Chicana Artists: Exploring nepantla, el lugar de la frontera
Anzaldúa, Gloria
To be disoriented in space is to be en nepantla, to experience bouts of disassociation of identity, identity breakdowns and buildups. The border is in a constant nepantla state, and it is an...
...When folk and fine art separated, the metate and the huipil were put in museums by Western curators of art...
...I make mine out of cigar boxes or 38 T'ILAiZL4 REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 8 0 0, C 0 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 38REPORT ON WOMEN In the "old world," art was/is functional and sacred as well as aesthetic...
...Mestizaje, not Chicanismo, is the reality of our lives...
...I was born and live in that inbetween space, nepantla, the borderlands...
...They thus create a new artistic space-a border mestizo culture...
...The retablos range from the strictly traditional to modern, more abstract forms...
...I wonder who I used to be, I wonder who I am...
...The maguey cactus is Barraza's symbol of rebirth...
...Retablo Oil, enamels on metal, 8" x 9" the appropriation of her art by the dominant art dealers...
...I think of the borderlands as Jorge Luis Borges' Aleph, the one spot on earth which contains all other places within it...
...in telling the writer/artist's personal story, it also includes the artist's cultural history...
...I wonder what meaning this bat figure will have for other Chicanas, what artistic symbol they will make of it and what political struggle it will represent...
...I touch the armadillo pendant hanging from my neck and think, frontera artists have to grow protective shells...
...In that culture I would have been named Matlactli Omome Mizuitzli...
...o She was decapitated by her brother, Huitzilopochtle, the Left-Handed Hummingbird...
...All three are mediators: Guadalupe, the virgin nother who has not abandoned us, la Chinda (Malinche), the d mother whom we abandoned, and la ie mother who seeks and is a combination Anhl- no h...
...The present unparalleled economic depression in the arts gutted by government funding cutbacks threatens los artistas de la frontera...
...By disrupting the neat separations between cultures, they create a culture mix, una mestizada in their artworks...
...What surfaces are images more significant to the prevailing culture and era...
...Chicana" artist, "border" artist...
...Here before my eyes, on the opening day of the "Aztec: The World of Moctezuma" exhibition at the Denver Museum of Natural History, is the culture of nuestros antepasados indigenas...
...Is "border" artist just another label that strips legitimacy from the artist, signaling that she is inferior to the adjectiveless artist, a label designating that she is only capable of handling ethnic, folk, and regional subjects and art forms...
...If you stay too long in nepantla you are in danger of being blocked, resulting in a breech birth or being still born...
...I am again struck by Chicana artists and wi imnrt nf anrPnt MPviar Coyolxauhqui, Goddess of the Moon, volcanic stone, 88"x 79"x 14," Museo del Templo Mayor, Mexico City...
...Around me I hear the censorious, culturally ignorant words of the whites who, while horrified by the blood-thirsty Aztecs, gape in VOL XXVII...
...Haciendo tortillas becomes a sacred ritual in literary, visual, and performance arts...
...5. The Maya huipiles are large rectangular blouses which describethe Maya cosmos...
...The community feeds our spirits and the responses from our "readers" inspire us to continue struggling with our art and aesthetic interventions that subvert cultural genocide...
...The border is in a constant nepantla state, and it is an analog of the planet...
...The warrior goddess' eyes are closed, she has bells on her cheeks, and her head is in the form of a snail design...
...Border art is becoming trendy in these neocolonial times that encourage art tourism and pop-culture rip-offs...
...This sense of connection and community compels Chicana writers/artists to delve into, sift through, and re-work native imagery...
...Santa Barraza, La Malinche, 1991...
...walk into the Aztec Museum shop and see feathers, paper flowers, and ceramic statues of fertility goddesses selling for 10 times what they sell for in Mexico...
...My mind reviews image after image...
...This obscuring has encouraged the virgen/puta dichotomy...
...3. Quoted in Jennifer Heath's "Women Artists of Color ShareWorld of Struggle," The Sunday Camera, March 8, 1992, p. 9C...
...They portray the world as a diamond...
