reality. Moreover, the Chicana/o experience
provides insight for surviving our current socio-political ordering: a capitalist model
running on an empty rhetoric of equality while ignoring problems related to race, class,
gender, and religion. Living in a multicultural society in which ethnic fragmentation
threatens to divide people into small balkanized communities lacking the agency to resist
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subjugation, Chicana/o scholars have had to adapt their theoretical models to include
those outside their community. In this way, Chicana/o studies, though rooted in a specific
ethnic historical experience, can serve any marginalized peoples who wish to better
understand and survive a fragmented and unjust reality. Laura E. Pérez sees this tradition
of resistance and survival as spanning five centuries:
Chicana badgirls, hociconas, big mouths, loud mouths, women who talk
back. They’re the ones who won’t stay quiet, who won’t make nice, won’t
pretend everything’s okay when it’s not. Badgirl hociconas don’t behave
in a world of double-standards, whether these be men over women,
heterosexuals over queer folk, haves over have nots, “white” people over
those “of color,” and so on. They shouldn’t.
Con o sin permiso, they speak out on behalf of the hidden strengths that
have allowed women, and Chicana/Latina women in particular ways, to
survive and even thrive against adverse conditions of racist, classist
sexism rooted in the historic misogyny that accompanied the European
invasion and settling of the Americas. ("Con O Sin Permiso" 3)
While Bolívar Echeverría sees the baroque paradigm as a way of surviving an
inescapable and unbearable capitalist modernity (20-21), this paradigm could benefit
from some vibrant Chicana/o hocicona attitude. Baroque badgirls from Sor Juana to
Gloria Anzaldúa: incapable of accepting the master narratives governing their socio-
cultural surroundings, they wrote in a resistant, vibrant, and creative ink. May the legacy
of this spirit continue.
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Introducing the baroque
Exuberance, extravagance, ostentation, excess, the extraordinary, the bizarre,
deformity, exaggeration, drama, chiaroscuro, allegory, the visual, the physical, the
overwhelming of the senses, the moving of emotions, religiosity, the transcendental made
flesh, transformation, movement, the transgression of boundaries, the open form,
dynamism, instability, the ephemeral, vanitas, illusion, artifice, self-reflexivity, criticism,
citation, parody, satire, bold and unexpected metaphors, witty conceits, inclusivity,
heterogeneity, complexity, contradiction, oxymoron, ambiguity: Given an interminable
list of the defining characteristics of baroque style, perhaps it is best not to ask “What is
baroque?” but rather, “Why baroque?” or more importantly, in the words of Walter
Moser, “Que fait le baroque?” (102, emphasis mine).
So, why baroque? Why do people express themselves using baroque forms?
Baroque cultural production issues from a certain consciousness. This baroque way of
thinking and seeing is preceded by the self-conscious realization that, in this world,
nothing is as it seems and everything is subject to transformation. Once conscious of
illusions of the human world, the illusion of order—the narratives and paradigms that
seem to structure the universe—begins to weaken or disintegrate, allowing for heterodox
and complex alternatives. The baroque enters upon the weakening of a paradigm, says
Walter Moser, which accounts for its resurgence following the Post-Renaissance
weakening of classical culture, the collisions of Spanish and indigenous cultures, and the
decay of the paradigm of modernity2 (110). In all three cases, logocentric and
2 By modernity, I am referring to the socio-cultural project emerging originally during the Renaissance
which bases its principles on the Enlightenment values of rationality, universalism, order and progress and
came to incorporate capitalism into its paradigmatic body.
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universalizing orders came into question and baroque strategies had the power to not only
articulate this malaise but provide its own alternative models. The realization that the
world is in motion, in constant transformation, also denies any paradigm which seeks
stability in the closed-concepts of unchanging universalisms. The baroque’s power lies in
this movement; in its ability to change and adapt. It is therefore not coincidental that now,
in a time where change has become rapid in both cultural and technological spheres, the
baroque paradigm has gathered so much interest.
What does the baroque do? Such a cosmovision comes with its own unique set of
practices. Among the many processes carried out by the baroque; however, four practices
show particular prominence: persuasion, engagement, appropriation, and transformation.
Persuasion and engagement
The baroque is characterized by its affinity for persuasion—the rhetorical
strategies employed with the object of touching the psyches of its audiences and thus
awakening the emotional, psychological, and intellectual fires within them. However,
considering that the art of persuasion has existed since the times of the Sophists, it falls
on us to inquire how exactly baroque persuasion operates differently from its
predecessors. Regardless of the end goal for which a work of art may strive —e.g., to
instruct, to delight, to move—, the baroque work focuses on effect, firmly centring itself
on the reception and response of its audience. While, on one hand, the purpose of post-
Tridentine art was, according to Bishop Gabriele Paleotti in 1582, “to persuade piety and
bring people to God” (Levy 49); Giulio Carlo Argan emphasizes the pervasive 17th
-
century practice of “persuasione senza oggetto” in which the techniques of persuasion
became independent of any underlying goal, being valued in their own right by the
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bourgeois spectator who had recently emerged as a relatively powerful and wealthy
consumer of art (Levy 52). From these two opposing aims of baroque art—to affirm
Catholic ideology and to utilize persuasive techniques to fulfill the demands of new
tastes—two divergent tendencies of the Baroque come into view: 1) art as a
propagandistic tool for controlling the masses and 2) art as a vehicle for satisfying the
emotional and intellectual desires of an audience who had developed an affinity for the
stimulating and engaging strategies of baroque persuasion. This is not to say that the
Baroque’s opposing tendencies of producing conservative propaganda and intellectually-
demanding art need to be reconciled: they merely present two polarities existing within
the same time and space. Moreover, while the goals of these tendencies may differ, their
techniques are often similar. As previously mentioned, the Baroque focuses on the effects
of the work, effects which are ultimately produced by persuasion. However, baroque
persuasion is unique in the sense that it demands the engagement of its audience; an
engagement that is realized through the emotional, experiential, and intellectual
participation of the spectator.
Emotional engagement is a defining feature of baroque persuasive strategies,
whether serving as a tool for affirming the subject’s faith in the supremacy of the
Catholic Church or as a means of achieving a non-rational understanding by way of the
sentiments. Evonne Levy asserts that the Counter-Reformation’s precision of the end goal
of art—to persuade devotion and unite Christians with God—created a shift in artistic
practices (50). Hence, artists began to explore the ways to best represent the emotional
states which would, in turn, effectively touch the emotive faculties of the viewer, thus
moving the spirit of the spectator (Levy 50). On the other hand, drawing on the thought
9
of Giulio Carlo Argan, Vernon Hyde Minor argues that baroque art does not attempt to
convince the viewer of the supremacy of the Catholic Church, but fulfills a larger, more
open-ended function, which is to “move the viewer, touch his or her desires, uncover and
reveal fundamental human reactions, and, in assuming the religious and moral base of
existence, go beyond them to reveal in larger terms the whole scope of public and private
life” (8). Whether baroque techniques serve the agenda of the post-Tridentine Church or
whether they operate for the purpose of instigating a profound reflection and
understanding of the self and the world, it is clear that the baroque elicits the emotional
engagement of its audience.
Experiential engagement constitutes a key aspect of baroque persuasive strategies,
whether functioning in the service of the promotion of Catholic ideology or simply for
the fulfilment of the public’s taste for persuasive techniques: a persuasion without an
object. José Antonio Maravall sees the experience of participation as being an essential
component in the conservative cultural machine which guides the masses. For Maravall,
“a difference exists [...] between mandate and persuasion; with persuasion demanding a
greater participation on the side of the guided, requiring that he or she be taken into
account and thus be given an active role” (Culture of the Baroque 74). In the same vein,
baroque art facilitates participation by effecting an expansion of the space of the art into
the space of the viewer and vice versa, a concept defined by John Rupert Martin as
“coextensive space” (155, 161). This coextension of space between the world of art and
the world of the living integrates the viewer into the work, demanding her/his active
participation in “the spatial-psychological field created by the work of art” (Martin 14).
For Vernon Hyde Minor, for example, a work such as Luca Giordano’s Ecce Homo
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(1659-60) not only skilfully represents the various auditory, tactile, and visual sensations
implicit in the scene’s content, but excites these same sensations in the viewer (24). This
virtual experience generates a different mode of perception which elicits an alternative
psychological state:
We grasp at objects as if in a dream. Things shift and are in flux. Whereas
some forms rise in sharp relief, others sink into shadow. We have no
cognitive or aesthetic distance. Like phantasmagoria, the events exist in our
minds as if we hallucinated them or were subject to autosuggestion. We are,
as a result, primed exercitants. (Minor 24)
Although the techniques described by Maravall, Martin, and Minor were used by the
Catholic Church as a way of inducing a desired psychological state, the purposes of these
works are not limited to the upholding of Tridentine ideology. Coextensive space
pervades secular baroque art as well, a striking example of which can be found in
Velázquez’s Las meninas: a piece that has no ulterior motive besides playfully
questioning the nature of sight, the concept of the image, and the boundaries separating
art and life. Furthermore, it is worth noting that the primed psychological state described
by Minor can be utilized for generating transgressive ideas as well as conservative
thought. The spectator, having achieved an alternative psychological state through
coextensive and participatory art, is potentially capable of non-quotidian imagining which
can result in the formation of new ideas and practices. This concept will be explored in
more detail in the second chapter which deals with contemporary performance art.
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Intellectual engagement is another important component of baroque persuasion,
operating both in the affirmation of conservative ideology as well as in the exercising of
the intellect for its own sake. On one hand, conceits, emblems, and allegory were used to
promote Catholic values, presenting enigmas which required deciphering on the part of
the viewer/reader, thereby engaging the intellect. For example, the autos sacramentales
of Calderón which served to affirm the ideology of the Church—specifically in
reinforcing the concept of the transubstantiation of the host—functioned based on
allegorical representations which demanded the intellectual engagement of their audience
to decode their messages. On the other hand, secular baroque works ignite the intellect in
a similar fashion. Vernon Hyde Minor speaks of how in metaphysical and Marinesque
conceits “extended metaphors compare objects, experience, and sensations so distant
from one another—and yet always connected by a slender if tenacious thread—that they
create a sense of surprise and intellectual excitement” (9). Similar to the decoding of the
allegory, the appreciation of the conceit lies in the intellectual process of making a
connection between two different elements, which ignites an intellectual spark in the
mind of the reader. However, the baroque goes beyond the simple production of mental
pleasure through the use of enigmatic tropes. Rather, 17th
-century thinkers explored
profoundly sophisticated concepts which still hold currency in today’s world, perhaps
explaining one of the many reasons as to why the Baroque continues to fascinate the
contemporary mind. Notably, these concepts include the interrogation of the reality and
illusion, as evidenced in Calderón’s La vida es sueño, as well as the pervasiveness of the
trompe l’oeil, extended to its limits in Andrea Pozzo’s Worldwide Mission of the Society
of Jesus (1691-94) in the Church of St. Ignatius. Of perhaps greater intellectual
12
sophistication is the baroque’s self-referentiality which interrogates the process of
representation itself, generating art that speaks of art. In this tradition, we again find
Velázquez’s Las meninas as well as the works of Flemish masters, such as Reverse Side
of a Painting by Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts, works which undeniably participate in
the incitement of the viewer’s intellectual faculties. Based on the given examples, we can
conclude that baroque persuasion was not limited to affirming conservative ideology;
rather, the Baroque hosted a full spectrum of works ranging from the closed form of
propaganda to the intellectually sophisticated open work which generated a mode of
thinking capable of diverging in multiple directions and generating an intellectual fervour
in the spectator which would ultimately affect her/his conception of life and the world.
We can see how, like the emblem and the allegorical autos sacramentales, these works
utilize the persuasive technique of the enigma, albeit with a more open-ended purpose:
not to convince or affirm a particular message but to induce thought for its own sake.
Appropriation and transformation
The baroque does not invent new and revolutionary concepts and forms but, rather,
practices the techniques of appropriation and transformation. While the Baroque’s
appropriation of Renaissance themes and concepts can be seen as a continuance of this
tradition, the Baroque transforms the Renaissance to the point of rupture. Dámaso Alonso
asserts that the Baroque continued Renaissance tradition, demonstrating how poets, such
as Góngora, appropriated 16th
-century imagery, content, and structure (312, 323, 348).
However, a new spirit emerged during the 17th
century, a spirit which had until then been
bubbling and flowering under the surface of Renaissance cultural life, and this baroque
spirit transformed Seicento ideas and forms using a force which opposed this tradition,
13
and yet did not break away from it: “la doblega y aun la retuerce, pero no la logra romper”
(Alonso 388). Gonzalo Celorio, however, despite affirming the baroque’s capacity for
appropriation and transformation, highlights the baroque’s “desire for rupture” (80).
Examining the Renaissance-Baroque transition, Celorio posits that the Baroque was only
able to break with its Renaissance past by first appropriating its classical structures (79).
However, in spite of the radical transformation realized by the baroque spirit, the baroque
is not a revolutionary spirit desirous of a complete rupture with the past, but it instead
reimagines the cultural legacy granted by history in critical and creative ways. In essence,
the Baroque does not break with Renaissance tradition so much as it surges with a new
spirit which stands in opposition to Seicento impulses and values.
This spirit, capable of appropriating and radically transforming cultural and
historical legacies, was not limited to the place and time of the 17th
-century Iberian
Peninsula. Rather, the affinity for reshaping histories and imposed cultures also emerged
in the art and architecture of the New World. For Ángel Guido and Lezama Lima, the
peoples of the Americas were able to appropriate and adapt the Iberian baroque,
transforming it into the defiant art of the Counter-Conquest. Mabel Moraña expresses a
similar notion by saying that the baroque culture of New Spain involved an appropriation
of hegemonic baroque codes which were artfully transformed to articulate a criollo
subjectivity and to question the hegemonic order (14-15, 47, 60). In addition, this spirit
was not limited to the chronological confines of the colonial Hispanic world, but re-
emerged in the 20th
century’s neobaroque3 forms and practices. For Celorio, the
3 The term neobaroque refers to baroque forms and practices belonging to a contemporary context.
Neobaroque does not imply a return to a Baroque past, but rather, a revisiting, revisioning, or recycling of a
14
neobaroque involves an appropriation of the past in an attempt to recover it and to
“possess culture” (102) and results in parodical transformations and, more specifically, in
the aesthetics of camp which have the power criticize through means of reflection, play
and humour (104-05).
Nearly 100 years of baroque modernity
The title of this section refers to the publication date of Heinrich Wölfflin’s
“Principles of Art History” (1915), which not only developed the first aesthetic
interpretation of 17th
-century art and architecture but also granted this period with a name,
coining the term, Baroque. Within the last 100 years, baroque studies have served various
purposes including the revalorization of baroque style and spirit, the investigation of the
New World Baroque as a response to imperialism, the articulation of a Criollo or Latin
American identity, the deconstruction and rearticulation of history and identity, the
criticism of the established order –specifically that of modernity–, and the imagining
necessary for inventing new orders.
Baroque revalorization
The last 100 years witnessed a surge of hunger for the baroque tastes capable of
relating to a world in which the illusory principles of rationality, harmony, homogeneity,
continuity, coherence, order, and progress were dissolving. A new perspective of the
world required a corresponding artistic sensibility and the baroque came to elicit
newfound interest. The Swiss art critic, Heinrich Wölfflin, rescued the Baroque from the
obscure depths of ill repute by defining it in aesthetic terms. His monumental Principles
historical legacy. Irlemar Chiampi sees this as “an extreme aesthetic exercise articulating the contents of the
historical baroque in the present” (521).
15
of Art History (1915) contrasted Renaissance classicism with the 17th
-century style
capable of creating a new painterly limitlessness which emphasized depth, openness, the
total effect of a unified whole, and the evasion of objective clarity (50-52). The transition
from classical to baroque, according to Wölfflin, remains inevitable, as the development
from the human psychology’s one way of seeing to another follows an almost natural law
of periodicity (54).
In Spain, the Generation of '27 also developed a taste for the baroque, reanimating
the corpse of Góngora who was able to speak to these poets in ways thought
unimaginable before this time for, while Góngora had fallen into disfavour during the 18th
and 19th
centuries, his poetry garnered new admiration in the 20th
century. Alexander
Parker notes that, although Ruben Darío was responsible for reintroducing Góngora to
Spanish poets, García Lorca’s promotion of Gongorine poetry generated a wider interest
and admiration for these 17th
-century works (18). Dámaso Alonso also remarks on how
the 17th
century’s strange aptitude for “la plasmación de ponderosas o ágiles imágenes
poéticas,” reappeared between 1920 and 1936 (565-66). The bold unexpectedness of the
Gongorine metaphor which unified dissimilar elements within the poetic image was
inspiring for avant-garde poetics of a time in which art was beginning to be conceived as
a way of not reproducing the world in a realist sense, but of exploring the artifice of
language. It was in this climate that Eugenio d’Ors, Catalan homme de lettres, in his “The
Debate on the Baroque in Pontigny” (1935), uprooted the Baroque from its seventeenth-
century European grounding and transplanted it into an ahistorical concept of reappearing
eras, or eons, maintaining that both the Baroque and the classical were opposing spirits
which re-emerged repeatedly in different epochs and in various parts of the world (83).
16
Like Wölfflin, d’Ors contrasts the classical style and spirit with those of its baroque
counterpart, elaborating on the latter with an unleashed, revolutionary fervour. For d’Ors,
the baroque spirit implies a return to pantheism, nature, the unconscious, and to a way of
thinking not bound to the arbitrary constraints of reason. This spirit involves a dissolution
of the classical center, instead opting for “multinuclear patterns,” ellipses, and infinity
(82-87). Perhaps the “freedom-loving...self-abandon” (82) mentioned in this seminar was
responsible for the intoxicated liberality and inclusivity with which d’Ors formulated his
concept of the baroque. A theory which defies all limits of time and space, limited only
by that fact that it is exclusive to human beings, can easily slide into meaninglessness.
Nonetheless, with his revolutionary candour, this man unfastened the temporal-spatial
moorings of this baroque bateau ivre, allowing its passage to the New World.
The New World Baroque as a response to European dominance
Across the Atlantic, the Argentine Ángel Guido was formulating his own New
World Baroque. Guido’s Redescubrimiento de América en el arte asserted that the art of
the Baroque Americas contained barely-hidden messages of insurrection against
European hegemony, subversive practices that he termed the Reconquista. Using the
examples of the Bolivian indigenous sculptor, El Quechua Kondori, and his mulatto
Brazilian counterpart, Aleijadinho; Guido recounted how these artists expressed their
insubordination by purposefully and obstinately deviating from Spanish aesthetic norms,
instead replacing European signs with indigenous ones and insolently “throwing all
classical proportion to hell” (169, translation mine). Redescubrimiento de América en el
arte articulates the anti-imperialist aesthetics of the Reconquista, an artistic expression of
an authentic Latin American identity, constituting one stage of a cyclical cultural
17
phenomenon fluctuating between periods of European dominance and American
Reconquest. Though a second period Eurocentric aesthetic dominance lasted throughout
19th
-century and well into the 20th
, Guido contends that a (then) new era of iconoclasm
had emerged, a “collectivist renaissance” (192) bolstered by the mystical forces of the
spirit and the imagination. For Guido, in a time where Europeans lay exhausted of
inspiration, Latin America offered an undiscovered, primordial landscape populated with
peoples of a visceral sensibility who lived closely with the earth. His book is a hope-filled
prophecy of another Reconquista, an oncoming movement of authentic American art.
Lezama Lima pays homage to Guido, building upon the Argentine’s idea of a
Latin American artistic Reconquest and formulating his own broader concept of Counter-
Conquest: a transformative syncretism articulating a uniquely Latin American identity
which, in its culmination, achieves a superior form of expression than that of its European
predecessor, providing a resistance against European cultural dominance. Like Guido,
Lezama Lima refers to el Quechua Kondori and Aleijadinho as examples of this
culminating New World Baroque expression, though Lezama also contends that these
early sparks of rebellion were premonitory of the future revolutions and wars of
independence. Like his predecessors, Lezama Lima refuses to contrast periods marked by
classical or Baroque tendencies, contending that Latin American reality has been baroque
since its inception. Fundamental to this transhistorical conception of the Latin American
baroque is “plutonismo” (213), the force that melds together a variety of cultural
fragments, daring to create a bold synthesis of styles from both sides of the Atlantic and
Pacific Oceans, fusing disparate parts into a robust alloy of forms belonging to the
American identity.
18
The New World Baroque as an expression of Latin American identity
As mentioned in the previous section, Lezama Lima’s counter-conquest process
of transformative syncretism articulates a uniquely Latin American identity which owes
its character to the Baroque. However, while Lezama followed Guido’s current of ink, his
compatriot, Alejo Carpentier, emulated the wide-angled kaleidoscopic vision of Eugeni
d’Ors. “Lo barroco y lo real maravilloso” (1975), presents an unrestrained, exorbitant
baroque, encompassing everything from Rabelais, the Popol Vuh, the Boom, Hindu
sculpture, Nôtre Dame de Paris, and Ferdowsi to the horror vacui of Aztec art. Following
d’Ors, Carpentier also envisions the baroque as not a historic style, but a spirit: a "suerte
de pulsión creadora" (69) common to humanity which re-emerges in cycles throughout
history in moments of societal culmination and cultural metamorphosis and innovation
(69, 77). However, despite this baroque’s habit of resurfacing in various places and times,
for Carpentier, Latin America is the chosen land for the baroque, due to its history of
cultural symbiosis and its consciousness of being criollo, of being something new (79).
Furthermore, this inherent baroque is inextricably linked to a latent real maravilloso,
seeing as the extraordinary is and has always been a quotidian occurrence in Latin
America (81-83). In this way, the real maravilloso and the baroque, an inseparable dense
foliage of intertwined plants from a vast and voracious jungle, are seen as constituting the
essential Latin American identity.
Like Carpentier, Mabel Moraña also sees the relation between the American
Baroque and the formation of criollo subjectivities. This process involved the criollos’
appropriation of the dominant codes in order to criticize hegemony as well as to articulate
the criollo identities that would lead to the formation of new nations. For Moraña,
19
baroque culture offered a flexible and transformative paradigm capable of including
American elements as well as moulding itself to suit the agenda of the criollo population
which found itself culturally and politically marginalized (14). The baroque model
facilitated the articulation of a marginalized criollo culture in the process of survival (47),
creating a criollo identity and providing the means to effect rupture.
Deconstruction and reconstruction of identity and culture
Haroldo de Campos’ essay, “O sequestro do barroco...o caso Gregório de Matos”
(1989), brought to light the fact that the official accounts of the history of Brazilian
national literature, particularly that of Antonio Candido´s Formação da Literatura
Brasileira, had excluded the Baroque from its positivist trajectory due to the Baroque’s
incongruity with this imagined nationalist literary progression. As de Campos affirms, the
Baroque cannot fit into an evolutionally-perceived literary course because of its
precocity: the genesis of Latin American colonial literatures occurred within a
sophisticated and complex baroque code (325). “O sequestro do barroco...o caso Gregório
de Matos” serves to deconstruct an incomplete and erroneous national history and to
reconstruct the history in a more inclusive and accurate way. In “The Rule of
Anthropophagy: Europe under the Sign of Devoration,” de Campos locates the origin of
the anthropophagous cultural practices of the Americas as first theorized by Oswald de
Andrade in his “Manifiesto antropófago” within the Baroque. For de Campos, the
colonial writers of the New World Baroque in particular, the Brazilian Gregório de
Matos were writers of difference who dismantled logocentric European discourses
through cannibalization, which is to say, the devouring and “re-chewing” (337) of a
cultural heritage to create a new polycultural synthesis involving parodic desacralizations.
20
These “new barbarians” (338), or cultural cannibals, have begun to invade the centre in a
way similar to Lezama’s Contra-Conquista, in which the art of the peripheral other comes
to affect the cultural centre. In a nutshell, what de Campos is proposing is that
anthropophagic cultural practices, founded in baroque colonial difference and
deconstruction, can serve to destroy the established narratives of a logocentric culture and
rechew/rebuild them in more dynamically inclusive ways.
Like de Campos, Walter Moser sees the baroque as a paradigm with the flexible
capacity to “défaire des identités” (113). Citing the works of Severo Sarduy and Raul
Ruiz, Moser posits that the baroque “ne soutient pas la construction d'identités. Bien au
contraire, ils s'attaquent aux moules identitaires dans le domaine culturel” (114). To
support his claim, Moser takes up the case of Gregorio de Matos as presented by Haroldo
de Campos. As the rescuing of the baroque Gregorio de Matos from a nationalist
sequestro (kidnapping) ruptures the linear path of a progressive national literary history,
the baroque presents itself as “une pratique culturelle capable de défaire le schéma
moderne de la ‘formation nationale’” (116). Moser lists three processes achieved by
reappropriating the Baroque: the dehistorization of poetry, thus allowing baroque poetry a
contemporary status; the denationalization of literature by linking de Matos’ barroquism
to an international cultural anthropophagy; and a de-ideologization of literature which,
“en activant la ludicité, la dépense sémiotique et la jouissance du corps signifiant dans la
poésie baroque,” goes against any singular, teleological vision of an national identitary
project (116).
21
Criticism of the established order and the invention of alternatives
Unlike the authors preceding him in the baroque Cuban trinity (Lezama Lima and
Carpentier), Severo Sarduy’s baroque theorizing was of a non-national character, never
explicitly upholding any concept of a baroque Latin American identity. Contrary to his
compatriots, Sarduy sought to limit his baroque conceptualizing to semiotic and linguistic
formalizations, owing much of his theorizing to the Parisian poststructuralist climate
which enveloped him. The formalizations developed by Sarduy substitution,
proliferation, condensation, parody, and intertextuality all serve to achieve a core
baroque process: artificialization. For Sarduy, the baroque was neither the pantheist,
natural spirit of d’Ors nor the marvellous-real essence of Latin America’s natural world.
For Sarduy, the baroque instead made a mockery of nature, revelling in its playful,
carnivalesque, wasteful, erotic artificiality. While Sarduy sees 17th
-century baroque
structures as retaining a certain sense of meaning and harmony despite destabilizing
practices, he sees in the neobaroque as an intensification of the 17th
-century Baroque,
resulting in disharmony and the loss of the object, “a necessarily pulverized reflection of
a knowledge that knows it is no longer ‘calmly’ closed on itself. An art of dethronement
and dispute” ("The Baroque and the Neobaroque" 271-90). This idea of a lost equilibrium
and the dispute of the established order is echoed in Barroco in which Sarduy studies the
dethronement of the heliocentric Renaissance order and the decentred cosmology of
Kepler and his elliptical orbits. Sarduy translates the ellipse of Kepler’s cosmology into
the decentring rhetoric of 17th
-century art and literature, linking changes in the scientific
ordering of the universe to corresponding changes in the cosmovisions of Western culture.
For Sarduy, the cultural production of the baroque 17th
century and the neobaroque 20th
22
century reflect the dethronement of an illusory stable, self-contained knowledge system
("The Baroque and the Neobaroque" 183) and an emerging new order.
In her book Barroco y modernidad (2000), Irlemar Chiampi brings to light a
baroque that serves as an alternate modernity to the one imposed by the hegemonic centre.
Lezama Lima’s concept of an uninterrupted baroque continuity in the Americas
constitutes what Chiampi sees as an alternative modernity, “the other modernity, outside
linear history’s myth of progress...our metahistory” (513). For Chiampi, the neobaroque
that would be heralded in by Sarduy is an “intensification and expansion of the
experimental potential of the historical Baroque recycled by Lezama and Carpentier, now
accompanied by a powerfully revisionist inflexion of the ideological values of modernity”
(517). She champions the neobaroque over postmodern meaninglessness, claiming that,
though both the neobaroque and postmodernism function within the same aestheticthe
death of the subject, fragmented discourse lacking a progressive narrative, etc., the
neobaroque has too much ideological content to be equated with postmodernism. Going
beyond merely piecing together senseless agglomerations of fragments, the neobaroque
“unleashes figures of a new form of tension” (520). For Chiampi, the neobaroque is
epitomized by its spatiality, physicality, and sensuality, focusing on “spaces, figures, and
bodies” (520). She defines the neobaroque as the “aesthetic of countermodernity,” noting
how modernity was incapable of incorporating “the ‘non-Western’ (Indians, mestizos,
Blacks, urban proletariat, rural immigrants, etc.) [into] a national project of consensual
democracy” (522). Chiampi fosters a link between this exclusion and the attractive pull of
the Baroque, which predated modernity. The neobaroque, in its reclaiming of pre-
Enlightenment aesthetics, “revert[s] the historicist canon of what is modern” (522).
23
Of course, this was not the first time that a progressive conception of the canon
was subverted. The German Romanticists, for whom neo-classicism constituted a breach
in the continuity of medieval, Christian, and Romantic literature and thought, also
subverted any progressive conceptualizing of the canon, esteeming the works of Calderón
so highly as to see in them the zenith of Romanticism, indicative of what they perceived
to be the deep-seated Romantic character of the Iberian Peninsula (Sullivan 177). For
Friedrich Schlegel, “Calderón’s excellence—the achievements in Christian tragedy and
drama of ‘this great and divine master’—should shine, rather, from a distance like that of
an almost unattainable exemplar” (Sullivan 215). Locating the unattainable apex of
literary and dramatic achievements in the past subverts the notion of cultural progress, a
viewpoint which stands in opposition to enlightened modernity’s faith in the continuous
advancement of thinking and cultural expression. Romanticism, therefore, carries out the
first articulation of counter-modernity. However, unlike the Romanticists who perceived
18th
-century neoclassicism as an interruption in a Romantic continuity spanning several
centuries, the baroque of Latin America maintained its baroque continuity, never fully
assimilating the values and thought of the Enlightenment. According to Mariano Picón-
Salas, “in spite of nearly two centuries of rationalism and modern criticism, we Spanish
Americans have not yet emerged fully from [the baroque’s] labyrinth” (87). Thus,
isolated from the rationalist modernity of Europe, Latin America’s baroque developed
independently, producing its own alternate modernity.
In “El ethos barroco” Bolívar Echeverría proposes the baroque ethos as a possible
model for an alternative modernity in the wake of a “civilizing crisis” (15). Echeverría
articulates four different ways of living modernity: the realist ethos, the romantic ethos,
24
the classical ethos, and the baroque ethos. Each one of these ethoses represents a way of
being or a characteristic behaviour which organizes the living world according to its own
distinct cosmovision and practices, trying to harmonize the contradictions of human life
and attempting to make “the unliveable, liveable” (18, translation mine). Echeverría
focuses on the baroque ethos and its connection to the legacy of mestizaje, to the baroque
aesthetic, and to modernity in general. He posits that there lies a deep “civilizing crisis”
(15, translation mine) at the root of all other crises, be they political, social, or
economical. This civilizing crisis is rooted in the modernity project whose Protestant-
influenced capitalist modernity has prevailed over all other potential modernities. The
type of capitalism evoked by Echeverría is constructed in such a way that it contradicts its
very own ideology, resulting in crisis. One of the founding principles of this
capitalisminvolving the satisfying exchange of human work for desired goodshas not
resulted in human satisfaction, rather, this value associated with the mutual relationship
of work and pleasure has been sacrificed to an abstract value involving the reproduction
of wealth (19). What is more, this form of capitalism takes advantage of the Protestant
work ethic to provide the semi-spiritual self-discipline necessary to maintain capitalist
production which demands “the sacrificing of use value’s now for the benefit of the
valorization of commercial value’s tomorrow ” (22, translation mine). In a nutshell,
Western capitalism has fooled workers into forgoing the satisfaction of the present in the
hope of receiving future satisfaction. Conscious of these problems and wishing for an
attainable post-capitalist utopia, Echeverría has investigated the baroque ethos as a
possible model of an alternative modernity capable of resolving this civilizing crisis.
25
Given that capitalism cannot be escaped, Echeverría posits that it must be
incorporated into whichever ethos emerges (19). Echeverría argues that the baroque ethos
is superior to the other three ethoses because of its capacity to simultaneously accept and
reject (27). Furthermore, he demonstrates how colonial Latin America best illustrates the
processes of the baroque ethos, given its legacy of mestizaje (28). In the colonial world
where an inadequate, dilapidated Euro-centric order was imposed on the indigenous and
African peoples (the others of the Americas), these others were faced with the necessity
of supporting the European model for the sake of maintaining some sort of social order
(34-35). In the process, however, mestizo cultural forms emerged in an effort to defend
the Euro-centric order while simultaneously, and often clandestinely, rejecting it in an
effort to permit the survival of both indigenous and European forms (34-35). In a way
similar to this practice of acceptance/rejection, the baroque ethos is capable of accepting
the inevitability of a capitalist modernity, while rejecting this modernity as it has been
imposed, seeking instead to transform it.
In his “El norte, el sur, la utopía y el ethos barroco,” Boaventura de Sousa Santos
takes up the same issue of the baroque ethos as a means of dealing with the fundamental
problems of our capitalist modernity. De Sousa Santos sees the crisis of our civilization
as stemming from an imbalance in the founding principles of modernity. He explains that
modernity was founded on two contradictory principles: social regulation and social
liberation, or “order and progress” (315). An ideal modernity would achieve a balance
between regulation and liberation; however, when the modernity project combined with
capitalism, the balance changed (316). Within the sphere of regulation, Rousseau’s
concept of vertical community-based regulation has been ignored, allowing other
26
elements of modernity’s regulation involving the State and the market to carry more
weight (316). Following the principles of the market and the hierarchical order of the
State has led to a polarization between the North (Europe, Anglo-America, and other
dominant regions) and the South (Latin America, Africa, South-East Asia, and other
subordinate regions). Though the capitalist modernity project is universal in vision, it
never distributed itself properly around the world and has only served to universalize
inequality (316-17). Faced with the crisis of an inept model of civilization, we find
ourselves in a paradigmatic shift which forces us to think of alternatives (320). For
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, it is not coincidental that the 17th
century is in vogue,
considering that in this period of paradigmatic transition, such as in the Baroque, we are
engaged in epistemological battles and looking for knowledge everywhere (320-21).
However, differentiating himself from Echeverría, who would look to the baroque as a
model for survival, de Sousa Santos instead asks for creative and utopic imaginings of
new possibilities (321), for the invention of a new psychology and subjectivity, and for
the invention of a baroque ethos based on what history has given us, taking what is useful
from this legacy for the construction of a new utopia (326). For de Sousa Santos, the
subjectivity of the baroque ethos is particularly important because it is
una subjetividad capaz de retórica, de visualización, de sensualidad , de
inmediatez, capaz de inventar y combinar conocimientos aparentemente
incombinables, de distinguir la vocación de las alternativas y, al mismo
tiempo, capaz de sorprenderse, de rebelarse, de distanciarse, de reírse.
(330)
27
This baroque ethos comes from the south and, in this paradigmatic transition, the north
needs to learn from the south (330) in order to facilitate the passing from modernity to
postmodernity (324).
Conclusion
The North does need to learn from the South. The North, wading knee-deep in a
sludge of postmodern meaninglessness has much to learn from the adaptable inclusive
system of the baroque. While the baroque expresses the same rupture with modernity that
postmodernism does, the baroque explodes with meaning. Unlike postmodernism, which
entails a denial of any meaning, the baroque constitutes an acceptance of multiple, albeit
contradictory, meanings. It offers a paradigm capable of integrating various knowledges,
ideologies, and worldviews which has become invaluable in a world where concepts of
universalism, monocultures and singular identities are dead. Encoded within it are the
mechanisms to survive despite the hegemonic impositions attributed to the neo-
colonialism of globalization and the persistence of capitalism. The case of the Chicana/os
is an interesting one because of their status of being, to use de Sousa Santos’ terminology,
the south within the north. What is more, the people of the Chicana/o borderlands have
been living and breathing the paradigm that we know as the baroque ethos, which for
them has been the experience of everyday life and the strategies used for surviving in it.
The Chicana/o borderlands
California is becoming a third world state. With a government drowning in debt,
massive unemployment, a disintegrating infrastructure and education system and
underfunded healthcare and social assistance programs, many Third World countries put
28
California to shame. Even before the financial crisis of 2007-2010, Los Angeles exhibited
an increasing gap between a marginalized working class and an elite and wealthy class.
Los Angeles presents a model of a reality which could potentially resemble the future
realities of most Euroamerican urban centres. On one hand, as a centre of transnational
corporations with established industries of commerce and technology and infused with a
large investment of foreign capital, Los Angeles is home to a large population of affluent
professionals. On the other hand, this elite society stands in stark contrast to a growing
blue-collar population, who are largely immigrants working in the service industry which
sustains the middle and upper classes. As Raymond Rocco explains,
Because of its linkage to...the processes of the internationalization of
production, Los Angeles is thus now a city that is characterized by a sense
of social fragmentation, a lack of center, multiple communities with little
or no sense of identification with one another, extremes of affluence and
poverty, ambition and despair. (407)
However, this social fragmentation based on class, ethnicity, and racial difference is not
unique to Los Angeles; but rather, this phenomenon is becoming the reality of the urban
centres of many first world nations. The lack of identification between the myriad of
different segments of the population points to the need for mutual identifications which
transcend differences, finding points of commonality capable of uniting communities.
Despite the struggles and political reforms, the current paradigms employed to
conceptually structure the diversity within the nation have not enjoyed any success.
German chancellor Angela Merkel recently pointed out how the multicultural approach or,
“saying that we simply live side by side and are happy about each other [...] has failed,
29
utterly failed” ("Merkel Says"). Neo-national and nativist movements are on the risein
France, Germany, and the USA in particularand anti-immigrant and racialized policies
are being established, the case of Arizona SB 1070 being of particular note. Chancellor
Merkel is correct: the multicultural paradigm has failed. As Chicana intellectual Rosaura
Sánchez explains, “The notion of pluralism, of a multicultural society, points [...] to a
type of heterogeneous cohesive whole while suppressing the reality of social
fragmentation” (381). Deceptively marketed as a concept which celebrated differences
and promoted egalitarianism by employing the inherently just system of the democratic
state, multiculturalism focused on a superficial layer of culture while brushing aside
crucial notions of class, gender and race. Moreover, the democratic apparatus of liberal
democracies are only egalitarian in theory. As Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita point
out,
many have traded in socialism for neo-Liberal calls for redemocratization
[...] forgetting that liberal democracy is the handmaiden of modernization;
that is, the consolidation of bourgeois democracy, which tends, if anything,
to preclude social transformation, much as been historically the case in the
United States, with its increasing polarized class and racially divided
society. (505)
The post-1965 period in the US has been a period where group rights have lost to
conservative egalitarianism (Omi and Winant 14) and has only treated individuals while
ignoring the issues of class, race, and gender, causing a disempowerment of group
movements and a fragmentation of any potential resistance to the status quo.
30
However, Chicana/o intellectuals have already investigated the problematics of
forming mobilized and resistant social groups capable of combining the seemingly
contrary concepts of diversity and a cohesive totality. Until the 1980’s, el Movimiento
(the Chicana/o movement) had been rooted in a mythically-generated nationalism which
silenced any difference from within. El Movimiento borrowed extensively from José
Vasconcelos’ mythically-conceived concept of the Mexican nation, which was rooted in a
glorious Aztec past and celebrated the concept of la raza cósmica, a mestizo race with
which every Mexican was to identify. The Chicana/o nationalist ideology created the
mythical foundation of Aztlán, the legendary home of the Mexica (Aztec) peoples before
their migration to Tenochtitlán. Aztlán became an imagined home in the Southwest US
and symbolized the Chicana/os’ historical legitimacy to the Southwest, which had been
lost due to US expansion through Texas Annexation, the Mexican-American War, and
the Gadsen Purchase. Like Vasconcelos’ mexicanidad, el Movimiento celebrated a
uniform mestizo race, la raza. However, as Barthes affirms in his Mythologies,
mythologies are not formed based on a historical reality, but are created to maintain the
ideologies of the ruling class.4 The homogenizing and mythicizing narratives which
glorified a shared uni-racial Mexica past and served to support a patriarchal and
heteronormative discourse in the end proved limited, as these paradigms occluded
differences of gender, race, and sexuality.
The metanarrative of el Movimiento was, however, later dismantled by Chicana
feminists in the 1980’s who instead began formulating new concepts of multiple
4 “The oppressed makes the world, he has only an active, transitive (political) language; the
oppressor conserves it, his language in plenary, intransitive, gestural, theatrical: it is Myth”
(Barthes 149).
31
subjectivity (Yarbro-Bejarano 83). Notably, Gloria Anzaldúa proposed the theory of
mestiza consciousness, “a consciousness that emerges from an awareness of multiple
subjectivity structured by multiple determinants-gender, class, sexuality, and
contradictory membership in competing cultures and racial identities” (Yarbro-Bejarano
86), as a postnational project rooted in the racial, historical, cultural, and spatial reality of
the border. Producing a new mestiza consciousness required
developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity [...]
[and turning] the ambivalence into something, else [...] That third element
is a new consciousness [...] and though it is a source of intense Pain, its
energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down
the unitary aspect of each new paradigm. (Anzaldúa 101-02)
Anzaldúa reconceptualizes mestizaje as a border consciousness, the realization that
subjectivity is multiple, conflicting, constructed, and shifting. With this new perception
comes its corresponding practices, linking inner struggle, self-(trans)formation and social
reform (Anzaldúa 100-10). The mestiza border consciousness proposed by Anzaldúa is
paralleled by Chela Sandoval’s “Methodology of the Oppressed” which posits that people
who have suffered marginalization because of class, race, or genderin particular,
women of colourhave developed a consciousness of the constructed, plural, and
shifting character of identities. The methodology of the oppressed is the strategy of
shifting identities in order to negotiate dominant discourses of meaning and power (62-
64). The goal of the methodologies of both the nueva mestiza and of the oppressed is to
put into theory a subjectivity rooted in reality which could integrate various strata of
difference without having to sacrifice coherence, having the possibility of fomenting
32
political linkages with enlightened others—anti-sexists, anti-racists, anti-classists—and
resisting oppressive hegemonic structures.