...vegetable crates that I find discarded on the street before garbage pickups...
...Each artist locates herself in this border "lugar" and tears apart then rebuilds the "place" itself...
...Night fear, susto, when every button is pushed...
...Border arte is an art that supersedes the pictorial...
...It is only one of my multiple identities...
...But there are other borders besides the actual Mexico/U.S...
...We, the viewers in the present, walk around and around the glass-boxed past...
...The problem now is how to resist corporate culture while asking for and securing its patronage...
...hanging from a nopal branch...
...The past is hanging behind glass...
...BY GLORIA ANZALDUA Stop before the dis- membered body of la diosa de la luna, Coyolxauhqui, daugh- ter of Coatlicue...
...Is the border artist complicit in VOL XXVII, No 1 JuLY/AuGuST 1993 41REPORT ON WOMEN Santa Barraza, Virgin con Corazon y Maguey, 1991...
...Through art she is able to re-read, reinterpret, reenvision and reconstruct her culture's present as well as its past...
...Artistic ideas that have been incubating and developing at their own speed have come into their season-now is the time of border art...
...Chilean-born artist Juan Davila's Wuthering Heights (1990) oil painting depicts Juanito Leguna, a half-caste, mixed breed transvestite...
...El arte de la frontera is community and academically based-many Chicana artist have M.A.s and Ph.D.s and hold precarious teaching positions on the fringes of universities...
...Border art challenges and subverts the imperialism of the United States, and combats assimilation by either the United States or Mexico, yet it acknowledges its affinities to both cultures...
...For women artists, nepantla is a constant state...
...Diversity is being sold on TV, billboards, fashion runways, department-store windows, and, yes, airport corridors and "regional" stores where you can take home a jar of Tex-Mex picante sauce along with Navaho artist R.C...
...But I and other writers/artists of la frontera have invested ourselves in it...
...inally, I find myself before the reconstructed statue of the newly unearthed el dios murcielago, the bat god with his big ears, fangs, and protruding tongue representing the vampire bat associated with night, blood sacrifice, and death...
...h.n and customs...
...To make, exhibit, and sell their artwork, and to survive, los artistas have had to band together collectively.12 I cross the exhibit room...
...2 Using the folkart format, Barraza is now painting tin testimonials known as retablos...
...Mestizaje is at the heart of our art...
...gy que...
...But there are drawbacks to having artistic and cultural power-the relentless pressure to produce, being put in the position of representing her entire pueblo and carrying all the ethnic culture's baggage on her espalda while trying to survive in a gringo world...
...The cajitas contain three-dimensional figures such as la virgen, photos of ancestors, candles and sprigs of herbs tied together...
...Gorman's "Saguaro" or Robert Arnold's "Chili Dog," and drink a margarita at Rosie's Cantina...
...The Chicana border writer/artist has finally come to market...
...Often las calaveras (skeletons and skulls) take a prominent position-and not just on el dia de los muertos (November 2nd...
...This capacity to construct meaning and culture privileges the artist...
...The three madres are cultural figures that Chicana writers and artists "reread" in our works...
...It's so raza...
...frontera...
...The artist, in - making plata from the L sale of her sculpture, P "makes it...
...Very appropriate symbols in my life, I mutter...
...If disconnected from la gente, border artists would with40 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 40 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASREPORT ON WOMEN Carmen Lomas Garza, Curandera (Faith Healer), oil on linen, 24" x 32", The Mexican Museum, San Francisco...
...6 Through the centuries a culture touches and influences another, passing on its metaphors and its gods before it dies...
...6, Roberta H. Markman and Peter T. Markman, eds...
...I walk out of the Aztec exhibit hall...
...Masks of theSpirit...
...It shows a Mexican male wearing the proverbial sombrero taking a siesta against the traditional cactus, tequila bottle on the ground, gunbelt VOL XXVII...
...But the Chicana is inside the mestiza...
...Image and Metaphor in Mesoamerica (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1989...
...De la tierra nacemos, from earth we are born, a la tierra regresaremos, to earth we shall return, a dar lo que ella nos di6, to give back to her what she has given...