There are some limitations in respect to border theories, however. Pablo Vila
writes that 1) the US-Mexican border described and theorized by most border
intellectuals bears little resemblance to the reality of the lands south of the border, 2)
border theory essentializes the cultures in question, 3) border theory does not account for
the fact that borders could become reinforced by experiential fragmentation, 4) many
theorists often present the new mestiza/o border-crosser as “a new privileged subject of
history,” a privileging that excludes people who, though marginal, cannot claim to be
hybrid nor to be border crossers, 5) border theory has been uprooted from its historical
and geographic specificity and has been used in very different contexts, resulting in a
homogenization of borders, 6) border theory tends to confuse identity with culture,
ignoring the fact that, while border norteños and Mexican Americans may share the same
culture, they carry vastly different identities, and 7) border theory assumes the existence
of a common brotherhood which unites Chicana/os, Mexican-American immigrants, and
norteños, while hiding the reality of fragmentation and antagonism between these
communities (307-08).
In other words, for border theory to sustain its claim of being rooted in a spatial,
cultural, and historical reality, it must take into account the multiple realities present for
the various groups that inhabit the borderlands. For a migrant farm worker, the
experience of border crossing is very different from that of the highly-educated and
successful Guillermo Gómez Peña. Likewise, the experience of being a maquila worker
in Ciudad Juárez is much different from being a Chicana feminist intellectual in San
33
Francisco. Border theory must either account for these realities or exclude those which do
not fit. The issue involving the fragmentation of experience is a difficult one which
produces multiple outcomes. While a consciousness of multiple constructed selves can
produce subjects capable of negotiating hegemonic structures or uniting with others from
different socio-cultural groups “unities in difference” (Hall 118), it can also result in
myopic individualism and a loss of any sense of community, or in a backlash of neo-
nationalist movements. In order to avoid the slippery nature of border theory, this
dissertation will focus on the experience particular to the Chicano/a environs which,
though influenced and informed by the concept of borders, presents a specific case rooted
in a continued historical and geographic reality.
Chicana/o culture has always presented a threat to US narratives of nation which
fixed their origins in an Anglo, white, puritan, settler genesis. However, this is not to say
that Chicana/os are “privileged subjects” for dismantling the hegemonic discourse of the
state: First Nations peoples can lay a first claim on their legitimacy to the Americas and
African-Americans supported (unwillingly, albeit) the development of the nation, along
with indentured labourers from Asia. Any immigrant to the US who has suffered
oppression at the hand of the state can refute the Statue of Liberty’s welcoming voice,
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” In reality
there exist various differencesethnicity, race, language, gender, sexuality, classwhich
can serve to dissolve the meta-narratives of nation. However, we cannot pretend that all
of these groups have an inherent bond uniting them as much as we cannot deny the fact
that antagonisms exist between them. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-immigration
sentiments exist as much in minority groups as in the mainstream US population. The one
34
element that does unite a diverse group of marginalized people is the fact that they have
all suffered from the oppression generated by neoconservative state policy structured
within a capitalist nation. Hence, by making the new mestiza realization that all identity is
constructed, these disenfranchised groups would consequently realize that, for the
purpose of allying to effect social change, a new group identity would have to be
constructed by finding a “unity-in-difference” (Hall 118), a unity of the oppressed. At the
beginnings of Chicanismo, the movement united itself around the concept of struggle as a
way to return home to Aztlán. Now that the nationalist mythology of Aztlán has lost its
currency, “it is the struggle that matters most” (Mariscal 70). Perhaps, instead of a unity
of the oppressed, which resonates with victimization and defeat, struggle remains the best
concept for uniting such a diverse group of people.
Chicana/o studies struggles with these very issues: how to create a complex,
multilayered, shifting subjectivity which integrates differential notions of race, ethnicity,
class, gender, sexuality, and generation while avoiding the fragmentation of a collective
consciousness. While practicing a baroque convivencia of heterogeneous and
contradictory worldviews, Chicana/o studies goes beyond these survival strategies to
construct a utopian new imagining of a community as a way of confronting unjust
societal structuring. The beauty of Chicana/o studies rests on its insistence on praxis, as
well as theory. Within Chicana/o studies are encoded the practices of struggle and
resistance with the aim of causing potential reform to the subjugating and silencing forces
of the state and, by association, transnational capitalism. Furthermore, this socio-political
theorizing does not limit itself to a purely academic space, but rather, goes hand-in-hand
with the production of culture.
35
Chicana/o cultural production: six observations
The following section will attempt to circumscribe some of the main processes
involved in Chicana/o cultural production. This is by no means an exhaustive list and,
like any attempt to define a vast and diverse subject, suffers from generalizations. George
Vargas states that “Chicana/o art is more about a state of shared consciousness rather than
a style” (117). However, it is also true that a certain consciousness demands
corresponding artistic practices. The consciousness of having a long history constantly
threatened with dissolution by the leviathan mainstream US, the consciousness of having
been excluded from the cultural and political centre, “the consciousness of being some
other thing, of being a new thing” (Carpentier 79, translation mine), the consciousness of
belonging one of many ethnicities holding varying worldviews and yet sharing the same
space, and the consciousness of the constructed nature of nation and of any singular
identity surely must translate into a distinct set of literary and artistic practices. The
following points seek to highlight these differences.
Chicana/o cultural production takes a political stance.
To begin, to be Chicana/o in the first place implies a politically-motivated attitude.
While being a Mexican-American indicates a heritage or a nationality, a person of
Mexican descent is Chicana/o by choice. According to Fregoso and Chabram,
Chicano was ultimately a term we had coined for ourselves and which “we”
invested with a new meaning: Chicano signified the affirmation of
working-class and indigenous origins, and the rejection of assimilation,
acculturation, and the myth of the American melting pot. Implicit in the
term Chicano was a strategic relation and a strategy of struggle that
36
thematized the Chicano community and called for social struggle and
reform. (28)
As the term Chicana/o by itself is invested with ideological and political struggle, this
struggle constitutes a large part of the process and content of Chicana/o art. Originally
borrowing from the philosophy of the Mexican muralists, whose works voiced overtly
political messages, the Movimiento of the 60’s and 70’s also promoted politically-
engaged public art. Cultural production presented itself as an integral part of the
promotion of a desired collective consciousness which would lead to social and political
reform. As artist Ester Hernández affirms, “As a Xicana-Azteca, I feel we must continue
our creative skills to give strength to our political, cultural, and spiritual struggle. We
must make visible our resistance to deception and the celebration of genocide” (in Social
and Public Arts 19). Though George Vargas asserts that the themes of Chicana/o art have
become more humanist, displaying a universal consciousness (14-15), the act of creating
art in a world in which Chicana/o art has been excluded, or “marginalized behind the
tortilla curtain” (Vargas 7), constitutes a political act in itself.5 To produce art within a
larger space of non-acceptance and to bring it into the public sphere serves to highlight
the official culture’s politics of exclusion. While the Chicana/o community has moved
away from the programmatic nationalist art of the Movimiento, opting for more complex
and inclusive modes of expression, the concept of cultural and intellectual production as
socio-political praxis has remained strong. Though Chicana/o works are diverse in
5 Chicana/o artists have been largely ignored, “especially from the powerful art centers in New York. The
2010 Whitney Biennial did not include a single Chicana/o artist in its survey of American art. (For that
matter, it didn't include a single Latino artist either.) The same goes for the New Museum, which didn't
include any Chicana/os or Latinos in its 2009 triennial, ‘The Generational: Younger Than Jesus’” (Miranda,
no pagination).
37
subject matter, complex, open-ended, and offer multiple perspectives, the political side is
either implicitly or explicitly omnipresent.
Chicana/o cultural production addresses and produces subjectivities and identities.
The articulation of subjectivities and identities in Chicana/o cultural production
involves two main processes: negotiation and creation. First, art not only presents a
testimony and a representation of the complex Chicana/o experience, but the act of
creating art in itself constitutes a process in which the author/artist can negotiate this
experience, giving a concrete form to her/his multiple and conflicting subjectivities. As
Anzaldúa notes, the deep interior of the mestiza self is a space in which a collision of
separate phenomena can become united into a new synthesis, which though not
necessarily implying a harmonious fusion coincides with the birth of a mestiza
consciousness (101-02). This is to say that a certain subjectivity emerges from the
process of the profoundly internal negotiation of the Chicana/o experience. Likewise, the
negotiation processes involved in the act of creating art articulate new subjectivities
which can then be communicated to and internalized by the Chicana/o community,
partially contributing to a collective sense of identity. Secondly, in the interstitial space of
the Chicana/o borderlands, the Chicana/o subject makes the realization that all identities
are constructed, especially in the realms of discursive practice: “When I write, it feels like
I’m carving bone. It feels like I’m creating my own face, my own heart” (Anzaldúa 95).
This realization implies that it rests on thinkers, writers, artists, and musicians to
construct new identities. Chicana/o cultural production plays the role of creating
identities through the praxis of the arts. As subjectivity is liable to shift and change, this
creation involves a never-ending process. The exploration and construction of identities
38
are crucial for uniting a diverse community for the purpose of resistance against
hegemony as “identity is a major weapon in the struggles of the oppressed” (Yúdice 221).
Chicana/o cultural production privileges public and quotidian spaces.
The Chicana/o Southwest has a strong tradition of public art. While the
Movimiento of the 60’s and 70’s favoured murals, poster art, and el teatro campesino, the
popular culture which preceded the Movimiento included many dynamic public displays
including fantastically elaborate low-rider cars and exorbitant pachuco styles. In
Chicana/o history, there has been no noticeable differentiation between high and low art,
due to the fact that a Chicana/o upper class capable of culturally isolating themselves
from the masses has never existed. Chicana/o cultural production is for the public,
denying the bourgeois practice of constructing esoteric and difficult works with the
purpose of exclusion. Chicana/o intellectuals run parallel with Cultural Studies scholars
in the sense that “they [Cultural Studies scholars] provide sophisticated and convincing
arguments about the ways in which the commonplace and ordinary practices of everyday
life often encode larger social and ideological meaning” (Lipsitz 51). Hence, art can be
found everywhere: from murals, T-shirts, and tattoos, to cars, corridos, and altares.
Chicana/o culture dissolves the borders between life and art. Denied space in museums
and galleries, artists’ works hang in cafés and community centres. Public artists take
culture to the streets such as in ASCO’s street performance pieces; Luis Jiménez’s
monolithic fibreglass statues; the controversial San Diego art/bus advertisement titled,
Welcome America’s Finest Tourist Plantation; and the continuing mural tradition,
including Barbara Carrasco’s computer animated mural, Pesticides! According to Ýbarra-
Frausto, the idea of public art goes beyond the art itself and transforms space and
39
consciousness ("The Chicano Movement" 178). Public art constitutes a visible
manifestation which challenges the excluding and silencing practices of the dominant
centres of culture and power. Perhaps this is why public art in the US continues to be “the
object of hot debate and institutional censorship” (Vargas 259). For a population which
has been rendered invisible within the narrative of the US nation, Chicana/o public art
demonstrates the refusal to be invisible.
Chicana/o cultural production employs rasquache techniques
Rasquache is a term in Mexican Spanish which originally denoted a low class
sensibility, similar to the term naco. Rasquache techniques developed from the living
conditions of the Chicana/os who, due to limited resources, sought out alternate
(rasquache) materials for cultural production. The term was reappropriated by Chicana/os
and came to be valued as a style, an attitude, a sensibility, and a way of life. Tomás
Ýbarra-Frausto first defined the rasquache style and practices as belonging to a
“pervasive attitude or taste” coming from a marginalized perspective which, in its core, is
both resourceful and adaptable ("The Chicano Movement" 171). According to Ýbarra-
Frausto, rasquachismo attempts to hold everything together while employing syncretism,
juxtapositions, integrations, and impure communions (171). It exudes flamboyance,
sensuous textures, suffers from horror vacui (172), and employs aesthetics of what is
apparently bad taste. Beyond its loud and extravagant forms, rasquachismo presents a
“bawdy, irreverent, satiric, and ironic worldview” (173).
Ramón García, however, refutes Ýbarra-Frausto´s concept of rasquache which he
sees as a patronizing view of working class culture seen from the position of a
middleclass intellectual (214). García points out that what seems rasquache to Ýbarra-
40
Frausto would not necessarily seem rasquache to the people producing these cultural
artefacts (214). García instead promotes his new terminology, Chicano Camp, to
differentiate the genuine appreciation of the positive images affirming Chicana/o popular
culture rasquache images, according to García from the ironic, critical, flamboyant,
exaggerated attitude of Chicano Camp (214-16). For García, rasquache supports the
maintaining of the status quo while Chicano Camp provides survival strategies for
Chicana/os marginalized by both mainstream American and Chicana/o cultures (211). He
explains that Chicano Camp is
A way of negotiating and confronting a bordered marginalization [...] a
way of existing in a disenfranchised social space that is unfixed and
indefinite. Camp style ironizes, parodies, and satirizes the very cultural
forms that marginalize and exclude. By so doing, Chicano Camp
deconstructs the ideologies that constitute this marginalized perspective.
(211)
However, García’s description of Chicano Camp runs completely parallel with Ýbarra-
Frausto’s rasquachismo: they are birds of the same extravagant feather. García simply
objects to Ýbarra-Frausto´s use of rasquache because the term carries a negative
resonance. García relocates the term rasquache to another form of culture: the non-
critical popular images which affirm Chicana/o nationality and its conservation. However,
these images do not constitute original or thought-provoking forms of art but are instead
first-degree kitsch. According to Celeste Olalquiaga, first degree kitsch is an “honest art”
in which “the relationship between the user and the object is immediate and based on
genuine belief.” The object has been cheaply produced and tends to be folkloric or gaudy
41
("Holy Kitschen" 277). In this category I would place iconic mass-produced images: Che
Guevara T-shirts, Virgin of Guadalupe keychains, Frida Kahlo shopping bags, etc. For
most of the people who consume these items, they do so out of genuine appreciation for
these icons. This is not to say that these images are naco kitsch, but their mass
propagation mixed with uncritical devotion makes them susceptible to ironic viewpoints.
These images lose their meaning through the processes of mass-production, overuse, or
loss of currency with the contemporary world. They become emptied of meaning or
“second-degree kitsch” which, according to Olalquiaga, requires a consciousness of the
object’s kitschness which consequently changes the object into “an empty icon, or rather
an icon whose value lies precisely in its iconicity, its quality as a sign rather than an
object” ("Holy Kitschen” 279). When an image becomes emptied, it is not garbage-
rasquache so much as an article with the potential to be recycled. For example, while a
devotional candle of the Virgin of Guadalupe constitutes first-degree kitsch, The Virgin of
Guadalupe Defending the Rights of Chicanos by Ester Hernández (fig. 2) demonstrates a
recycling of the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, transforming it into an irreverent and
invigorating symbol of ethnic and gender-based power. This process of ironic, parodic,
critical, and playful transformation is what constitutes rasquache mechanics.
Fig. 2. Ester Hernández, La Virgen de Guadalupe
defendiendo los derechos de los Xicanos, 1974.
(Baxandall and Gordon 209)
42
This is where Ýbarra-Frausto and Ramón García differ. Ýbarra-Frausto’s rasquache
denotes a process, using available materials to create something new. García’s rasquache
is descriptive of already existing cultural artefacts, which is perhaps why he finds the
term to be pejorative. The rasquache process denotes, however, a creative baroque
recycling which reinvents cultural artefacts and detritus to make something new and
provocative.
Moreover, Rasquachismo is specific to a type of relationship between the artefact and
the individual. For example, while both rasquache and kitsch artefacts may appear
superficially similar, the motives of their authors are quite different. Differentiating
between kitsch and rasquache, Amalia Mesa-Bains affirms that
Kitsch as a material expression is recuperated by artists who stand outside
the lived reality of its genesis. Conversely, rasquachismo for Chicano
artists is instrumental from its shared barrio sensibility. One can say that
kitsch is appropriated while rasquachismo is acclaimed or affirmed.
Rasquachismo is consequently an integral world view that serves as a
basis for cultural identity and a socio-political movement. (no pagination)
For Amalia Mesa-Bains, rasquachismo is a collective sensibility and subjectivity which
is fundamental to a Chicana/o collective identity and for survival and resistance. This
view of rasquachismo combines the conservatism of García’s rasquache with the defiant
and critical sauciness of Ýbarra-Frausto’s rasquache. Rasquachismo is capable of both
affirming and rebelling and, like the baroque ethos, it seeks cultural preservation
(Echeverría 34-35), but not without “rebelling and laughing” (de Sousa Santos 330).
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Chicana/o cultural production articulates hybrid processes.
Chicanos are like antennas. . . . We have all this information. We pick up all these
different stations, and its blurs into one thing, and that’s the Chicano experience.
(Louie Pérez in G. García H27)
From living a pluricultural experience, Chicana/o cultural production cannot
avoid articulating the variety of cultural referents found in daily living. As Ýbarra-
Frausto sees it, Chicana/o art presents a visual narration of cultural negotiation (180).
Without the (false) stability of a singular and unquestionable national narrative, the mind
is continuously negotiating various, disparate, or conflicting messages. As noted earlier,
Anzaldúa sees this negotiation as the self “attempting to work out a synthesis” which
involves the formation of “a new consciousness—a mestiza consciousness” (101-02).
Chicana/o cultural production, through its use of hybrid forms, shows the process
of the mind trying to create a synthesis based on a heterogeneous reality. However, the
term hybrid does not always convey a finished product in which disparate elements have
fused into one homogenizing entity. Ideally, the Chicana/o work remains open and
adaptive to a world continually in flux just as the mestiza consciousness stays in
“continual creative motion” (Anzaldúa 80). The goal is not so much to convey an already
formed subjectivity, which would result in a static representation, but rather, to show the
process of forming a subjectivity, to show to process of dealing with an experiential space
of cultural collisions, a convivencia of fragments, fusions and confusions, and the
resulting consciousness that comes out of such a reality.
However, there is another reason for employing hybridity, apart from the cultural
negotiations achieved by artists/writers and shared with their public. The objective of this
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hybridity is cultural conservation, similar to that practiced by the colonial subjects of the
Spanish Empire. This strategy comes from the realization that, excluded from the master
narrative, one must introduce elements of the threatened culture into the structures of the
dominant code, and thus ensure cultural preservation, however limited this preservation
may be. Speaking of hybridity in Chicano hip-hop, Rafael Pérez-Torres states that
mestizaje articulates “a cultural strategy for agency and change while at the same time
evoking a sense of historical place and connection by naming a racialized subjectivity.
The idea of mestizaje at once suggests change and permanence” (325). Mestizaje, in this
case, anchors itself in a historical and/or racial reality while appropriating the elements
and media of the surrounding socio-cultural landscape, creatively imbuing the work with
a sense of history and an ethnically/racially-derived identity as well as articulating
something completely new in the process.
Chicana/o cultural production appropriates and transforms.
George Mariscal remarks that Chicana/os have a very strong “transformative
sense,” providing the example of Luis Valdez’s 20th
century adaptation of a medieval
Spanish nativity play, La Pastorela, in which “hell becomes a toxic waste site, and Christ
the son of a migrant worker” (Mariscal 65-66). This transformative sense is somewhat
related to hybridity as a strategy for cultural survival, as mentioned in the previous
section. However, instead of crafting a mestizaje of diverse elements, this transformative
practice takes traditional forms and reinvents them to suit contemporary contexts. For
example, as Ýbarra-Frausto states, Chicana/o artists have fused socio-political elements,
such as AIDS, gang violence, and pesticide use, into traditional practices such as el Día
de Muertos ("Notes from Losaida" xvi). Recent Chicana/o literature also rearticulates and
45
modernizes tradition. This is the case of Ana Castillo’s So far from God in which one
character, La Loca, experiences a type of Immaculate Conception, only instead of
mysteriously becoming filled with the seed of God, this modern virgin suffers an
immaculate infection of AIDS. Likewise, in Ramón García’s short story: “Amor Indio:
Juan Diego of San Diego,” the Juan Diego of the Virgin of Guadalupe story “is Indio like
the Nahuatl original, but he is also a cholo addicted to drugs who meets what appears to
be an apparition of La Virgen de Guadalupe on a San Diego barrio corner” (Estrada 49).
The purpose of these transformations could be various. One such objective
parallels the intentions of parody. Gonzalo Celorio writes that the aim of parody in Latin
America is to possess a culture and to show this possession though criticism, reflection,
play, etc. (102). He also claims that parody involves a return to the past for the purpose of
preserving, recuperating, or enriching it (101). When accused of not being “real Mexicans”
by Mexican nationals while struggling to avoid assimilation into the mainstream US
melting pot, displaying knowledge of traditional culture becomes a defensive mechanism
in response to antagonism from both nations. At the same time, however, the
transformative practices of these Chicana/os are a veiled assault on static Mexican
sacrosanct cultural artefacts. They are showing that, though they are well-versed in
Mexican traditional culture, they reject many of its narratives as being insufficient for
communicating within their current American reality. While invoking elements of
traditional culture lovingly pays homage to Mexican roots, the transformation performed
on these traditions involves both a humorous rebellion and a revitalization of petrified
cultural artefacts.
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The baroque border
While many baroque theorists, specifically Bolívar Echeverría, attribute the
colonial mestizaje resulting from the Iberian occupation of the Americas as best
illustrating the baroque ethos (Echeverría 28), there is a more recent example of a climate
in which a baroque ethos has been emerging, a place which has been mostly ignored by
baroque researchers: the Chicana/o Southwest.
A colonial baroque historical foundation
The cultural landscape of the Chicana/o borderlands was not formed from a tabula
rasa; rather, the Southwest has a persistent Mexican and colonial legacy which continues
into the present day. As Amalia Mesa-Bains explains,
I think it’s hard for people to understand that all the time California has
been California, it’s always been Mexico. There is a Mexico within the
memory, the practices, the politics, the economy, the spirituality of
California. It’s invisible to everyone but Mexicans. We’ve known it, we
see it, we live it, but Californians don’t know it. (cited in Isenberg 152)
California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and half of Colorado can be
considered the other Mexico, the Mexico that was colonized by the US between 1845 and
1854 and incorporated into their national body. This other Mexico experienced much of
the same phenomena as did the rest of Mexico: conquest, proselytism of the indigenous
peoples, mestizaje, the colonia, and independence. The cathedrals and missions that
remain in the Southwest are witnesses to this legacy, shouting out the baroque in every
winding and rippling curlicue and echoing a mestizo legacy with every indigenous
insertion. This Mexico, like Bolívar Echeverría’s Mexico, also sits on a foundation of
47
mestizaje, the same cultural mestizaje that Echeverría links to the baroque ethos (36).
However, what most contributes lifeblood and continuity to the Mexican cultural
presence in the Southwest is the constant influx of Mexican immigrants, bringing their
own sensibilities cultivated on the soil of a rich baroque legacy.
Living in the crack between two worlds: the Chicana/o baroque experience
Maravall speaks of the picaresque phenomena of the 17th
century as only being
possible in “sociedades que habían traspasado históricamente un considerable grado de
dinamismo y movilidad, que, por ello, habían entrado en confrontación con otras
sociedades y era en ellas experiencia relativamente frecuente la de los choques de
culturas” (La literatura picaresca 258). The Baroque was a time of movement, dynamism,
culture shock, and crisis: “Crisis económica, social, e histórica” (762). It was an age of
uncertainty and confusion (11) in which the old paradigms of Renaissance classicism had
lost their vigour and people were looking for new ways to see and organize their world. It
was an age in which identities started to shift and slide, where people were beginning to
change professions, ascend in social class, and, in the case of the colonies, shift between
racial categories. The colonies became an environment of clashing cultures and
worldviews, as well as a crucible for hybridity and the formation of new identities.
Anzaldúa describes the US-Mexican border as “a vague and undetermined place”
that is always in the process of transforming itself (25), that is characterized by its
restlessness and its ambivalent state (26) and that has created a third country of “shock
culture” (33). Not coincidentally, her description runs parallel with Maravall’s
description of a Baroque society characterized by movement, dynamism and culture
shock (La literatura picaresca 258). Both the 17th
-century Hispanic world as much as the
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Chicana/o borderlands of recent years have been spaces of cultural collisions and
confusions. The criollos, the mestizos, and the mulattos fell into the crack between
Imperial Spain, the nearly destroyed world of the First Nations peoples, and Africa.
Likewise, border dwellers “live in the interval, ‘in the crack between two worlds’”
(García Canclini 238). Anzaldúa describes this experience as being “sandwiched between
two cultures, straddling all three cultures and their value systems” in which “the coming
together of two habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural
collision” (100). Like the Baroque of the Hispanic world, the Chicana/o borderlands
encompass a climate of uncertainty, ambiguity, dynamism, and hybridity. In the words of
Guillermo Gómez-Peña,
Cities like Tijuana and Los Angeles [...] are becoming models of new
hybrid culture, full of uncertainty and vitality. And border youth—the
fearsome ‘cholo-punks,’ children of the chasm that is opening between the
‘First’ and ‘Third’ worlds, become indisputable heirs to a new mestizaje
[...] Like it or not, we are attending the funeral of modernity and the birth
of a new culture. (Warrior for Gringostroika 39)
From this confrontation of two realities, new phenomena emerge: a new mestiza
consciousness and a mestiza culture, or rather, el ethos mestizo. For Anzaldúa, this
consciousness can “[break] down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm” (102) and, for
Echeverría, el ethos barroco, interrelated to the cultural mestizaje of the Americas, can
serve as both a refuge and a weapon against the paradigm of modernity (18). Either case
involves the decay of old orders and the birth of something new. As Carpentier states, the
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baroque “suele presentarse precisamente en expansión en el momento culminante de una
civilización o cuando va a nacer un orden nuevo en la sociedad” (77).
Rasquache baroque
Chicana/o culture, like baroque culture, is intensely visual. The core aesthetic of
Chicana/o culture, rasquachismo, like the baroque, is defined as an aesthetic practice, a
sensibility, a world-view, and a strategy for survival and resistance. As an aesthetic,
rasquachismo’s definition is completely congruent with that of the baroque:
To be rasquache is to be unfettered and unrestrained, to favour the
elaborate over the simple, the flamboyant over the severe [...] The
rasquache inclination piles pattern on pattern, filling all available space
with bold display. Ornamentation and elaboration prevail and are joined
with a delight in texture and sensuous surfaces. (Ýbarra-Frausto, "The
Chicano Movement" 172)
As a visual aesthetic which captivates the senses, rasquachismo invokes the pratices of
Góngora and the exuberant mestiza profusion of the Mexican colonial baroque; as an
“irreverent, satiric, and ironic worldview” (Ýbarra-Frausto, “The Chicano Movement”
173), rasquachismo shows the face of Quevedo or of Sor Juana writing her Respuesta a
Sor Filotea. As a “sensibility attuned to mixtures and confluence” which creates
“syncretism, juxtaposition and integration” (Ýbarra-Frausto, "The Chicano Movement"
171), rasquachismo parallels the Barroco de Indias where “La hibridez, la mixtura, la
simbiosis hacen del barroco americano un arte bizarro, fantasioso, colorido, popular, [...]
es signo vigoroso de la originalidad Americana” (Celorio 88). And it is this originality, a
differentiating code which seeks to articulate an identity separate and in opposition to the
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dominant culture, which is common to both rasquachismo and the New World Baroque.
In the words of Amalia Mesa-Bains:
The sensibility of rasquachismo is an obvious and internally defined tool
of artist-activists. The intention was to provoke the accepted “superior”
norms of the Anglo-American with the everyday reality of Chicano
cultural practices [...] rasquachismo is a world view that provides an
oppositional identity. (no pagination)
Similarly, in the Barroco de Indias, a sensibility and style emerged as a way of providing
an identity in opposition to superior Old World norms. In the spirit of Ángel Guido’s
reconquista and Lezama Lima´s contraconquista, el Quechua Kondori
expressed his insubordination in his sculpture seeing that each palm of
sculpted stone was made with the obstinate intent to not imitate the
Spanish [...] With creole insolence, when he throws all classical proportion
to hell. With creole heresy when he replaces the Catholic cross with the
Incan sun. (Guido 168, translation mine)
It is this identity articulated through art which created resistance to the dominant
cultural norms and, by proxy, the dominant culture itself. The need to produce differential
culture comes from the lived experience of trying to survive physically,
psychologically, and culturallya marginalized existence in a difficult and adverse
environment. It is a way of “[making] the most from the least [...], a combination of
resistant and resilient attitudes devised to allow the Chicano to survive and persevere with
a sense of dignity” (Mesa-Bains, no pagination). This continued existence involves
cultural survival within a larger dominant Anglo society. Just as the artists and artisans of
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the colonies ensured the survival of their traditions by incorporating their signs into the
baroque framework of religious art and architecture, Chicana/os practice similar syncretic
practices to promote cultural survival and negotiations. These practices involve
“sustaining elements of Mexican tradition and lived encounters” by recombining
“disparate elements such as corridos, images of Walt Disney, Mexican cinema, and mass
media advertising, and even Mexican calendario graphics and American Pop art” (Mesa-
Bains, no pagination). Like the shock culture which resulted from the clashing of Spanish
and indigenous worlds which required a new, flexible, hybrid, baroque ethos for
articulating and negotiating this reality, the cultural collision between Chicana/o and US
mainstream cultures “could only be negotiated through the sensibility of rasquachismo, a
survivalist irreverence that functioned as a vehicle of cultural continuity” (Mesa-Bains,
no pagination). This combinatory strategy facilitated not only cultural continuity but also
served as a way of articulating a shared history excluded from official culture.
Reclaiming this history, like de Campos reclaiming Gregorio de Matos, highlights the
limited and inaccurate historical narrative of the nation and the how Chicana/os, like the
barrocos in Brazil, have been excluded from official history.
It is within this rasquache baroque that I situate the performative, literary, and
artistic works which will provide the subject matter for the following three chapters. All
the works treated in this dissertation participate thoroughly in rasquache baroque
sensibilities, citing baroque history and summoning the ghosts of the colonial past while
generating inclusive structures, impure hybridities and juxtapositions, flamboyance,
excess, bold transformations, and critical humour for the purpose of negotiating an
adverse and complex reality and for culturally arming oneself against hegemony and its
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metanarratives, in an attempt to ensure cultural survival and resistance. The first chapter,
“Robo-baroque: The Performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his Pocha Nostra,”
investigates the colonial baroque legacy which saturates the performances of Guillermo
Gómez-Peña and his performance group, La Pocha Nostra. This legacy is demonstrated
by a layering of baroque conventions—allegory, hagiography, and the wünderkammer—
as well as by an intensely baroque spatial and temporal ordering which harnesses the
powers of decentralization, pluralism, coextensive space, and seriality. The second
chapter, “Ana Castillo’s Xicanista Baroque: allegory, hagiography, and the supernatural
in So Far from God,” explores how the Ana Castillo continues the colonial baroque
traditions of allegory, hagiography, and miracles in her novel, So Far from God. The
third chapter, “Amalia Mesa-Bains’s Domesticana Baroque,” looks at the heavy baroque
citation which permeates the installation works of Amalia Mesa-Bains, investigating how
these installations use the conventions of the wünderkammer and vanitas along with the
concept of the mirror and the fold to speak of baroque knowledge systems, female and
non-Western identities, and feminine interior spaces.
Strategies for entering into the future
The strategy of mestizaje is a baroque strategy, involving the assimilation of the
dominant European code and its transformation into a combination of fragments from the
subordinate code which had been previously destroyed during conquest and colonization
(Echeverría 36). As much as this process partially accepts and assimilates the dominant
culture, it also resists the dominant culture in an indirect, elaborate, and exaggerated way
as well as by means of understated and clever play; rousing and questioning the value
structures of society and demanding that they transcend to a level where they would be
53
able to incorporate values contrary to the system’s very order (Echeverría 36). The
concept of an open and flexible value system is echoed in Chicanismo’s rasquache,
where “communion is preferred over purity” (Ýbarra-Frausto, "The Chicano Movement"
171) as well as in Anzaldúa’s mestiza border consciousness which affirms multiplicity
and denies any singular and exclusive subjectivity determined by race, culture, gender,
class, and/or sexuality. The emphasis on heterogeneity in the accounts of the baroque
ethos and the mestiza consciousness denies the existence of any singular paradigm which
would seek to dominate and silence the others. As Bolívar Echeverría’s baroque ethos
serves as a way to survive and resist capitalist modernity, the Chicana/o ethos serves as a
way to survive and resist erroneous monocultural neo-nationalist narratives as well as the
multiculturalist paradigm that ignores group rights pertaining to class, race, gender, and
sexuality. However, beyond surviving and contesting the established order, the baroque
and the Chicana/o ethoses are encoded with an element of creative utopic imaginings. De
Sousa Santos speaks of creating a new subjectivity, based on the baroque ethos, which
could foment the basis of a new, utopic epistemology (322) and help us out of the current
impasse of capitalist modernity. Anzaldúa has already created a new subjectivity, the
mestiza consciousness, “a new mythosthat is, a change in the way we perceive reality,
the way we see ourselves, and the way we behave” (102). Just as De Sousa Santos
suggests that we construct a baroque ethos based on what history has given us by taking
what is useful from it (326), Anzaldúa takes what is useful from her people’s history and
lived reality and uses this legacy to construct a mestiza ethos. “I am participating in the
creation of another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a
new value system” (103), Anzaldúa affirms. The open, inclusive, multivocal, complex,
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and shifting quality of both baroque and Chicana/o ethoses shows promise of providing
more effective ways of navigating the heterogeneous and complicated world of today and
the future.
Conclusion
Socio-cultural phenomena which have emerged from a space involving 1) a
baroque historical precedent, 2) multiple and conflicting cultural referents and practices,
3) the disintegration of the narratives of singular identities and of the nation, and 4) a
subordinate culture threatened with dissolution within a dominant one are in need of a
strategy for cultural preservation, for holding the universe together, and for “rebelling and
laughing” (de Sousa Santos 330). Rasquache, mestiza, baroque: whatever name you wish
to call it, this is the ethos of choice in the Chicana/o borderlands.
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Chapter 1
Ana Castillo’s Xicanista Baroque:
Allegory, Hagiography, and the Supernatural in So Far from God
Misión Dolores, San Francisco. The 18th
century mission exhibits a distinctly New World
Baroque bravura, with beams painted in indigenous
arrow patterns and a façade styled in a convoluted
unfurling of flourishes and curlicues. A frontispiece
painted with trompe l’oeil architecture covers the
main retablo during Lent, in which three
allegorical figures dominate the fictional space: Fe,
Esperanza, and Caridad.
These allegorical figures have come to inhabit the imagination of Ana Castillo,
whose novel, So Far from God, continues and reshapes the New World baroque traditions
which persist in Nuevo México as much as in México Viejo. The novel encompasses the
multiple realities and histories which have collided together within the space of New
Mexico. Fe, Esperanza, and Caridad are the daughters of a single mother, Sofia, all of
whom live in the town of Tomé, a region described by its colonial legacy of penitentes,
curanderismo, and miracles. A fourth daughter, La Loca, adds another allegorical figure
to this family, beginning the novel with her mysterious death; her journey through hell,
purgatory, and heaven; her resurrection, and her levitation. Resembling modern day
saints, all four daughters undergo martyrdoms: Caridad is viciously assaulted by the
Fig. 3. Frontispiece, Misión Dolores, San
Francisco
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malogra6, Fe’s body is consumed by cancer, Esperanza is tortured and killed in Saudi
Arabia, and La Loca mysteriously contracts AIDS (an immaculate contraction) and
slowly wastes away. Their mother, Sofia, is inspired into political engagement following
the breakdown of her washing machine, deciding to run for mayor and to begin a farming
and wool weaving cooperative. She and her only living daughter, La Loca, participate in
a Viernes Santo procession which has been radically transformed to include speeches
from activists speaking in favour of environmental protection and Native rights and
against meaningless wars. This utopic world quickly falls into pessimistic irony when
Sofia becomes president of MOMAS (Mothers of Martyrs and Saints), a gynocratic
institution based on the valorization of the suffering of sons and daughters which is more
concerned with maintaining its elite hierarchy and selling products than with promoting
social justice.
As evidenced by the plotline, So Far from God carries strong political overtones,
a politicization which corresponds to neobaroque strategies of resistance. As outlined in
the introduction to this dissertation, the baroque of the Americas articulated thinly
disguised expressions of insubordination which generated a spirit of resistance against the
colonizer (Guido, Lezama Lima). The neobaroque of Sarduy, however, contains the
potential for more than just resistance as the neobaroque pulses with a revolutionary
quality, practicing the art of dethronement which ushers in a new order ("The Baroque
and the Neobaroque" 183). Compared to Sarduy’s revolutionary neobaroque, Gonzalo
Celorio’s neobaroque is slightly less extreme, relying on the complementary processes of
recovering and transforming the legacy of the past through reflective, critical, and
6 The malogra is a legendary otherworldly creature from New Mexico which is made of wool and frequents
crossroads during the night, waiting to asphyxiate those who pass by.
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humorous play (104-05). Castillo is participating in neobaroque resistance in a similar
way to Guido and Lezama Lima’s colonial subject as well as Sarduy and Celorio’s
neobaroque subject: Not only does her novel demonstrate rebellion against US hegemony
and capitalism, albeit thinly veiled through fiction, but she also recovers a Mexican and
Mexican-American past for the purpose of saving it from the effacement of official
history, investing value in it, and critically transforming it in reflective ways which often
bring laughter.
One of the traditions that Castillo recovers from the colonial past is allegory. The
full development of allegory began in the Baroque where it achieved a privileged form in
emblem books and in the post-Tridentine autos sacramentales of Calderón de la Barca.
The mode allowed for profane mixings, for anachronistic analogies, and for multiple
layers of meaning. It appealed to Counter-Reformist sensibilities which favoured physical
representation as a vessel for communicating metaphysical concepts, compelling the
active involvement of both the senses and the mind. For this reason, the playwright was
“atento a la necesidad de hacer palpable por medio de los sentidos lo inteligible y
espiritual” (Regalado 2: 156). However, as much as it was a didactic technique used to
clearly illustrate abstract ideas, allegory was also an enigmatic technique which required
the mental engagement of its audience in order to decipher its meaning:
El arte de los autos […] no es reducible a un mundo cerrado, sino que es
más bien un paradigma artístico abierto, capaz de despertar motivos
olvidados, entre los que se destaca nuestra necesidad de orientarnos por
medio de un orden simbólico que nos haga presente una imagen dramática
de la existencia. (Regalado 2: 32)
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Considering these qualities, allegory provides Castillo with an appropriate mode for
expressing abstractions in understandable and yet mysterious ways: “Calderón llevó a
cabo una difícil síntesis de dos tendencias en la literatura alegórica: una esotérica,
fundamentada en la representación de los misterios a un público de iniciados en el culto,
y otra exotérica, dirigida al pueblo” (Regalado 2: 121). Perhaps, like Calderón, Castillo
owes much of the success of her novel to her use of allegory, through which she is able to
reach a broad audience, though on varying levels of understanding.
The taste for allegory permeates the lives of the saints as well. The saints are
allegorical, representing archetypes of idealized human behaviour. Their physical
suffering directly correlates to their sanctity and their bodies which, when martyred,
become prepared “for emblematic purposes” (Benjamin, The Origin 217). The suffering
of martyrs, despite the emotion-inducing physicality of their hyperbolic wounds and tears,
is “always accompanied by an allegorical distillation of passions in the form of ideas, a
combination of sensuousness and sobriety” (Parkinson Zamora 178). The purpose of the
lives of saints is a didactic one: to inspire Christians to follow prescribed models of
behaviour and to impress the connection between suffering and sanctity deep into their
consciousness. This didacticism is realised not only with baroque strategies of emotional
persuasion achieved through witnessing extreme acts of corporeal violence, but also with
the wonder incited by miracles.
New Spain’s Baroque imaginary was populated with miracles which challenged
the dichotomy of the real and the supernatural. “Miracles, visions, and hallucinations
became commonplace in colonial Mexican society” and “visits to hell or to paradise
became common currency among believers of every type” (Gruzinski 83). La Loca’s
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journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven, as well as her resurrection and her levitation
can be seen as a continuation of this New World Baroque tradition of collapsing real and
fictitious worlds, producing a “chronic hallucinatory state” (83). Supernatural events run
throughout So Far from God. La Loca and Caridad sometimes exercise their clairvoyant
powers; the family is frequented by spirits, including La Llorona; and La Loca performs
miraculous healings through prayer. What is deemed to be a “chronic hallucinatory state”
in la Nueva España has endured to the present day with the continued documentation of
fantastical miracles. The apotheosis of the surreal miracle finds its narrative form in the
ex-voto. Ex-votos are folk paintings which, along with a written inscription, give
testimony to how prayer to a saint or to the Virgin Mary was miraculously granted. Ex-
votos transcend the boundaries of everyday reality, documenting marvellous occurrences
involving supernatural phenomena. Figure 4 shows a contemporary rendering of how a
giant squid saved a fisherman who was lost in the mists of the sea. The wife of the
fisherman attributes this miracle to the Virgin Mary who, in answer to her prayers, sent
the giant squid to save the woman’s husband. Through the tradition of ex-votos, one can
see how the supernatural entwines itself deeply within the New World Catholic
understanding of the universe and how Ana Castillo’s marriage of allegorical
hagiographic traditions with hallucinatory otherworldliness is not arbitrarily invented, but
continues a cultural history beginning in colonial New Spain and enduring into the
present day.
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Fig. 4. Ex voto Pulpo, Janus Museum, Washington Grove, Maryland
It is within the closely related traditions of allegory, hagiography, and miracles
that Ana Castillo writes her novel. In So Far from God allegory, hagiography, and
popular narratives involving the supernatural slide seamlessly together into a polysemous
genre. Coming from a Mexican-American cultural standpoint, writing in an allegorical
mode about present-day saints, martyrs, and miracles seems only appropriate. Allegory is
the baroque mode, the mode of a baroque Catholicism whose worldview runs is deeply
embedded in the minds and spirits of Chicanas/os. Ana Castillo has stated that, despite
the fact that many Chicanas/os opted for indigenista ideologies as a way of rejecting
Western culture, they could not completely eliminate Catholicism from their lives
“because Christian symbols and beliefs have infiltrated many indigenous practices,
family and community ties remained Catholic, and many Mexican customs are tied to
Catholicism” (Massacre 95). She recognizes that there is still an underlying part of the
Chicana’s identity which beats with a latent Catholic religiosity (Massacre 95). This
permanent Catholic subjectivity echoes in the character of Esperanza who “in high school,
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although a rebel, she was Catholic heart and soul. In college, she had a romance with
Marxism, but was still a Catholic” (38). Writing about a people who, from the bottom of
their hearts, palpitate with a deep baroque Catholic sensibility requires an equally
appropriate narrative form. This allegorical miraculous hagiography is the form Castillo
has constructed as an effective means of telling her story and the story of her people.
Allegory in So Far from God
In its most basic sense, allegory is a non-literal mode of representation in which
meaning is conveyed by means of figures and their actions. It is a dynamic mode capable
of drawing analogies between diverse and contrary subjects. It is deeply rooted in history,
using aspects of a historical reality to speak of abstract concepts or using figurative
abstractions to speak of historical realities. It denies realism: characters become either
exaggerated archetypes or faceless abstractions, the ordering of events seems illogical,
and supernatural occurrences easily enter the narrative. There are no details for the sake
of details: everything exudes meaning and “‘mere’ ornament no longer exists, in this
view” (Fletcher 125). It is a mode which, through its complexity and contradiction,
approaches a more faithful representation of the truth (Hunter 269). For Fredric Jameson,
the allegorical spirit allows for discontinuities and heterogeneity, rendering its
representation polysemous and dreamlike (146). It is a “successively progressing,
dramatically mobile, dynamic representation of ideas which has acquired the very fluidity
of time” (Görres in Benjamin, The Origin 165). Allegory is “a way of seeing” (Benjamin,
The Origin 166). It is a baroque way of seeing.
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So Far from God explicitly reveals its allegorical mode by the naming of its
characters: Fe, Esperanza, Caridad, La Loca, Sofia (Wisdom), Felicia, Francisco el
Penitente, etc. The names indicate that the characters are embodiments of abstract
qualities rather than realist representations of individuals. It is tempting to simplify the
allegorical figures in So Far from God by directly correlating the characters’ names to
their corresponding personified virtues. For Laura Gillman, Fe has faith in the American
Dream, Esperanza employs her hope for social justice, and Caridad “exercises her
‘charity’ by giving her body to anyone closely resembling her husband Memo” (179-80).
However, assigning names fails to fully describe the polysemous quality of each
character. La Loca speaks of the limitations of naming in the novel when her father asks
her why she called her horse “Gato Negro,” given that he was a horse, not a cat. She
responds to her father, “I’m not calling Gato Negro a cat [...] I named it Gato Negro. I
never said it was a cat” (152-53). Loca’s logic reveals how signifiers do not necessarily
reflect the signified. The narrator continues the discussion, explaining how Gato Negro’s
eyes looked like a cat’s eyes when it prepares for an attack, though qualifying that
“calling it Gato Negro didn’t mean nothing more than that, obviously, because horses are
not attack animals. Everyone knew that” (153). Castillo shows us how naming only
captures a partial and contradictory semblance of the signified. Following this logic, the
names of Fe, Esperanza, Caridad, and Loca do not necessarily correlate to their
corresponding virtues, but at best to a partial and contradictory semblance of these virtues.
Instead, each figurative character houses a multiplicity of abstract concepts,
creating ambiguous allegorical figures. In So Far from God, as in most modern allegory,
there is no pure and direct correlation between the character and her abstract quality, as in
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the medieval sense of allegory, but rather, there is an ambiguous, polysemic, and
composite quality to Ana Castillo’s characters. In this sense, Castillo’s allegorization is
an extension and an intensification of baroque allegory, which was capable of uniting
multiple meanings within the allegorical figure. In Calderón de la Barca’s auto
sacramental, El verdadero Dios Pan (1670), one allegorical figure represents the Moon,
Diana, Proserpina, and the human soul, while another character, el Dios Pan, personifies
the Greek god Pan, the Good Shepherd, and the Eucharistic body of Christ (Kurtz 24).
Likewise, So Far from God’s Caridad allegorizes a morally lost abandonada; the
confusion between caritas and cupiditas; the neglect of the heart, as demonstrated by her
carelessness towards her horse, Corazón; the healer, both through her profession as a
nurse and as an apprentice curandera; and the awakening of mestiza and indigenous
understanding. As Angus Fletcher explains, allegorical protagonists have a “segmented
character,” generating new personalities as each event occurs, “secondary personalities
which are partial aspects of himself” (35). These multiplying identities also recall the
baroque concept of proliferation in the sense that they deny the existence of any singular
signifier, invoking instead “a chain of [signifiers] which progresses metonymically and
which circumscribes the absent [signifier], tracing an orbit around it […] a radial reading”
(Sarduy, “The Baroque and the Neobaroque” 118). In a similar understanding, Lois
Parkinson Zamora speaks of the instability of the baroque self as expressed by shifting
fragments which are incapable of defining the whole. As examples, she cites the Pensées
of Pascal and the multiple self-portraits of Frida Kahlo as examples of fragments
expressing “the vagaries of the self” while never achieving a total comprehensive vision
of that self (186). Though allegory flattens, stylizes, and creates abstractions which deny
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the complex psychologies found in realist depictions of human characters, any
predilection for essentializing or simplifying is avoided by the creation of multiple and
shifting selves. This constitutes an appropriate baroque choice as much as an appropriate
choice for the Chicana/o borderlands where, as Gloria Anzaldúa has expressed, the new
mestiza subject is composed of multiple, conflicting, and shifting selves (100-01).
The composite nature of each character is often contradictory, indicative of the
baroque taste for impurities achieved through the combining of disparate aspects. Mary
Magdalene became popularized during the Baroque due to her ambivalent position
between prostitute and saint and Caridad follows in this tradition, living a drunken and
highly sexualized lifestyle which, after her brutal attack by the malogra and her “Holy
Restoration,” becomes ascetic and saintly. Her composite allegorical character is further
complicated by fragments from both Catholic and indigenous cultures. As Gail Pérez
notes, Caridad has been partly modelled on the life of Saint Clare (63), who also
experienced a radically austere lifestyle apart from society. In other ways, Caridad begins
to embody indigenousness: she worships the earth and is mistaken for the spirit of Lozen,
the Apache warrior (So Far 88). Finally, she is united with the beloved Acoma Esmeralda,
who is her sister on a mythological plane, according to the Acoma genesis myth which
places Caridad and Esmeralda in the roles of the first two women, whom the deity
Tsichtinako calls back to the earth which had originally formed them (211). Esperanza’s
personification of hope is also contradictory. Whatever hope she embodied in her La
Raza politics has turned into a hopeless impasse in which she cannot advance the
interests of the Chicana/o community, having been relegated to a feminine symbol in a
patriarchal and mythologized Chicano nationalist movement. During El Movimiento of
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the 1970s, Esperanza organized protests which led to the establishment of Chicano
studies classes. She was the voice that fomented on-campus participation in support of
the United Farm Workers and spoke of the injustices suffered by Salvador Allende and
Victor Jara (So Far 239-40). However, what had once represented the embodiment of
hope through struggle and resistance became “an unsuspecting symbol, like a staff or a
rattle or medicine” in a phallocentric indigenist Chicano ritual (So Far 36). Esperanza
could no longer offer hope because she had lost all agency as a female within in a male-
centred world lost in mythic escapism. Her only choice was to become a journalist
covering the Gulf War, a war waged by a country which ignored the interests of her own
community; a war in which she disappears and is tortured, not unlike a desaparecida
from the Latin American dictatorships of the 1970’s. In short, if Esperanza in any way
personifies the virtue of hope, it is a misplaced and dysfunctional hope.
Walter Benjamin states that the use of allegory denotes the incapacity of
representing ideals, as the baroque allegorical way of seeing only exists in spaces
signifying the decline of the world (The origin 166). Incapable of representing the pure
ideal virtues belonging to Western tradition, Castillo has adulterated them, demonstrating
the desperate situation facing her people. Fe, Esperanza, and Caridad do not represent the
virtues implied by their names, but rather, they point to the crises within Chicana/o
communities: the betrayal of the Chicana/o community in favour of the American Dream
(Fe), the loss of momentum within el Movimiento (Esperanza), and the persistence of
racial and gender-based oppression (Caridad). These crises eventually lead to the deaths
of all three daughters. In pursuit of the perfect home and appliances, Fe accepts a well-
paying job at a factory where she uses toxic substances to clean weapon parts and
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consequently dies from cancer. Esperanza had “little left to keep her locally” (So Far 46)
and, since her relationship with Rubén/Cuahtémoc (a personification of the mythically-
conceived male-centred Movimiento) was doomed to fatality, she went where she was
needed: Saudi Arabia (So Far 46). Women’s exclusion from the narrative of the
Movimiento meant that Esperanza could not exercise her fighting spirit in local politics,
compelling her to go abroad where she was killed. Caridad was raped and nearly killed
by the malogra, a monstrous composite representing the continuing legacy of conquest
and colonization, “a thing, both tangible and amorphous. A thing [...] made of sharp
metal and splintered wood, of limestone, gold, and brittle parchment. It held the weight of
a continent and was indelible as ink, centuries old and yet as strong as a young wolf” (So
Far 77). The description of the malogra conjures images of violence and civilization: the
metal and wood of swords and lances, the limestone constituting the foundation of the
Church, the gold which lined Spanish coffers, and the parchment on which laws were
written, land divided, and Western culture propagated. The narrative of the malogra is
one in which the female body comes to represent conquered territory. Caridad was not the
victim of an individual attacker, but of an intangible systemic misogynist force: “it wasn’t
a man with a face and a name […] Nor two or three men. That was why she had never
been able to give no information to the police” (77). The realisation of this brutal attack
within present time indicates a continued presence of systemic racial and gender-based
oppression. This oppression is repeated by Francisco el Penitente who personifies the
ascetic European Catholicism of the Franciscan school. Francisco experiences a profound
attraction to Caridad, seeing her as his female counterpart: the St. Clare to his St. Francis
(Gail Pérez 69). He becomes vulture-like, stalking Caridad, blind to her shift away from
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Eurocentric Catholicism and towards a mestiza worldview which focused more and more
on Native feminine principles. Simultaneously fascinated and abhorrent of her
relationship with the indigenous Esmeralda, Francisco chases the lovers off a cliff at Sky
City, enacting a Eurocentrically envisioned Catholicism’s continued persecution of the
indigenous and the female.
In its totality, this collection of polysemous characters creates yet another
composite: the multiple subjectivities to be found in the Chicana mind. If, as Ana Castillo
says, her characters were based on different parts of herself (Saeta and Castillo 145), So
Far from God puts these subjectivities into action, staging the allegorical performance of
her internal conflicts and negotiations. As fragments of an undefined whole, the
characters perform their subjectivities, allegorizing their fragmentary selves through their
actions. While Caridad embodies the need to understand local knowledge and to heal the
community, Esperanza does not content herself with matters of healing or survival, rather,
she represents the need to go out into the world and promote social transformation. While
Fe represents the ambition to leave behind the heavy yoke of her despised marginality
and its corresponding poverty, La Loca personifies the creative feminine spiritual impulse
which remains independent of society (the irrational―craziness―has long been
associated with the feminine). Western tradition, beginning with Plato, has sustained the
idea that the rational is inherently masculine, while the irrational is inherently feminine.7
Within this tradition we can also locate thinkers such as Karl Jung, whose theory of the
unconscious anima and animus sees the non-rational anima as feminine. Marie-Luise von
7 Plato’s Timaeus holds that, at first creation, all souls were given male bodies. Thereafter, the men who
had conquered their emotions continued to inhabit their male bodies, whereas those that had not became
women (no pagination). Adam Weitzenfeld notes that Plato’s assertion that the rational immortal soul is
male infers that the mortal faculties, i.e. emotions, are feminine (25). Based on this logic, Weitzenfeld
concludes that “by behaving like a woman (i.e. feminine), one will become a woman” (25).
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Franz, one of several authors whose writings were included in Jung’s Man and His
Symbols, defines the anima as “a personification of all feminine psychological tendencies
in a man’s psyche, such as vague feelings and moods, prophetic hunches, receptiveness to
the irrational, capacity for personal love, feeling for nature, and […] his relation to the
unconscious” (186). It is hardly coincidental that the characteristics of the anima
correspond with those of La Loca. In fact, Marie-Luise von Franz highlights the prophetic
power of the feminine anima, saying that not only were the Greek oracles female
priestesses but also that Inuit shamans wore female clothing to connect them to the spirit
world (186). La Loca’s premonitions and soothsaying would make her equivalent to an
oracle or shaman figure. From these correlations, we can see how La Loca is an allegory
of the female anima and its associated non-rational faculties as well as its cultural and
historical manifestations.8 La Loca, thus, represents the anima of the Chicana mind, a
vital part of the psyche which serves as a spiritual guide.9 Last but not least, Sofia
embodies the subjectivity of la dolorosa, the suffering mother. For most of her life Sofia
remained trapped in traditional patterns of thinking which inhibit her empowerment.
However, her transformation into mayor, entrepreneur, and activist seems to collect the
best characteristics of her daughters and to put them into action, taking Esperanza’s
activist impulses, Caridad’s will to heal, Fe’s ambition, and Loca’s creative spirituality. If
8 Interestingly, Marie-Luise von Franz points out that the anima can carry both positive and negative
aspects, the latter of which is seen in mythological female spirits such as in the Lorelei or Rusalka, who
frequented rivers and other bodies of water attempting to lure and drown men (188). The figures of the
Lorelei and the Rusalka closely approximate La Llorona, with whom La Loca has a close relationship. 9 “Whenever a man’s logical mind is incapable of discerning facts that are hidden in his unconscious, the
anima helps him to dig them out. Even more vital is the role that the anima plays in putting a man’s mind in
tune with the right inner values and thereby opening the way into more profound inner depths. It is as if an
inner “radio” becomes tuned to a certain wave length […]. In establishing this inner “radio” reception, the
anima takes on the role of guide, or mediator, to the world within and the Self. […] this is the role of
Beatrice in Dante’s Paradiso, and also of the goddess Isis when she appeared in a dream to Apuleius […] in
order to initiate him into a higher, more spiritual form of life” (von Franz 193).
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“the instability…in the Baroque self and its representations may be understood as a
struggle with unanchored parts” (Parkinson Zamora 186), the drama in So Far from God
may be understood as a struggle with fragmented selves performed by means of allegory.
Given that the women in So Far from God represent various Chicana
subjectivities, these women along with the townspeople of Tomé represent the greater
Mexican-American world and, in their totality, they construct an allegorical “group
portraiture.” The baroque fascination with the relation of parts to the whole is
exemplified through group portraiture in which “selves are individualized and yet their
identity is conferred by the group to which they belong. In all cases, these portraits are
designed to suggest a multiple, interconnected corporate self” (Parkinson Zamora 184).
An example of one such painting can be seen in the the colonial Mexican portrait of Don
Manuel Solar and His Family (fig.5). Castillo’s novel achieves a similar rendering of the
concept of baroque group portraiture, using literary allegory instead of visual allegory as
a means of demonstrating the relation between personified Chicana/o subjectivities. This
is where the individual’s story, or the story of a family, comes to constitute the story of
the collective. Just as Fredric Jameson’s conceptualizing of third world allegory
collapses the dichotomy of private and public, making the individual story tell of the
collective experience (141, 158), So Far from God allegorizes the relation of the Chicana
self to Mexican-American society, telling a collective female story situated within a
larger Mexican-American narrative. La Loca’s isolation from the outside world shows
how intuitive feminine wisdom and spirituality remain hidden from the Mexican-
American mainstream; La Loca secretly “curing” her sister by intuitively performing her
abortions at home. Caridad’s run-in with the malogra describes the Chicana’s detrimental
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relationship with the patriarchal attitudes responsible for perpetuating misogyny. Sofi’s
difficulty in convincing her comadre that her inspiration to run for mayor did not stem
from craziness but from a legitimate will to action shows how Mexican-American society
(represented by the comadre) reacts to women who intend to change the status quo.
Esperanza’s relation to Rubén/Cuahtémoc demonstrates the politically-engaged
Chicana’s relation to the masculine-dominated Movimiento. All of these relations form an
interconnected portraiture of a disparate group of subjectivities united within the
framework of the Mexican-American community.
The interaction between allegorical characters comprising this community recalls
the baroque fascination of the relation of parts to the whole and the relation of the self to
Fig. 5. Portrait of the Captain of the Grenadiers, Don Manuel Solar and
His Family (1806). Museo Soumaya, Mexico.
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others (Parkinson Zamora 185). Through the allegorical performance carried out by the
characters in So Far from God, one begins to understand the relational dynamics between
competing subjectivities in the Chicana/o world. Ultimately, what the novel tells us is
that, like Sofi’s wringer washer, the mechanics of these relations are largely
dysfunctional. Esperanza recognizes this fact, having “read everything she could find on
dysfunctional families, certain now that some of her personal sense of displacement in
society had to do with her upbringing” (39). Given that the women in So Far from God
represent fragmented parts of the Chicana self, this fragmentation points to a
dysfunctionality within that self which is translated into community interactions. If the
characters were to collaborate with each other, sharing the strengths inherent to their
diverse subjectivities, perhaps the machine of the self could hold strong and propel itself
into action. Instead, the women seem to be drawn into their own separate paths, helpless
to their fate. Esperanza, the fighter for social justice, never was able to raise political
awareness in her family, except by talking to them after her death. Even then, Caridad
failed to understand politics (163) and, for La Loca, the outside world was so abhorrent
that she could not fight for justice even if she wanted to. Fe constitutes a missing
component in the workings of the family system, having rejected her family for Anglo-
American values. Caridad also exists apart, never informing her family of her mestizo
curanderismo apprenticeship nor of her love of the feminine indigenous sister self,
Esmeralda. La Loca, however, constitutes the strongest connective component in her
family. Although she refuses to touch her sisters, she prays for them, performs abortions
for them, miraculously cures them, and communicates with their spirits. However, despite
this common linkage―a connection to the underlying feminine spirituality to which they
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owe their survival―, Loca remains dysfunctional within society. Her sisters have taught
her from their experiences that entering the outside world only results in tragedy. Home is
the only safe place.
Being assigned to a role within the collective, the allegorical character is never
represented as an individual capable of exercising control over her/his destiny. In stark
contrast to mimetic drama, allegory does not “question any case of power that intervenes
from above to control man’s actions arbitrarily” (Fletcher 150). Thus is the case in So Far
from God, where characters are pulled by fate, the persistence of historical patterns, and
the attitudes and practices of their community. The first chapter description refers to the
four sisters as Sofia’s “Four Fated Daughters” (19) and the words “fate” and “destiny”
are repeated ten more times throughout the novel. Lacking the personal psychology
necessary for motivating their behaviour, allegorical characters perform actions without
apparent logic or explanation. After Caridad’s “Holy Restoration,” she inexplicably
leaves home and “it was all very sudden and no one could really explain it, not even
Caridad, but she was beginning to say and do a lot of things that could not be explained”
(43). The individual will is not present in the allegorical mode, as the allegorical
character does not represent a realistic individual, but rather, his/her actions serve to
contribute to a greater narrative. For this reason, events that can appear absurd,
incongruous, and magical can enter into the text as a way of supporting the plot. However,
though these unwilled incongruous actions may contribute to the argumentative plot, they
also present a cosmovision of an incomprehensible world in which the human will to
action is either non-existent or results in naught. The characters inhabit a world in which
their lives are beyond their control; where they are pulled into situations without causality
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or previous reflection. Individual agency is useless within the framework of this
collective. Essentially, the concept of fate corresponds to the forces of entrapment
embedded in the persistent attitudes of the collective which have the power to shape the
destiny of its people. “Unlike their abuelos and vis-abuelos [sic] who thought that
although life was hard in the ‘Land of Enchantment’ it had its rewards, the reality was
that everyone was now caught in what it had become: The Land of Entrapment” (172).
In order to achieve social transformation, one must change the dynamics of The
Land of Entrapment. Breaking the archetypes, changing people’s mentalities, and
revisioning history are presented as effective methods of reshaping this world which
denies agency and change. When Sofi’s washing machine breaks down, she begins to see
the dysfunctional of everything around her. Nothing seems to work in Tomé—even her
comadre broke her sewing machine. The world around her had become an allegorical
representation of her own society. At this point of realization, she breaks her assigned
archetype of the suffering mother and decides to run for Mayor of Tomé, inventing an
office which had until then been non-existent. She incorporates Esperanza’s social justice
politics and creates the Ganados y Lana Cooperative, having faith not in capitalism, as Fe
had, but in a collective enterprise which would favour the wellbeing of her people.
However, the most difficult and important aspect of social transformation involved
changing people’s mentalities in order to convince them that they were capable of
creating a different and better world (So Far 146). Sofi becomes an archaeologist: a
“guerrillera cultural” (Castillo, Massacre 220), performing her own historical revisions.
She uncovers the myths perpetuated as methods of social control, such as the case of La
Llorona. Sofi’s father had indoctrinated her with this tale: “La Llorona was a bad woman
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who had left her husband and home, drowned her babies to run off and have a sinful life,
and God punished her for all eternity” (161). The myth, as Sofi realizes, conceals a
contradictory reality in which women are abandoned by men and left to raise their
children alone, as Sofi had done. Esperanza believes that, before patriarchy-sustaining
values had manipulated the legend for their benefit, La Llorona may have been a “loving
mother goddess” (163). In revisioning her own life history, Sofi breaks out of a long
period of distorted amnesia, in which she believed to have been abandoned by her
husband, Domingo, when she had in fact thrown him out of her house (214). The
community and its traditional thinking had labelled her as “la abandonada” (134) and, in
the fulfillment of this role, she lost the capacity to recognize her own agency and the truth
was deformed to suit the old patterns of female helplessness and abandonment. She
became the archetype of la dolorosa, the suffering mother figure so valued in
Catholicism. The community perpetuates these archetypes that persist despite the
contradictory truth that belies them. The real miracle performed in So Far from God is
Sofi’s will to action, demonstrating her ability to defy her fate and to escape her socially-
defined role, instead seeking a new self-definition capable of leading her community
toward a better future.
Martyrs of unpopular causes: modern day saints on the margins
In Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Mapa/Corpo II: Corpo Divino, performance artists
become “saints and Madonnas of unpopular causes” using the body and its accoutrements
to emblematize marginalized martyrs such as “border crossers, undocumented migrants,
prisoners, the infirmed and displaced invisible others” (Corpo Ilícito). This work mixes
an intensely visual baroque performance, a reinvented Catholic spirituality, and radical
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socio-political commentary in a way which parallels what Ana Castillo has achieved in
So Far from God. Effectively, the women in Castillo’s novel are also martyrs of
unpopular causes: Fe is a martyr of capitalist practices, Esperanza is a martyr of a
meaningless war, Caridad is a martyr of misogyny and colonization, and La Loca is a
martyr of AIDS.
Gómez-Peña and Castillo have harnessed the visual plasticity of the saintly body
as way of expressing testimony to the injustices enacted on marginalized people. Much in
the same way that the saint’s injured and suffering body provides a visual and visceral
representation of the saint’s devotion, the bodies of Castillo’s saints represent phenomena
existing beyond the immediate physicality of the body. In Castillo’s novel, meaning is
inscribed in the body, not as an outward sign of the martyred women’s beliefs, but as an
emblem signifying the injustices which have led to their torture and death. Caridad’s
body, through the violent signs enacted on it, gives testimony to the violent legacy of
colonization and the persistence of machista attitudes. When Caridad is scourged,
branded, stabbed in the trachea, and has her nipples bitten off, this is not meant to
represent an act carried out by individual men, but is meant to signify an idea more
intangible and larger in scale. Every tribulation suffered on the baroque body exudes
meaning: branding points to the treating of women as property, the tracheotomy points to
the silencing of women, and the loss of her nipples points to how she has been deprived
of her ability to sustain life. Fe’s body, her flesh slowly eaten away by cancer, represents
the dangers of unregulated capitalist practices. La Loca’s body becomes emaciated
through her immaculately contracted AIDS. In her blue bathrobe, reminiscent of the blues
robes of the Virgin Mary, the image of La Loca parallels Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s La
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Purísima Inmaculada Concepción (fig. 6). She exhibits a saintly purity, though,
ironically, her body is physically impure, which is to say, diseased. Loca’s body is
opened psychically by Dr. Tolentino, who extracts uterine fibroids and ovarian cysts,
showing a diseased reproductive system deprived of its creative power. Considering
Loca’s isolation from the sins of the world, the disease manifested in her body is
testimony to the fact that AIDS affects innocents as much as those involved in high-risk
activities. Esperanza’s body is never recovered and the injustice enacted against her is
signified through corporeal absence. This absence points to a lack of meaning in
reference to the Gulf War. Seeing as “no one had understood the meaning of the brief war
in the Middle East” (243), Esperanza’s body cannot signify any tangible and meaningful
sign; it can only signify through its absence.
Fig. 6. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, La Inmaculada
Concepción de El Escorial, 1660-65.
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Castillo has invoked the tradition of hagiography because its narrative of
corporeal suffering provides appropriate allegories for representing the explicit or
implicit violence enacted on people, particularly women. According to Lois Parkinson
Zamora, the prevalent depiction of saintly suffering began during the Baroque which
adulated the saintly body “in all its visceral aberrations” (177). Saints were consequently
recognized by their dismembered signifiers: St. Apollonia’s extracted teeth, St. Lucy’s
detached eyes, and St. Agatha’s amputated breasts (Parkinson Zamora 177). Thus, it is
not by coincidence that during the attack of the malogra Caridad’s nipples are bitten off;
this amputation is simply following in the tradition of gruesome hagiographic martyrdom,
as seen in Sebastiano del Piombo’s Martirio di sant'Agata (fig. 7). This referencing of St.
Agatha by Castillo, however, relates to a painful historical reality: many of the women
murdered outside of Ciudad Juárez were raped and brutalized in the same way as Caridad
was: sometimes with their breasts removed or their left nipple bitten off. Baroque
hagiographic violence is not limited to art, but constitutes a part of a lived reality. Perhaps
Baroque hagiography is the only genre that comes closest to representing a truly violent
reality, a reality so incongruous that it defies any definition that could possibly be
realized by the conventions of realistic depiction, but instead requires the symbolic power
of allegory to mediate the inassimilable experience of living in a harsh world where the
marginalized (female) other is granted so little societal value that her body becomes a
disposable object.10
10
The lack of respect for the integrity of Caridad’s body, denigrated by a latent misogyny, is similar to the
lack of respect for Fe’s body, denigrated by capitalism’s favouring of profit over the wellbeing of workers.
In an interesting parallel, Elvira Arriola links the femicides of Ciudad Juárez to transnational corporations’
lack of respect for the dignity of female workers, which has in turn produced a cultural climate in which
women are devalued; essentially the disposable objects of maquilas and murderers alike.
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And yet, despite their hagiographic-like suffering, neither the murdered women of
Ciudad Juárez nor the women of So Far from God are recognized as martyrs due to
public attitudes. Traditional views towards sanctity remain entrenched in the Mexican-
American society painted by Castillo in her novel, particularly regarding moral behaviour.
Although “for those with charity in their hearts, the mutilation of the lovely young
woman was akin to martyrdom” (So Far 33), due to Caridad’s reputation as a sexually
promiscuous woman, the police never search for her attackers and her brutal assault soon
disappears from the collective memory (33).11
In addition, the community only
recognizes saints who perform miracles or blessings for their benefit. La Loca and
Caridad both performed miracles, becoming known as La Santa Loca and La Santa
Armitaña. However, when the sisters would not perform miracles or blessings for the
citizens of their community, they were quickly forgotten, becoming only La Loca and La
11
Note that a similar situation happened in Ciudad Juárez. Elvira Arriola mentions how the former
governor of Chihuahua criticized the murdered women of Ciudad Juárez “for the way the dressed or for
frequenting nightclubs, thus blaming the victims for their fate and turning the demands for investigation
into a mockery of justice” (27).
Fig. 7. Sebastiano del Piombo, Martirio di sant'Agata, 1520.
Florence, Palazzo Pitti.
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Armitaña (25, 134). La Loca was finally considered a saint―perhaps out of political
reasons―after her mother became president of MOMAS. However, people quickly
forgot the meaning of her life and martyrdom and they “never really could figure out who
La Loca protected and oversaw as a rule […] In general, though, it was considered a good
idea to have a little statue of La Loca in your kitchen and to give one as a good luck gift
to brides and progressive grooms” (248). Because of Fe and Esperanza’s incapacity for
performing miracles, they remained unrecognized as martyrs despite their hagiographic
suffering: Esperanza was tortured and killed in the Middle East and Fe was tortured by
doctors who scraped away her flesh and, after her death, there was so little remaining of
her body that the church condoned her cremation (186). The people lost interest in
Esperanza after the war ended (134) and Fe’s case remained silent: when she returned to
the munitions factory seeking answers, everyone had been partitioned into cubicles where
“nobody and nothing able to know what was going on around them no more. And
everybody, meanwhile was working in silence like usual” (189).
In summary, the greatest obstacles preventing the recognition of these women’s
tribulations are public apathy, amnesia, and silence. Castillo is criticizing the
community’s complicity in perpetuating injustices against women by only focusing on
their individual self-interests while ignoring the concerns of the whole community.
Apathy leads to a collective amnesia and the community’s refusal to seek justice
demonstrates a tacit acceptance of the idea that female bodies are of little value. Without
placing any importance on a women’s right to life and wellbeing, apathy quickly turns
into amnesia. Silence results either from the fragmenting of the community by dominant
forces (as evidenced by the partitioning of Fe’s workplace into cubicles to prevent
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communication) or by the wilful silence of a community which is too fearful or apathetic
to organize any resistance to these injustices. Castillo is therefore highlighting the role
that collective apathy, amnesia, and silence play in the perpetuation a system in which the
marginalized female continues to have few rights and protections.
The community acts uncritically towards its religious views, blinding themselves
to the “saints of unpopular causes” (Corpo Ilícito) who inhabit the world around them,
and preferring the saints that follow the status quo of saintliness. Historical amnesia is the
norm, and popular saints are welcomed without knowing their histories. The curandera,
Doña Felicia, is the exception to this amnesia (perhaps being the personification of local
history itself) as demonstrated by her “falling out” with the Santo Niño de Atocha due to
his nationalistic prejudices. “She no longer entrusted her prayers to the child Jesus who
once saved Christians from the Muslims […] and conquering Catholics from the pagan
Indians” (82). However, unlike Doña Felicia´s historically-derived circumspection, her
nephew, Francisco el Penitente, wilfully ignores the historical reality of his spiritual icon,
Saint Francis, whom he imagines as a remote otherworldly spirit generating miracles
from the heavens, instead of the engaged humanitarian who cared for the vulnerable
people and creatures of his community (101). Castillo signals a need for the historical
investigation of not only religious history, but all histories and traditions that continue
legacies of hatred or do not serve the most disempowered people of society.
Castillo employs parody as a way of criticizing the uncritical acceptance of
religiously-derived social norms embedded in Mexican-American society, constructing a
parodic hagiography as a way of condemning attitudes which prevent social
transformation. Here, parody is not used as the colonized subject’s veiled threat towards
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the colonizer (García Canclini 261) ―the mainstream US in this case―, but as a
challenge to her own people. Challenging the structures of Chicanismo goes against the
grain of El Movimiento which espoused a non-critical solidarity, erasing differences of
gender, race, and sexuality, and instead promoted a heteronormative masculine identity
based racially on Jose Vasconcelos’ raza cósmica. In the 1970’s, Chicanas who contested
male-dominated leadership in the Chicano Movement and rejected the phallocentric
narratives of carnalismo and compadres were often labelled traitors, Malinches, and
vendidas (Chabram-Dernersesian 168-69). Castillo’s novel belongs to a body of Chicana
works which respond to the phallocracy of El Movimiento by examining the inequalities
within the Chicana/o community, especially those which contributed to the oppression of
women. Using inverse hagiography, So Far from God demonstrates how historical
legacies built into the Mexican-American consciousness prevent society from investing
value in women and from taking action to ensure their wellbeing.
In the novel’s divergences from hagiography one can find the author’s criticisms
of the psychological entrapments existing within the Mexican-American consciousness.
For all intents and purposes, Caridad’s character follows the archetype of the saint: a
violent martyrdom, a capacity for healing, supernatural abilities, an ascetic retreat from
the world, and the production of miracles. She diverges from saintliness because of her
sexuality: first with the multiple sexual encounters she has with countless faceless men
and second, because of her lesbian love for Esmeralda. In the eyes of the people, Caridad
loses her value as a saint because of her sexuality, a loss which is criticized by Castillo
who denounces the entrenched Mexican-American Catholic ideals of purity and celibacy.
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Though her saintly status is evidenced by her bridal photo on her mother’s scapular, Fe’s
vita diverges from the hagiographic mould in the sense that her object of devotion has
changed from God to capitalism. Just as the saint must possess an unwavering faith in her
beliefs, Fe does not question the abusive capitalist practices at work at the munitions
factory. The Catholic-derived value of obedience has been transferred from religion to a
much more dangerous sphere. Fe does not question the nature of her work, even as her
health deteriorates. Her plant is filled with women of ethnic and racial minorities, women
who have become the preferred workers in factories and maquiladoras because of their
submissiveness and their acceptance of authority (Fernández-Kelly). Fe, represented in
the white purity of her wedding gown, is yet another submissive Virgin Mary enslaved to
the capitalist faith.
Sofi diverges from the traditional figure of la dolorosa by assuming agency. For
all of the hardships that her daughters endure, she lacks the power to remedy their
underlying problems. During the 20 years that her husband was away gambling, drinking,
and womanizing, Sofi had worked in her butcher shop “hanging rumps of pigs and lambs
and getting arthritis from the freezer and praying to God to give [her] the strength to do
the best by [her] girls alone” (111). She is called la abandonada, assuming an identity
rooted in a historical reality: in 2008 25% of Hispanic families in the US were managed
by one custodial parent (US Census Bureau). However, this disempowering conception of
self metamorphoses through Sofi’s re-remembering: she had been the one who kicked
Domingo out of the family home. The archetype of la dolorosa/la abandonada had been
so deeply embedded into the surrounding culture that it caused Sofi to distort her own
identity. Through this parody of la dolorosa, Castillo criticizes the entrenched social
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structures which place value in identities based on submission and suffering, which, in
their encouragement of attitudes of passive acceptance, impede positive social
transformation.
Conversely, it is due to her refusal of submission that Esperanza diverges from the
hagiographic pattern. Esperanza is a rebel and a mitotera who refuses to stay with her
family and resign herself to a life of misery, choosing instead to go out into the world and
assume an active life. According to Sofi’s comadre―whose chismosa-inspired speech
represents the collective voice of the community―, Esperanza is somehow responsible
for her kidnapping as she was a “mitotera, a troublemaker about politics” who “had got
herself missing in Saudi Arabia” (134). Just as Francisco el Penitente refuses to see the
activist side of Saint Francis, the community refuses to see the saintliness in Esperanza’s
activism. As Esperanza’s hagiographic parody diverges from the norm because of her
active involvement in resistance, Castillo criticizes the community’s incapacity to see the
value in those martyred due to political engagement.
These parodical techniques run in parallel with the baroque, neobaroque, and
Chicana/o practices of appropriation and transformation. As outlined in the introduction,
the Baroque performed a conservative appropriation of Renaissance forms, while
simultaneously rebelling against these traditions (Celorio 78-79), transforming classical
models and instilling them with its own originary fire. Castillo’s literary education,
which was formed outside of the academy, was constructed intentionally from works
existing outside of the North American literary canon. She specifically sought out texts
pertaining to the Latin American literary tradition, including the novels of the Boom and
The Lives of the Saints (Saeta and Castillo 135, 147; Baker 60). From The Lives of the
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Saints, Castillo appropriates the hagiographic tradition, reworking it with her own
originary fire. Gonzalo Celorio insists that the neobaroque technique of appropriation
through parody is elicited in order for the author to demonstrate her/his cultural
knowledge and to show this knowledge through critical play and reflection (102) and this
is absolutely one of Castillo’s goals, as her works involve an archaeological investigation
into traditional culture which unearths Mexican, Catholic, and Mesoamerican roots. It is
essential for Castillo to show her domination of Mexican and Mexican-American culture
in order to affirm her own cultural integrity. As she writes in Massacre of the Dreamers,
certain women indeed had contact early on in their lives with Mexico and
acquired enough identification with its diverse culture and traditions to
battle against the attempts of white, middle class society to usurp all its
citizens into an abstract culture obsessed with material gain. (38)
Cultural knowledge is power, and employing a reinvented hagiography is one way of
demonstrating this power.
However, conserving and understanding cultural forms is not enough; rather, the
author needs to understand the complexities of these traditions so that she/he can skilfully
mould them in thought-provoking ways, thus rendering them relevant to today’s world.
This is where the beauty of transformation enters, in the form of rasquache-style
strategies of resistance. As mentioned in the introduction, rasquache is a Chicana/o
sensibility which takes all available material and cultural forms and incorporates them
into discourses of parody, satire, and resistance (Ýbarra-Frausto, “The Chicano
Movement” 171-73). When Castillo transforms her Santa Loca into La Inmaculada of
AIDS, she is working in an intensely rasquachista mode. Using the Catholic traditions
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which saturate Mexican and Mexican-American culture and creatively transforming them
to speak of contemporary issues is a common practice in Chicana/o cultural production
which frequently combines tradition, religiosity, and activism. These forms communicate
religion’s inextricable ties to ethnic identity, which is equally inextricably tied to politics.
There are no universalisms here: for every socio-political problem, there exists an
underlying ethnic and racially-determined reality. The universal crises which emerge
from So Far from God ―capitalist abuses, war, misogyny, AIDS―are concentrated in
minority populations where a lack of political agency combined with deep-seated social
attitudes compound their effects: the Mexican-American population provides a large
percentage of the exploited workforce in farms, factories and in the service industry; they
provide a disproportionate number of soldiers to be killed overseas; women continue to
be disempowered, both inside and outside the domestic sphere; and the rate of diagnosed
cases of AIDS in New Mexican Hispanic communities is increasing in a way unequal to
their population (Zummo 1, 3). These socio-political issues demand an aesthetic that
denounces these injustices while affirming the value of traditional forms in a way which
simultaneously rebels against tradition. In So Far from God, a utopic rasquache Viernes
Santo procession is staged, eliminating the traditional aspects of the Way of the Cross and
replacing them with political commentary, effecting a bifocal discontinuous performance:
Jesus fell, and people all over the land were dying from toxic exposure in
factories […] Jesus met his mother, and three Navajo women talked about
uranium contamination on the reservation […] Jesus was helped by Simon
and the number of those without jobs increased every day. (242)
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In this episode, the people of Albuquerque have appropriated the form of the Viernes
Santo procession, emptied it of its original content, and infused it with meaningful
political commentary. The transformative practices carried out by the participants in the
procession reveal the larger mechanics at work within the novel, which also operate on
rasquache parody.
These transformative processes reverberate in synchronicity with Castillo’s theory
of Xicanisma, in which she asserts that “as Xicanistas […] we must simultaneously be
archaeologists and visionaries of our culture” (Massacre 220). To be an archaeologist of
culture is to recuperate the fragments of history and analyze their meaning, leaving
behind that which is useless or harmful, taking that which is valuable and powerful, and
incorporating these selected fragments into one’s own cultural imagining. The
archaeologist’s critical selecting and discarding of cultural fragments combines with the
visionary’s utopic seeing, which recognizes points of connection between the past and an
imagined future, examining how the potent symbols of history could propel a people’s
struggle toward that utopia. This ideal melding of tradition and future imaginings was
carried out in the episode of the politically-engaged Way of the Cross procession.
Strikingly, Jesus was absent from the spectacle, omitting a visualization of suffering in
the flesh. In Tomé, Francisco el Penitente carried the cross every Viernes Santo, his
penitential spirit valorizing anguish and the abnegation of the body as a way of attaining
closeness to God. These symbols of metaphysical anguish have been eradicated from the
procession, replaced instead by the misery experienced by living people in a tangible
socio-political reality. The self-flagellating penitents have been replaced with figures of
action: La Loca rides on her horse like a San Martín Caballero, known for ripping his
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cloak in half to give to a beggar. A woman named “Pastora Somebody or Other” sings
songs of resistance which, despite their secular content, causes the crowds to weep and to
cast their eyes to the heavens (241). Though the original religious content has been
substituted by political messages, there is a strong element of religiosity that still remains,
making the political aspects more emotive and spiritually evocative. Castillo believes that,
while many aspects of Catholicism are detrimental to women, there remains a Chicana
spirituality that has been shaped by Catholicism (Massacre 95). This Catholic-informed
spirituality, when exorcised of the demons of misogyny and social control, constitutes a
powerful force that can be harnessed for activism and social transformation.