...the smaller diamonds at each corner, the cardinal points.The weaver maps the heavens and underworld...
...It depicts both the soul del artista and the soul del pueblo...
...2. See Luz Maria and Ellen J. Stekert's untitled art catalog essay inSanta Barraza March 8-April 11,1992, La Raza/Galeria Posada,Sacramento, CA...
...No 1 JULY/AUGUST 1993 39 VOL XXVII, No 1 JULYv/AUGUST 1993 39REPORT ON WOMEN I wonder who I used to be...
...Sponsoring corporations that judge projects by "family values" criteria force multicultural artists to hang tough and brave out financial and professional instability...
...Outsiders" jump on the border artists' bandwagon and work their territory...
...It is September 28, mi cumpleafios...
...The ways of a people, their history and culture put on paper beaten from maguey leaves...
...The Mexico-United States border is a site where many different cultures "touch" each other and the permeable, flexible, and ambiguous shifting grounds lend themselves to hybrid images...
...1 I remember visiting Chicana tejana artist Santa Barraza in her Austin studio in the mid-1970s and talking about the merger and appropriation of cultural symbols and techniques by artists in search of their spiritual and cultural roots...
...In border art there is always the specter of death in the background...
...La gente chicana tiene tres madres...
...Of course, there is nothing new about colonizing, commercializing, and consuming the art of ethnic people (and of queer writers and artists) except that now it is being misappropriated by pop culture...
...Chicana artists are engaged in "reading" that nepantla, that border...
...We are both nos (us) and otras (others)-nos/otras...
...The new culture adopts, modifies, and enriches these images, and it, in turn, passes them on changed...
...Juanito's body is a simulacrum parading as the phallic mother with hairy chest and hanging tits...
...I recall Yolanda L6pez' Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe (1978), which depicts a Chicana/mexicana woman emerging and running from the oval halo of rays that looks to me like thorns, with the mantle of the traditional virgen in one hand and a serpent in the other...
...9. The exact quote is: "We have an internalization of fixed spacelearned early in life...
...Now, 16 years later, Barraza is focusing on interpretations of Pre-Columbian codices as a reclamation of cultural and historical mestiza identity...
...Malaquis Montoya's Frontera Series and Irene P6rez' Dos Mundos monoprint are examples of the multi-subjectivity, split-subjectivity and refusal-to-be-split themes of the border artist creating a counter art...
...Sus simbolos y metdforas todavia viven en la gente chicana/mexicana...
...Self Help Graphics and the Galeria Sin Fronteras,Austin, Texas organized the exhibitions...
...The Mexican immigrant at the moment of crossing the barbed-wired fence into the hostile "paradise" of el norte, the United States, is caught in a state of nepantla...
...Imagenes de la Frontera" was the title of the Centro Cultural Tijuana's June 1992 exhibition...
...As I walked around her studio, I was amazed at the vivid Virgen de Guadalupe iconography on her walls and on the drawings strewn on tables and shelves...
...She seems to be pushing at the restraining orb of the moon...
...Mi cuerpo vive dentro y fuera de otras culturas and a white man who constantly whispers inside my skull...
...One's orientation in space is tied to survivaland sanity...
...I recall the nichos (niches or recessed areas ) and retablos that I had recently seen in several galleries and museums...
...Something about who and what I am and the 200 "artifacts" I have just seen does not feel right...
...Portrait represents the cultural rebirth of the Chicana struggling to free herself from oppressive gender roles...
...Reproduced in Family Pictures/Cuadros de familia, Children's Book Press, San Francisco, 1990...
...It suggests another kind of border crossing-genderbending...
...VOL XXVII, No 1 JULY/AUGUST 1993 37REPORT ON WOMEN vicarious wonder and voraciously consume the exoticized images Though I too am a gaping consumer, I feel that the artworks are part of my 1 cy-my appropriation d from the misapproprial "outsiders...
...dislocation is the norm...
...As I pull out a pad to take notes on the clay, stone, jade, bone, feather, straw and cloth artifacts, I am disconcerted with the knowledge that I am passively consuming and appropriating an indigenous culture...