Extraordinary events in So Far from God
So Far from God has been described by the Los Angeles Times as being the One
Hundred Years of Solitude of the US (Milligan 19) and the similarities between the two
novels have led critics to associate Ana Castillo’s novel with the magical realist mode
(Aldama; Gillman). Both novels speak of a family living in an isolated town ―so far
from God― where the colonial legacy infiltrates an everyday reality, where people suffer
from amnesia, and where tradition and inheritance reproduce detrimental social and
genetic patterns: Fe’s cousin/husband Casimiro, descending from a lineage of sheep
herders, suffers from congenital bleating, a trait reminiscent of Márquez’s Aureliano III,
who was born with the tail of a pig.
This alternate world in which the real coexists with the surreal or supernatural
could seem at first to be consistent with magic realist writings. However, as Caminero-
Santangelo asserts, it is questionable if So Far from God has been written in a magical
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realist mode, considering that the characters fail to accept magical events as quotidian
happenings (83). The astonishment exhibited by the characters in So Far from God when
witnessing miracles contradicts the reception of magical events in magic realism where
“wonders are recounted largely without comment, in a matter-of-fact way, accepted
presumably as a child would accept them, without undue questioning or reflection” (Faris
177). Though in both novels magical events occur as part of an everyday reality, their
differences rest in how these events are depicted. While the cold, detached narrator of
One Hundred Years of Solitude portrays the ascension of Remedios the Beauty as a
natural event, the ascension of La Loca Santa has been handled quite differently by Ana
Castillo. So Far from God’s characters are very aware of the extraordinariness of the
events surrounding them and miracles are interpreted and analysed by various members
of the community, every one of whom carries a very different opinion towards these
seemingly magical events. According to Ana Castillo, the women in So Far from God
were modelled after holy martyrs and saints. She denies any relation to magical realism,
arguing that her novel is informed by religion, not magic: “We are made to believe in
these miracles [...] it’s not magical fiction; it is faith” (in Miller and Walsh 27). While
there are supernatural aspects to So Far from God, these aspects are not imaginatively
invented by Castillo, but rather, based on a historical reality composed of religion,
miracles, and cuentos. Ana Castillo takes elements of the local culture –curanderismo, la
Llorona, la malogra, etc.― and weaves them into a non-realist narrative that is
nonetheless very much anchored in a geographic and historic reality.
While the veracity of these magical-seeming events is rarely questioned, the
nature of these events always elicits various interpretations, revealing the complexly
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heterogeneous and often contradictory cosmovisions operating within this community.
The first chapter, telling of La Loca’s miracle, boldly displays the discrepancy between
worldviews when the priest, Father Jerome, asks the toddler if her behaviour should be
read as an act of God or one of Satan. Sofi responds by beating the priest and calling him
an hombre necio and a pendejo for not having realized that the child’s resurrection and
levitation were not the work of Satan, but true miracles. La Loca Santa’s resurrection and
levitation are interpreted on various occasions throughout the novel. During the
miraculous event, the townsfolk were not sure if “they were witnessing a miracle or a
mirage of the devil” (24). Afterwards, the legitimacy of Loca’s death comes into question
as it is possible that she had an epileptic seizure and was mistakenly diagnosed as dead by
an inexperienced doctor (25), casting doubt on the authenticity of her resurrection. Nearly
two decades later, Fe “highly suspected that such a thing as her little sister flying up to
the church rooftop had never happened” (28). Of course, Fe’s interpretation of reality is
unreliable seeing as she remembers her own Gritona episode, not a mentally-depraved
period of constant screaming, but as the Asian flu (138). When Father Jerome informs the
bishop of La Loca’s resurrection, he omits the “details” about her flying, an omission
pointing to the fact that he had witnessed her levitation, but was too ashamed or afraid to
admit what he had seen to a church official. The bishop dismisses the resurrection as “an
example of the ignorance of that community” (85). As a child, Francisco el Penitente
remembers La Loca Santa flying up to the rooftop: “What he wouldn’t have given to
know the secret of that trick! To the boy, it was a trick, the way children view the magical,
which to them falls within the realm of possibility” (192). The fact that every
townsperson has a different interpretation of what occurred the day of La Loca’s funeral
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attests to the existence of multiple ways of seeing reality within this community: a
collective fragmentary reception. This is a New World Baroque kaleidoscopic vision of
reality which sees all possible realities simultaneously, accepting all and rejecting none.
By narrating supernatural events―which, due to their inexplicable nature,
demand interpretation through belief systems most integral to one’s vision of the
universe―, the novel shows how there exists no singular way of interpreting the
phenomena of the world. When Esperanza witnesses the miraculous recovery of Fe la
Gritona―who had been screaming nonstop for weeks since she was abandoned by her
fiancé―and of Caridad―barely alive since the malogra’s attack, surgically pieced
together, mute, fed by tubes―, she begins to question all that she had ever believed:
Catholicism, Marxism, Atheism, and Native American Spirituality. However, none of
these belief systems seemed to explain the reality located within her home (38-39). These
belief systems were insufficient for understanding reality. Esperanza is too conscious of
the many ways of seeing the world and realizes that, despite the large quantity of
available interpretive tools, there is not one way of seeing that functions more effectively
than another. Her reality is far too mysterious and complex to be explained.
The multiplicity of knowledges and their corresponding worldviews complicate
interpretation and action. For example, the healing processes detailed in the novel include
modern Western medicine, curanderismo, Filipino psychic surgery, and prayer. The
effectiveness of the first three options seems doubtful. Western medicine can neither heal
Caridad’s brutalized body nor Fe’s cancer. On the contrary, the text depicts Western
medicine as being more detrimental than beneficial: Fe’s intravenous is wrongly inserted,
causing chemotherapeutic drugs to go directly to her head (187). The curanderismo of
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Doña Felicia is effective for minor health problems specific to Mexican and Mexican
American folk culture: empacho, aigres, mal de ojo, suspensión. However, when several
curanderas come from the region to help with La Loca’s AIDS, conflicts arise between
their methods:
tablespoon after tablespoon of this solution and that oil went into Loca’s
mouth […] Aceite de comer cooking oil mixed with hot water and sugar
for La Loca’s sore throat. No, no, said Teresa of Isleta, a drop or two of
kerosene in a teaspoon of sugar for the throat. Poleo water for mouth
sores! (233)
Witnessing psychic surgery performed on her daughter by Dr. Tolentino, Sofi assumes
what she had seen (the doctor’s “spirit” hand entering Loca’s abdomen, removing blood
clots, cystic fibroids, and an ovarian tumour) was a hallucination. The surgery fails to
cure Loca’s AIDS and it is not clear if it relieves her suffering. Out of all these curative
methods, prayer is the only one capable of working miracles when dealing with hopeless
cases. Loca “prayed real hard” (38), undergoing an epileptic seizure which led to the
“Holy Restoration” of her sisters (37-38). If Loca indeed embodies the latent creative
Chicana anima that remains unbounded from the oppressive structures of religion and
society, perhaps by harnessing this force Chicanas can achieve the seemingly impossible.
The multiplicity of knowledge systems used for interpreting the world reveals the
heterogeneous and fragmentary quality of the Chicana/o community. As with the
curanderas, coming to a general consensus for the best course of action is next to
impossible, with the only alternative being to choose all possible options. This allowance
of the coexistence of multiplicities denotes a baroque inclusivity characteristic of fractal
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societies, but it also denotes the lack of a unifying system for understanding the totality of
this polysemous reality. There remains the need to establish points of coherence between
these disparate fragments, coherence which could cement and empower a diverse
community.
Ay, corazón, no sufras más.
The demonstrative, enigmatic, figurative, critical genre of a reinvented
hagiography realised in an allegorical and parodic mode not only represents Castillo’s
understanding of the Chicana self and her world, but also condemns the mechanics of a
society which victimizes women and prevents its people from achieving wellbeing and
happiness. So Far from God criticizes the passive reception of culture, signalling the need
to interrogate traditional conceptions of the world and to understand the historically-
derived nature of reality. The novel highlights the need to transform this reality, both by
re-remembering the historical foundations of culture and by unleashing utopic imaginings
capable of uniting a community through a common cultural sensibility and spirituality so
that they may better confront injustices. In Massacre of the Dreamers, Castillo mentions
how the female workers of the Watsonville Canning and Frozen Food Company not only
started a hunger strike to protest inadequate pay and working conditions, but also how
they “conduct[ed] a Catholic pilgrimage on their knees to a local church where they
prayed for justice” (56). Mexican Catholic spirituality offers an empowering force for
Chicana social movements, as it provides an identitary and emotional element to activist
practices. Castillo asserts that a mestiza’s spirituality constitutes a large part of her
identity, a part that precedes the Conquest and remains “the unspoken key to her strength
and endurance as a female during the ages” (Massacre 95).
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This undercurrent of spiritual force has the potential for uniting and mobilizing a
great number of Chicanas incapable of identifying with Marxist ideologies rooted in
White atheist discourse. The Chicana spirituality instead harnesses the power rooted in
syncretic Mexican Catholic sensibilities while operating outside of Catholic misogynist
doctrine. La Loca embodies this principle, exhibiting a powerfully effective spirituality
which functions outside the norms of society. Using an intuitive knowledge, she “cures”
her sister of her pregnancy, all the while conscious of the fact that her actions go against
the laws of the Church and State (27). The intuitive curative spirituality found in La Loca
exists beneath the surface of Mexican/Mexican-American society. Castillo recalls how
her grandmother, a curandera by vocation, “cured” her teenaged cousin of her unwanted
pregnancy (A Healing Legacy 95). This mestiza spirituality―an obedezco pero no
cumplo spirituality―only takes from Christianity what it finds useful and rejects the rest,
developing organically far from the prying eyes of official culture, much like the
extraordinary hybrid New World Baroque architecture that developed far from the prying
eyes of the vice-regal capital.
The New World Baroque ethos boasts a capacity for powerfully bridging the past
with the future in a way which both preserves culture and rebels against it. As Boaventura
de Sousa Santos argues, the baroque ethos has the capacity for combining disparate
knowledges as well as for invention, rebellion, and laughter. It is capable of realising
utopic imaginings, but this subjectivity must be invented, taking what is useful from
history for the construction of this utopia (326, 330). The messages gleaned from
Castillo’s Xicanista fiction conform to the baroque ethos in the sense that they argue for a
critical archaeology of culture, where figures such as La Llorona become unearthed, re-
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examined, and revisioned to produce symbols which generate power. This same Chicana
baroque subjectivity imagines the utopia of the Ganados y Lana Cooperative, a non-
capitalist system capable of functioning within a capitalist modernity. This subjectivity
reinvents the Viernes Santo procession, unleashing it from the tradition of the cofradías,
and uniting various communities in the effort to produce socio-political transformation.
Nonetheless, it is laughter that constitutes the apotheosis of this utopic imagining.
In the final chapter of So Far from God, women have achieved power and recognition
through MOMAS (Mothers of Martyrs and Saints). However, as their prestige is founded
on the suffering of their children, the Catholic archetype of la dolorosa still remains
embedded in the women’s psychology. When constructing a subjectivity for the purpose
of realising an imagined utopia, happiness must not be overlooked. A utopia is defined by
its happiness. As Castillo says in Massacre of the Dreamers, “survival should not be our
main objective. Our presence shows our will to survive, to overcome every repression
known to humankind. Our goal should be to achieve joy” (146).
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Chapter 2
Robo-baroque: The Performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his Pocha Nostra
Fig. 8. Antonio de Roa
Consumed with the obstinate determination to proselytize the Natives of New
Spain, Fray Antonio de Roa (fig. 8), the Monster of Penitence, endeavoured to translate
his doctrinal sermons into the language of the flesh. During Holy Week, he would
interpret the role of a suffering Christ while his retinue of indigenous companions
physically tormented him, playing the part of the Jews and the Romans. De Roa would
perform acts of public self-flagellation, followed by walking on burning coals after which
the Natives would bathe him in boiling water. They bound the priest to the pillory,
whipped him, scorched him with fire, and finally found themselves moved to tears by de
Roa’s display of humiliation and suffering. Due to these extreme displays of religious
devotion and corporeal resilience, "the Indians thought him to be more than a man"
(Trexler 28). Amazed, frightened and full of wonder, the Natives came to understand the
most important points of the Catholic faith (López Beltrán 89). Communicating through
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the performative body presented a powerful way of promoting belief in a Christian God
and in the superiority of the Catholic Church: it made immediate and sensate that which
was abstract and so far away from the indigenous experience. This baroque aesthetic of
excessive, dramatic, and emotionally spiritual displays pervaded the colonies and
continued throughout the centuries, evolving into various forms including the staged
crucifixions of the Iztapalapa district of Mexico City where spectacles of live crucifixions
still form an integral part of Holy Week festivities (fig. 9).
Given Mexico’s deep-seated tradition of persuasive religious theatricality
baroque par excellence, the birth of Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Cruci-Fiction Project
in 1994 should come as no surprise. Perhaps it was the political climate surrounding the
creation of the project that first impelled Gómez-Peña to develop the intensely
neobaroque aesthetics which had already been lying semi-dormant in his post-Mexican
consciousness. Extreme times call for extreme measures and a strong current of nativist
Fig. 9. The Passion of the Christ re-enacted in
Iztapalapa. (López, “Inicia Jesús de Iztapalapa”)
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and xenophobic sentimentsculminating in California’s Proposition 187, an initiative
which sought to prohibit illegal immigrants from using state servicesnecessitated a
response which could leave a lasting impression in the psyches of state citizens.
Performance artists Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes, presenting themselves as an
illegal charro12
and an exaggerated cholo,13
bound themselves to crosses measuring five
metres andlike their Itzapalapan brethrenstaged their own crucifixions on the wide
expanse of performative space known as Rodeo Beach (fig. 10). Like the public displays
of their predecessor, Antonio de Roa, the Cruci-Fiction Project did not exclude intense
suffering: while tied to their crosses, Sifuentes passed out and Gómez-Peña dislocated his
shoulder (Abolafia et al.). Through rituals of dramatized self-mortification, all three
performance artistsde Roa, Gómez-Peña, and Sifuenteseffected a visual display
which loudly affirmed their devotion to their respective causes: Christian conversion and
the upholding of immigrant rights. Their techniques relied on intense allegorical visuals
which elicited strong emotions, leaving a profound impression in the minds and souls of
their spectators. Reading the trajectory of this style of performancefrom colonial
conversions to the crucifixions in Itzapalapa and, finally, to the Cruci-fiction Project,
one discerns a persistent pattern of baroque and neobaroque techniques. While the
content of these performances may have changed over time, the forms and practices have
not. There remains the same visceral originary fire as seen in previous centuries.
12
Charro refers to the classic figure of the Mexican cowboy. He is recognized by his traditional attire: a
black wide-brimmed hat (sombrero), black pants and a jacket, all of which are often embroidered in silver
thread. 13
Cholo refers to a male social type which pervades Chicano/Mexican-American culture. The term
describes a person involved in local subcultures, such as low-riders, graffiti art, and hip hop. The typical
cholo is characterized by his plaid shirt, his baggy pants, his rolled-up bandana/headband, and his
sleeveless undershirt.
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The baroque echoes throughout the performance repertory of Gómez-Peña and his
troupe, La Pocha Nostra. The performances of La Pocha Nostra are obviously,
unmistakably and, consciously neobaroque. Gómez-Peña has defined the group’s
aesthetic as being both “robo-baroque” and “ethno-techno-cannibal” (Ethno-techno 80)
and it is undeniable that his performances employ a myriad of baroque devices.
Following the Cruci-Fiction Project, The Temple of Confessions (1994-1996) exemplifies
a reworking of baroque Catholic religiosity as it cites “the religious dioramas found in
colonial Mexican churches,” provoking powerfully emotional responses from its
audiences (Abolafia et al.). These colonial Catholic aesthetics resurface in Borderscape
2000 (1998), a spectacle combining a syncretic ritualityevoking Christian, indigenous,
and invented practiceswith an ironically ethnographic dimension. The result of this
Fig. 10. Guillermo Gómez-Peña performs the Cruci-fiction
Project. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/somarts/5124235173/)
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fusion produces a densely layered Cathedral-meets-the-wünderkammer quality, fusing
elements which invoke a hybrid New World Baroque religiosity as well as a 17th
century
fascination with the chimeras of natural history. The Living Museum of Fetishized
Identities (1999-2002) developed this type of ethnographically-framed spectacle even
further, creating various marvellous and monstrous composite beings who, in their
totality, achieved a baroque horror vacui, filling up the performative space and
bombarding the audience from all directions with visuals, movement, and meaning.
Ethno-techno or Ex-Centris (2002-2004) effected a carnivalesque reversal in which the
audience members, who were costumed and positioned into tableaux vivants by the
performers, became the spectacle. By creating an ephemeral living statuary, the
performance invoked a baroque game which played with the blurred delineation between
the representational world of static art and the dynamic reality of the living body. The
baroque continues to pervade the recent and ongoing Mapa/Corpo seriesMapa/Corpo I
(2004), Corpo Divino (2007), and Corpo Ilícito (2009)which has responded to the
changing political circumstances of the past ten years, exuding a hyper-sensory
spirituality which overflows with allegorical visuals.
The neobaroque cultural production of Gómez-Peña stands in stark contrast to the
17th
century culture of Catholic monarchical despotism. Spain’s 17th
century was
characterized by absolutism, a cultura dirigida (Maravall, Culture of the Baroque) which
was consolidated by the exuberance of baroque persuasive techniques. According to
Maravall, these techniques were developed by the ruling classes as a way of influencing
public opinion and guiding the people towards a desired conservative ideology (70-71).
However, though this guided culture promoted the preservation of the traditions which
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sustained nobility, it also allowed for new ways of seeing and understanding the world.
Maravall describes this paradox as “a process of modernization that was contradictorily
set in place to preserve inherited structures” (Culture of the Baroque 263). Operating
within this environment of conservatism were figures who managed to criticize the status
quo in their own ways, such as Góngora, whose works provided an escape into an
exorbitant illusionism, Quevedo, whose writings expressed the absurdly grotesque nature
of the time, and Gracián, whose publication of the pessimistically satiric Criticón led to
his exile. Given these examples, it is obvious that baroque techniques are capable of
serving a wide variety of ideologies, be they conservative or bursting with critical
rebellion.
Likewise, despite the imposition of a heavily Catholic and imperial discourse,
many works emerged in the colonial Americas which challenged the dominant culture of
the metropolis. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz presents the boldest example of criollo defiance,
not only for her protests against the injustices enacted against her gender, but also for
having written indigenous and African components into her villancicos.14
As mentioned
in the introduction and first chapter of this dissertation, the Americas bred fusions and
transformations which sometimes carried thinly masked sentiments of rebellion and, for
Ángel Guido and Lezama Lima, these hybrid subversive forms of expression constituted,
respectively, a Reconquista and a Contraconquista against imposed European traditions.
Effectively, the colonized peoples of Iberoamerica created subversive hybrid forms which
constituted a new and authentically American art. This bold difference contributed to the
formation of a culture which stood apart from the European models and, according to
14
One of Sor Juana’s villancicos was written entirely in Nahuatl while another incorporated African voices
(Paz 317).
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Lezama Lima, became integral to a sense of American identity, the same identity which
proved to be foundational for later movements of independence (237-38). In this manner,
the baroque, though originally an imposed culture, demonstrates its potential for criticism
and rebellion.
However, apart from having the capacity to articulate rebellion, the baroque also
provided a flexibility of form which allowed for a limited preservation of threatened
traditions. Cultural preservation, in this case, is not so much an act of conservatism as one
of defiance. For example, El Indio Kondori practiced acts of preservation when he
incorporated indigenous motifs into the imposed European architectural structures (fig.
11), and yet, the conservation of these traditions constitutes a contestatory action against
Spanish cultural dominance. When dealing with subordinate populations, the persistence
of inscribing their threatened cultural forms into the dominant structures not only
corresponds to an act of survival, but also to an insistence in the value of their culture.
This insistence is necessarily political, as it not
only attempts to unify a community by means
of fomenting a sense of pride stemming from a
shared cultural legacy, but it also has the
capacity to shape this opposing cultural identity
into a critical and defiant discourse, as overtly
demonstrated in neobaroque practices.
Fig. 11. El Indio (José) Kondori: La
Iglesia de San Lorenzo, Potosí, Bolivia.
Photo: Eduardo Manchón.
(http://www.panoramio.com/photo/325)
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The New World Baroque’s rearticulation of tradition for the purpose of
preservation and defiance approaches the workings of the neobaroque, which rediscovers,
reinterprets, and revisions history in ways which challenge established narratives. As
Gonzalo Celorio affirms, neobaroque practices recover a baroque past in order to
“possess culture and express this knowledge through criticism” as well as through play,
humour, reflection, deliberation, and recognition (504). According to Severo Sarduy, the
neobaroque rejects all establishment (Ensayos generales 212) and, for a community
which needs and desires a form of art which opposes the establishment while preserving
and revisioning silenced histories and traditions, the neobaroque offers effective cultural
devices and strategies. As explained in the introduction to this dissertation, given that the
Chicana/o community’s history has been omitted from the narrative of the US nation,
historical appropriations and revisions provide not only a way to ensure the preservation
of cultural forms, but also to produce alternate discourses which stand in opposition to the
American mainstream.
Though the neobaroque pervades Chicana/o cultural production, I cannot accept
credit for discovering its existence. What I am currently identifying as neobaroque within
Chicana/o cultural production has been understood for decades under the term,
rasquache: an exuberant sensibility which takes all that tradition had given Chicanas/os
and imaginatively pieces it together to form works that exude parody, satire, irony, and
camp for the purpose of creating a playful oppositional discourse against hegemony
(Ýbarra-Frausto, “The Chicana Movement” 171-73). Like rasquache, the neobaroque
relies on humour as a poignant way of communicating its messages which are expressly
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more political than the thinly veiled messages of subversion of the New World Baroque.
As John Ochoa states,
otra herramienta importante para la obra de Gómez-Peña, y una de sus
denominadas ‘armas para combatir gringos y tapados’, es un fino sentido
del humor. Es quizá éste el aspecto más accesible de su obra, y algo que le
permite tocar con ligereza temas profundos e inquietantes. (15)
Through the rasquache or neobaroque strategy of humour, one can more easily produce
politically-charged works and, for this reason, neobaroque devices and political content
often go hand in hand, as seen previously in Ana Castillo’s hagiographic parody which
expresses deeply political messages. Likewise, Gómez-Peña’s neobaroque invocations of
a colonial past provoke a type of critical play which denounces hegemony, demonstrating
a rebellious spirit which is indistinguishable from the political defiance implicit to
Chicana/o discourse. As Chicana/o cultural production is necessarily political, Gómez-
Peña’s works also serve as vehicles for promoting political dialogue.
Nonetheless, whether promoting a conservative or subversive agenda, the baroque
and neobaroque are similar by way of the mechanisms they use to engage, move,
persuade, and win the wills of their audiences. Neobaroque techniques continue to hold
the same persuasive power that baroque techniques did 400 years ago. Today, as much as
four centuries ago, audiences continue to be persuaded through the senses by the bold
monumental visuals; through the emotions by the religiosity of the language of suffering
and ecstasy; and through the mind by the playful transformations and reversals wrought
by parody, satire, and humour.
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Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s performances harness the persuasive power of the New
World Baroque legacy, bursting with an intense religiosity, el horror al vacío, hybrid
wonders, exaggeration, the overwhelming of the senses, and the engaging of extra-
rational faculties. La Pocha Nostra actively draws upon cultural referents and practices
dating back to colonial times, refashioning and intensifying them to suit a contemporary
context in which they continue to move, persuade, fascinate, and engage audiences
worldwide. Allegories abound, the performers becoming living emblems like those of
17th
-century emblem books, occupying an ambiguous space between the tangible and the
abstract; between art and life. Many of the works recycle the signs and mechanisms of the
baroque Counter-Reformist church as they are moulded to suit the matters at hand: actors
assume the images of saints or of the suffering Christ, imbuing the surroundings with
extreme emotions and rendering the metaphysical into sensate form. The performers also
call upon the proto-ethnographic discourse implicit in colonial human exhibitions and the
baroque wünderkammer, fashioning themselves as parodical hybrid ‘specimens’ or,
potentially, new castas defying any systematic racial categorization. These ‘robo-baroque’
techniques are intensified by La Pocha Nostra’s ordering of performative space, which
not only thrives with multiple foci, but also erases the limits between performer and
spectator, encouraging interactive play. The group’s works exude a certain limitlessness,
a freedom which encourages constant transformation and baroque mutations. Essentially,
this chapter seeks to understand all of the baroque phenomena pulsating at the core of La
Pocha Nostra’s corpus of works, focusing specifically on the group’s invocation of the
baroque conventions of allegory, hagiography, and the ethnographic wünderkammer and
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later examining the spatial and temporal ordering in which these conventions are brought
to life.
Allegory
La Pocha Nostra’s performers render their concepts in allegorical emblems more
obviously and intensely than the vast majority of their fellow artists. This is perhaps due
to the group’s insistence on moments of sustained slow movements and posing which
create a living, emblematic picture. During these moments, the image solidifies in the
mind of the spectator, highlighting the importance of the form separated from movement,
thus inciting contemplation and deciphering in the way an emblem would. For this reason,
La Pocha Nostra has cultivated the technique of tableaux vivants and photos
performances, taking the moving, living body and transforming it into sculptural material.
The performers harness the power of the static image, much in the tradition of baroque
allegorical paintings or hagiographic statues, all the while infusing these forms with the
visceral dynamism of the living human body.
Straddling an ambiguous zone between real and representative spheres, the works
of La Pocha Nostra inhabit a space between the allegorical image and allegorical
narrative. Due to the fact that these performances have very little narrative action and yet,
are not frozen in time like paintings, they cannot be classified as narrative allegories nor
as visual allegories. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that visual allegories also possess a
discursive quality. As Mieke Bal explains, “the metaphorical interpretation [of paintings]
ignores the narrative structure of the work [...] it neglects to examine the way visual art is
discursive as much as visual; the way it ‘speaks,’ tells a story, as much as it ‘shows’ a
state” (Double Exposure 97). In the painting “The Victorious Hero Makes Peace” by
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Peter Paul Rubens, which visually describes Perseus seizing the forelock of Opportunity,
the viewer witnesses a demonstrative image as much as a narrative action (fig. 12).
Likewise, when Gómez-Peña dresses as a Zapatista and invites members of the audience
to hold a rifle against various parts of his body (fig. 13), the participants are showing a
state as much as telling a story through action.
Fig. 12. Peter Paul Rubens, The Victorious Hero Makes
Peace, ca. 1636.
Fig. 13. Audience member holds rifle to Gómez-Peña's mouth,
Corpo Ilícito, Donaufestival, Austria, 2010. Photo: Karola Riegler.
(http://www.behance.net/gallery/La-Pocha-Nostra-corpo-ilicito-
post-human-society-69/546246)
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Allegory has a problematic and unstable relationship with personification, as the
latter insists on the close relation between the physical form of the signifier and the
abstract concept of the signified. Though personification remains an inseparable facet of
allegory—in fact, John Ruskin defines allegory as “the bestowing of a human or living
form upon an abstract idea” (10: 377)—, allegory insists on the distance between the
superficial meaning of the signifier and the enigmatic meaning of the signified.
Conversely, “personification emphasizes the face which appears, which is, by definition,
the surface meaning. In this way, allegory and personification work, characteristically, in
opposite modes” (Tambling 171). In personification, the allegorical vehicle of the body is
also invested with meaning. The baroque body, with its dynamism, tangible and realistic
depictions, and identifiable psychology, breaks the bounds of its abstract function as an
allegorical signifier. Speaking of Rubens, Lisa Rosenthal notes that his “paintings move
and engage us because, even as they rely upon personifications to convey abstract ideas
[…] these figures are depicted with drama, wit, and psychological complexity, forging
their allegorical programs to compelling narrative action” (3). Throughout her book,
Gender, Politics, and Allegory in the Art of Rubens, Rosenthal posits that the Flemish
artist’s use of personification creates allegorical dissonance. This dissonance occurs due
to the fact that the personification of abstract concepts through the body complicates any
simple correlation between signifier and signified because the signifier, the body itself,
produces meanings independent of its context, which can result in ambivalent messages.
Likewise, in performance art, the body constitutes the primary source of meaning, and
any personification embodied by the performer will inevitably become more complex,
contradictory, or intensified depending on the meaning exuded by her/his body.
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Allegory is problematized yet again due to the fact that, in the works of La Pocha
Nostra, the personified form is not purely representative. In performance, unlike in
theatre, the performer does not ‘play’ a character so much as she/he is the character.
There is no clear allegorical demarcation between the person and the persona, the vehicle
and the message. In theatre, “to act is allegorical: it is speaking the words of another”
(Tambling 140). However, in performance, one speaks one’s own words and the persona
crafted by the artist emerges from the artist’s own subjectivity. According to Guillermo
Gómez-Peña, “performance artists rarely ‘represent’ others. Rather, we allow our
multiplicity of selves and voices to unfold and enact their frictions and contradictions in
front of an audience” (Ethno-techno 35). Essentially, the object of this performance art is
not to represent the other, as in the allos (other) of allegory, but to express one’s multiple
subjectivities through the body. For this reason, La Pocha Nostra’s personae occupy an
ambiguous position between art and life, demanding a completely different way of
conceptualizing art which reflects an underlying baroque philosophy. As Jean Rousset
writes, in the baroque “c’est le personage qui est la personne; c’est la masque qui est la
verité” (54).
La Pocha Nostra employs two approaches to allegorical rendering in order to
perform multiple subjectivities. The first method involves a transformative seriality
during which the artist’s diverse subjectivities unfold over a period of time, requiring the
spectator to see the entire collection of performative personae before she/he can grasp the
full multivocality of the performer’s conception of self. Because these personifications
elapse over a period of time, this method allows for a more narrative ‘telling’ which
requires transformative practices in order to express the series of multiple personae
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which form the various facets of the performer’s consciousness. This process resembles
the baroque principle of transformation, or more specifically, variations on a theme15
because, despite the differences between shifting personae, there remains an underlying
structure, an underlying principle identity from which all other identities depart in flight.
Gómez-Peña asserts that, when the artists perform these multiple personae, “they don’t
exactly ‘represent’ or ‘act’ like them. Rather, they morph in and out of them without ever
disappearing entirely as ‘themselves’” (Ethno-techno 36). Thus, over the period of the
performance, the audience witnesses each artist’s plethora of identities which comprise a
collection of parts expressed in serial form, all of which belong to one overarching main
identity. Similarly, in the previous chapter we saw the segmented character of multiple
selves in Ana Castillo’s allegorical personages, each one of whom represented various
subjectivities which, in a baroque proliferation, signified a complex and abstract
conceptualizing of Chicana identity.
The second method of allegorical rendering is more immediately demonstrative,
involving a simultaneous visualization of all multiple subjectivities. This visualization is
necessarily fragmentary, each part (a robotic prosthetic glove, a Native headdress, a metal
corset) synecdochically representing one of many identities. The resulting personae are
hybrid polyvalent forms, bursting with ambiguous and conflicting messages which beg
decoding. For example, in the Mapa/Corpo series, Guillermo Gómez-Peña performs the
hybrid persona of a conquistador/cyborg/indigenous/drag queen, often wearing a
conquistador’s helmet, robotic prostheses, a traditional Native beaded vest, woven
15
According to Omar Calabrese, the practice of “variations on a theme” was founded on the Baroque idea
of virtuosity, which “consists in a total flight from a central organizing principle […] toward a vast
polycentric combination and a system based on its transformations” (40).
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Mexican peasant skirts, and high heels. All of these attributes are allegories in themselves
which, unlike the fragmentary allegories of Walter Benjamin in which the object to be
represented remains absent (The Origin 178), point to elements which are indeed present
in the performer, but only in partial form. When attempting to represent something as
complex, abstract, and plural as identity, no language is sufficient. Rather, the baroque
strategy of excess offers the only way to create a full (yet incomplete) picture capable of
faithfully expressing the contradiction and multiplicity of cultural referents which belong
to the consciousness of the polycultural self. Essentially, the self is a collection of parts
and, in the words of Walter Benjamin,
in every collector hides an allegorist, and in every allegorist a collector. As
far as the collector is concerned, his collection is never complete; for let
him discover just a single piece missing, and everything he’s collected
remains a patchwork, which is what things are for allegory from the
beginning. On the other hand […] the allegorist can never have enough of
things. (The Arcades Project 211)
However, the cannibalistic impulses driving the inclusion of multiple referents
within these collections of hybrid personae do allow for an expression of alterity as well
as the self. The cannibal consumes foreign elements, integrating them into her/his cultural
body. As Oswald de Andrade stated in his “Manifiesto Antropófago,” “I am only
interested in what is not mine. Law of Man. Law of the Cannibal” (143, translation mine).
Likewise, the artists of La Pocha Nostra do not attempt to construct pure concepts of self
when developing their personae; rather, they too practice cultural cannibalism,
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incorporating into their performative bodies elements not belonging originally to
themselves. In the words of Gómez-Peña:
We’re like artistic cannibals devouring everything we encounter […] What
we do as performance artists is to ‘embody’ all this information, and to re-
interpret it for a live audience, refracting fetishized constructs of otherness
through the spectacle of our “heightened” bodies on display. (González
and Gómez-Peña 249)
When the performers consume elements of the surrounding culture, incorporating them
into their consciousness, they are collapsing the boundary between self and other. The
artist consumes socio-cultural phenomena from the outside world, “re-chewing”16
it and
creating something that belongs uniquely to her/him. The act of appropriating and
reconstructing elements of alterity transforms what had previously been ‘other’ into
something with which the artist identifies. As Jeremy Tambling affirms,
Personification works by making identifications, and claims implicitly, by
its existence, that it can conceptualize, or visualize, or realize, the ‘other’
in a particular form: as Revenge, or as Sleep. It creates an image, and
makes it a fetish, expressing something in the self. This, because it is
created by the person who makes the visualization, is not ‘other’, but a
way of rendering ‘otherness’, or difference, in terms which make it the
image of, and the expression of, the views of the person who has the
power to create it. (173)
16
As explained in the introduction to this dissertation, for Haroldo de Campos, the colonial writers of the
New World Baroque dismantled dominant discourses through cultural cannibalism: through the consuming
and “re-chewing” of official culture to create new parodical polycultural fusions (337-38).
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Consequently, in the performance personae elaborated through personification,
there exists a sense of identification between performer and persona, given the fact that
this persona is constructed by the self and is crafted by one’s own subjectivity. This is
evident in La Pocha Nostra’s ‘artificial savages’ which are “composite collage[s] of each
person’s political, religious, social, and sexual concerns” as well as “living metaphors” or
“human artifacts” (Ethno-techno 125). The recipe for creating the hybrid ‘artificial
barbarians’ is the following: “one-quarter stereotype, one-quarter audience projection,
one-quarter social reality, and one-quarter aesthetic artifact” (González and Gómez-Peña
249). This formula results in a multifaceted vision informed by the outside world as much
as by the interior world, essentially blurring the distinctions between self and other. As
Gómez-Peña elucidates, “These personas are heightened versions of multiple selves
contained inside my psyche and my body; the other ‘Others’ within me […] Are they
mere emblematic or metaphorical representations of my internal life as it intersects with
social reality? I’m not sure” (González and Gómez-Peña 251). The artist himself remains
unsure about where his internal self begins and exterior reality ends. The process of
creating allegorical personae informed by diverse viewpoints renders impossible any
attempt to distinguish aspects of the self from aspects of the other; and yet, this process
approximates the multi-faceted nature of identity, which is formed as much by the
varying projections of an external reality as by the subjectivity of one’s internal world.
Moreover, these hybrid personifications demonstrate the artists’ attempt to
visually express a complex vision of a reality condensed into one figure, from various
points of view and with all of its ambiguities and contradictions. The result is a
personified concept of identity materialized through the enigmatic trope of allegory,
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producing a visual display conceptualizing the complexities inherent to a polycultural and
multivocal world. The allegorical rendering of this multiplicity is necessarily incoherent
at first, demanding interpretation. As Gordon Teskey writes, “an allegory must be, unlike
a parable or a fable, incoherent on the narrative level, forcing us to unify the work by
imposing meaning on it. An allegory is an incoherent narrative (or, in the visual arts, an
incoherent picture) that makes us interpret throughout” (5). La Pocha Nostra’s works are
saturated with incoherent and contradictory messages. As Gómez-Peña affirms,
our work deals with composite images and hybrid personas that embody a
multiplicity of symbols, and elicit multiple readings. Performance art is a
terrain of ambiguity. My audiences and viewers are always asking
themselves: What’s wrong with this picture or with this tableaux vivant?
Why is this supermodel wearing a Zapatista mask? (González and Gómez-
Peña 249-51)
This incoherence demands interpretation which, in turn, engages the minds of the
spectators. As detailed in the previous chapter, allegory depends on enigma to invoke the
mental engagement of its audience. To this end, La Pocha Nostra creates dense layering
of visual tropes which seep into the mind in a haunting and somewhat uncomfortable way.
Gómez-Peña describes the purpose of this enigmatic haunting as a way for the work to
persist in the mind of the spectator:
Once the performance is over and people walk away, our hope is that a
process of reflection gets triggered in their perplexed psyches. If the
performance is effective […] this process can last for several weeks, even
months, and the questions and dilemmas embodied in the images and
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rituals we present can continue to haunt the spectator’s dreams, memories
and conversations. The objective is not to ‘like’ or even ‘understand’
performance art, but to create a sediment in the audience’s psyche. (“In
Defence of Performance Art” 79)
Moreover, leaving psychological residue in the spectator’s mind requires much
more than instigating their intellectual engagement. Baroque persuasion operates on the
emotional and visceral responses of the audience, and personification successfully
provokes this engagement of non-rational faculties, precisely because of the fact that it
uses the human body as its preferred medium. Capitalizing on the dynamism of the
human form, baroque paintings evoked a vitality that superseded realism, offering images
of people which seemed to pulsate with the essence of life itself. This is evident in the
paintings of Rubens whose “allegorized bodies […] force their bodily meanings on us
through their emphatic sensuality and inescapably fleshly presence” (Rosenthal 11).
Furthermore, La Pocha Nostra’s personae are living amplifications of these dynamic and
sensual allegorized bodies. There is something incredibly visceral about the allegorical
body in performative action, something capable of leaving a deep impression in the
psyche. As Gómez-Peña affirms, “Stelarc’s warning in the early 1990s that the body was
becoming obsolete turned out to be untrue. It’s simply impossible to ‘replace’ the
ineffable magic of a pulsating, sweaty body immersed in a live ritual in front of our eyes.
It’s a shamanic thing” (“In Defence of Performance Art” 79). And is this not the essence
of the baroque, utilizing the ineffable magic of the body in order to more powerfully
express the ineffable?
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Hagiography
As detailed in the previous chapter, hagiography relies on allegorical rendering in
order to communicate spiritual abstractions through the physical immediacy of the flesh.
Saints embody abstractions in ways which are visually apparent: St. Lucy, the patron
saint of the blind, carries her eyes on a plate; La Virgen Dolorosa metaphorizes her
lamentation with a knife stabbed through her heart; and Saint Jerome holds a skull,
showing his awareness of human mortality. Despite having come from a historical reality,
the saints are not treated with the realism of biography or the portrait; rather, they become
emblematic personifications who, through their tortured ecstatic bodies, signify
ideological connotations.
The hagiographic tradition exudes abstract and metaphysical meaning while
offering a palpable human quality which the viewer finds both attractive and identifiable.
The power of the saints lies in their capacity to project a lifelike radiance which attracts
their audience and allows them to identify with them on a human level. Baroque painting
was profoundly effective in reproducing the subtleties of human expression, mastering a
realist style which captured the penetrating psychology of the subjects of their paintings.
However, we must remember that “what the baroque offers us never remains a pure and
simple realism” (Maravall, Culture of the Baroque 257). The power behind the saints lies
in the fact that they are not products of realistic mimesis, but personifications that point to
ideological and spiritual concepts. They are at once human and identifiable, and yet,
otherworldly and transcendent. For Lois Parkinson-Zamora, baroque religious portraiture
sustains this ambiguity between the human and divine as, “religious portraits depict
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selves who are at once individuals and archetypes, selves whose specific emotional
interiority is designed to project an allegory of interiority as such” (173).
La Pocha Nostra has harnessed the ambivalent power of the combined human and
otherworldly qualities exhibited by hagiographic portraiture, intensifying this tradition
through the ‘shamanic’ character of the performative body. The group’s practice of
creating hagiographic personae began with the Temple of Confessions, in which the
performers became “highly decorated ‘living (border) saints’ from an alleged ‘persecuted
religion’” (Gómez-Peña, Dangerous Border Crossers 240). This aesthetic choice has
remained a staple of the Pocha Nostra experience, such as in Mapa/Corpo II: Corpo
Divino, which was performed by “saints and Madonnas of unpopular causes,” including
“border crossers, undocumented migrants, prisoners, [and] the infirmed and displaced
invisible others” (Corpo Ilícito). One such embodiment of unpopular divinity is seen in
the figure of Roberto Sifuentes performing as a cholo-Christ (fig. 14). Referencing this
hagiographic tradition invokes practices and sensibilities which are inherently Mexican as
well as profoundly baroque and Gómez-Peña affirms that his “Mexican sensibility is
permeated with Catholic iconography gone wrong, with female Zapatista Christs,
mariachi and low-rider Christs, with immigrant pietas and border madonnas” (González
and Gómez-Peña 259). These living saints, like the saints of baroque portraiture and
statuaries, utilize the power of their performative bodies to move their audiences on a
visceral level while simultaneously touching their spirits through ritualized action and
through references to divine iconography. The living human body intensifies this whole
experience, taking the performance to a whole different level of reception.
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La Pocha Nostra works on the knowledge that the body itself, the real individual
human body, exudes meaning even before entering the artistic space. The body as a site
of personal and cultural meaning constitutes a fundamental principle of performance art,
which favours corporeal expression over speech. Thus, performance artists base their
work
upon their own bodies, their own autobiographies, their own specific
experiences in a culture or in the world […] Since the emphasis is upon
the performance, and on how the body or self is articulated through
performance, the individual body remains at the center of such
presentations. (Carlson 5-6)
Fig. 14. Christ-like cholo Roberto Sifuentes performs in Corpo
Divino at the MOCCA in Toronto, 2008. Photo: Joshua Meles.
(Carson)
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That being said, the 1980’s witnessed the return of the spoken word to
performances as a way of more coherently voicing political concerns (Carlson 117).
Nonetheless, this political voice did not rob the body of its privileged focus; rather, the
body was invoked in yet another way when, in the 1990’s, performance art began to
express the concerns of race, gender, and class (144), concerns which are inevitably
communicated through corporeal expression. When Violeta Luna and an African
immigrant stage a parody of La Pietà in the Chi-Canarian Expo in Las Palmas de Gran
Canaria (fig. 15), the racial difference of their bodies is what communicates meaning
before anything else. Likewise, in So Far from God when Caridad’s body is attacked by
the malogra, it becomes an emblem of racial and gender-based violence. Thus, any form
of representation that uses human figures
inevitably adds another layer of meaning to
the work of art as “allegories […] operate
within the dense network of cultural codes
in which both actual and represented
bodies become sexed, classed, racially
defined and rendered desirable or repellent,
safe or dangerous, kin or foreign” (Baskins
and Rosenthal 4). Allegorical in character,
the hagiographic body also operates
according to these complex webs of
cultural meaning.
Fig. 15. Violeta Luna and a local performer stage a
parody of La Pietà in the Chi-Canarian Expo, Gran
Canaria, 2005. Photo: BRH-LEÓN editions.
(http://www.brheditions.es/ingguillermo.html )
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“Lives of saints are, by definition, extreme, and the metaphysics of the Baroque
body cannot be understood without reference to these heroic figures in transcendental
garb” (Parkinson-Zamora 177). The saintly body and the performative body correspond
in multiple ways, the most striking being their penchant for extreme behaviour, notably
involving suffering and the infliction of pain. Gómez-Peña speaks of Mexico’s
characteristically “extreme performance personas” among which he includes “the
dioramas of santos found in colonial churches” (Gómez-Peña and González 236).
Performance art often resembles the highly dramatic and physically tortuous practices of
the saints. In 1974, Chris Burden’s crucifixion on a Volkswagen Beetle involved the artist
having nails hammered into each of his hands. In White Light/White Heat (1974), Burden
lay on a hidden triangular platform in a gallery and did not eat, talk, or come down from
the platform for over three weeks. Considering the dramatized physical afflictions of the
saints, the ‘extreme performances’ of Antonio de Roa’s self-mortifications, as well as the
tortures and deprivations suffered by artists such as Chris Burden, it can be said that
Gómez-Peña’s extreme performance personae have been shaped by both a colonial
baroque legacy as well as by modern performance. In the Baroque, visualized physical
pain and suffering came to be seen as an outward sign of ecstasy and, consequently,
spiritual transcendence.17
The signifier of the body in pain became allegorical and
“martyrdom prepared the body of the living person for emblematic purposes” (Benjamin,
The Origin 217).
However, this violence enacted on the body—the gaping wounds, the upturned
eyes flooded with hyperbolic tears pleading to the heavens—serves for more than merely
17
Lois Parkinson Zamora writes that, in the Baroque, the saints' “pain was increasingly depicted as
indistinguishable from ecstasy” (177).
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stirring the emotions of the spectator. Rather, this exaggerated display of suffering is
“always accompanied by an allegorical distillation of passions in the form of ideas, a
combination of sensuousness and sobriety” (Parkinson Zamora 178). Likewise, La Pocha
Nostra employs the visual language of saints, not only for the purpose of provoking
intense emotions, but also for communicating their ideas through the striking forms of
allegorical hagiography. It is in this light that I see the Mapa/Corpo: a violent allegorical
hagiography which expresses a multitude of ideas within the ‘brown’ female body (fig.
16). Though the Mapa/Corpo also follows a violent hagiographic tradition—the piercing
of her flesh with needles mimics the piercing of Saint Sebastian’s flesh by arrows or of
La Dolorosa’s heart by a dagger, or Saint George’s lacerations from the wheel of
swords—, the outward signs of the Mapa/Corpo’s suffering, like the physical vicissitudes
suffered by the saints, point to ideas beyond themselves.
Fig. 16. Violeta Luna performs the Mapa/Corpo in Mapa/Corpo 2: Corpo Divino,
Harstad (Norway) 2007. Image captured from online video (La Pocha Nostra).
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The Mapa/Corpo is a living allegory representing the (neo-)colonization of
territory, enacted by an acupuncturist who inserts needles bearing the flags of the
‘Coalition of the Willing’18
into her flesh, claiming territory for (neo-)colonizing powers.
Since before the time of the Conquest, conquered territory had been compared to the
naked female body and allegorical paintings from the 16th
to 18th
century visualized the
four continents through the female form. Affirming her civilization, Europe appeared
fully clothed. America and Africa were left naked, suggesting not only their imagined
barbarity, but also showing the eroticized desire implicit in narratives of conquest and
colonization. In “The Breasts of Columbus,” Laura E. Donaldson offers the example of
Jan van der Straet’s 1575 woodcut in which Amerigo Vespucci encounters the
personification of America (fig. 17). She notes that, while Vespucci is fully armoured,
America is represented as “a naked, erotically inviting woman” (52). This trope is
repeated in John Donne’s 1669 elegy titled, “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” in which
America is embodied by a woman undressing for a man (the poetic voice) who becomes
her conqueror, colonizing her body: O my America, my new found lande. As mentioned
the previous chapter, the character Caridad from So Far from God also becomes
emblematic of the violation and colonization of a territory when attacked by the malogra.
Similarly, the Mapa/Corpo is following in this tradition of gendered cartography, Violeta
Luna’s female body suffering martyrdom and colonization at the hands of the Coalition
of the Willing.
18
‘The Coalition of the Willing’ was comprised of the countries supporting the war on Iraq.
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The allegory of the Mapa/Corpo refers to the colonization, not only of territory,
but of the living people within that territory, and how their race, ethnicity, and gender
directly relate to colonizing practices. While allegorical personification and hagiography
privilege the body as a powerful, sensate, and meaningful vehicle of expression, the body
is also the ideal site for communicating gender and racial concerns. For this reason, La
Pocha Nostra adds another tradition to their repertoire: ethnography.
Ethnography
There are two colonial precedents for La Pocha Nostra’s revisioned ethnographic
practices: the casta paintings and the wünderkammer. The casta paintings were
ethnographic depictions of racial mixes which sought to classify citizens into discrete
categories within the Spanish and Portuguese colonies (fig. 18). Interestingly, these
paintings were not realistic depictions of individuals; but, rather, “personified
Fig. 17. Jan van der Straet, America, 1575.
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abstractions” (Vásquez 70), or allegorized types used to represent large populations of
people matching a racial profile. The casta paintings can be seen as proto-ethnographic
representations which emerged from the Enlightenment’s impulse to classify and
organize scientific knowledge, as well as from the dominant Spanish/criollo’s desire to
uphold social control by maintaining a stratified society which privileged them as the
ruling class. However, the various castas are not presented in scientific fashion, as
lifeless butterflies impaled by pins in a display case; rather, they are often found in the
middle of performing a typified action. Gómez-Peña is quite aware of the legacy of casta
paintings and how they contribute to a characteristic performativity in Mexican culture,
which “has always been fascinated with the staging of extreme performance personas.
Sometimes these personas embody idealized or demonized identities; other times, they
depict imaginary identities codified in colonial fantasy” (González and Gómez-Peña 236-
7). The casta paintings’ invoking of performativity, allegory, ethnography, racial
discourse, identity, and colonization
certainly makes these historical
images an ideal source for Gómez-
Peña’s art, given that the discuss and
problematize the same issues:
ethnicity, race, identity, and their
corresponding power relations.
Fig. 18. Casta painting by Juan Patricio Morlete
Ruiz, De coyote e indio, chamizo, 1764.
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A marvellous early prototype of the modern museum, the wünderkammer,
emerged in the 16th
and 17th
centuries to fulfill the taste for novelty and amazement which
infused this era. The wünderkammer was a room in which people could move about
freely—a total performance space—, marvelling at various wonders which included
works of art, artefacts from foreign lands, and rare objects from the natural world (fig.
19). As will be discussed in the third chapter of this dissertation, the character of the
wünderkammer changed significantly during the 18th
century when the collections
became categorized by discrete fields of scientific study, marking “the shift from the
collections’ performative character into a more analytical mode of presentation”
(Olalquiaga, “Object Lesson” no pagination).
Fig. 19. Natural philosopher Ole Worm's wünderkammer. Illustration from Museum Wormianum, 1655.
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From these increasingly analytical curiosity cabinets emerged the idea of the
modern museum, which is a foundational concept in La Pocha Nostra’s works. In fact,
Gómez-Peña refers to La Pocha Nostra as “an interactive museum and a curiosity cabinet”
(Ethno-techno 78). In 1992, Gómez-Peña and other artists began question the ideological
workings of the museum, specifically the way that these institutions construct narratives
of difference. He writes that he and his collaborators experimented “with the colonial
format of the ‘living diorama,’” creating “interactive ‘living museums’ that parody
various colonial practices of representation including the ethnographic tableau vivant, the
Indian Trading Post, the border curio shop, the porn window display and their
contemporary equivalents” (Abolafia et al.). This colonial ethnographic parody is
exemplified by the iconic piece performed by Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco in 1992, The
Guatinaui World Tour, aka, The Couple in the Cage. Responding to the Columbus
Quincentenary, this work served to “remind the US and Europe of ‘the other history of
intercultural performance,’ the sinister human exhibits, and pseudo-ethnographic
spectacles that were so popular in Europe from the 17th century until the early 20th
century” (Abolafia et al.). Fusco and Gómez-Peña, dressed as artificial barbarians, toured
various cities worldwide, exhibiting themselves in a gilded cage as authentic
“undiscovered Amerindians” (Abolafia et al.). The Shame-man Meets el Mexi-can’t
(1993) took place in a Natural History museum where Gómez-Peña and First Nations
artist, James Luna, performed their own diorama, exhibiting themselves as present-day
indigenous peoples. Challenging the concept of the museum, Gómez-Peña wrote, “Next
to us, the ‘real’ Indian dioramas speak of a mute world outside of history and social crises.
Next to us, they appear much less ‘authentic’” (Abolafia et al.). The Temple of
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Confessions (1994) branched into Mexican Catholic performativity, “combining the
format of the ethnographic diorama with that of the religious dioramas found in colonial
Mexican churches” (Abolafia et al.). In The Mexterminator project (1997-2000), Gómez-
Peña collected information from visitors to his internet site who participated in the
creation of Mexican and Chicana/o hybrids based on the fears and desires of the
participants’ imaginings. The information gleaned from this exercise became material for
new performance personae, “thus refracting fetishized constructs of identity through the
spectacle of our artificially constructed identities on display” (Abolafia et al.). The
performance that issued from The Mexterminator project was The Living Museum of
Fetishized Identities (1999-2002), a living museum filled with “ethno-cyborgs” (fig. 20)
and “artificial savages” which operated on an intensely “robo-baroque aesthetic”
(Abolafia et al.).
Fig. 19. Juan Ýbarra performs the ethno-cyborg,
El Robowarrior, in The Museum of Fetishized
Identities. Sydney, 2000. (Gómez-Pena, Ethno-
Techno 284)
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However, considering their performative character, their penchant for the
curiously bizarre, and their eclectic collections of diverse elements, the works of La
Pocha Nostra are much more wünderkammer than museum. For example, resembling a
Taino extraterrestrial cockroach composite, Juan Ybarra performs El Hombre Cucaracha,
executing frenetically non-human movements19
and giving the impression of being
trapped in a viewing room, a microchamber of La Pocha Nostra’s curiosity cabinet. The
bizarreness of this ethnographic/zoological specimen inspires wonder in the spectator,
parodying the practice of showcasing Native Americans and extraordinary animal
specimens alike for the amusement of Europeans during the 16th
-19th
centuries, a pratice
which dehumanized indigenous peoples to the level of the zoological exhibit. El Hombre
Cucaracha does not resemble the dioramas of museums which seek to represent a
realistic depiction of native peoples, frozen in some moment of a distant past; rather, this
persona exhibits a monstrous hybrid quality which pertains to the extraordinary. El
Hombre Cucaracha is irrefutably citing the historic imagining of the chimeras of natural
history.
“El Hombre Cucaracha” belongs to the La Pocha Nostra’s collection of ‘artificial
savages,’ whose highly decorated, exaggerated, and parodical forms emanate a baroque
spirit of self-conscious artificiality. In truly baroque fashion, Gómez-Peña writes, “Many
‘artists of color’ are interested in the staging of authenticity; others in the debunking of
authenticity. I’m more interested in the conscious staging of artificial authenticity”
(González and Gómez-Peña 243). In the same way that Severo Sarduy’s baroque model
of the trasvesti is an exaggerated staging of a woman, the artificial barbarian is a
19
Ýbarra’s performance can be seen online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkjyIMji0Q4.
128
hyperbolic staging of an imagined racial and cultural other. Just as Sarduy’s trasvesti
goes beyond attempting a realistic mimesis of a woman, opting instead for “el absoluto de
una imagen abstracta, religiosa incluso, icónica en todo caso” (Ensayos generales 91), the
artificial barbarian also goes beyond constructing illusions of authenticity, opting instead
for an exaggerated and iconic persona embodying abstract concepts of alterity. It is this
exaggeration which provides the key to deconstructing the artifice: we know that a
trasvesti is not an ‘authentic’ woman because of the hyberbolic femininity which belies
its artificialized construction. Likewise, we know an artificial barbarian is not an
authentic barbarian because its exaggerated savageness belies its constructed nature.
Though the baroque artist may create elaborate constructions of illusions and artifice,
she/he always leaves clues that allow for the dismantling of these ‘falsehoods.’ In the
case of Sarduy’s trasvesti, the phallus is the mark of artificiality, the sign that points to its
constructed nature (Ensayos generales 93). The artificial barbarian also leaves clues that
lead to his unmaking. In the Guatinaui World Tour, Gómez-Peña projected himself as
Aztec-like, wearing a native headdress and a conchero-style bib/vest and loin cloth (fig.
21). However, like the trasvesti’s phallus, the artist’s wrestling mask, cowboy boots, and
sunglasses provided the tools for dismantling this exquisite illusion.
It is worth noting that not everyone is equally receptive to these clues: Gómez-
Peña affirms that over 40% of his audiences believed that the artificial savages from The
Guatinaui World Tour were authentic indigenous peoples (Abolafia et al.). The joke is on
them: in producing this pseudo-ethnographic spectacle, the artists are also exhibiting the
reactions of their audiences, who become the focus of the event (fig. 21). Gómez-Peña
often refers to this tactic as “reverse-anthropology,” in the sense that it turns the
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anthropological gaze back on the dominant culture, ultimately revealing their own
(mis)conceptions. Works that exploit the techniques of satire, irony, and parody often
employ a code which is only understandable to a certain segment of the public, their
meanings eluding the understanding of the rest of the audience. This is precisely what
happened in The Guatinaui World Tour, as what seemed to be an obvious parody of the
ethnographic exhibitions of the colonial age was perceived by some as an authentic
showing of recently discovered Native Mexicans.
La Pocha Nostra’s artificialized pseudo-savage spectacles highlight the ignorance
of the public, using humour as a tool of defiance. Coco Fusco expounds the power of
parody in Latin America, stating that
much of the resistance to the violence of colonization has been through
acts of parody and satire—laughing at imposed identities, imposed rules,
imposed laws. Latin Americans have a legacy of negotiating the very
Fig. 21. Reverse-anthropology: Gómez-Peña and Fusco study their audience in The
Guatinaui World Tour. (Abolafia et al.)
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difficult impositions that come with colonial rule by finding an opening
within it and throwing it back in a humorous way. (Sawchuk 117)
La Pocha Nostra takes the audience’s projections and historical representations of alterity
and playfully distorts them, projecting back the ridiculousness of these visions and
creating a counter-discourse that resists dominant narratives through mockery: a
Contraconquista effected through humour.
Baroque spaces
There is a playfully resistant character to the neobaroque which defies imposed
limits and hierarchies, instead preferring openness and multivocal inclusivity. La Pocha
Nostra operates on this neobaroque understanding, structuring their performances like a
Keplerian universe (fig. 22) that explodes beyond its boundaries. The philosophical
implications of Kepler’s elliptical solar system was further developed by Severo Sarduy
who described its evolution as such: “el paso de Galileo a Kepler es el del círculo a la
elipse, el de lo que está trazado alrededor del Uno a lo que está trazado alrededor de lo
plural, paso de lo clásico a lo barroco" (Ensayos generales 151-52). La Pocha Nostra’s
performances, like the Keplerian model, also abandon the authority of the center in
favour of the inclusive power of plurality. Decentered, these works thrive with multiple
foci while embodying a dynamic coextensive universe which transgresses even the limits
of time in order to extend this fervour of multiplicity. Essentially, La Pocha Nostra uses
the neobaroque techniques of decentralization, pluralism, coextensive space, and seriality
with the purpose of effectively communicating La Pocha Nostra’s worldview as well as
provoking a desired psychological effect in their audiences.
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Many of La Pocha Nostra’s works take place in an environment in which there is
no central focus. The audience may walk around freely, observing several performative
foci from varying perspectives. The Temple of Confessions contains simultaneous
performances by a widow in mourning; an “apocalyptic nun” dragging a two-meter cross;
a bloody cholo assuming various postures, such as fashioning a tourniquet from the
American flag in an effort to inject himself with a syringe-gun; and a wheelchair-bound
and excessively ornamented Gómez-Peña who, projecting the image of a tropicalized
shaman, listens to audience members’ confessions between staged acts of excessive
alcohol consumption (Guillermo Gómez-Peña). The number of performative foci
multiplies in The Living Museum of Fetishized Identities, whose showing in Mexico
included 12 simultaneous performances involving 15 performers and more than half a
dozen audience members who formed a tableaux vivant (Museo de la identidad fetich-
izada). The practice of multifocality has continued within recent works, such as in the
Mapa/Corpo series where the audience has the freedom to travel between various
performance stations hosting acts by 1) Guillermo Gómez-Peña who, dressed as a hybrid
Fig. 22. Kepler's elliptical universe. (Illustration by the author)
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conquistador/cyborg/indigenous/drag queen, recites poetry and interacts with the
audience; 2) a woman in a burqa performing various actions such as wrapping a string of
thorns around her face, prodding herself with a spatula, or revealing a gartered leg; 3) a
cocoon made of plastic film and an attendant who cuts it open to reveal the infirm New
Barbarian, a hybrid Mesoamerican/drug addicted/cholo/Christ; and 4) an acupuncturist
and her/his female patient whose body, as previously mentioned, becomes the
Mapa/Corpo, an allegorical representation of neo-colonization symbolically carried out
through acupuncture. La Pocha Nostra increases the dense layering of the audience’s
sensory experience by adding various audio and visual foci: live video shows, art
installations, recorded music, and sound clips featuring political speeches.
The audience is not only free to experience these multiple performances but can
also participate in the spectacle. In The Temple of Confessions, audience members knelt
before glass-enclosed saints/specimens, confessing their fears and desires toward their
racial and cultural others. Audiences of El Mexterminator Project (1998-1999) were able
to manipulate the performers in multiple ways, including hand-feeding, costuming,
touching, and painting them. This process was reversed in The Living Museum of
Fetishized Identities, where Gómez-Peña directed audience members who were invited to
choose a “‘temporary ethnic identity’ and become ‘their favorite cultural other,’” forming
their own tableaux vivants (Abolafia et al.). In Mapa/Corpo, spectators can choose to
wash the feet of a woman in a burqa, write messages of hope onto the body of the New
Barbarian, or participate in the decolonization of the Mapa/Corpo by extracting its flags.
Gómez-Peña promotes the decentring of the spectacle by actively including the audience
members as performance foci, asking them questions and provoking their participation in
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co-authoring his poetry. As far as spatial ordering is concerned, La Pocha Nostra’s works
present the Keplerian universe as described by Sarduy, in which the authoritarian centre
is dethroned and replaced by a fecund plurality (Ensayos generales 151-52).
The motivation for this decentring directly reflects the ideology of its authors: the
ideal of a pluralistic world of equal power and open dialogue in which citizens are
encouraged to actively participate. The work’s neobaroque structuring allows for a
multiplicity of voices without hierarchical ordering. It concedes equal spatial authority
and mobility to all who are present and encourages the engagement of an active audience
possessing the agency to co-direct this performative world. As Maravall stated, in order
to move spectators, one required their participation to the extent that would feel complicit
in the performance (Culture of the Baroque 75). As discussed in the introduction to the
dissertation, the participation of the audience can be elicited for both conservative and
transgressive ends. Although the purposes of La Pocha Nostra vary considerably from
those of the 17th
-century ruling classes, both seek the inclusion of the public and value the
opinion of the spectator. After all, being complicit in the spectacle encourages the
audience to conform to the ideology propagated by the performance. Nonetheless, unlike
the guided culture of 17th
century absolutism, the works of La Pocha Nostra are open and
ambivalent enough to allow for multiple interpretations and, though they may win over
the emotions of the audience, they do not force any univocal messages on them.
Once undergoing the dethronement of the center, the performance space becomes
a plural space, allowing for the emergence of multiple foci similar to the baroque
“núcleos proliferantes” described by Carpentier (72). But what is the relation of these
nuclei to the entirety of the performance? Given that 1) baroque ordering, like the
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Keplerian universe, is inclusive and that 2) baroque reasoning offers “an alternative
epistemology that accommodates antinomies” (Parkinson Zamora 297), the baroque
worldview encourages the coexistence of diverse elements within a shared space without
requiring any unifying logical cohesion between them. Each performance nucleus is
completely autonomous and has no apparent relation to the other performance nuclei,
their only commonality being the inclusive spatial framework of the performance in
which they find themselves. Each performance nucleus constitutes an independent world
in the Keplerized universe of the theatre.
Historically, this baroque ordering concerning a collection of diverse parts can be
seen in the structures of the retablos (fig. 23) in which each niche is occupied by a
different virgin, saint, or Christ with his or her own performative space. This is also the
organizing logic of the wünderkammer, in the sense that these rooms contained diverse
collections of unrelated rarities. Because of the group’s overt discourse on ethnography,
La Pocha Nostra has been defined as “an interactive museum and a curiosity cabinet”
(Gómez-Peña, Ethno-techno 78). However, given the group’s propensity for Catholic
citation and emotive religiosity, La Pocha Nostra’s works could be more aptly described
as interactive wünder-retablos.
The phenomenon of unrelated components incorporated into a whole is part of a
New World Baroque aesthetic sense that remains active to this day, specifically in
Mexican and Mexican-American popular culture. This is the case with the altares,
identificatory symbols of Mexican-American culture which not only hold the capacity to
include a multiplicity of referents (photos of deceased family members; figures of saints;
memorabilia; plastic flowers…), but also function as miniature personal museums which
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give visual form to memory, history and spirituality (fig. 24 and 25). Amalia Mesa-Bains
calls this style domesticana: a female-centred rasquache sensibility which emerges from
the domestic space. Domesticana “retells the feminine past from a new position […]
Artists use pop culture discards, remnants of party materials, jewellery, kitchenware,
toiletries, saints, holy cards, and milagros in combined and recombined arrangements that
reflect a shattered glamour” (no pagination). The aesthetics of the altar and the retablo
demonstrate a general sensibility of abundance and heterogeneity which permeates
Chicana/o America. James Griffith writes that, within the cultural space of contemporary
Mexican American Arizona, people continue to use baroque principles of organization in
which images can be combined “without the need for a thematically unifying device”
(159). Each image “is a totally independent entity which has its own meaning and
existence outside the ensemble” however, “once in the ensemble, they add to the totality
of that ensemble” (159). Griffith provides the reader with a description of a low rider car
that has been painted with images of both Miss Piggy and Cheech and Chong as an
example of this baroque ordering sense (159).
Fig. 23. Simón Pereyns, Retablo mayor de la Iglesia de San Miguel, 1586.
Huejotzingo, Mexico. (Kiracofe)
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Fig. 24. Ofrenda for the Day of the Dead, San José, California (photo by author)
Fig. 25. Amalia Mesa-Bains, An Ofrenda for Dolores del Río, 1984.
(Smithsonian American Art Museum, http://americanart.si.edu)
137
Why plurality? A multiplicity of nuclei results in the loss of the apprehensive
power of the audience. The baroque presents us with the impossibility of the
apprehension of the whole (Sarduy, “Lautréamont y el barroco” 121) and the existence of
proliferating nuclei successfully prevents this total apprehension. Consequently, the
audience members experience a loss of the domination of the whole show and can only
receive the work by fragments relative to their own perspectives within the open fluidity
of the performative space. When seeing Corpo Ilícito, I recall frantically looked in every
direction, attempting―unsuccessfully―to capture everything. Finding myself incapable
of apprehending everything, I became anxious and hyper-alert, knowing that at any
instant I could miss a fragment of meaning which could potentially alter my interpretation
of the whole performance. I quickly resigned myself, however, to the fact that every
audience member shared my incapacity. Each person would leave the show having an
experience composed by differing elements and none of these experiences were in any
way less valid than another. The loss of the perception of the whole should not be viewed
as negative; rather, the fragmentary quality of these works liberates and empowers the
audience, allowing them to construct their own narratives relative to their experiences. In
this way, the performance comes closer to the complex reality of the world in which we
live: everything that we experience is relative to our position in relation to the point of
focus and whatever information we absorb can only be received in fragments. As masters
of our own narratives, we decide how to piece together these fragments, constructing our
own unique visions of reality. The use of plurality within Gómez-Peña’s works grants
audience members the freedom to choose and to assemble their own meanings based on
their own unique experiences.
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There remains a second motive for the use of plurality: a complex layering of
proliferating nuclei has the capacity to provoke an alternate mode of perception in the
audience. This mode could be termed inclusive perception: an attempt to experience all of
the performance nuclei simultaneously. At this point, the audience member loses her/his
critical focus and surrenders the analytical mind to the total experience of the
performance. Gómez-Peña explains that the ‘total environment’ experienced by the
audience houses a multiplicity of elements (“ethnocyborg personae […], live and
prerecorded music, multiple video projections and slides, fog, cinematic lighting,
embalmed animals, old-fashioned medical figurines and ‘ethnokitsch’ design motifs”)
which, in their totality, contribute to a “robo-baroque” aesthetic and induce a “heightened
state” in the spectator/participant (Ethno-techno 81). This post-Mexican speaks the truth:
an oversaturation of sensorial elements inevitably produces a ‘heightened state’ in the
audience member who, unable to synthesize the multitude of images, sounds, and
meanings, enters into an alternate psychological mode of perception. This technique of
overwhelming the senses was employed during the Counter-Reformation in Spain and in
the Spanish colonies as a proselytizing strategy: to overstimulate the senses and to
provoke the emotions in order to convince the public of the superiority of the Catholic
Church. Post-show testimonies from audience members provide evidence pointing to the
alternate psychological state produced by the performances of La Pocha Nostra. One
statement from an interviewee in Norway who had recently seen Mapa/Corpo sums up
the psychological effect of the experience:
It’s still too early for me to say much more, there were so many
impressions that have to sink into my head. Too much going on inside my
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head now just a few minutes after the show. So much happened, so many
impressions. It’s hard to put into words, but I absolutely liked it. A very
strong experience. (La Pocha Nostra)
Here we can see, in bold operation, the effects of using the baroque strategy of excess. La
Pocha Nostra provides so many layers of visuals, action, and sound that the mind and
spirit become overwhelmed, finding no way to create order from an apparent chaos. Later,
in an attempt to give meaning to this complex confusion, the mind begins to actively
construct its own understanding of the performance. Nevertheless, until the process of
cohesive meaning-making begins, the audience member remains dumbfounded and yet,
in a very receptive alternative state of mind. Gómez-Peña uses the baroque principle of
excess—the supersaturation of nuclei—to provoke a psychology in his audience which is
conducive to liminoid activities. Within the field of anthropological performance theory,
Victor Turner has defined as liminoid the open, playful, spontaneous, subversive
activities which mark a liminal space outside the established structures of industrial and
post-industrial societies. Accordingly, Gómez-Peña uses a supersaturation of signs to
psychologically induce a liminoid state in the minds of his audience. This state somewhat
resembles the “flow experience” studied by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in the sense that
the participant becomes so engaged in an activity that the mind lacks the attention
necessary to monitor the body. The body and the identity disappear from the
consciousness because the participant cannot simultaneously exert intense concentration
and feel that he/she exists and, thus, “existence is temporarily suspended”
(Csikszentmihalyi). Nevertheless, the way of arriving at a “flow” state of mind is very
different from Gómez-Peña’s strategy of supersaturation. While Csikszentmihalyi’s flow
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involves intense attention to a singular engaging activity, the works of La Pocha Nostra
call for the expansion of the spectator’s attention into a vertiginous number of directions.
The engaged audience member requires a dynamic perception capable of jumping from
focus to focus and ingesting large amounts of information. However, because the mind
cannot possibly absorb the multiplicity of sensorial elements, it slides into an altered state
which allows for non-objective understanding necessary for liminoid play. Colin Turnbull
argues that one cannot understand liminoid activities through objective study but, rather,
one must actively participate in these activities, crossing into the liminal-performative
space. This participation requires a renunciation of the inner self “to become something
else” (76). In a sense, the psychological state induced by La Pocha Nostra’s performances
leads to a similar surrender of objectivity and prepares the audience for engagement and
collaboration within the performance. As Gómez-Peña reminds us, every culture
possesses its own space for liminal activities, “a space for contestation and deviant
behavior.” In Western culture, this space belongs to performance art which, through its
liminality, “helps others to re-connect with the forbidden zones of their psyches and
bodies and acknowledge the possibilities of their own freedoms” (“In Defence of
Performance Art” 84-85). The supersaturation of nuclei within the performance is largely
responsible for inducing the psychological state necessary for achieving this reconnection.
The desired participation of the audience is further achieved through the workings
of “co-extensive space,” a term used by John Rupert Martin (155,161) which, as noted in
the introduction, describes the expansion of the space of the art into the space of the
viewer and vice versa, resulting in the viewer’s active participation in “the spatial-
psychological field created by the work of art” (14). In the Baroque, the use of co-
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extensive space was not limited to paintings or writings; rather, art entered into the space
of everyday life and, conversely, everyday people entered into the world of art. During
festivities consecrated to Saint Days, carnival, Holy Week, Corpus Christi, and royal
celebrations, theatre not only infiltrated the public sphere, but the public became
necessary participants in these spectacles. As mentioned earlier, Maravall insists that
during the Spanish Baroque the participation of the audience was necessary for
persuading the people, for moving the psyches of the public and for winning their wills.
Persuasive techniques could effectively channel the masses and successful persuasion
demanded the public’s active role in the work (Culture of the Baroque 74-77). Through
this engagement with the art, the hearts and minds of the audience become activated and
open to suggestion. One teary-eyed older woman who was interviewed after seeing
Mapa/Corpo reacted as such: “When he [the New Barbarian] reached out [his] hand to
me and I took it, it was almost like looking Christ in the eyes. The whole performance
was very strong, almost impossible to describe. I was deeply moved” (La Pocha Nostra).
The feelings expressed by this woman demonstrate how Mapa/Corpo touched her in the
same way that baroque public spectacles affected their audiences and in the same way
that Antonio de Roa, with all of his interactive performances of suffering, moved his
indigenous converts to tears. Following in the tradition of the baroque public spectacle,
La Pocha Nostra also elicits the participation of its audiences, encouraging their
emotional and extra-rational engagement. These performances erase the boundaries
separating spectators and spectacle, suspending all normal subject-object dualisms. As
Gómez-Peña affirms, within this “de-militarised zone” of the performance, “the distance
between ‘us’ and ‘them’, self and other, art and life, becomes blurry and non-specific”
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(“In Defence of Performance Art” 78). Within this participatory co-extensive liminoid
space, the audience member no longer observes the spectacle objectively, but rather, he
or she has entered another way of apprehending the event, an understanding achieved
only through participation and a “surrender of the inner self to become something else”
(Turnbull 76).
Moreover, when the infirm bloody cholo—the New Barbarian—reached out to the
older woman, he did not only touch her on an emotional level; but rather, the emotion
provided a point of access into the woman’s psychology, potentially sparking an internal
transformation. Reaching out to this woman, the New Barbarian was either begging for
assistance or pleading for her compassion, and his Christ-like persona activated a feeling
in her heart which could potentially inspire a certain socio-political consciousness.
Perhaps if more people could see the suffering Christs in cholos and the anguished saints
in marginalized others, the world would be a different place. The use of co-extensive
space allows for a personal and emotional relation with the performers and the
performance which, intensified with affective religious imagery, persuades the public
towards La Pocha Nostra’s political agenda. The depth of this persuasion can only be
achieved through inducing an alternative state of understanding, a feeling state.
Having achieved a temporary loss of personal identity and finding themselves in
an alternate state of understanding, the audience has joined the performers, crossing over
into their liminoid space, a space for transformative theatrical play and invention, a space
which becomes a laboratory of new ideas possessing the potential to become formative
practices within the outside world. Provoking change outside the performance is an ideal
of La Pocha Nostra, as documented in their 2004 manifesto: “If we learn to cross borders
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on stage, we may learn how to do so in larger social spheres. We hope others will be
challenged to do the same” (Gómez-Peña et al. 2). In other words, the transformative
behaviour of pushing or transgressing boundaries within performance will hopefully lead
to the formation of new ideas and practices in the exterior world. Liminal spaces grant a
degree of freedom to the audience, allowing for a certain spontaneity from which
previously unknown or occluded ideas, desires, or fears can spring forth. La Pocha Nostra
believes that “performance furthers dialogue by creating various pathways, trajectories,
and unsuspected intersections which are mostly discovered/learned through the body and
later circulated through language and action” (Gómez-Peña et al. 6).
Thus, by beginning with the corporeal and the senses, performance transforms the
mind and thoughts of the participant, a transformation which is later translated into the
intellectual faculties involving language and action. This strategy conforms thoroughly
with baroque principles and their insistence on communicating metaphysical concepts by
way of the body, the physical, and the sensual. This strategy also constitutes a defining
character of baroque art, as exemplified by the expressive plasticity of works like
Bernini’s Santa Teresa (fig. 26). In order to understand this sculpture’s metaphysical
content, we must first explore the sensual corporeal experience of sexual ecstasy.
Conversely, we can achieve the understanding of new ideas by first articulating them
with the performative body. Gómez-Peña reveals his thoroughly baroque way of thinking
when he states:
[La Pocha Nostra’s] system of thought tends to be both emotionally and
corporeally based. In fact, the performance always begins with our skin
and muscles, projects itself onto the social sphere, and returns via our
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psyche to our body and into our blood stream, only to be refracted back
into the world via documentation. Whatever thoughts we can’t embody,
we tend to distrust. (“In Defence of Performance Art” 80)
Moreover, La Pocha Nostra goes beyond a mere contemplation of ineffable abstractions
achieved through corporeal visualizations; rather, the participants (audience and
performers) are invited to use their bodies in ways which diverge from the patterns of
everyday life. It is the very use of their bodies that not only grants the participants an
understanding unattainable though the intellect alone, but also fuels the flow of thought
and creative activity.
Fig. 26. Bernini’s Santa Teresa: understanding achieved through the
corporeal.
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The final baroque ordering technique employed by La Pocha Nostra is that of
seriality. Omar Calabrese cites seriality as being a defining characteristic of the baroque
in the sense that it offers an identical process to that of “variations on a theme” (40). Not
only is each of La Pocha Nostra’s performance pieces repeated variably in different
locations and at different times, but some works have also been purposefully ordered into
series. Thus, La Pocha Nostra’s performances present us with a system based on
transformation, a process invoking the baroque qualities of instability and mutability.
Each performance presents a variation on a theme, a metamorphosis from the original
idea. For example, Mapa/Corpo I is based on the ideas of neo-colonization and the post
9/11 body politic and, having been performed during the Iraq war and occupation, it
presents allegories of protest against the former Bush administration. Mapa Corpo II is a
post-war mutation of the first Mapa/Corpo, integrating “living saints of unpopular causes
(border crossers, undocumented migrants, prisoners, infirm and displaced invisible
others)” with the end of expressing a “radical spirituality located in the body that
emerged out of the debris of war.” Mapa/Corpo III is a variation informed by the post-
Bush world and articulates the new culture emerging with the election of Barack Obama
and the healing and cultural reconstruction necessary after the destructive legacy of the
post 9/11 era (“Pocha Projects 2010”). The recent works of Gómez-Peña and La Pocha
Nostra exhibit a serial transformative character, basing their performances on a core idea
and presenting variations of this idea depending on their present circumstances. Like an
intelligent organism, each work transforms and adjusts itself according to its socio-
political environment. The power of Goméz-Peña and La Pocha Nostra’s transformative
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performances lies in their adaptive capacity to express the concerns of a rapidly changing
world.
However, seriality invokes yet another baroque principle: abundance. Seeing as
one singular performance work cannot provide the communicative power necessary for
articulating the vastness of what an entire series intends to express, the performances
need to accumulate, ensuring that the sum total of performances with all of their
variations approximate the intended meaning. This baroque proliferation points to one
affirmation: the inefficacy of communication. There is so much to say, so many stories, a
multiplicity of perspectives, so many fears, desires, and imaginings and yet human
communication is insufficient to express this. “The language of abundance is also the
language of insufficiency” (Fuentes 67) and Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra’s
proliferating performances attest to the obstinate struggle to communicate despite
language’s inherent insufficiencies, refusing to limit a show’s expressive potential to one
invariable work. Instead, these series choose to grow, change, engender more
performances, and extend their tentacles around their environs until they can better
articulate the variety of ideas that they intend to express.
Conclusion
La Pocha Nostra appropriates and transforms baroque traditions relating to
allegory, hagiography and proto-ethnography because of the powerful ways in which
these traditions can express abstract concepts through the visceral human body, inciting
sensorial, emotional, and intellectual understanding and communicating through the
visual codes of gender and race. However, what renders these reinvented traditions
particularly powerful is the neobaroque spaces in which they unfold.
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Essentially, La Pocha Nostra uses baroque ordering to communicate its worldview
and to provoke a mentally engaged state in its audience. The combination of excess
stimuli, the freedom of a total environment, and the involvement of the audience causes
La Pocha Nostra’s work to stand out from both established theatre and also from colder,
more inaccessibly intellectual performance works. As one audience member expressed,
after having seen Mapa/Corpo:
I’m not used to this kind of performance. It was a very strong experience
that touched me. I think it’s very good when someone uses art to put a
spotlight on political issues like this. This was not a performance for just
the head, but for both head and heart. Then it becomes great art for me,
when both those elements are present in a performance. (La Pocha Nostra)
This performance was so markedly different from any of those previously seen by this
audience member because Mapa/Corpo was a baroque performance: it not only spoke to
the intellect, but to the emotions as well. Maravall asserts that, in the Baroque, among the
trifold aim of delectare-docere-movere (to delight, to teach, to move the affections),
movere “was the end to be obtained” (Culture of the Baroque 77). Likewise, Gómez-
Peña relies on extra-rational and emotive sensibilities in order to move his spectators,
much in the same way as Antonio de Roa moved the indigenous people to tears with his
interactive displays of suffering. Just as de Roa used engaging, spiritual exuberance to
win his audience, La Pocha Nostra uses the same strategies to sway their audiences
towards their own ideologies.
However, La Pocha Nostra does not employ emotive theatricality in order to teach
its audience in the programmatic way of the Baroque absolutism; rather, it provides
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works of sufficient complexity and ambiguity to allow the spectators the freedom to
construe their own meanings, entailing a process of self-directed thought and learning. La
Pocha Nostra’s aim of moving the public not only focuses on winning their hearts and
minds, but also on how to open their hearts and engage their minds in ways that could
eventually translate into action outside the boundaries of the performance. Unlike the
guided culture of the Baroque and unlike Antonio de Roa’s hyper-emotive spiritual
demonstrations, Gómez-Peña’s neobaroque techniques provoke transformative political
thought and question established identities as well. His politically-charged works are
meant to activate the spectator and, for this reason, he chooses neobaroque techniques in
order to engage the corporeal senses, the emotions, and the minds of his public. The
works of La Pocha Nostra encourage public dialogue, allowing the artist to enter into the
public sphere and, conversely, allowing the public to enter the world of art. This fluid co-
extension of space is supported by La Pocha Nostra’s belief that the artist is an active
citizen whose place is the world, el mundo (Gómez-Peña et al. 2), and if we are indeed
living in El gran teatro del mundo, Mr. Gómez-Peña would like to open its doors and rip
out its seats!
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Chapter 3
Amalia Mesa-Bains’s Domesticana Baroque
Sor Juana's Library, Emblems of the Decade, Vanitas, Der Wünderkammer, Altar
for Santa Teresa de Ávila, Curiositas: the Cabinet: The names of Amalia Mesa-Bains’s
works by themselves explicitly reference the Baroque age and its conventions. At first
sight, this neobaroque revisiting becomes immediately apparent: the viewer is bombarded
with drapery, folds, curlicues, an excess of objects, ribbons calling out their inscriptions,
hybridized Catholic altars, organic detritus, lace, saints, miniature galleons, ornate frames,
still-lifes, mirrors, letter racks à la Cornelis Gysbrechts, devotional candles, emblematic
texts, cherubs, veils, and skulls. The works of Amalia Mesa-Bains go beyond a simple
continuance of Mexican baroque style; rather, they effect an affirmation and
revitalization of the Mexican colonial aesthetics which have endured into the present-day,
preserved in the fecund protective womb of the domestic sphere.
Mesa-Bains’s works exude the baroque; and not only in the aesthetic sense, but
also in their referencing of baroque history and culture. For example, Venus Envy II
includes a recreated study of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, invoking Nueva España’s most
exceptional author and thinker. The nun’s desk references the baroque convention of the
vanitas painting, displaying a diverse collection of objects, including a skull, representing
the ephemeral quality of life and the inevitability of everlasting death. The baroque
citation continues: behind Sor Juana’s desk is a reproduction of Velázquez’s Venus del
espejo. Venus Envy III includes a wünderkammer, reminiscent of the baroque curiosity
cabinets which sought to generate wonder through the marvellous and were motivated by
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the “desire to bring all knowledge into a single space” (Mauriès 9). As noted in a
previous chapter, during the Enlightenment the wünderkammer became more analytical
and didactic in character, separating its contents into discrete fields of knowledge.20
The
most notable epistemological separation occurred between naturalia and artificialia,
from which emerged the conventions of the natural history museum and the art gallery
(Mauriès 185). Thus, by referencing the wünderkammer, Mesa-Bains speaks of the
treatment of knowledge and the shifting worldviews between the Baroque and modernity.
Beside Mesa-Bains’s wünderkammer we find a letter rack, referencing the trompe l’oeil
paintings so prominent in the 17th
-century Flemish school (for example, Cornelis
Gysbrechts’ A Letter Rack/Trompe l’oeil). The viscous saturation of baroque references
throughout Mesa-Bains’s installations offers more than just a simple tip of the hat to the
masters of the 17th
century. Rather, these winks and nods to the 1600’s invite the viewer
to read this installation from a baroque viewpoint and, when the spectator enters into this
mode of baroque seeing, Mesa-Bains’s works seem to explode with meaning.
Amalia Mesa-Bains and her domesticana baroque
Amalia Mesa-Bains is the singularly most successful Chicana artist. Although
many other Chicanas have enjoyed considerable fame—notably, Yolanda López and
Esther Hernández—, Mesa-Bains has enjoyed mainstream success, having been
represented by Miami’s Bernice Steinbaum Gallery (Pérez, Chicana Art 87) and winning
a MacArthur fellowship award (Griffith 1). She holds a BA in fine art, an MA in history
and education, and a PhD in psychology and, like many Chicana/o intellectuals, she
20
For example, the collections of Joseph Bonnier de Mosson (1702-1744) “were housed in an enfilade of
rooms in his hôtel particulier […], devoted successively to anatomy, chemistry, pharmacy, drugs, lathes
and specialized tools, natural history […], prints and rare books, mechanics, and physics” (Mauriès 189).
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wears many hats: she is an activist, a critic, an artist, a teacher, a psychologist, a
researcher, and an author (Weintraub 92). One of her greatest critical contributions to the
field is her elaboration of domesticana, a Chicana sensibility similar to the rasquachismo
theorized by Tomás Ýbarra-Frausto. While sharing many of the same characteristics as
rasquachismo—accumulation, subversive play, ornamentation, collections of disparate
objects, etc.—, domesticana emerges from the particular environment of feminine spaces
and their association with the traditional practices of sustaining memory and alternative
(folk) spiritualities, spaces which also express covert defiance to the limits imposed by
patriarchy and Anglo hegemony. For this reason, domesticana results from a tension
between the affirming and criticizing the domestic sphere (Mesa-Bains 5).
As with the rasquache worldview and practices outlined in the introduction of this
dissertation, domesticana also parallels the baroque in multiple ways, albeit from a
specifically female Chicana/Mexicana context. However, Amalia Mesa-Bains employs
these domesticana baroque strategies to speak of themes which transcend her local
context—notably, those relating to knowledge and power, identities, and gender’s
relation to the configuration of interior/exterior social spaces—, while simultaneously
speaking of aspects relating to her personal life and the Chicana experience. Domesticana
makes the realization that the private is also public: a slightly different but interrelated
continuance of the same fold. Entering the interior worlds formed by Mesa-Bains’s
domesticana cosmovision, this chapter will focus on three baroque themes. The first
theme will involve the convention of the wünderkammer and its elaboration of
knowledge systems and their various ways of ordering the world, the second will use the
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baroque trope of the mirror to speak of female subjectivities, and the third will focus on
feminine interior spaces through Deleuze’s conceptual device of the fold.
Der wünderkammer: baroque knowledge in the works of Amalia Mesa-Bains
Several of Amalia Mesa-Bains’s installations speak of the relationship between
representation, knowledge, and power, particularly within the domains of art and science.
In Vanitas: Evidence, Ruin, Regeneration, the artist uses the baroque conventions of the
wünderkammer and the vanitas painting to show how these traditions have dehumanized
colonized others by transforming them into symbols of wealth or objects of scientific
study. Mesa-Bains also references the wünderkammer to draw attention to Western
modernity’s separation of knowledge into discrete fields of study. In installations such as
The Library of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the artist counters the fragmentation of
knowledge systems by creating spaces in which the scientific coexists with folk medicine,
spirituality, and cultural memory. In a way that parallels the baroque wünderkammer’s
“desire to bring all knowledge into a single space” (Mauriès 9), Amalia Mesa-Bains is
invoking a baroque understanding of knowledge as an expansive and inclusive system
holding multiple elements from various traditions. In The Curandera’s Botánica, Mesa-
Bains elaborates on this baroque understanding, adapting it into her own utopian model
for healing by combining science with other culturally-specific understandings which
take into account the various psychological, spiritual, and physical needs implicit in the
process of holistic wellbeing. While Vanitas: Evidence, Ruin, Regeneration not only
condemns the way that various disciplines have constructed discourses as tools of
domination over racial and cultural others, but also criticizes the way in which scientific
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study separated the body from the spirit, The Library of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
provides an alternative to this oppressive and divisive understanding, an alternative which
is appropriated and transformed in The Curandera’s Botánica to suit the artist’s particular
personal and cultural context.
Fig. 27. Amalia Mesa-Bains, Vanitas: Evidence, Ruin, Regeneration, 1993. Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell
University. (González 143)
Vanitas: Evidence, Ruin, Regeneration
The installation, Vanitas: Evidence, Ruin, Regeneration (fig. 27), visualizes the
contradictory relationship between the scientific impulses of the wünderkammer and the
spiritual themes of vanitas which often accompanied the cabinets of curiosity. The
installation pullulates with references to scientific inquiry. The piece is centered around
an autopsy table which is surrounded by scientific instruments, including microscopes,
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magnifying glasses, and a telescope. The objects of study include “feathers, animal skins,
glass vials filled with grain, dried citrus fruit […], and old maps” (González 142) as well
as figurines and images of indigenous and African peoples. In addition, Mesa-Bains
references the vanitas tradition, including a skull on the autopsy/display table, wilting
flowers, and most strikingly, a reproduction of David Bailly’s painting, Vanitas with
Negro Boy (fig. 28).
Fig. 28. David Bailly, Vanitas with Negro Boy
It was precisely the unstable character of the natural and human world (the
baroque world) that propelled the cult of the wünderkammer. According to Patrick
Mauriès, the owners of the wünderkammern “preferred the immutable and unmoving
nature of objects to the illusions of a world in a constant state of flux and the turbulence
of the human passions” (7). The expansion of European empires into new territories and
the consequent encounters with diverse peoples and species caused a crisis in the classical
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ordering of the world. This disruption in the ordering of the universe provoked a new
desire to establish meaning, hence the curiosity cabinets were sought to internalize the
chaos of the world by “imposing upon it systems—however arbitrary—of symmetries
and hierarchies” (Mauriès 12). Thus, the baroque wünderkammer was partially born from
classicist impulses. These impulses, as previously noted, coincided with the growth of
Enlightenment sensibilities which transformed the curiosity cabinets into highly ordered
systems of display which divided collections into categories pertaining to different fields
of knowledge. The impure space of the wünderkammer and its predilection for marvels
had given way to a new cosmovision and “there was no place for the inexplicable or the
bizarre in a culture that demanded, then as now, a reality that was on the way to being
explained” (Mauriès 194).
However, the wünderkammern expressed concepts that contradicted their attempts
to fix and systematize the immutable and chaotic nature of the world. The curiosity
cabinets of the Baroque often infused themes of vanitas into their displays, incorporating
the characteristic tropes of the skull and the hourglass to speak of worldly transience.
Arthur MacGregor sees vanitas as a persistent theme throughout the early wünderkammer
(52), the most notable example being that of Frederik Ruysch who created fantastical
tableaux landscapes of posed foetal skeletons (fig. 29) (33). Certainly, the advances in
anatomical studies and the new practice of the autopsy contributed to the already
established traditions of vanitas and memento mori, intersecting in a space breaching
science, art, and religion. Arthur MacGregor details the collections belonging to several
medical schools, such as the Anatomy Theatre at Leiden where during the 17th
century
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series of skeletons, human and animal, were arranged in the form of
tableaux—one pair as Adam and Eve, other human skeletons mounted on
horses and cattle, several of them supporting pennants inscribed with
reminders of the transience of life—‘Memento mori’; ‘Pulvis et umbra
sumus.’ (39)
Thus, any attempt by the wünderkammer to fix the transience of life is simultaneously
contradicted by its insistence on the ephemeral nature of the physical world.
Fig. 29. Frederik Ruysch's tableaux landscapes of foetal skeletons
The wünderkammer infused with the themes of memento mori and vanitas is
essentially contradictory because the wünderkammer is driven by “a lust to possess” the
world (Mauriès 66), while vanitas serves as a constant reminder that all worldly
possessions are ephemeral trifles which hold little value when considering the gravity of
everlasting death.
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Driven by the desire to possess the world, the wünderkammer performs the
representative function of displaying the expansiveness of the empire and the domination
of nature. Cultural fragments from foreign lands served as signs denoting the empire’s
spheres of influence, while objects collected from the natural world served as material
manifestations which synechdochically represented conquered lands. This representation
extended to the human world and the colonized other who became an object of study
under the emerging proto-ethnographic lense. Referencing the colonial beginnings of
ethnography, Mesa-Bains juxtaposes images and figures of African and indigenous
peoples with devices for examination, such as microscopes and magnifying glasses.
Jennifer González sees this juxtaposition as a commentary on how “the African diaspora
and indigenous populations […] were subject to devices of observation, speculation,
measurement, and investigation” (142). However, scientific investigation is neither
harmless nor objective; rather, it has the capacity to possess its object of study by
imposing meaning on it. Hence, the wünderkammer can provide a visual representation of
domination, effected through the construction of knowledge surrounding the colonized
other.
However, this desire to possess the world and its human inhabitants extends into
the representational world of art, giving the vanitas painting its own wünderkammer-like
quality. Like the wünderkammer, the oil painting is motivated by the desire to own
precious objects as “oil paintings often depict things. Things which in reality are buyable”
(Berger 83). In his Ways of Seeing John Berger explains how the oil painting was able to
reproduce the tangibility of objects to the point where owning the image of an object was
similar to actually owning the object itself, thus making appearances into commodities
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(83, 87). Still-life and vanitas paintings are most representative of the desire to possess
and to display riches, as they typically visualize commodities: sumptuous textiles,
musical instruments, shells, pearls, heaps of food, coins, books, etc. These displays of
wealth and power also included the depictions of African servants or slaves, as seen in
Bailly’s Vanitas with Negro Boy, The Paston Treasure (depicting the wünderkammer of
Robert Paston, 1st Earl of Yarmouth), or de Witte’s Admiral de Ruyter at Elmina Castle.
Jennifer González notes that Bailly’s painting “recalled a history of slavery that was
materialist in all its forms. As an object to be put on display, the dark-skinned body of the
young boy became a sign of wealth and power for the absent master” (142).
The motivation to represent material wealth conflicts with the core philosophy of
vanitas, the idea that the luxuries of the world are fleeting and that their value is illusory.
Though Bailly’s painting, Vanitas with Negro Boy, includes the typical signs denoting
life’s brevity—flowers, a skull, an hourglass, and bubbles—, the purpose of signs
denoting the ephemeral character of wealth is much more ambiguous. This ambiguity
stems from the fact that the moralizing message of vanitas denies the values of mundane
luxuries and pleasures, while the oil painting serves to exalt the material wealth of its
owner. Thus, the convention of vanitas provides a moralizing tone to paintings,
essentially allowing the owner of the painting to escape condemnation for the sin of
vanity. Consequently, the vanitas convention gives Bailly the excuse to paint his African
servant, ostensibly to speak of the brevity of the boy’s life, while the main motivation for
including the servant is to display the painter’s wealth. Much like the wünderkammer, the
oil painting was motivated by the desire to possess the world and to show this possession
through representative signs.
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Thus, in Vanitas: Evidence, Ruin, Regeneration the representational world of the
painting is conflated with the representational world of the wünderkammer, their
juxtaposition within the same installation emphasizing how both conventions operate on
symbolic practices which enforce messages of wealth and power. Like Bailly’s Vanitas,
the autopsy/display table shows how natural science and ethnography relied on
representative techniques as a way of promoting their Eurocentric worldview and
displaying Western power over other peoples and knowledges. As previously noted, the
wünderkammer was dependent on representative display to show the expansiveness of the
empire and the domination of the natural world. The collection of objects and images
denoting colonized others not only speaks of the objectification of human beings through
scientific examination, but of how ethnographic practices present these colonized others
in a way which symbolically enforces hegemonic power.
Examining, investigating, and dominating the natural and human world are
granted at the expense of more profound and often spiritual understandings. In addition to
the naturalia (feathers, animal skins, vials of grains, dried fruit) which serve as objects of
scientific study, the installation also references the study of the human body through the
inclusion of the autopsy table: a site for investigating mysterious corporeal workings.
Patricia Saldarriaga notes how the 17th
-century beginnings of autopsy marked the
impossibility of a body-soul unity (20), a division criticised by Mesa-Bains throughout
her installation. The body of the autopsy and the naturalia of the wünderkammern
provide only ‘shells’ of their living selves removed from their natural context and,
effectively, drained of their spirit. Consequently, any attempt to comprehend the
mysteries of life through the examination of these objects will result in limited and
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perhaps erroneous understandings. In this way, the examination of these natural objects
parallels the ethnographic investigation of the indigenous and African figures, in the
sense that these people have also been taken out of their cultural context and analysed
only as shells of their selves, based on superficial and erroneous understandings. Like the
autopsy-related practices which led to the divorce between the body and the spirit, the
advance of scientific study effected a separation between the material and the spirit
through its objectification of the human and natural worlds. Ultimately, Amalia Mesa-
Bains is criticizing this schism between physical and spiritual worlds, pointing out how
scientific objectification robbed colonized peoples of their humanity, a humanity residing
in the universal concept of the human soul.
Finally, in an attempt to remedy the schism between body and spirit, Amalia
Mesa-Bains evokes a New World alternative to vanitas by alluding to the Day of the
Dead. The artist constructed archways from marigolds, the characteristic flower of the
Day of the Dead, and the spectators would pass through these archways to enter the
installation (González 141). The flowers performed the fleetingness of life as they “first
wilted, then dropped their petals slowly over the course of the exhibition, enacting in real
time the ephemeral condition of life” (González 141). The ephemeral nature of the
material world represented by the wilting marigolds runs parallel to the ideology of
vanitas, and indeed Mesoamerican culture emphasized the brevity of worldly life.
However, the Mexica cosmovision underlying the celebrations of the Day of the Dead
offers something that vanitas cannot: regeneration. The theme of regeneration is
referenced in the title of the installation, Vanitas: Evidence, Ruin, Regeneration, pointing
to the fact that the Mexica holy day did not only pay tribute to the dead, but was also a
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celebration of rebirth. By referencing a day in which the realm of the spirits flows into
and the physical world of the living, Mesa-Bains evokes the Mexica recognition of a
spiritual world existing in close proximity to the material world, hence providing an
alternative to Western science’s epistemological split between the world of the eternal
soul and the physical world of bodies seen as transient vessels of decaying flesh.
The Library of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
The Library of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (fig. 30) is part of a larger installation
titled, Venus Envy II: The Harem and other Enclosures. Sor Juana’s re-created library is
dominated by a large desk which overflows in a horror vacui of various objects. All of
these objects in their totality point to the diverse and generous conception of knowledge
of the New World Baroque, of which Sor Juana presents an exemplary case. As a figure,
Sor Juana embodies a vast and inclusive envisioning of knowledge and the world. Not
only did she excel in many disciplines, such as math, science, art, music, and writing, but
she included the non-European in her studies and writings, incorporating Nahua and
African elements into her villancicos.21
Her desk is an allegory filled with fragments
referencing diverse disciplines of study and knowledges from various cultures, countering
the Enlightenment’s isolation of the disciplines into separate fields. Instead, Mesa-Bains
has created a space where science coexists with religion and the arts and where
mainstream Western knowledge practices coexist with those belonging to indigenous and
popular spheres. An added dimension to this heterogeneous pooling of knowledges is the
inclusion of cultural memory through photographs and documents relevant to the
Chicana/Latina experience.
21
As mentioned in the previous chapter, one of Sor Juana’s villancicos was written entirely in Nahuatl
while another incorporated African voices (Paz 317).
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Fig. 30. Amalia Mesa-Bains, The Library of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1994. William College
Museum of Art. Photo: Nicholas Whitman. (Pérez, Chicana Art 103)
The desk in The Library of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz displays objects related to
scientific pursuits: magnifying glasses, callipers, surgical scissors, and chemistry
equipment. However, in addition to these items, one can see bundles of healing herbs,
magic soaps and powders bought from botánicas, and a milagro heart. These medicines
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and potions add a folk and mestizo- indigenous aspect to Western science, amplifying it
beyond the limits defined by its rational empiricism by including alternative knowledges
which have a spiritual or magical dimension. According to Jennifer González, “Sor Juana
believed that scientific research into natural phenomena would inspire spiritual devotion
rather than challenge religion” (157) and in Sor Juana’s study one sees material evidence
of science’s coexistence with other domains of knowledge. Given that during this period
of time the analytical study of the physical nature of the natural world was not only a new
practice but one that was potentially perilous (Cook 12), Sor Juana’s interest in natural
science was undoubtedly transgressive.22
Within the context of the installation, these
referents of Western and non-Western science spatially coexist without conflict in the
desk’s accumulation of objects as if they were all part of one heterogeneous mass. For
example, the burner, magic soaps, magnifying glass, and healing herbs all occupy the
same space, overlapping and making contact with each other. By the spatial arrangement
of these material referents, the desk allegorizes the interrelatedness and compatibility
between these knowledge systems.
However, this allegory of baroque knowledge goes beyond collapsing the limits
separating science from other disciplines. The table also showcases antique globes,
photographs of buildings, a violin, statues of saints, a Mesoamerican-style codex
22
For example, though Vicencio Juan de Lastanosa (1607-1681), the owner of Spain’s most celebrated
wünderkammern, collected very little naturalia, he was “strongly criticized by Gracián as leading away
from moral philosophy” (Cook 11). Harold J. Cook attests that during this time “there was a very real and
serious danger arising from the study of natural bodies: the separation of moral knowledge from the study
of nature” (11). In contrast, Sor Juana’s parallel cultivation of her spiritual devotion and her knowledge of
the world closely approximates the attitude of the novatores. In the time of the novatores a “curiosidad
innovadora” (Pérez-Magallón 32) emerged which questioned of all established truths and adhered to the
belief in man’s intelligence, his capacity for reason, and his ability to observe reality (33). This vision of
man and the world was a “nueva percepción del papel del individuo que no descarta, sin embargo, la
creencia religiosa, pero que la sitúa en un plano paralelo, e incluso superior, y que no influye en el proceso
de conocimiento sobre las cosas reales ni en las normas de la vida privada o la coexistencia colectiva”
(Pérez-Magallón 33).
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manuscript, indigenous pottery/sculpture, and lotería cards. This desk display neither
recognizes separations between disciplines nor between official culture and folk culture:
science, cartography, photography, architecture, music, and religion exist alongside folk
Catholicism, indigenous literature and arts, as well as Mexican popular culture. Amalia
Mesa-Bains has harnessed the inclusive baroque vision of knowledge to explode the
imposed limits between the Western and the non-Western and between official and
marginalized cultures. This pre-Enlightenment view of the world, embodied in the desk
allegorizing the extensive and inclusive thought of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, counters the
divisions and hierarchies of knowledge characteristic of the Enlightenment, which
privileged Western epistemology over the knowledge systems of the colonized, leading to
a devaluation of indigenous and mestizo cultures.
From the position of a Chicana/o, the Western world’s devaluation of indigenous
and mestizo knowledge, culture, and history holds particular significance. Living within a
country which has erased Mexican-Americans from the narrative of the US creates a
consciousness of how the dominant forces of society determine what knowledge is
valuable in order to enforce an ideology that sustains power. Chicanas/os therefore look
back to their past in an attempt to recover what was erased, and use the ideas and symbols
of this marginalized history to create identities and to re-establish the value of their
heritage. The vision of knowledge, culture, and history embodied in the thinking of Sor
Juana Inés de la Cruz as represented in the allegory of her desk is appealing to the
Chicana/o consciousness, precisely because of its lack of epistemological hierarchies and
its inclusiveness of multiple histories and cultures.
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Perhaps this is why Amalia Mesa-Bains chose to include a photograph of her
grandmother in the installation: as a way of linking these multiple histories to the
Chicana/o collective memory. By including the photograph, the artist is linking her own
history and cultural memory to the historical colonial baroque worldview represented by
Sor Juana’s desk, establishing conceptual linkages which defy chronological time. The
interpretative consequences of this anachronism are multiple. On one hand, the photo
places Sor Juana within a Mexican-American context, provoking the establishment of
connections between Sor Juana’s worldview and the Chicana/o cosmovision. We can see
Sor Juana as a proto-Xicanista, the original Chicana feminist who researches indigenous
history and culture in an attempt to extract value from it and to adapt it to her present
context, fostering powerful and multivocal understandings of a pluricultural reality. On
the other hand, the inclusion of the photo could compare the Mexican-American woman
to Sor Juana, showing that these women, despite the harsh environment in which they
live, have maintained their cultural knowledge by allowing it to thrive despite the
limitations imposed on them by their surrounding social world.
The linkages between Sor Juana and contemporary Latina feminists continue in
another part of the installation, Sor Juana’s reading room. Before the installation was set
up at Williams College in Massachusetts, female students had protested, demanding that
the university hire a Latina professor. Mesa-Bains collected articles and video stills of the
protest and added them to the wall of Sor Juana’s library (González 158), showing how
these struggles of women, whose intellectual success is impeded by imposed gender and
class-based limits, form an intimate part of a larger historical struggle. The Latina student
protest called for the inclusion of marginalized voices as a way of extending the teaching
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of history and culture beyond the canon, an effective way of valuing marginalized
histories and cultures. In much the same way, Sor Juana’s inclusion of Nahua and African
voices in her writings also extended her work beyond the canon and served as a way of
valuing the non-European, and of including these non-Western subjects into her
imagining of a Mexican community.
Essentially, Amalia Mesa-Bains has found in Sor Juana a baroque and utopic
model of thinking which continues to be relevant in a complex contemporary reality in
which the effects of colonization are still present. The power of baroque thinking lies in
its ability to create new subjectivities which are, according to Boaventura de Sousa
Santos, “capaz de inventar y combinar conocimientos aparentemente incombinables”
(330). In this sense, de Sousa Santos sees the baroque as a model which when used can
result in creative and utopic imaginings of new possibilities (321). Through the thinking
of Sor Juana, Amalia Mesa-Bains looks to the baroque model as a way of constructing
creative and utopic imaginings. In this utopian understanding of knowledge, the past
coexists with and relates to the present, the Western and the non-Western are not
incompatible, and official and marginalized knowledges have been released from the
limits of their hierarchical ordering. This utopian model is expansive in scope, containing
a multiplicity of elements that, in their totality, creates a model of conceptualizing the
universe which is empowered by the diversity of its parts.
Finally, it is seemingly contradictory that the vanitas theme would be used in a
work that is thoroughly engaged in the materiality of culture as a way of constructing
identitary meaning for everyday living. The vanitas tradition was founded in the idea that
life was transient and meaningless when confronted with the inevitability of death.
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However, Amalia Mesa-Bains has transformed the vanitas conventions by way of the
substitution. While the artist keeps the characteristic skull and hourglass, she replaces the
ephemeral fruits and flowers with the ruins of history. These ruins do not metaphorize
decay, but rather, the persistence of history, albeit in fragmentary forms. Thus, this
vanitas by Amalia Mesa-Bains does not speak of the transitory meaninglessness of
worldly existence, but instead highlights the meaningfulness of existence, and how this
meaning is essential for Chicana cultural survival. The ruins of the past hold significance
for Chicana visionaries who employ their creative and critical archaeologies to construct
powerful identities which inspire the struggle for better futures.
The Curandera’s Botánica
The Curandera’s Botánica (fig. 31) was created in response to personal health
issues afflicting the artist and her family. In addition to having suffered from a lung
condition for years, Amalia Mesa-Bains was badly injured in a car accident. During this
period of time, she also lost her parents, her sister had a stroke, and her husband battled
cancer (Britt, no pagination). The Curandera’s Botánica is consequently an exploration
of physical healing as well as cultural and spiritual healing.
The Curandera’s Botánica, like The Library of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, creates
a hybrid mixing of Western science and indigenous/mestizo folk understandings of the
natural world. In much the same way that The Library of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
collapses the hierarchies of knowledge and the boundaries between disciplines, The
Curandera’s Botánica adds themes of cultural memory and spirituality to this
understanding of the natural world and the medical sciences. This lack of distinction
between categories not only stresses the interrelatedness shared by the material world and
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the cultural, psychological, and spiritual spheres, but also creates an effective system for
healing the broken Chicana body and soul, whether on an individual or a collective scale.
Fig. 31. Amalia Mesa-Bains, The Curandera’s Botánica, 2011. (“516arts show update”)
Like The Library of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, The Curandera’s Botánica
contains referents pointing to multiple registers and fields of knowledge. The burners,
flasks, clamps, and vials are interspersed with Catholic devotional candles while an
illuminated photographic print of the artist’s grandmother hangs above the table on the
gallery wall. Considering that Mesa-Bains wrote a book titled, The Curandera’s Book,
whose cover featured the very same photo of her grandmother, it is probable that the
artist’s grandmother was a curandera. According to Donald Munro, Mesa-Bains’s
grandmother “instilled in Mesa-Bains a respect for traditional healing remedies” (no
pagination). Underneath the palimpsest of the chemistry table lies a second tier holding
items referring to a more indigenous-mestizo rendering of medicine and its relation to the
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natural world. This shelf—lying between the chemical apparatuses and a terrain of pine
needles, lavender, grass, and shrubberies—constitutes an inbetween space straddling
natural and technological worlds. This shelf holds corn husks (symbolic of regeneration
and Mexican indigenousness), small statues of the Virgin Mary, antlers, moss, earth,
devotional candles, and eggs. Not only do eggs represent regeneration, but they are a key
tool of curanderismo, specifically for diagnosing el susto and, according to Amalia Mesa-
Bains, the serious trauma from her car accident gave her el susto, which she describes as
the state where “the soul is either dislodged or disrupted in some way” (in Britt, no
pagination).
However, the natural world and indigenous-mestizo understandings are not shown
as being discretely separate from Western knowledge; rather, the mutual dependence on
these domains is highlighted in The Curandera’s Botánica. The two-tiered table does not
serve to separate the Mexican indigenous-mestizo vision of healing from the Western
view of medicine: both levels include saints and devotional candles. Moreover, the legs
of the table connecting the two surfaces are decorated with twisting plants and tin
milagros, pointing to nature and folk spirituality’s trespassing into the realm of modern
medical practices. This chemist’s table reminds us that these medicines harness their
power from the natural world and, though modern medicine is effective for material
healing, it lacks the resources for spiritual healing. Amalia Mesa-Bains has included the
devotional candles to represent the spiritual element which completes the healing process.
The installation recalls the various medical practices in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God,
albeit Mesa-Bains has created a powerful hybrid of multiple healing traditions, while the
practices narrated by Castillo exist in separation. Conversely, Mesa-Bains has
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appropriated Western medicine and has imbibed it with elements pertaining to her own
cultural understanding and heritage, transforming it into something more suitable and
effective for her particular culturally-defined needs.
La cultura cura. Culture heals. Amalia Mesa-Bains takes this aphorism to heart,
making Chicana/o and Mexican cultural memory and identity an intrinsic part of this
healing process. First, the photo of the artist’s grandmother not only points to the
curandera as a healing figure, but to a whole wealth of indigenous and mestizo
knowledge which gives historic and cultural value to the Chicana/o community. She also
represents the ties to family and the community, and how they form an integral part of the
healing process, and not just for the individual, but for the collective.
The appropriation and transformation of culture can have a healing effect,
fostering connections capable of suturing a fractured community and producing
representations which can negotiate a colonial past as well as create a collective identity.
During the Baroque, the wünderkammer served as a microcosm of the greater world and
was a physical metaphor for the multiplicity of the world itself (Mauriès 237).
Confronted with a vast new territory whose unforeseen contents threatened to rupture the
classical systems that gave order to the universe, these curiosity cabinets, according to
Patrick Mauriès, were able to “establish a sense of continuity amid the disorder and
discontinuity of reality, the chaos of the outside world” (237). Similarly, Mesa-Bains’s
Curandera’s Botánica creates a sense of continuity between modern chemistry and
traditional indigenous/mestizo healing practices by locating referents to both fields of
knowledge within the same space, thus effecting a correlation between the two. By
establishing these connections, Mesa-Bains heals the rift between Western and
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indigenous knowledge systems. However, this bridging between worlds does not end
here. Just as the baroque wünderkammer was a theatrum mundi or a reproduction of the
universe on a smaller scale (Mauriès 23, 51), it is Mesa-Bains’s wish to inscribe this
universe with her own collective history and culture, creating a Chicana/Mexicana
microcosm within the bounds of the gallery walls.
Nonetheless, Mesa-Bains’s wünderkammer holds an ambivalent quality. On one
hand, its ability to include heterogeneity and to foster impure connections between
referents promotes a conception of the world which is beneficial for healing the fractures
caused by colonialism and the cultural hegemony imposed successively by Europe and
the US. On the other hand, her wünderkammer also evokes a history of colonialism
through its collection of marvels from distant lands, which did not serve to further any
crosscultural understanding, but instead served to produce wonder, “for wonder was the
keynote of the cabinet of curiosities, and the marvels of the collection, in all their far-
flung historical and geographic variety, were the fundamental components” (Mauriès 67).
As mentioned before, underlying this compulsion to collect was the “lust to possess”
(Mauriès 66) which paralleled the impulse to colonize. In appropriating the tradition of
the wünderkammer, Mesa-Bains is employing the neobaroque strategy of appropriation
and transformation with which, according to Celorio, the artist attempts to possess
cultural history while inciting playful criticisms or reflections on this legacy by
transforming it (102, 104-05). In this way, the artist negotiates colonial history by
affirming and rejecting its various aspects. Moreover, in The Curandera’s Botánica, the
curandera has appropriated the cabinet of curiosity and has transformed it into an
emblem of her communal identity, repairing a subjectivity fractured by colonialism and
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refashioning an identity from the ruins of history. The symbol which unifies this identity
is the large statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe who crowns the cabinet and who
encapsulates the indigenous, the mestizo, the spiritual, the earth mother Tonantzin, and
the processes of hybridization which have been a fundamental part of Mexican culture
since colonial times.
In much the same way that The Library of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz visualizes an
ideal baroque conceptualization of knowledge which includes a multiplicity of aspects,
The Curandera’s Botánica takes into account all aspects of healing to create a holistic
and effective system. Having the same mestiza sensibility for hybrid forms which has
existed since colonial times, Amalia Mesa-Bains creates her own utopian model for
healing, combining science with other culturally-specific understandings which take into
account the various psychological, spiritual, and physical needs specific to her worldview
and experience as a Chicana.
In summary, Mesa-Bains’s works explore the ambiguous nature of the
wünderkammer which attempts to dominate the world by imposing order and meaning on
it while simultaneously allowing for heterogeneity, inclusivity, and impure communions.
Whether criticizing or praising the wünderkammer, Amalia Mesa-Bains employs this
convention as a way of referencing baroque thought, its fervour of multiplicity and its
capacity to relate the apparently unrelatable. The wünderkammer represented the universe
and the collector attempted to “bring all knowledge into a single space” (Mauriès 9) as
well as to draw connections between the seemingly disparate, finding the hidden
analogies that existed behind a confusion of multiplicity (Mauriès 34). However, Mesa-
Bains takes a more novatora stance when she emphasizes the interdependent role of
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science and spirituality in the figure of Sor Juana, an interdependence which is
emphasized further in the Curandera’s Botánica where medical healing is facilitated by
folk spirituality as well as cultural memory and community. However, to say Mesa-Bains
promotes the novator’s cosmovision in which scientific inquiry can coexist with religious
devotion does not mean that the artist condones all types of scientific inquiry. While
scientists such as René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683-1757) suggested that
studying the natural world would inspire admiration toward God (Daston and Park 323),
this period of time also witnessed the schism between God’s works (naturalia) and
artificialia as well as the establishment of hierarchies of knowledges and the separations
between disciplines. Enlightenment thought put forth the idea that the world could be
explained which, in the proto-ethnographic practices of the 18th
century, went hand in
hand with the racist attitudes which bolstered hegemonic rule. Mesa-Bains criticizes the
use of science as a tool of oppression while promoting Sor Juana and the curandera’s
scientific novatora vision: one that is intimately connected to spiritual understanding,
multiple knowledges, and a sense of a larger heterodox community. Only the baroque
propensity for multiplicity and impure communions could perhaps bridge the gaps in
such a community, making it an appropriate vehicle for Mesa-Bains’s personal and
cultural healing. Taking the baroque model, allegorized by the wünderkammer, Mesa-
Bains finds a system capable not only of providing cohesion, but of rescuing and
preserving threatened histories and memories, transforming them into representations
holding strong contemporary relevance. If the goal of the baroque wünderkammer was to
create a vision of the world, Mesa-Bains’s wünderkammer-inspired installations also
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construct representations of different worlds; worlds that nonetheless connect themselves
to the present Chicana sphere and speak to present concerns and sensibilities.
The Mirror
The mirror “was a favourite trope of the historical baroque,” states Mieke Bal in
her Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (135). The 17th
-
century preference for the device of the mirror rests in the fact that it alludes to several
baroque concepts and themes: vanitas and memento mori, the illusiveness and deception
of appearances, and the growth of a new self-conscious and self-reflexive attitude. During
the baroque the mirror corresponded to the concept of vanitas. Vanity, the sin of devoting
oneself to worldly pleasures and appearances, is characterized by the mirror which
captures the successive fading of the viewer’s youth and beauty. As Lois Parkinson
Zamora notes, “during the Baroque period the mirror acquires a negative charge,”
becoming “a moralizing emblem, an emblem of vanitas” (17). Parkinson Zamora notes
how vanitas and memento mori fused during this period in which skulls regularly found
themselves alongside mirrors, “reminding the viewer of the speciousness of pleasure and
the falsity of appearance. Mirrors reflect only what is visible, whereas only what is
invisible is lasting and true” (17). Vanitas, however, touches on a greater theme which
pervades the baroque: the illusiveness and deception of appearances. The mirror provides
a representation of the physical self and, though the image may be a reflection of a
physical reality, it is still not the true, natural self. The image in the mirror is only a
fleeting vision of reflected light, yet another allusion to baroque impermanence. For
Mieke Bal, the mirror is emblematic of the blurry boundary existing between the real
object and its representation in the reflective surface (Quoting Caravaggio 228). The
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mirror, thus, creates confusion between subject and object, because the object, which is
the image of the self, ultimately participates in the formation of the subject. As Mieke Bal
affirms, “the mirror […] reflects the self back to the subject, thereby enabling the
formation of subjectivity that can exist in a cultural world” (Quoting Caravaggio 209).
The mirror also denotes the subjectivity which emerged during the Baroque as “during
the Baroque, the awareness of point of view led […] to something we now call self-
reflection, a self-consciousness of the individual” (Bal, Quoting Caravaggio 28). This
consciousness of self can be seen in baroque art as it attempts to return the gaze of the
spectator (Fuery and Fuery 27), the most obvious example being Velázquez’s Las
meninas in which the viewer’s gaze is not only returned by the painted figures, but is
complicated by the artist’s play with mirrors in which the viewers see themselves as King
Felipe IV and Queen Mariana. Baroque self-reflection was exemplified by those who
visited baroque museums (wünderkammern) who “understood themselves to be objects of
display. Rather than simply looking at objects, they were constantly looking through
objects and often looking at themselves to discern the meaning embedded in them”
(Findlen 303). Recognizing the spectators’ consciousness of being objects of display,
these museums often included mirrors. Of particular note is the collection of Ferdinando
Cospi who “placed a mirror directly overhead so that the visitors could picture
themselves in the museum, joined to the objects through its reflection” (Findlen 303),
amplifying the sense of self-consciousness and allowing the viewer to become part of the
museum’s spectacle. Thus, though the baroque mirror may have carried moralizing tones
cautioning against falling prey to the deceits of the illusory world, it also emblematized a
new way of seeing the self in relation to the world.
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The mirror presents a recurring motif in Amalia Mesa-Bains’s work. In Venus
Envy I: The First Holy Communion before the End, the mirror serves as a site where the
contradictions between sexuality and religious spirituality collide with indigenous
subjectivity. In Venus Envy II: The Harem and Other Enclosures, Sor Juana Inés de la
Cruz’s fractured mirror becomes a trope for the nun’s fractured mind-body relationship.
Finally, Venus Envy III: Cihuatlampa, The Place of the Giant Women evades these
contradictions and fragmentation by creating a utopic world where women can determine
their own identities without imposed social constraints.
Venus Envy I: First Holy Communion before the End
There are two references to Venus in Venus Envy I. The first is a small image of
Titian’s Venus of Urbino which is found in a display case housing dresses for communion,
confirmation, and marriage (fig. 32). The second reference more subtly points to
Velázquez’s Venus del espejo: the vanity table’s mirror has a small angel hanging on the
topmost part of the rococo frame (fig. 33), citing the cherub, Cupid, who holds up
Venus’s mirror so that the goddess may see her reflection.
The Venuses carry problematic aspects before even being placed within the
installation piece. First, the underlying motivation behind the painting of the Venuses was
not to glorify any sense of the divine feminine power befitting of a goddess, but rather, to
give satisfaction to the male viewer. For this reason, both the Venus of Urbino and the
Venus del espejo have been crafted as sexually-charged works which address the male
spectator, ultimately bestowing upon him the power in this image-based relationship and
rendering the goddess powerless. The absence of obvious allusions to the Goddess of
Love in Titian’s painting has led some critics to insist that Titian’s Venus de Urbino is
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not a representation of divinity at all, but is simply a portrait of a nude woman. Roberto
Zapperi asserts that “the painting known today as the Venus of Urbino simply shows a
nude woman lying on a bed, as her servants in the background attend to her clothes”
(163). In fact, Maria Loh notes that this Venus was known simply as la donna nuda until
1568 when “it was christened as a ‘venus’ by Vasari” (33). Like the Venus of Urbino,
Velázquez’s Venus del espejo also can be interpreted as a idealization and eroticization of
female beauty. Instead of representing divinity, she is the image of beauty itself, a
material beauty which, according to Christie Davies, excludes any notion of spirituality:
“The classical setting is an excuse for a very material aesthetic sexuality—not sex, as
such, but an appreciation of the beauty that accompanies attraction” (55). The idealization
of material beauty is inseparable from eroticization and the Venus de Urbino has been
interpreted as a highly sexually-charged work. Countering the modesty of the classical
Venus pudica, in which the goddess covers her pubis with her hand, Kelly Dennis asserts
that the painting insinuates masturbation as well as an erotic engagement with the viewer
given that the donna nuda “coyly acknowledges the viewer as she caresses herself” (29).
She also argues that the reason why the Venus de Urbino has often been viewed as an
obscene work of art is due to the way in which it engages the viewer through the
goddess’s acknowledging gaze (33). In a similar way, Velázquez’s Venus del espejo also
looks out of the painting to the viewer, even evading the laws of physics to achieve this
glance.23
From her reflection, we can assume that this Venus is not using the mirror for
self-contemplation, but as an erotic medium of returning the viewer’s gaze. This way of
23
The fact that the viewer can see Venus’s face in the mirror indicates that she is not looking at her
reflection, but at the reflection of the spectator. The play of mirrors engages the viewer in much the same
way as in Las meninas, by including the spectator into the representative field of the work of art and
inciting the intellect to reflect upon the optics of this gaze.
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addressing the male spectator ultimately places the male spectator in a position of power
because the passively reclining Venus recognizes the male viewer as the true subject of
painting. As John Berger elaborates, in the nudes of art history “the principal protagonist
is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
Everything is addressed to him. Everything must appear to be the result of his being there”
(54). Thus, by merely citing these two masterpieces, Mesa-Bains enters into a complex
hall of mirrors concerning the female body and how it is seen and displayed, linking these
visual relationships to cultural and historical male-female power relationships.
It would seem as if the citation of these Venuses by Amalia Mesa-Bains,
interwoven in an environment of Catholic purity, brings together the irreconcilable forces
that complicate the ideal form and behaviour of the Western woman. Confronted by the
sensually glorified female goddesses of art history who have been stripped of their divine
agency, serving instead as languid erotic eye candy, and the competing models of Marian
purity and the abnegation of the corporeal, the Western woman suffers a schism between
body and soul. She can either be an idealized sexual object lacking individual spiritual
power or she can choose to develop her spirituality at the expense of her sexuality.
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Fig. 32. Amalia Mesa-Bains, Venus Envy I: First Holy Communion before the End,
1993. Photo: George Hirose. Whitney Museum of American Art. (González 146)
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Fig. 33. Amalia Mesa-Bains, Venus Envy I: First Holy Communion before the End, 1993. (Pérez, Chicana Art 102)
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When the eroticized Venuses interweave themselves with the Catholic referents
from Venus Envy I: First Holy Communion before the End, they highlight the
contradiction existing between the ideal eroticized female and the competing model of
the female who embodies the socio-religious values involving purity and the negation of
the body. In Catholic society, images of goddesses can never represent the divinity
radiated by the pure modesty of the Virgin Mary and thus, there are no representations of
idealized females who unify the concepts of the corporeal/sexuality and spirituality. This
schism between body and soul is emphasized by Mesa-Bains who juxtaposes the Venus
of Urbino, unabashedly naked and seemingly playing with her pubic hair, with the
communion, confirmation, and wedding dresses. The artist states that communion is a
fork in the road where the soul and the body are forced to separate, the point where girls
become conscious of sin which is expressed through confession (González 147). In the
display case, the body is absent, replaced by the dresses which symbolize purity and the
denial of the erotic body. This juxtaposition of Titian’s Venus and the dresses creates a
stark contrast between competing models of idealized femininity: The Venus who
embodies a sensuality deprived of spirituality and the ideal Catholic female who
embodies a spirituality deprived of sensuality.
When the installation’s imagined woman sits down at her vanity table, she is re-
enacting Venus looking into her mirror. Will she return the male gaze and participate in
an engaging erotic spectacle, producing an image based on the desires of male viewer? Or
will she reproduce her image of self to conform with Catholic values? To be certain, the
chair facing the vanity table is burdened by an enormous white rosary, indicative of the
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heaviness of Catholicism in Mexican and Mexican-American culture, effectively
weighing down the chair which is the substitute of the absent female body.
However, this dichotomy between the sensual body and the chaste spirit is
interrupted by a ghostly presence. The Mexica mother goddess, Coatlicue, reveals herself
from behind the glass (fig. 34). While it is uncertain whether she is in the process of
emerging or simply exists as an element of the historical past partially occluded by the
mirror’s palimpsest, she adds another dimension to the Venus/Virgin dynamic. First of all,
the conceptualization of Coatlicue’s femininity exists outside all Western conceptions
concerning the idealization of women. She is neither sexualized nor is she representative
of a chaste negation of the body. Contrary to Venus, she is not an object of visual
pleasure, but instead exudes monstrosity, inspiring more fear and respect than lust. She
wears a necklace of skulls, has a head formed from two snakes, and has claws instead of
hands. Her body is not virginal, but rather, her breasts sag from extensive nursing. Unlike
the languid Venus who provides worldly erotic pleasure and unlike the patient and
passive Virgin Mary of official Catholicism, Coatlicue is a terrifying force which both
gives life and viciously consumes it.
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Fig. 34. Amalia Mesa-Bains, Venus Envy I: First Holy Communion before the End,
1993. Photo: George Hirose. Whitney Museum of American Art. (González 149)
At this point, it would be negligent to omit Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the
Coatlicue State, a painful in-between state derived from the psychological conflict
stemming from the Mexican-American experience. The Coatlicue state develops from the
internalization of contradictory Anglo, Native, and Mexican worldviews which has
entailed the fragmentation of the self and internal chaos, leading to “the resistance to new
knowledge and other psychic states” (Keating 330). From the impasse of the Coatlicue
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state, there are two possible options. The first involves a disintegration of the self while
the second involves the collecting of these fragments into a complex and resilient form of
consciousness. This consciousness, known as the mestiza consciousness, involves a
flexible, divergent, and inclusive way of thinking which allows for the entrance of
plurality, the coexistence of contradictions, and ambivalence (Anzaldúa 101). The vanity
table’s referencing of the competing ideals of the sensual Venus and the pure virgin
brings yet another psychological conflict imposed by the Western world. The excavation
of the indigenous Coatlicue from behind the looking-glass, however, disrupts this
conception of the feminine self by introducing an opposing feminine ideal into the site
where these subjectivities are created —the mirror. In the boudoir vanity where
conflicting worldviews materialize, Coatlicue appears as an indication of the emerging
mestiza consciousness which sees the void left by the absence of the indigenous self and
strives to redress this lack, reintegrating indigenous aspects into her conceptualization of
self and the world.
Lacan sees the mirror as the site of subject formation, where “culture touches
nature and thus proves its existence as well as its entanglement with culture” (Bal,
Quoting Caravaggio 228). Mesa-Bains’s vanity table, however, lacks any reference to
nature. The subject is conspicuously absent, her ‘natural’ body having been replaced by
representation: a white decorated chair on whose lap sits a bridal bouquet. The self is
presented as being culturally-generated, burdened with a heaviness that is not only
evidenced by the yoke of the giant rosary, but also by the accumulation of statues of the
Virgin Mary and a photo of the artist’s grandmother, who speaks of the perpetuation of
the subjectivities passed from generation to generation.
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The mestiza consciousness, the end result of the emerging Coatlicue, is aware of
the fact that all identities are constructed. Knowing this, the subject is capable of
constructing her own subjectivity, pulling powerful symbols from the past, such as
Coatlicue, and using them for redefining identities which defy the restraints imposed by
Western idealizations of the feminine. Laura E. Pérez has astutely noted the mirror’s
connection to identity, calling the boudoir mirror in Mesa-Bains’s Venus Envy, “a
theatrical space that allows for potentially expansive refashionings of identity […] It is an
altar where reverence for the otherwise devalued, racialized, gendered self, and what is
important to the self, is cultivated” (Chicana Art 100-101). When making the realization
that all identity is constructed, the subject is empowered and is able to creatively think of
ways to escape harmful subjectivities and to heal and reimagine the self.
Part of this healing process seeks the reintegration of the body with the mother
figure. Lacan proposed that the mirror stage marked a separation from the body of the
mother. Considering that Coatlicue is the mother of the Gods and the universe, perhaps
her emerging image in the mirror shows a growing reconnection to the previously
separated body of the mother, a healing process merging Chicanas to a feminine
indigenous past from which they had been separated due to the effects of conquest and
colonization. This revision of established psychological theory denies the isolation of the
individual, placing her instead within a larger imagining of a culturally-defined collective
self.
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Sor Juana’s Mirror
Fig. 35. Amalia Mesa-Bains, The Library of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a room from
Venus Envy II: The Harem and other Enclosures, 1994. Photo: Nicholas Whitman.
Williams College Museum. (Bal 217)
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There are two mirrors in The Library of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a room from
Venus Envy II: The Harem and other Enclosures. The reflective coating of the first mirror
has been partially scratched off to reveal Velázquez’s Venus del espejo, connecting this
installation to the previous one. This repetition lends some clues to the overall themes at
work in the Venus Envy series: the female body, its representation, the male gaze, the cult
of beauty, and the formation of the female subject. The second mirror, however, is the
most significant for this particular installation. The mirror forms a triptych, each panel
displaying images lying beneath the surface of the glass (fig. 35). The triptych gives the
mirror an iconographic quality, as it points to a larger tradition of Catholic art, as seen
particularly in the altar screens (reredos) of the colonial churches of New Mexico and
extending even further back in history to the late medieval folding panels exemplified by
the masters of the Netherlands.24
The left panel reveals a small figure of a monja
coronada, a portrait of a young nun entering the convent, her head decorated with a
crown and flowers. These portraits were customary in colonial Mexico and provided a
way of preserving the image of the girl upon beginning her religious vocation. The
conservation of the virtuous image of the daughter was a mark of accomplishment for her
24
Shirley Neilsen Blum describes the advantages the triptych held for the late medieval artist as “he did not
have to face immediately the prospect of condensing a total thought realm onto a single panel. The triptych
afforded [the artist] a series of units on which he might continue to weave his many patterns around the life
of Christ and the saints. The lack of coordination of the parts and the multiplicity of the units not only
accommodated, but actually encouraged, his still medieval, analogical spirit of addition and repetition” (4-
5). Given the triptych’s capacity to include the multiple, it is appropriate for baroque expression in the
sense that it operates around the idea of a collection of disparate parts united within the frame which
encompasses the whole. While this ordering sense exploded in the baroque retablos, multiplying the
number of frames within a frame, the reredos of colonial church art, particularly in remote New Mexico,
sustained the tradition of the triptych. In fact, the triptych is so prevalent in colonial New Mexican churches
that the New Mexican author Fray Angélico Chávez gave his trilogy of short stories the name “New
Mexico Triptych.”
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family, a way of displaying her religious devotion.25
The flowers, much in the tradition of
vanitas, denoted the ephemeralness of youth, beauty, and earthly existence. The central
image of the tripartite mirror contains Miguel Cabrera’s portrait of Sor Juana. The third
panel contains a portrait of a young novice, Sor Ana María de San Francisco y Neve and,
though she is of little historical significance, what is significant is her youth and beauty
which, like the monja coronada of the first panel, has been preserved eternally in this
image.
The mirror in Sor Juana’s library speaks of the nun’s problematic relationship
with her female body and its representation, which she views as a vain and deceitful
physical trapping standing in opposition to the intellect and the ‘natural’ self. The mirror,
along with its annotational poem inviting literal/metaphorical reflection, collapses the
delimitations separating subject and object and—in a very baroque fashion—invites the
reader/viewer into the work, effecting a coextension of space between art and life and
bringing the audience closer to Sor Juana’s psyche.
The mirror exhibits a fracturing of the self in which the mind and body exist in a
divisive relationship. What is shocking about this mirror is the fact that the central panel
is broken, rupturing Sor Juana’s body into multiple fragments. On one hand, the fractured
image references the failure of representation and how any attempt to faithfully capture
reality is ultimately limited. In her Mirall Trencat, Mercè Rodoreda uses the trope of the
broken mirror as a way of telling her story: using multiple perspectives from different
characters—essentially using a broken mirror to reflect the multiple views of a reality. In
25
This concept is repeated in the first communion photos from Venus Envy I: First Holy Communion
before the End, which lend a more contemporary rendering of the event marking the beginning of girls’
religious life.
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the introduction to Rodoreda’s novel, Josep Miquel Sobrer writes, “a mirror that is
broken at once distorts and enhances reality. By reflecting a vision from several angles, a
broken mirror reminds us of the inherent fragility of a unified viewpoint” (xi). For a very
heterodox reality which denies any unified vision of truth, the broken mirror offers
perhaps the only way to more faithfully represent the complexity of such a reality.
The conception of the self, however, becomes much more complicated when
gazing in the mirror. As previously mentioned, looking in the mirror is emblematic of the
formation of a subjectivity which can participate in the cultural world (Bal, Quoting
Caravaggio 209). It would follow that the fractured image of self in the mirror would
denote a fractured and perhaps multiple subjectivity, ruptured from diverse points of
views and from various societal stresses. This painful fragmentation of the self is similar
to Anzaldúa’s Coatlicue State which, as previously noted, develops from the
internalization of irreconcilable worldviews. One of the greatest fractures in Sor Juana’s
subjectivity resulted from her identification with the patriarchal world of ideas and her
irreconcilable identity as a woman. In this way, the rupturing of the body is particularly
significant in the case of Sor Juana, who saw her gendered body as an impediment to
realizing her aspirations. Instead of the broken mirror of Mercè Rodoreda which, as a
mode of representation, allows for effective storytelling, the fragmenting of Sor Juana
descends into violence against her female body. This corporeal destruction is repeated in
her armchair which, acting as a substitute for the absent body, has been gashed into open,
bloody wounds. In her El Primero Sueño, for example, the soul only experiences freedom
during the dream state when it leaves its earthly corporeal form. Liberated, the soul can
understand knowledge without the confines of the flesh, particularly the confines of the
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female body. In contrast, taking into account Patricia Saldarriaga’s claim that El Primero
Sueño simultaneously affirms and rejects the Cartesian separation between body and soul,
seeing as the body performs vital operations for the soul’s functioning and by granting it
“una visión de éxtasis gracias al funcionamiento del elemento corporal” (169); Sor Juana
cannot be said to have lamented her corporeal existence but instead saw it as essential for
sustaining and developing her spiritual life. It is, however, inarguable that her gendered
body was a social obstacle to her intellectual pursuits: “Los textos de Sor Juana dicen
claramente que ella no creía que ser mujer fuese un impedimento natural: el obstáculo
venía de las costumbres no de la condición femenina” (Saldarriaga 122-23). The convent
lifestyle could only further problematize the social and cultural perception of the female
body in its attempt to desexualize the body: “todo el cuerpo estaba comprometido a este
voto de clausura, desde la cabeza hasta los pies. Por ejemplo, el cabello se cortaba antes
de o en el momento de la toma del velo” (Saldarriaga 156). Sor Juana participated in this
abnegation of the gendered body, particularly when she performed a symbolic mutilation
of what she perceived to be a sign of female frivolity, cutting off her hair as punishment
for not learning as quickly as she had intended. She later said, in her Reply to Sor Filotea,
It turned out that the hair grew quickly and I learned slowly. As a result, I
cut off the hair in punishment for my head’s ignorance, for it didn’t seem
right to me that a head so naked of knowledge should be dressed up with
hair. For knowledge is a more desirable adornment. (Flynn 15)
Sor Juana’s act shows how she believed that the beauty of the female body was
antithetical to intellectual pursuits. Thus, the broken mirror denotes a fracturing of the
relationship between the body and the intellectual psyche, in much the same way that the
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first communion, for Mesa-Bains, represents the beginning of the fracturing between the
body and the spirit.
The allusions to the vanity of feminine beauty continue. Underneath the mirror,
the artist has written in English and in Spanish Sor Juana’s poem, “A su retrato.” This
annotation is characteristic of Mesa-Bains’s emblematic style and is meant to be read in
conjunction with the accompanying image—the mirror. “A su retrato” was penned in the
tradition of vanitas:
Éste, que ves, engaño colorido,
que del arte ostentando los primores,
con falsos silogismos de colores
es cauteloso engaño del sentido;
éste, en quien la lisonja ha pretendido
excusar de los años los horrores,
y venciendo del tiempo los rigores,
triunfar de la vejez y del olvido,
es un vano artificio del cuidado,
es una flor al viento delicada,
es un resguardo inútil para el hado;
es una necia diligencia errada,
es un afán caduco y, bien mirado,
es cadáver, es polvo, es sombra, es nada. (86-87)
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The poem sees beauty as a deceitful image which hides nothing more than eventual death.
However, unlike the vanitas evoked by the mirror whose image is impermanent, the
portrait’s image is permanent, freezing this youthful beauty in time. Licia Fiol-Matta
writes that this poem is “a brilliant and unprecedented twist on carpe diem” in the sense
that “it is not the morbidity of the flesh that Juana deplores, but the fateful permanence of
the canvas, its capacity to hold the body fixed in an afterlife” (364). In a sense, the
portrait is anti-baroque, because it creates a static image which denies the transformative
forces of aging and death. For Sor Juana, the portrait is an unfaithful representation of
reality, an act of artifice which makes a static icon out of a fleeting moment in one’s life.
The images of the nuns also produce a sort of iconography, immortalizing them at
the beginning of their vocation as objects of beauty, innocence, and religious devotion.
However, these static icons that Sor Juana renounces influence her perception of the self,
clouding the vision of the ‘natural’ self in her mirror. They are images created by and for
the social world, visualizations produced through socio-cultural eyes. Consequently, the
portraits’ integration into the mirror produces meaningful implications. The viewer, an
imagined Sor Juana, could only see her subjectivity as being formed only partially by the
‘natural’ world and by her own perception. Impressed upon this vision of self are always
the views of others: her portrait and the idealized typologized portraits of beautiful
innocent nuns beginning their vocations. Perhaps it is also her rejection of these images
that causes the mirror to crack.
“A su retrato” evokes the theme of vanitas, ultimately criticizing the painted
image for its inability to capture the ephemeral quality of life. Mieke Bal writes that Sor
Juana’s poem plays on Góngora’s “Soneto 166,” whose final line reads, “en tierra, en
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humo, en polvo, en sombra, en nada” and speaks about “the deadly ‘void’ of the mirror”
(Quoting Caravaggio 248). Bal informs us that the subject of Góngora’s poem is male
and expresses a carpe diem theme, as the poetic voice “condemns his resistant beloved
[…] to nada if she does not ‘pluck the day,’ if she does not fall for him while he still
wants her” (Quoting Caravaggio 249). However, Steven Wagschal notes how Góngora’s
poem is more evocative of vanitas than of carpe diem because it focuses on decay rather
than on the beauty of ephemeral life, choosing instead to destroy beauty through words
(107). Thus, by writing images and then destroying them, “Góngora creates absence by
writing ‘nothing’ over that which he previously wrote” (Wagschal 116). Wagschal
concludes that only the art of writing can depict absence, while painting continues to exist,
betraying the very concept of vanitas (116). This idea corresponds perfectly with Sor
Juana’s condemning of the permanence of the portrait which, frozen in time, is incapable
of presenting the real self which is subject to transformations and eventual death.
Following Wagschal’s thinking, the mirror itself would best represent absence because
the image of self represented on its surface is even more ephemeral than text. Unlike
Góngora’s sonnet, Sor Juana’s A su retrato plays with the concept of mirroring as the nun
reflects on her portrait as a fleeting image of the self.
Moreover, through its baroque addressing of the reader, the poem “A su retrato”
further enriches this interpretation of the mirror through its collapsing of subject/object
dualisms. Sor Juana invites the reader to take her place in front of the mirror by invoking
the second-person voice: “éste que ves.” In this way, as pointed out by Mieke Bal, the
“you and the I are one and the same” in “A su retrato” and thus the reader identifies with
the poetic voice (Quoting Caravaggio 249). In a very baroque way, the reader is invited
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into the poem as a participant in the work of literary art. This invitation thus collapses the
boundaries defining subject and object, a collapse which is intensified by the presence of
the installation’s physical mirror in which the viewer inhabits the space of the art,
becoming framed by the mirror and being addressed by the words, “Éste que ves […] es
cadáver, es polvo, es sombra, es nada.” The spectator temporarily becomes Sor Juana in
the act of looking at herself and contemplating the vanity of deceitful images of beauty.
Finally, the act of becoming Sor Juana allows the readers/viewers to contemplate
the poet’s words in a way which touches them personally. This contemplation, combined
with the vision of the self in the mirror, fosters a consciousness of the body in the viewers,
who had previously been so absorbed in the world of art that they had forgotten their
corporeal existence. The mirror and the poem’s invocation in the second person wakes
the viewer from this bodiless dream, much like Sor Juana’s awakening from the Primero
Sueño. However, despite this consciousness of the body, the audience can never fully
understand Sor Juana’s mind-body fracturing, a problematic relationship which could
have only come out her particular socio-historical context where religious devotion was
divorced from the material and corporeal world and which disallowed the full
participation of women.
The Cihuateotl’s Mirror
In the third installation of the Venus Envy series, Venus Envy III: Cihuatlampa,
the Place of the Giant Women (fig. 36), the trope of the mirror makes itself apparent
through the enormity of its physical form. A gigantic woman embodied by a verdant
mountainous topography reclines in the same position as Velázquez’s Venus del espejo,
looking into a gigantic hand mirror. Venus Envy III: Cihuatlampa, the Place of the Giant
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Women revisions Western art’s phallocentric domination by creating enormous female
figures who derive their power from intercultural linkages. In a self-determined
gynocentric utopia, the Cihuateotls are free from the limitations of imposed identities and
can therefore construct their own ostentatious, flamboyant, and monumentally baroque
subjectivities.
The Cihuateotls were the women who died in childbirth, an act that the Aztecs
saw as equally heroic to fighting in battle. Honouring these women for having been slain
in partum, these women were granted access to a land in the afterlife called Cihuatlampa.
The work’s exhibition statement for the Steinbaum Krauss Gallery explains that
Amalia Mesa-Bains uses Cihuatlampa as a metaphor for her own
experience of being too large for society. It is a critique of the restriction
of those womyn who refuse to keep their proscribed place in the patriarchy.
Fig. 36. Amalia Mesa-Bains, Cihuatlampa, the Place of the Giant Women. (Fresnobee.com)
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In Cihuatlampa, these giant womyn live beyond the roles that men
traditionally assign to them. Cihuatlampa is a place of counterpoint to a
patriarchy that tames womyn, purportedly to ensure social order and to
guarantee sexual reproduction on male terms. Cihuatlampa is the mythical
and spiritual place that enables Amalia Mesa-Bains to cite/site her
collective exploration through cultural material, memory, and the
interrogation of sexuality and gender. (Pérez, Chicana Art 62)
Cihuatlampa, Land of the Giant Women revisions the representation of women in
art history, investing them instead with a power that escapes the bounds of patriarchy.
The female nudes of art history often display women as nothing more than sexualized
objects lacking any identity of their own. As explained by John Berger in his Ways of
Seeing, the role of the female nude in European traditional painting is to be an object of
display. She is not naked because nakedness would reveal her own individuality: “To be
naked is to be oneself” (Berger 54). Rather, she is nude, lacking individuality, essentially,
an object for display: “To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized
for oneself. […] Nudity is placed on display” (Berger 54). As a result, the nudes of art
history are languid passive objects which have served the desires of the male
spectator/owner. As previously noted, in contrast to the objectified female, the
spectator/owner is the active subject of the painting (Berger 54). Hence the spirit of
subjectivity and individuality is invested in the male owner/viewer of the painting and is
denied to the female object of the painting. For this reason, Berger sees a contradiction in
the spirit of individualism which was so integral to humanism: “The contradiction can be
stated simply. On the one hand the individualism of the artist, the thinker, the patron, the
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owner; on the other hand, the person who is the object of their activities—the woman—
treated as a thing or an abstraction” (62). Despite the passing of time and the questioning
of the female nude tradition by artists such as Manet, the perception of the painted female
subject did not change with modern attitudes. Carol Duncan notes how the MoMA is
filled with images of nude women lacking any sense of individuality, rather they are
“simply female bodies, or parts of bodies, with no identity beyond their female
anatomy—those ever-present ‘women’ or ‘seated women’ or ‘reclining nudes’” (111).
The artists of the first half of the 20th
century avant-garde continued to depict female
nudes, this time preferring figures of prostitutes who are also “unspecified individually,
identifiable only as occupants of the lower rungs of the social ladder. In short, the women
of modern art […] have little identity other than their sexuality and availability, and,
often, their low social status” (Duncan 111). Furthermore, Berger sees the objectification
of women in Western culture as being a deeply-embedded phenomenon which continues
to form the consciousness of women who understand themselves as a sight to be beheld
and judged primarily by the gaze of the ideal male spectator (63). He claims that “the
essential way of seeing women […] has not changed. Women are depicted in a quite
different way from men […] because the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male
and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him” (64). For this reason, Laura Pérez
sees Mesa-Bains's reworking of the masculinist painting tradition through the substitution
of the traditional nude with the Cihuateotl as a way to
outweigh masculinist painting, displacing its Eurocentric construction of
what constitutes female, and the sexually desirable in women […] what is
perceived as feminine—i.e., related to women or supposedly womanlike—
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in patriarchal cultures has been historically divested of social, intellectual,
creative, sexual, and spiritual power […] What is instead divested of
authority in the amazonian province of Cihuatlampa are patriarchal,
Eurocentric discourses, and women are (once again) invested with power.
(“Writing on the Social Body” 39-40)
Mesa-Bains is rewriting masculinist painting traditions, making a parody of Velázquez’s
Venus del espejo and transforming it into a monumental form which rejects the
sexualisation of the male gaze.
The Cihuateotl’s mirror presents a strategy for establishing creative linkages
between diverse historical referents, thus establishing crosscultural female alliances. As
with the other mirrors from the Venus Envy series, another image appears from the behind
mirror of the Cihuateotl: the Virgin of Montserrat. This black Madonna stands in stark
contrast to the white Madonnas found in the first installation of the Venus Envy series,
Venus Envy I: First Holy Communion before the End. Compared to the white virginal
themes evoked by Venus Envy I, the dark Virgin of Montserrat along with the earth-
mother-like Cihuateotls create an antithesis to the idealized Inmaculada, instead evoking
a fecundity associated with the earth and with sexual power. It is interesting to note that,
unlike the vanity mirror in Venus Envy I in which a non-Western indigenous image
interrupts the reflective surface, it is now a European image that is manifesting itself to
the Cihuateotl, fostering a creative link between the indigenous and the more ancient
traditions of the Old World, of which the Virgin of Montserrat is perhaps a surviving icon
of a legacy of goddess-worship, belying any unified vision of pure Spanish Catholic
culture. Instead, the Virgin of Montserrat reveals Spain’s pluricultural foundation given
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that “the fact that the Virgin of Montserrat is black and has hybrid features of Roman and
Oriental background makes a clear reference to the place of Spain in the margins of
European psyche as the bridge between Europe and Africa; Western Christian values and
Orientalism” (Morcillo 83-84). The hybid image of Montserrat is vital for Mesa-Bains’s
configuration of the utopic land of Cihuatlampa, which does not serve as an antithetical
world outside Western tradition, but instead is a conceptual space in which women can
excavate powerful symbols from the past, such as the Cihuateotls or the Virgin of
Montserrat, and employ them in the imagining of a future in which women create their
own subjectivities without the limits imposed by patriarchy or by Eurocentric ideologies.
The linking of points of similarity between referents belonging to different
cultures not only transcends the cultural barriers, but also explodes the conceptual limits
of self and other. As previously mentioned, Lacan sees the mirror stage as the realization
of the separation of the body from the mother. The fact that the earth-mother Cihuateotl
looks into the mirror and sees another mother, the mother of Christ, does not exactly
effect a separation, but rather, a recognition of similitude. This recognition of the
mother/self in the mirror maintains an integral quality which establishes a collective
sense of womankind.
The Cihuateotls exist in a timeless state between a mythic conception of a distant
past and the imagining of a utopic future. This imagining is essential for the creation of
self which transcends the constraints previously seen in Venus Envy I and Venus Envy II,
where subjectivities were limited by the cult of beauty and the idealization of the
immaculate Virgin figure or, in the case of Sor Juana, where corporeal expression and
embellishments were rejected in favour of a gender neutral identity which could more
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effectively compete in a phallocentric world. In Cihuatlampa, these giant women are free
from these restraints and have the power to determine their subjectivities on their own
terms, including an expression of this subjectivity through ostentatious self-fashioning.
The Cihuateotls participate in ostentatious baroque self-constructions whose
power resides in meaningful artifice. Jean Rousset writes in his La literature de l´âge
baroque en France that the baroque is encapsulated in the figure of the peacock who
embodies the key qualities of ostentation and artifice (229). Perhaps it is not coincidental
that Mesa-Bains has crafted one of the Cihuateotl’s enormous dresses out of vibrant
multicoloured plumes. The other dress is equally flamboyant: a gold organza robe, topped
with a headdress branching into space (fig. 37). Descriptions of the exhibition also speak
of a pair of gigantic high heeled shoes. This is a baroque theatrical space of colour,
texture, extravagance and monumentality where huge women create their subjectivities
by using their imaginations. In this theatrical world, identities are not pre-formed, but
performed. Jean Rousset argues that in the baroque identity itself is found in masks (54)
and, similarly, the identities of the Cihuateotls are also created through imaginative
constructions of self. These self-constructions see artifice not in the way of Sor Juana saw
her hair (as a vain embellishment) but, following the attitude of the baroque peacock, as a
glorious display of colourful iridescent feathers which exudes meaning. The idea of
vanity has been destroyed, for in the baroque world of Cihuatlampa artifice itself is
meaningful. Meanwhile, the death-centred vanitas philosophy has been replaced by a
sense of continuity: the Cihuateotls are timeless entities who are as imperishable as the
mountains that give form to their bodies.
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Fig. 37. Amalia Mesa-Bains, Venus Envy III: Cihuatlampa, Land of the Giant Women, 1997. (Pérez, Chicana Art
64)
With its connotations of vanitas, playful optics, self-conscious forming of
subjectivities, and its blurring of the boundary between the natural self and the self
constructed by culture, the baroque mirror is hardly as gender-neutral as we may have
previously thought. Since the Middle Ages, women have been culturally identified with
the mirror and its corresponding theme of vanity, a tradition which continues into the
present day. As Berger emphasizes, “men look at women. Women watch themselves
being looked at. […] The surveyor of woman in herself is male; the surveyed female.
Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly into an object of vision: a
sight” (47). Thus, women are highly conscious of their images as seen by the cultural
world, a world which in turn shapes these images. At Mesa-Bains’s boudoir vanity, the
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subject who sits at the mirror to form her subjectivity is conflicted by the legacy of
Western art’s disempowered objects of erotic beauty and the chaste Catholic piety
embodied by the Virgin. As both models of idealized women deny the subject an active
sexuality combined with a deeper spiritual understanding, Mesa-Bains offers Coatlicue as
an alternative female model which interrupts this Virgin/Whore dichotomy. If only
Coatlicue and the mestiza subjectivity that she brings in her wake could have repaired Sor
Juana’s broken mirror, ruptured by a society which refused her intellectual development
due to her female body. The concept of the gendered mirror, however, reaches its apex in
Cihuatlampa where the phallocentric traditions of Western art have been appropriated and
transformed. In Cihuatlampa, the reclining Cihuateotl does not look at herself being
looked at by the male spectator, nor does she return his gaze to flatter him. Rather, she
looks at herself to see others (the Virgin of Montserrat), projecting her gaze into the
world in order to know herself and to form her subjectivity. In Cihuatlampa, the
Cihuateotls actively construct their sense of self. Rejecting the costume of the nude, they
fashion themselves in ways that project an ostentatious individuality, the baroque
costume of the self. In Cihuatlampa, ostentation should never be confused with vanity, as
vanity implies appearances without truth, substance, or meaning. Instead, the Cihuateotls
have conquered the traditionally female attribute of vanity because, in Cihuatlampa as in
the baroque, form exudes meaning, in this case identitary meaning which empowers the
female subject.
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The fold
Amalia Mesa-Bains’s installations are filled with folded surfaces, not only
recalling Baroque tastes for drapery and theatrical curtains, but exuding what Gilles
Deleuze would call texturology (115). The textures produced by drapery are the baroque
attitude in material form. For one, drapery clothes the empty surface, becoming like a
second skin, a sort of organic matter with folds, crannies, bumps, shadows, and
highlighted spaces whose texture appeals to the baroque horror vacui. These textures
deny linearity, instead embodying the non-linear and the irrational. Drapery expresses
movement, the turbulent flow of water cast in artificial form. Deleuze, for example, sees
the drapery surrounding Bernini’s Santa Teresa as flames, “a spiritual adventure that can
set the body ablaze” (122). In this way, baroque drapery goes beyond its sensuous and
emotion-provoking materiality. As Deleuze says, “folds of clothing acquire an autonomy
and a fullness that are not simply decorative effects. They convey the intensity of a
spiritual forcer exerted on the body” (122). And so, these non-linear forms with all of
their expressiveness are most apt for communicating the non-rational experience in a very
plastic way. Last but not least, drapery was favoured in the Baroque for its theatrical flair,
which was sought in the theatre as well as in paintings which were often framed with real
or trompe l’oeil curtains. Drapery provides a theatrical frame which delineates the world
of artifice, fiction, and illusion. The curtain signals the threshold between the real and the
illusory, the inside and the outside, the seen and the unseen, and between opening and
closing (Doy 10).
The material folds in the Venus Envy series foment thought on the nature of folds,
folding, enveloping, and enclosing. The microcosm of folded matter reflects a vision of
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folding on a larger scale. The installations in the Venus Envy series are a set of enclosures,
pleats of feminine space folded away from the larger social sphere. In Venus Envy each
spatial area of the installation is an enclosed space: a fold into a female specific universe
which encompasses multiple layers of history, culture, and psychology.
For understanding these enclosed female spaces, I will use Gilles Deleuze’s
concept of the fold from his acclaimed text, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. The
trope of the fold was developed by Gilles Deleuze as a contemporary interpretation of
Leibniz’s metaphysics, specifically the Leibnizian concept of the monad as the whole
universe contained in one being. Based on Leibniz’s monad, Gilles Deleuze
conceptualizes the fold, or the process of folding, as the basic unit of existence. The
efficacy of the concept of folding rests in the fact that it denies separation and composite
parts. Instead, every fold is found in another fold and every fold is made up of yet more
folds, allowing for an interrelatedness and complexity not seen in other models of being.
Fold #1 First Holy Communion before the End
Venus Envy I: First Holy Communion before the End is the first fold of space in
the Venus Envy series. This fold constitutes a female universe which is socially and
culturally-determined by official Catholicism and its cult of the Inmaculada. However,
just as Deleuze’s fold is a universe containing everything, Venus Envy I also contains
conflicting elements which produce disruptions in this microcosm.
Entering into this fold is like entering into another universe, an interior feminine
sphere that is folded into a larger social sphere. This particular pocket of female space,
determined by Catholic history and culture, is also a psychological space, housing
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individual and collective memory. This memory is found in the display cases holding
images of girls photographed at their first communions spanning multiple eras (fig. 38).
White elements pervade the entire space, a white contrasted by the dark eerie Cathedral-
like lighting. The white points to the Catholic values of purity. In fact, the whole area
seems to be a space embodying the cult of purity: the devotional candles in the rack
flicker like those of the cathedral, and the locks of girls’ hair resemble relics of saints’
body parts. We see another three-part series in Catholic female narrative: lying side by
side in the display case, the communion, confirmation, and wedding dresses tell the story
of this narrative of purity.
What is implicit in all of these signs is the cult of the immaculate Virgin Mary, the
model of feminine behaviour in official Catholicism. Although this ideology invades the
space in its physical rendering, it is nonetheless disrupted by seeds of transgression. In
the display case, we see The Virgin of Guadalupe Defending the Rights of Chicanos, by
Ester Hernández, a reimagining of the virgin in which she takes on a role of resistance
instead of passivity. What is more striking, however, is the disruption in the boudoir
mirror in which an image of Coatlicue unfolds itself, opening up another fold into a
distant cultural memory which manifests itself as a ghostly presence.
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Fig. 38. Amalia Mesa-Bains, Venus Envy I: First Holy Communion before the End, 1993. Photo: George Hirose.
Whitney Museum of American Art. (González 147)
Though this space is an enclosed space and thus, a limiting space, it still contains
a depth of time where the distant past —in the form of Coatlicue— exists along with the
near future, symbolized by an icon of Chicana feminist liberation. Here, the ideological
model of the immaculate Virgin does not remain pure, but is perforated with elements
which complicate and contradict this model, elements which have always been there,
hiding in pockets.
As Deleuze writes, “the folds in the soul resemble the pleats of matter” (98).
Likewise, these folds within Amalia Mesa-Bains’s cultural memory resemble the
psychological pleats in the Mexican-American feminine psyche. Coatlicue and Chicana
feminism had always been present in the collective psychology, but remained hidden or
undeveloped in those folds which were overwhelmed by Catholicism and its cult of purity,
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whose power rested in the ritualized symbols of material beauty: lace, dresses, white
flowers, long locks of hair, ribbons, etc.
Venus Envy I is like the Leibnizian monad in the sense that it is a micro-universe
containing everything. And though this universe focuses on one region, the cultural and
psychological sphere produced by official Catholicism, the ninja Guadalupe and the
goddess Coatlicue exist here as well, in a way of conceptualizing the universe which
includes everything and denies linear chronology.
Venus Envy II: The Harem and Other Enclosures
Enclosures can be as beneficial as they are limiting. The title of the second part of
the Venus Envy series, The Harem and Other Enclosures, explicitly defines these
feminine spaces as enclosures, folded away from the rest of the world. And though they
are isolated from the public, these spaces are also gynocentric worlds which allow for
contemplation and self-development. Venus Envy II: The Harem and Other Enclosures
offer such spaces.
One segment of this installation, The Virgin’s Garden (fig. 39), provides an
alternate universe to the virginal space of Venus Envy I. The walled garden, a metaphor
for virginity, contains a wardrobe which has transformed into a grotto overflowing with
moss, roots, branches, and leaves, among which emerges a small statue of the Virgin
Mary. In contrast to the communion, confirmation, and wedding dresses from the last
installation, the virgin’s grotto contains richly coloured brocade robes, denoting fecundity
and exuberance.
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Fig. 39. Venus Envy II: The Harem and Other Enclosures, The Virgin's Garden, 1994. Williams
College Museum of Art. (González 152)
This world embodies the infinitely porous quality of the rhizomatic baroque
which involves the endless folding of space. Deleuze says that “matter is porous and
spongy” and “the world is infinitely cavernous” (7). His translator says that the baroque
has an “intense taste for life that grows and pullulates” (Conley x). Entering the fold of
the garden, a conventionalized trope signifying trespassing into the vaginal fold, the
viewer enters into another fold, that of the grotto (fig. 40). The grotto is consequently,
filled with other folds: the folds of the sumptuous robes and a drawer overflowing with
porous materials such as moss (fig. 41). This is the space of the virgin responsible for life
that grows and pullulates.
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Fig. 40. Amalia Mesa-Bains, Venus Envy II: The Harem and Other Enclosures,
The Virgin's Garden, 1994. Williams College Museum of Art. (González 154)
Fig. 41. Amalia Mesa-Bains, Venus Envy II: The Harem and Other Enclosures, The
Virgin's Garden, 1994. Williams College Museum of Art. (González 154)
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The harem from Venus Envy II (figure 42) is also like an enclosed female garden.
The word harem refers to a sacred inviolable place and these sites historically marked the
division of female/male space, as well as private/public space. Like the boudoir
environment from the last installation or like The Study of Sor Juana, these are feminine
enclosed spaces, folded away from the public, masculine sphere. It is worth noting that
the harems were not made only to protect or separate women and children from the
outside world, but were also considered spaces of self-development, where women could
become cultivated and eventually ideal brides. In this sense, the harem was like a private
garden for keeping and growing women.
Fig. 42. Amalia Mesa-Bains, Venus Envy II: The Harem and Other Enclosures, 1994. Williams
College Museum of Art. (González 155)
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Evoking the folding quality of drapery, this installation is characterized by its use
of veils. They are not the fleshy draperies seen in Venus Envy I’s boudoir-cathedral, but
coloured screens. The veil is a trope for illusion and the supposed truth or reality existing
behind it. Unlike the drawn curtain which conceals, the veil only partly conceals. Instead,
the veil distorts reality or, in this case, it colours reality. We see this repeated in the
windows which have been covered in coloured film, not obstructing the light, but altering
our perceptions.
As an almost universal trope, the veil signifies the screen which creates illusion or
obfuscates what lies behind the screen, whether that be truth, divinity, or nature. As noted
in the first chapter of this dissertation, women have long been associated with enigmatic,
irrational, and unknown natural forces.
Moreover, male-defined scientific
rationality seeks to pierce the veil, in an
attempt to achieve knowledge. An
allegorical representation of this impulse
is found in the statue, Nature unveiling
herself before Science (figure 42), which
enacts “the modern fantasy of (female)
nature willingly revealing herself to the
(male) scientist, without violence or
artifice” (Daston and Galison 244).
Fig. 43. Louis-Ernest Barrias, Nature Unveiling Herself
before Science, 1899.
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The veiled harem is ultimately communicating with the previous installation of
The Virgin’s Garden: a partially hidden rhizomatic nature identified with the feminine,
the mysterious grotto of femininity, the enigmatic abyss, separated by the wall, or in the
present example, by the veil. Here we see the development of interrelated themes: women
as holders of enigmatic hidden knowledge protected by the folded barriers of hymens,
wall, and veils who are intrinsically related to an equally enigmatic nature.
Thus, The Virgin’s Garden and the Harem, with their insistence on a fecund and
mysterious feminine knowledge rooted in nature, present entirely different visions of the
female, compared to Venus Envy I, which speaks of a virginal purity lacking earthly
knowledge. This idealized blank slate of nothingness stands in contrast to the figure of
the Virgin in her garden, who bursts with dirt, moss, sand, and secret knowledge.
The Study of Sor Juana
For ages there have been places where what is seen is inside: a cell, a sacristy, a
crypt, a church, a theater, a study, or a print room. The baroque invests in all
these places in order to extract from them power and glory. (Deleuze 27-28)
The next enclosure is a recreation of the study of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and,
like the boudoir, the walled garden, and the harem, this study is another female enclosure,
a fold nearly closed off from the outside world. Echoed in the convent are the same
values of purity offered by the communion girls, the tiny veiled brides of Christ
reappearing in the nun who is an adult veiled bride of Christ. Just as the Virgin’s garden
pullulates with life, Sor Juana’s studio pullulates with knowledge. It is a space of learning,
a sort of sanctuary from the outside world where a woman can develop herself and her
thought. As the Virgin in her grotto explodes with a rhizomatic knowledge, Sor Juana
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explodes with various registers of knowledge. In this fold of Sor Juana’s study, we can
see a representation of the various coexisting and overlapping folds of her
epistemological vision and worldviews which, like The Virgin’s Garden, are infinitely
porous and cavernous. The study presents a fecund folded space where the nun could
develop while protected in this feminine enclosure.
The monad of the studio allows the inclusion of everything, even elements from
other historical moments. As in the Boudoir/Chapel, there are what appear to be
chronological disturbances in the nun’s study. Beyond the contemporary packets of
curandera magic powders and a framed photograph of Mesa-Bains’s grandmother, the
reading room provides folds into the present day. Amalia Mesa-Bains embedded current
events into Sor Juana’s library, as noted in the previous section on baroque knowledge.
On the walls of Sor Juana’s library, the artist incorporated articles and video stills of the
student protest which demanded the hiring of a Latina professor (González 158), showing
how the struggles of women whose intellectual success is impeded by imposed gender
and class-based limits form another pocket of resistance in an embryonic stage,
developing in this environment of proto-feminism.
Venus Envy III: Cihuatlampa: Land of the Giant Women
The third fold of the Venus Envy series is titled Cihuatlampa: Land of the Giant
Women and creates a utopic feminine space which transcends the socio-cultural limits
imposed by patriarchy as well as the limits of chronological history.
Cihuatlampa is a utopic response to the limitations implicit in the other spaces in
the Venus Envy installation. Unlike the passive immaculate Virgin Mary presence in
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Venus Envy I: First Holy Communion before the End, the Cihuateotl provides a powerful
supernatural female figure which does not enter into Western narratives on virginity.
Unlike the virgin in her walled garden, the Cihuateotls are visible and exist in the open,
exploding the enclosed space of the domestic sphere. They are monumental, extravagant,
and loud in their enormous fabulous feathered dresses and gold organza robes and, like
Sor Juana, the artist’s Cihuateotls are giant women who “live beyond the roles that men
assign for them” (Pérez, Chicana Art 62). However, unlike Sor Juana, the Cihuateotls are
granted the freedom to be enormous and to develop apart from the limits of patriarchy.
This space collapses the limits between historical reality and the imagination and
thus the artist can draw from the pre-Columbian past to speak of her vision for an ideal
future. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues, the baroque ethos has the capacity for
combining disparate knowledges as well as for invention, rebellion, and laughter. It is
capable of realising utopic imaginings, but this subjectivity must be invented, taking what
is useful from history for the construction of this utopia (326, 330). This technique is
similarly practiced by many Chicana feminists, including the author Ana Castillo, who
argues for a critical archaeology of culture which unearths elements of history, re-
examines them, and revisions them to produce symbols which generate power (220).
Ultimately, this is what Amalia Mesa-Bains has achieved in her Cihuatlampa installation:
the Cihuateotls, unearthed from history, have been revisioned to create symbols of power,
resistance, and inspiration. As Chicana author and artist Cherrie Moraga writes, “The
Chicano scribe remembers, not out of nostalgia but out of hope. She remembers in order
to envision. She looks backward in order to look forward” (in Pérez, Chicana Art 34).
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In summary, the fold, like the mirror, is not a gender-neutral trope. The vulva, the
essential sign of femininity, is a series of folds which create an enclosed space: hence the
Medieval image of the virgin as a walled garden. As women have traditionally been
excluded from leading active public lives, they have consequently developed in enclosed
spaces, similar to the interior spaces in which, according to Deleuze, the baroque invests
itself (27-28). Contradicting the traditional assumption that associates women with purity
and passivity, the spaces created by Amalia Mesa-Bains denote a fecund activity where
we can perceive germinating seeds of feminist rebellion and pullulating rhizomatic
female-generated life—the enigmatic female anima behind the veil which evades
masculinist rational understanding. Cihuatlampa, however, either expands the fold to its
limit or explodes it. Like Sor Juana who brings the whole world into her study,
Cihuatlampa brings in a whole universe (including mountains) into the enclosed space of
the gallery. Either Mesa-Bains has stretched this interior space to include this universe or
she has completely obliterated the boundaries of female enclosures altogether, bringing
the feminine into open space.26
This final part of Mesa-Bains’s Venus Envy trilogy
presents a liberating revolutionary quality in the sense that these gigantic women have
broken the constraints of their enclosures and are no longer forced to hide the fecund
mysteries of their sex, but are instead free to perform this gendered identity as vibrant and
powerful divas of nature and art.
Conclusion
The works of Amalia Mesa-Bains are saturated with history and memory. A
deeper knowledge of the colonial world is necessary for understanding how the
26
Note how the Cihuateotls’ clothing hangs in the open air, unlike the robes from the Virgin’s wardrobe.
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subjectivities and worldviews of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were forged by
centuries of cultural imperialism as well as by the fecund cultural interactions which
resulted from this heterogeneous environment. To begin know this history is to begin
know the complex workings of the Chicana subject. However, the investigation of
histories and collective memories offers more than self-knowledge. For example, given
the cultural legacy of colonialism which has denigrated the indigenous aspects of the
mestiza subject, the excavation and recovering of indigenousness provides a way of
recovering part of the self, thus constituting an essential step in the process of cultural
and identitary healing. In the works of Amalia Mesa-Bains we also see historical
explorations which are of a more universal nature, such as when the artist excavates and
displays baroque images that objectify women or when she references the schism
between the body and the spirit which began with the 17th
-century rise of anatomical
science. Thus, Mesa-Bains invokes a historical past to promote understanding of the
cultural foundation from whence emerged the problematic self which is still very much
present in the world of today.
However, understanding this complex history only constitutes one part of
neobaroque domesticana. As Gonzalo Celorio states, the neobaroque demonstrates
cultural possession through criticism and reflection and revisits history for the purpose of
preserving, recuperating, or enriching it (101-02). Similarly, domesticana criticizes
domestic life, gender roles, and Anglo cultural domination while preserving memory and
traditions (Mesa-Bains, no pagination). Thus, domesticana—a neobaroque sensibility
which emerges from feminine spaces—criticizes aspects of history while simultaneously
affirming the past. This strategy offers the only effective method of negotiating a
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complex history, recognizing the fact that, although European cultural impositions
brought devastating consequences for the indigenous peoples of the Americas, this legacy
of cultural violence and exchange constitutes the foundation of mestizaje. Hence, the
works of Amalia Mesa-Bains revisit the complexity of the colonial world, with all of its
valuable and detrimental attributes, for the purpose of affirming and rejecting the cultural
foundations which promoted oppressive discourses against women and racial others as
well as provided an exuberant way for understanding a heterogenous and marvellous new
world.
Thus, in a way that parallels Ana Castillo’s Xicanisma, Amalia Mesa-Bains
performs the role of the cultural archaeologist/visionary, recuperating the fragments of
history, reflecting on them, and criticizing them (Castillo, Massacre 220). The
installations explored in this chapter demonstrate the artist’s role as a critical
archaeologist of culture, as she examines the way in which art and science objectified
women and racial others during the Baroque and how both science and Catholicism
incited a split between the spirit and the (sexual) body. Amalia Mesa-Bains conjures
these colonial ghosts to instigate reflection on contemporary attitudes toward these
problematic subjects, particularly in the continuing role artistic and scientific discourse
plays in our conception of self and of others. Confronted with historical discourses which
served to sustain patriarchal and European hegemony, the viewer begins to reflect upon
contemporary representations of women and racial others and how, in many cases, very
little has changed. The artist’s referencing of the separation of spirituality from the
sensual body also maintains its currency in today’s world where, despite the immense
social changes which have occurred in the last 50 years, Christian values promoting the
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abnegation of the body for achieving spiritual development continue to pervade Western
societies. Hence, the works of Amalia Mesa-Bains highlight the pervasiveness of these
attitudes with the aim of criticizing this detrimental socio-cultural legacy.
Nonetheless, Amalia Mesa-Bains’s neobaroque domesticana also affirms various
aspects of her mestiza historical foundations. While Vanitas: Evidence, Ruin,
Regeneration revisits the baroque wünderkammer for the purpose of criticizing its
accompanying scientific attitudes which objectified racial others, The Study of Sor Juana
also revisits the wünderkammer, albeit with the aim of praising its flexible and expansive
vision of knowledge and the world. Thus, the artist has appropriated the convention of the
wünderkammer because she sees value in its ability to sustain difference as well as to
create unforeseen points of connection between seemingly disparate referents and
concepts. This way of thinking, a baroque way of thinking, is useful for producing order
and meaning in a complex and heterogeneous world and has consequently served the
artist’s desire to unite multiple histories and cultures within one space. Moreover, the
practice of appropriating and transforming aspects of history is not only a neobaroque
technique but also a Xicanista strategy for fomenting cultural and identitary force, as the
Xicanista archaeologist/visionary appropriates the valuable elements of history,
imaginatively shaping them into new and powerful symbols which inspire struggle and
socio-political transformation (Castillo, Massacre 220).
The transformative shaping of history offers ways of escaping its problematic
legacy by either providing alternatives which are capable of healing the
objectified/fragmented self or by imagining new subjectivities which are empowered by
valuable symbols of the past. In the boudoir mirror of Venus Envy I: First Holy
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Communion before the End we have seen how the image of Coatlicue provides a symbol
of feminine power which offers an alternative to the problematic Virgin/whore dichotomy
as well as the separation between spirituality and the (sexual) body. The indigenous-
inspired alternative to traditional European female subjectivities reaches its maximum
development in the Cihuateotls of Venus Envy III: Cihuatlampa. Land of the Giant
Women, where the nude of art history has been parodied, shaping it with indigenous
elements to create a powerful new female identity. Responding to the criticisms present
in her other works, specifically the criticism that women and racial/cultural others suffer
from imposed identities; this final installation in the Venus Envy series creates a utopic
space in which women are free to create their own subjectivities. Appropriately, the
baroque provides the preferred attitude for this utopia, due to its capacity for collecting
the fragments of history and reimagining them in dynamic, colourful, and monumental
forms. As mentioned multiple times, the baroque ethos is capable of inventing
subjectivities by appropriating what is useful from history for the creation of utopic
imaginings (de Sousa Santos 326, 330). Amalia Mesa-Bains is consequently working
within this baroque ethos, imagining utopias where women have achieved the power and
self-definition which allows them to lead magnificent lives, like exuberant baroque
peacocks who have exploded the limits of society and the world.
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Conclusion
Fig. 44. Amalia Mesa-Bains, Guadalupe (Chicana Badgirls, Las
Hociconas 22)
After journeying through this dissertation, Amalia Mesa-Bains’s Guadalupe (fig.
44) seems to hold new resonance. Are these anatomical dolls yet another example of
Mexico’s characteristically “extreme performance personas” (Gómez-Peña and González
236)? More than simple anatomical manikins, are these figures not inspired by the
hagiographic statuaries of post-Tridentine churches, fusing scientific study with a strange
religiosity? Does Eve’s dissected abdomen not evoke some saintly martyrdom, her
displayed organs pointing to meanings lying beyond her physical presence? Finally, do
these two figures not call into question the division between the body and spirit and, by
extension, the division between the study of the natural sciences and the understanding of
the spiritual world? The allegorical representation condensed in the figures of Guadalupe
clearly emblematizes the epistemological separation between the physical reality of the
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body and the conceptualizing of the spiritual world. Complicating this apparent binary,
however, is the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe who, beyond symbolizing divinity,
references a specific identity: the Mexicana/Chicana. The artist makes a correlation
between spiritual understanding and Mexicana/Chicana identities, showing how these
subjectivities are based on culturally-specific religious foundations. Moreover, as
“identity is a major weapon in the struggles of the oppressed” (Yúdice 221), the Virgin of
Guadalupe, an identitary icon, also symbolizes political struggle. Moreover, unlike the
physical body which can be dissected, objectified, and dominated; Guadalupe shows us
that the spirit remains intact, an integral force which cannot be conquered.
After exploring So Far from God, La Pocha Nostra’s performances, and Amalia
Mesa-Bains’s installations, it is easy to note the common threads uniting all of the
discussed works. It is no coincidence that for these authors/artists, the baroque offers the
most apt paradigm for expressing their unique positions in a complex world, a
fragmented and diverse world which carries a rich and overwhelming heavy historical
legacy as well as an adverse and problematic contemporary reality. Confronted with a
similar history and socio-cultural environment, their works show many similarities in
terms of their form, content, and purpose.
In terms of form and content, the works explored in this thesis display many
similarities, particularly in their use of baroque devices. Notably, we have seen a strong
use of physicality through allegory and hagiography, as well as a general insistence on
the power of the body for communicating in non-rational ways. We have also been struck
with intense displays of proliferation, through the composite personae of Ana Castillo
and Guillermo Gómez-Peña as well as the wünderkammer aesthetics of La Pocha Nostra
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and Amalia Mesa-Bains. Likewise, the artists harness the power of co-extensive space,
creating total environments which envelop their audiences and invite them into the
artistic field, provoking engaged, sensorial, emotional, and intellectual responses. Finally,
all of the works studied in this dissertation are deeply involved in history, appropriating
artefacts and practices from the past and transforming them for the purpose of negotiating
a problematic historical reality whose phantasms continue to haunt the present.
The works of Castillo, La Pocha Nostra, and Mesa-Bains exhibit a strong
physicality through the use of allegory, hagiography, and the body. As previously noted,
allegory’s power rests in the fact that it is capable of communicating the abstract through
palpable and understandable forms while adding an enigmatic element which engages the
mind. The characters in So Far from God, the stage personae of La Pocha Nostra, and the
installations of Amalia Mesa-Bains all operate on such a concept of allegory. The
allegory used by Ana Castillo and La Pocha Nostra relies heavily on personification in
order to communicate complex, ineffable, and abstract concepts. Their corporeal
allegories fuse with hagiographic tradition, insisting on the power of the human body for
expressing the non-rational: essentially, the same strategy employed by the post-
Tridentine Church to impress their followers, using the sensuous bodies of saints in states
of ecstasy or martyrdom to communicate the ineffability of sublime experience. However,
unlike the saints of the Counter-Reformist Church, the allegorical hagiographic bodies
created by Castillo, La Pocha Nostra, and Mesa-Bains have been transformed to speak of
the contemporary concerns of race and gender, which are implicit in corporeal
representation. These are not traditional saints who suffer to provoke piety in the hearts of
their audience, but rather, they perform suffering in order to move their audiences while
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highlighting socio-political problems related to racial and gender-based oppression.
Although the works of Mesa-Bains rely less on personified allegories than on emblematic
representation, the same hagiographic themes pervade her installations. The saintly body,
though conspicuously absent, is eerily alluded to through synecdoche and metonymy:
locks of hair serving as relics; empty communion, confirmation, and wedding dresses; the
presence of the bride evoked by the boudoir chair; and the martyred chair referencing the
absent body of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The baroque of the borderlands shows us how
the body not only continues to provide the most effective way of representing ineffable
experiences and concepts, but also how it remains a powerful site for staging racial and
gender-based concerns, concerns which still need to be articulated in a society where
feminism and race-based movements have lost momentum.
All the works studied within this dissertation rely on baroque proliferation as a
device most apt for representing a complex, heterodox, and fragmented contemporary and
historical reality. In So far from God, we have seen proliferations of Chicana
subjectivities, as well as multiple belief systems and diverse ways of understanding the
world. In the performances of La Pocha Nostra, we have seen multiple subjectivities
articulated in performance personae which either morph in series before our eyes or form
composites represented by a hybridized collection of cultural referents. The installations
of Amalia Mesa-Bains display a plethora of artefacts which, in their totality, achieve an
ambiguous and complex vision of history and its legacy within the present day. This is
the baroque logic of the wünderkammer: an attempt to create impure communions
through seemingly magical correlations between diverse parts. This is the rasquache logic
which attempts to hold the world together. In a world of heterogeneity, multiplicity, and
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fragmentation, one is in need of a paradigm which has the flexibility to include
everything, to connect the disparate and produce meaning out of the seemingly chaotic.
This thesis has explored works which harness the power of baroque co-extensive
space, generating environments which envelop their audiences in the representative field
of art. The performances of La Pocha Nostra allow the audience to trace their own paths
in the artistic spaces, creating their own sense of meaning. Likewise, the installations of
Amalia Mesa-Bains envelop their audiences in folds of interior places, creating a sense of
intimacy which provokes the response of the sentiments. The artists rely on baroque
folded spaces such as the cathedral and the wünderkammer to produce an environment in
which the spectator becomes physically, mentally, and emotionally engaged in the art,
and essentially, stops being merely an objective spectator. The power of these spaces
cannot be underestimated. With her installations that envelope the viewer in sensual
tactile environments, Mesa-Bains evokes a feeling state in the viewer which aids in the
understanding of Chicana cultural memory, an experience which ultimately leaves an
impression in the psyches of her audience. Speaking of her intentions for Venus Envy,
Mesa-Bains imparts, “I wanted the viewer to be able to pass into another time, to feel the
residue of rituals and beliefs from the past and through that encounter, gain an experience
from the hearts” (Griffith 95). The co-extensive spaces produced in the performances of
La Pocha Nostra generate similar psychological effects, touching the hearts and minds of
the spectators and provoking a deeply-felt engagement with the artistic experience which
has the potential to effect socio-political transformation in the outside world.
However, perhaps the most pervasive technique common to all the works
investigated in this dissertation is that of appropriation and transformation, a technique on
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which I have elaborated extensively in the introduction. The techniques of appropriation
and transformation are particularly useful for a culture which carries a problematic
colonial history as well as suffers exclusion from the official history of the US nation.
Appropriation, as previously discussed, allows for the preservation and continuity of
history, while transformation shapes historical legacies in critical and reflective ways.
Moreover, these techniques are consistent with Gonzalo Celorio’s definition of the
neobaroque in which the citation of history displays cultural knowledge and generates
resistance though critical play (102, 104-05). Conscious of the need to practice historical
appropriations and critical transformations, Ana Castillo has created the concept of the
“guerrillera cultural” (Massacre 220), the archaeologist who critically extracts fragments
of history and adapts them to produce powerful symbols that can effect socio-political
change. This adaptive archaeology is apparent in So far from God which appropriates and
transforms La Llorona in order to create a figure more conducive for female
empowerment. La Pocha Nostra appropriates hagiographic and ethnographic figures as
well as the stereotypes perpetuated in cultural mythology, creating a contestatory
discourse through parodical transformations. Amalia Mesa-Bains appropriates
historically-defined spaces (the wünderkammer, the cathedral, the enclosed garden, the
harem, etc.), changing them in ways which produce critical reflection, particularly on
topics concerning gender and race. By excavating the jewels and demons of history, the
Chicana/o cultural warrior begins to understand the complexities of her own
subjectivity—the conflicting forces which form the core of her sense of self. Chicana/o
cultural production shows the process of this excavation and its accompanying
negotiation. As cultural negotiation is a complex and interminable process, creative
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transformations are needed which recognize a historical legacy of conflict and ambiguity
but can also contribute to the production of new subjectivities capable of envisioning a
future beyond the chaos of the past and present. Therefore, creative transformations not
only generate parodical resistance, but also create ways of reimagining identities.
Thus far, we have seen how the works investigated in this thesis are united by a
common thread in relation to their content and form, relying on many of the same
baroque devices. However, the works are even more strongly united by their underlying
purpose, which is undeniably political in nature. More specifically, the
texts/performances/installations explored by this dissertation provide resistance against
an adverse socio-political reality; speak of the need to create identities and communities;
and finally, attempt to create an alternative and critical spirituality.
The works of Ana Castillo, La Pocha Nostra, and Amalia Mesa-Bains beat with a
latent political consciousness, addressing and resisting against an adverse socio-political
reality which extends from colonial times to the present. The object of resistance varies:
sometimes the works contest patriarchal oppression, sometimes they speak out against
capitalist practices, and sometimes they contest the persecution of racial and cultural
others. While So Far from God criticizes a long legacy of patriarchal oppression
sustained by Catholic ideology and decries capitalism’s abuses against working class
others, the novel also criticizes the complicity of the Mexican American community in
the perpetuation of abuses by their repressive attitudes which impede social justice.
Likewise, the performances of La Pocha Nostra are overtly political, their motivation
usually stemming from the current political climate. Their work strongly responds to
attacks upon the brown body—articulated in their saints of unpopular causes—and
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evokes a long legacy of colonization, connecting contemporary injustices against racial
and cultural others to the ethnographic practices of the past. Amalia Mesa-Bains carries
out similar methods to La Pocha Nostra, invoking the objectified racial others from the
colonial past in order to question present attitudes toward race. Like Ana Castillo, Amalia
Mesa-Bains brings light to women’s issues, referencing a long history filled with a
patriarchal ideology which continues to haunt our contemporary world. Like the baroque
of the Reconquista or Contraconquista described by Ángel Guido and Lezama Lima and
like the rebellious neobaroque of Severo Sarduy, the works created by these Chicana/o
artists pulsate with resistance to the imposed order(s).
However, rebellion by itself is insufficient; rather, these Chicana/o intellectuals
are obliged to propose new orders and new ways of conceptualizing the self and one’s
community. In So Far from God, we witness the fragmented allegorical subjectivities of
the female characters and how this fragmentation results in dysfunction and tragedy. Only
when Sofi harnesses the power of the various subjectivities embodied by each of her
daughters, is she able to create a strong, balanced subjectivity for herself which will
enable her to take political action and effect social change. Likewise, the novel highlights
the fragmentation of the Mexican American community in Tomé and the need for a
cohesive vision that could create the necessary solidarity for overcoming their
marginalized positions. This sense of community is temporarily realized by the
cooperative founded by Sofi, but is quickly eclipsed by Mothers of Martyrs and Saints
(MOMAS), a hierarchical system which operates on the Catholic-based valuing of
suffering mothers. La Pocha Nostra uses their performances to explore and create the
multiple subjectivities necessary for navigating a complex cultural reality. Their
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performances show us how identities are multiple, constructed, and performed. Existing
in an interstitial space between the natural self and the cultural world, identities are
realized through action and interaction with the world. La Pocha Nostra also seeks to find
points of connection between the various marginalized others embodied in their
performances, articulating a vaster sense of community based on a shared experience of
oppression. Although there is no explicit referencing of community in her works, the
installations of Amalia Mesa-Bains are heavily rooted in gender-based identities which
have been imposed through religious ideology and patriarchal objectification. Her works
show the need to break these identities by interrupting them with alternative subjectivities
based on indigenous female icons, proposing new conceptualizations of the female
subject which can bridge cultural divisions—e.g., the Cihuatlampa and the Virgin of
Montserrat—and create a more expansive collective female identity. The new orders
proposed by Castillo, La Pocha Nostra, and Mesa-Bains reflect a unified diversity whose
power resides in the sum of its parts and maintains its coherence through the development
of new conceptual relationships. Through the logic of the wünderkammer, it conceives of
an almost magical order out of the apparent disorder of the world.
More than anything, the works explored in this dissertation attempt to create an
alternative spirituality which recognizes the affective power of Catholic tradition while
rejecting the oppressive and conservative aspects of its ideology. Thus, the authors/artists
recognize their Catholic background as having formed the very eyes with which they see
themselves and the world as well as having sculpted their own hearts which respond to
religious representation. Holding onto this inherent religiosity, they politicize it and
infuse it with indigenous elements, creating an alternative spirituality capable of
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sustaining various traditions and resisting hegemonic power. Esperanza in So Far from
God recognizes the latent Catholicism that remained an integral part of her spiritual
consciousness no matter which radical ideology she espoused. Perhaps the best
representative of this alternative religiosity can be found in the figure of the curandera,
Doña Felicia, who practices a hybridized religion which rejects the oppressive elements
of Catholicism while embracing its healing spirituality. La Pocha Nostra also channels
the energy of Catholic ritual and representation in their modern-day saints, articulating a
politicized spirituality infused with the shamanic quality exuded by the performative
body. As Gómez-Peña states, “it’s simply impossible to ‘replace’ the ineffable magic of
a pulsating, sweaty body immersed in a live ritual in front of our eyes. It’s a shamanic
thing” (“In Defence” 79). Likewise, Amalia Mesa-Bains also creates an alternative
spirituality which combines the affective techniques of the baroque cathedral with
indigenous spirituality and goddess-worship. Critical of official Catholicism’s idealizing
of purity and corporeal abnegation, Amalia Mesa-Bains promotes a spirituality which
recognizes the sensual body as an integral part of spiritual development. In summary,
these Chicana/o thinkers operate on rasquache baroque mechanics, taking what religious
tradition has given them and crafting it into something powerfully resistant which speaks
to the heart.
But, why baroque? There are many explanations as to why these authors/artists
chose to use baroque aesthetics and strategies in their works. First, the baroque choice
comes from a shared cultural heritage which not only constitutes a powerful oppositional
identity, but is also recognized by Chicanas/os as an effective way to create affective art.
Secondly, as noted in the introduction, the baroque emerges when there is a weakening in
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the social order, and the last 30 years have seen the decline of Chicano nationalism as an
organizing ideology. Thirdly, despite advances achieved by the Chicana/o community,
there is still the need to struggle for social justice and the baroque has the capacity to
articulate resistance through playful strategies involving laughter.
What is common in all of the studied works is a realization of the power of
baroque aesthetics which have passed into the present through Mexican Catholic and folk
cultures. This flamboyant, hyperbolic, excessive style—rasquachismo—provides the
aesthetics for articulating an oppositional identity which stands in contrast to the Anglo-
American sensibilities rooted in puritanical simplicity and restraint. Thus, practicing
rasquachismo in the US constitutes an aesthetic—and thus, ideological—act of defiance
against hegemonic culture. However, defying the sensibilities of dominant society is not
the only goal of rasquachismo. Rather, the authors/artists studied in this thesis create
rasquache baroque works due to their genuine appreciation for these aesthetics and their
intensely affective quality. For Ana Castillo, rasquache Catholic aesthetics not only
distinguish her work from the American mainstream, but also the use of allegory and
saints provides a vehicle for broadcasting her message through means which are
simultaneously visual, physical, and narrative and also incite the sensorial, emotive, and
intellectual faculties of her readers. A similar realization happens for Gómez-Peña who
makes a correlation between his performance personae and the “extreme performance
personas” found in the statues of saints in colonial churches (Gómez-Peña and González
236). Gómez-Peña owes his aesthetics to the colonial baroque taste for extreme
physicality and performativity which induces emotion. The rasquache baroque aesthetics
used in his works make them stand out from the minimalist tendencies of other artists,
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giving Gomez-Peña a style that stands in opposition to the established artistic sphere.
Amalia Mesa-Bains’s aesthetics are founded firmly in the rasquache baroque, specifically
in the proliferations found in the domesticana altars with which she grew up. Mesa-Bains
has fully embraced this legacy of textures, colours, and shiny surfaces, giving her an
oppositional identity to the established artists that have been celebrated by the artistic
center. Rasquachismo constitutes not only a weapon, but also a beloved tool which gives
shape to affective forms and sews together the fragments of history into robust
kaleidoscopic reimaginings.
As noted by Walter Moser, a resurgence of baroque power coincides with the
weakening of a paradigm (110). The paradigm of Chicanismo disintegrated in the 1980’s
for multiple reasons, including its essentializing mythological foundations and its
inability to account for the differences within its own community. Thus, the community
which had been previously united under the fictions of the Raza de bronce mythology
and a common desire for struggle and emancipation became fragmented. Articulating this
sense of fragmentation, Gloria Anzaldúa began to describe her multiple subjectivities and
her painful and creative position spanning a border, her body split in half by a “1950
mile-long open wound” (24). The old models of solidarity had lost their currency, failing
to accommodate the differences within the community. The weakening of Chicano
nationalism called for a new paradigm which would accommodate difference and extend
beyond the bounds of the immediate community, forging new alliances which could
consolidate power. On an aesthetic and conceptual level, rasquachismo and the baroque
are paradigms capable of sustaining difference, inviting the establishment of points of
relation between the apparently disparate. Rasquachismo, like the baroque, is an attempt
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to hold the world together (Ybarra-Frausto, “The Chicano Movement” 171), to give a
sense of continuity to the diversity of fragments which make up a complex and
heterogeneous experience. This is the logic of both the domestic altar and the
wünderkammer: spaces that sustain difference and yet offer the possibility of establishing
unforeseen connections. In a cultural climate of fragmented communities and chaotic
diversities, internalizing rasquache baroque thought could result in unanticipated
alliances between cultural groups and the fomentation of inclusive and empowered
communities. The Chicana/o baroque marks the end of nationalism and the beginning of
communities based on the commonalities of lived experiences, finding points of
identification across culture, race, religion, gender, and sexuality; establishing new points
of suture or the “unities in difference” as described by Stuart Hall (118).
Perhaps more important than its capacity for uniting a fragmented diversity of
peoples and ideas, the baroque provides a means of rebelling and laughing. So Far from
God and the performances of La Pocha Nostra are permeated with humour. From the
beginning of Castillo’s novel where Sofi beats the priest, calling him a pendejo, to the
end where the Mothers of Martyrs and Saints (MOMAS) test the authenticity of the
spirits of their dead children by inviting them to take a bite out of tacos, Ana Castillo’s
humour serves to deflate hierarchal power in ways similar to Sarduy’s neobaroque which
“rejects all establishment” (Ensayos generales 212). This humour produces joy, defies the
established order, and constitutes a strategy for surviving the adverse reality specific to
Mexican America. The author elucidates:
If we can’t laugh or find joy, which is one of our greatest strengths, it
would be a tragedy. Because we do have to live, in addition to living with
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the environmental issues, the economic destitution, we have children to
raise, we have celebrations, we have our rituals, and if we didn’t find joy
and humour we would have long been gone. We’re not drones. We may be
perceived as being drones in society, but we are not drones. It seems weird
to see somebody trying to be funny about it, but that is the way that we
move on from generation to generation by seeing the irony. It’s not a
laughing, vacant joke humour; it’s a humour that is pointing out the
contradictions—always. That’s being done more than anything in So Far
From God. (Saeta and Castillo 146)
For Gómez-Peña, humour constitutes a weapon more than a survival strategy. His works
are saturated with satire, parody, and exaggerations which mock and reject all imposed
identities and ideologies. As John Ochoa has noted, this humour, one of his “armas para
combatir gringos y tapados,” allows Gómez-Peña to approach profound and problematic
topics (15). Amalia Mesa-Bains produces less humorous defiance than imaginative
transformations which subtly express resistance. Mesa-Bains’s parody is playful, not in
the way to make her audience laugh aloud, but in ways that play with established
traditions. To this end, Cihuatlampa: Land of the Giant Women defies the tradition of the
female nudes of art history, turning them into extravagant divas of hyperbolic proportions.
These rasquache techniques of exaggeration and parody are consistent with the strategies
of thinly-masked defiance which characterize the cultural production of the colonized, the
spirit of Contraconquista which forms an integral part of the baroque. In the Chicana/o
community there is still the need for struggle and the rasquache baroque offers an artistic
means of resisting against hegemonic impositions as well as offering the benefits of
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laughter, producing a sense of joy and solidarity which strengthens the psyches of a
people, allowing them to continue in their lucha.
But, what use does the rasquache baroque have beyond the local context of the
Chicana/o community? First, the complex and fragmented reality addressed by Chicana/o
cultural production is not unique to the Southwest, but is quickly becoming the reality
experienced in most major cities of the Western world. Thus, in a fractured world of
apparent meaninglessness, the rasquache baroque provides a new way of understanding
one’s self and one’s socio-cultural environment. Secondly, Chicana/o thought is capable
of deconstructing and revitalizing the antiquated concept of US national identity,
providing a stronger, more complex, and more inclusive sense of national belonging.
Finally, rasquache baroque thinking has the power to reshape and revive debilitated
ideologies and movements, facilitating possible mobilization and eventual socio-political
transformations.
The complex and fragmented reality addressed in Chicana/o art is not confined to
a local context. The world is in a rapid state of flux and we are confronted with multiple
worldviews, ideologies, sensibilities, and cultural practices to the point where all
understandings seem relative; a perception which can easily translate into the view that
everything is meaningless—essentially, a postmodern cosmovision. Postmodernism was
a response to the desire for art that appealed to a self-conscious audience which was
aware of the fragmented and incoherent quality of the world and desirous of open works
that addressed them and engaged them into the artistic field. However, while the baroque
responds to the same desire, it does not fatalistically accept incoherence and
meaninglessness as part of an inevitable reality. Rather, this paradigm provides a new
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way of understanding the self and ordering the world. The power of the baroque rests in
its ability to create new connections and to build coherence without sacrificing diversity
and the tensions resulting from contradictory combinations. The baroque insists in
meaning, but also insists on the fact that meaning is made, and should not be taken for
granted. Ultimately it is our responsibility to make meaning by sewing together the
fragments of the world, creating the points of suture between various cosmovisions,
identities, and communities. The rasquache baroque offers us this flexibility, the power to
hold the entire world together.
What is more, the baroque has the power to hold together not only the Chicana/o
world, which has undergone fragmentation and confusions, but also has the power to
fortify and revitalize the weakening ideology of the US nation. Bolívar Echeverría wrote
of how weakened European models were imposed on the others of colonial America who,
for the sake of sustaining social order, supported these models, though their mestizo
culture clandestinely rejected these Euro-centric impositions (34-35). Likewise,
Chicanas/os are American citizens who have much to contribute to the fortification and
revitalization of the narrative of the US nation and, like the colonial other mentioned by
Bolívar Echeverría, they can use their baroque ethoses to accept and reject American
ideology. The Mexican heritage of the American Southwest contradicts the US
foundational narratives based on pilgrims, settlers propelled by Manifest Destiny, and
later, the immigrants welcomed by the Statue of Liberty at Ellis Island. In terms of class,
Chicanas/os point out the fallacy of the American Dream by highlighting entrenched
poverty. They also point out the dysfunction of the supposedly liberal multiculturalist
model, which has led to the disempowerment of group movements by emphasizing the
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rights of the individual. Essentially, the US needs a new way of envisioning itself,
because any self-conception based on a homogeneous national identity, on freedom to
economic self-definition, and on an inherent equality achieved through the justice system
is inevitably contradicted by its cultural foundation of diversity, its extensive
Native/Mexican/Black history, its intensifying polarity between the working class and the
extremely wealthy, and its prisons whose inmates are disproportionately Black and
Latino. In a nutshell, the abstract quality espoused by the US nation, the concept of
freedom, is mostly limited to those belonging to an elite class and race. Chicanas/os shine
a light on the cracks in US nationalism, pointing out how this sense of nation must be
repaired. However, the Chicana/o baroque flexibility of thought allows for a sense of
nation which would recognize multiple subject positions, multiple histories, and a
diversity of languages, cultures, and worldviews while still maintaining a sense of nation,
albeit a nation united by its diversity. This way of thinking has the capacity to overcome
the fragmentation of communities through its emphasis on the power of groups,
challenging the US valuing of the individual.
Chicana/o and baroque thought make the realization that identity is constructed.
Though this realization highlights the fictions underlying the narrative of US nationhood,
it also grants US citizens the power to define and redefine what it means to be American.
Ana Castillo insists that the US must acculturate the mestiza vision (Massacre 16) and the
baroque offers such a vision, allowing for heterogeneity and for the inclusion of
previously erased histories into the national narrative. The inclusion of historical and
cultural diversity is essential in an age where neo-nativist sentiment, fuelled on the
erroneous understanding of the US being white and English-speaking at its very base, is
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gaining popular support. The perception that the US rests on white Anglo protestant
foundations not only produces tension and divides communities, but is also becoming
less and less feasible as people who subscribe to this ideology are becoming a smaller and
smaller segment of the population. A vision welcoming impure communions, a vision of
mestizaje and mulatez, a vision accepting multiple and conflicting cultural foundations
which can adapt to the constant changes produced by immigration and the general
movement inherent to the living organism known as society would prove to be much
better disposed for describing and understanding reality as we know it.
Finally, Chicana/o baroque thought has the capacity to transform and revitalize
weakening ideologies and social movements. In recent times we have witnessed a general
lack of support for and/or interest in organized religion, Marxist-based social justice,
feminism, and race-based liberation movements. These ideologies previously lent
coherence to vast groups of people and, in many cases, secured rights and protections for
the oppressed. A lack of faith in the Church has led to an emergence of New Age
individualism, where people are free to pick and choose what they believe in, essentially
fragmenting any previously enjoyed sense of collectivity. Marxism lost many of its
adherents and failed to attract new ones, partly due to its association with a certain
segment of society: mainly educated, white, atheist and male. Mainstream feminism had
also lost its momentum, particularly because of its universalizing tendencies which ignore
differences of race and class. Race-based movements lost much of their credibility as
they began to be perceived as radical and later were rendered antiquated by
multiculturalism.
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However, Chicana/o baroque thought is adept at forging unanticipated
combinations which can fortify and revive debilitated ideologies and movements. Using
the sensibility inherent to cultural cannibalism, the rasquache baroque consumes the best
elements from various ideologies, re-chewing them into powerful hybrids. The
authors/artists detailed in this dissertation produce works which articulate hybrid social
movements that include issues of class, gender, and race but do so with a politicized
spirituality which engages the heart. Ana Castillo holds that the success of the
Watsonville Cannery workers’ strike was indebted to the expression of a feminine
spirituality consolidated in identitary and spiritual symbols, such as the Virgin of
Guadalupe (Massacre 56). In her novel So Far from God, the hybrid Holy Week
procession/protest staged in Albuquerque is such an example of a diverse community
exercising a politicized spirituality to speak of various issues concerning race, class, and
gender. Likewise, the works of La Pocha Nostra exude their own politicized spirituality
by utilizing the emotive power of Catholic hagiography and shamanic performativity to
speak out against the injustices related to race, ethnicity and gender. Finally, the
installations of Amalia Mesa-Bains create environments which exude spirituality, and yet
speak of race and gender-related issues. The rasquache baroque shows its ability to
sustain coherence across the differences found in these social movements, and to
empower them with a force that speaks to the spiritual side of its audience, inspiring them
to action with the power of art. Chicana/o cultural production has the combinatory power
of the baroque, the affective power of the post-Tridentine Church, and the rebellion of the
Contraconquista, all melded together to create art which promotes inclusive visions,
which persuades and engages the psyche, and which critically resists oppression.
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The Future
The Chicano scribe remembers, not out of nostalgia but out of hope. She
remembers in order to envision. She looks backward in order to look forward.
-Cherríe Moraga (Pérez, Chicana Art 34)
Chicana/o cultural production looks to the future and is desirous of change.
Chicana/o art invokes history in order to salvage it, to preserve it, to revision it, to
appropriate it, and to transform it into something powerful which will propel the
Chicana/o community into a better future. So Far from God, as previously mentioned,
appropriates and transforms the Holy Week procession, eradicating Catholicism’s
fatalistic valorizing of earthly suffering and transforming the ritual into a social protest
which unites a greater community of the oppressed. The works of La Pocha Nostra are
focused on instigating future change, creating alternate performative spaces which serve
as laboratories for new ideas and which foment metaphorical border-crossing. Their art is
based on political praxis seeing as “If we learn to cross borders on stage, we may learn
how to do so in larger social spheres. We hope others will be challenged to do the same”
(Gómez-Peña et al. 2). Amalia Mesa-Bains imagines a different future through her utopic
revisioning of the nudes of European art who transform into powerful monumental
indigenous females who exercise their freedom to self-definition. Not merely being
content with expressing the concerns of a problematic history and a complex reality,
Castillo, Gómez-Peña, and Mesa-Bains all project utopic visions which imagine socio-
political change, offering strategies for creating a better world. Here, the baroque is not
only concerned with survival but, like the baroque of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, it
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carries the potential for imagining new possibilities (321), offering elements derived from
history that can be used in the construction of new subjectivities and new utopias (326).
This is the ethos of transformation and hope.
Given that the rasquache baroque offers a paradigm effective for navigating a
seemingly incoherent reality—the state of most of the industrialized world—, the next
stage would involve bringing this paradigm to the international sphere. Though Ana
Castillo insists that the US must acculturate the mestiza vision (Massacre 16), I would
argue further that Canada and Europe should also acculturate a mestiza-like vision. The
authors/artists studied in this dissertation have all achieved a limited amount of
international acclaim (Gómez-Peña having achieved the most through his worldwide
touring); however, a greater transnational dialogue could foment new intercultural
understandings and alliances. As a side benefit, the international recognition of Chicana/o
intellectuals abroad could generate a greater respect for their works and thought within
the mainstream US population and within American artistic and literary establishments.
All the authors/artists explored in this thesis have much to offer on an international level:
So Far from God is strongly rooted in local concerns relating to New Mexico; however,
Ana Castillo’s Xicanisma finds resonance in any woman incapable of identifying with the
feminism defined by middle-upper class Europeans and Americans. She identifies with
the experience of colonized women and has written that she has “much more in common
with an Algerian woman” than with a Mexican man (Massacre 23). Ana Castillo says
that people worldwide contact her, relating to Xicanisma, noting in particular an Egyptian
woman who studied Castillo’s work as part of her dissertation (“2412 Profile”). Given
this mutual identification, I can only imagine how deeply Castillo’s works would speak to
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North African women living in Europe, particularly in the suburbs of Paris. While the
works of La Pocha Nostra enjoy international acclaim, they also adapt to the regional
concerns of their venues, incorporating local performers into their pieces. The ideas
explored by these artists may change according to the location, but the fundamental
issues are often the same. Immigration is an issue in the Islas Canarias as much as in
Southern California, and the performances raise many similar concerns. Amalia Mesa-
Bains’s works, though rooted in the local domesticana traditions of altars, extend their
referencing to a larger sphere including Europe as well as the Americas. All the
authors/artists bring their local concerns to the international sphere, while simultaneously
maintaining new cosmopolitanism in their work. After all, this is the pattern of a rapidly
growing new socio-cultural order, which was first elaborated in the US Southwest and is
emerging in all major cities of North America and Europe. Say farewell to the concept of
the monocultural nation. As the Chicano artist Gronk says, “Borders don’t apply now.
East L.A. is everywhere” (Fregoso 62).
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Appendix 1
Copyright Release
Copyright Act Section 29, Fair Dealings
Because this dissertation is a non-profit publication, I have included copies of images
without obtaining prior copyright clearance. What would otherwise be an infringement of
copyright for a commercial publication is, in Canada, permissible under the “fair dealings”
provision in Section 29 of the Copyright Act, which follows.
Fair Dealing
Research or private study
29. Fair dealing for the purpose of research or private study does not infringe copyright.
R.S., 1985, c. C-42, s. 29; R.S., 1985, c. 10 (4th
Supp.), s. 7; 1994, c. 47, s. 61; 1997, c. 24,
s. 18.
Criticism or Review
29.1 Fair dealing for the purpose of criticism or review does not infringe copyright if the
following are mentioned:
(a) the source; and
(b) if given in the source, the name of the
o (i) author, in the case of a work,
o (ii) performer, in the case of a performer’s performance,
o (iii) maker, in the case of a sound recording, or
o (iv) broadcaster, in the case of a communication signal.
1997, c. 24, s. 18.
Section 29.1 of the Copyright Act can be found online at:
http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-42/page-16.html