...Santa Barraza, Yolanda L6pez, Marcia G6mez, Carmen Lomas Garza and other Chicana artists connect their art to everyday life, instilling both with political, sacred and aesthetic values...
...Hay muchas razas running in my veins, mescladas dentro de mi, otras culturas that my body lives in and out of...
...4. See Carmen Lomas Garza's children's bilingual book, Family Pic-tures/Cuadros de familia (San Francisco: Children's Book Press,1990), in particular "Camas para sonar/Beds for Dreaming...
...Like that of many Chicana artists, her work, she says, explores indigenous Mexican "symbols and myths in a historical and contemporary context as a mechanism of resistance to oppression and assimilation.'" 3 I wonder about the genesis of el arte de la frontera...
...The border person constantly moves through that birth canal, nepantla...
...Along with other border gente, it is at this site and time, en este tiempo y lugar where and when, I create my identity con mi arte...
...They are actually tiny installations...
...7 Another Latino artist, Rafael Barajas (who signs his work as "El Fisg6n"), has a mixed-media piece entitled Pero eso si...soy muy macho (1989...
...She wears running shoes, has short hair, and her legs are bare and look powerful--a very dykey-looking woman...
...La negaci6n sistemdtica de la cultura mexicana-chicana en los Estados Unidos impide su desarrollo hacidndolo este un acto de colonizaci6n...
...7. See Guy Brett, Transcontinental: An Investigation of Reality (Lon-don: Verso, 1990...
...I ask myself, What does it mean to me esta jotita, this queer Chicana, this mexicatejana to enter a museum and look at indigenous objects that were once used by my ancestors...
...Crossing class lines-especially from working class to middle classness and privilege-can be just as disorienting...
...Until we live in a society where all people are more or less equal, we need these labels to resist the pressure to assimilate...
...They are overworked, overlooked, passed over for tenure, and denied the support they deserve...
...But the leg sticking out from beneath the sarape-like mantle is wearing a highheeled shoe, panty hose, and a garter belt...
...For me, being Chicana is not enough...
...Labeling creates expectations...
...It may encourage self-serving hustling-all artists have to sell themselves in order to get grants, get published, secure exhibit spaces, and get good reviews...
...In fact, border artists are engaged artists...
...Among the alternative galleries and art centers that combatassimilation are the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in SanAntonio, Mexic-Arte Museum and Sin Fronteras Gallery inAustin, Texas and the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco...
...We surrender to the rhythm and the grace of our artworks...
...21-24...
...Faint traces of red, blue, and black ink left by their artists, writers, and scholars...
...I arrive at the serpentine base of a reconstructed 16-foot temple where the Aztecs flung down human sacrifices, leaving bloodied steps...
...The stone represents the heart...
...Yet the dominant culture consumes, swallows whole the ethnic artist, sucks out her vitality, and then spits out the hollow husk along with its labels (such as Hispanic...
...She is the author of Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) and the children's book Friends from the Other Side/Amigos del Otro Lado (1993), and the editor of Making Face, Making Soul (1990...
...These are traditional popular miracle paintings on metal, a medium introduced to colonial Mexico by the Spaniards...
...Nepantla is the Nahuatl word for an in-between state, that uncertain terrain one crosses when moving from one place to another, when changing from one class, race or gender position to another, when traveling from the present identity into a new identity...
...Puede ser una ficci6n...
...The retablos I make are not just representations of myself, they are representations of Chicana culture...
...er in isolation...
...eAdonde nos vamos de aqui...
...Border artists cambian el punto de referencia...
...When we become disoriented from that sense of space we fall in danger of becoming psychotic...
...The multi-subjectivity and splitsubjectivity of the border artist creating various counter arts will continue, but with a parallel movement where a polarized us/them, insiders/outsiders culture clash is not the main struggle, where a refusal to be split will be a given...
...But for some, the hustling outdoes the art making...
...Through art she is able to re-read, reinterpret, reenvision and reconstruct her culture's present as well as its past...
...4 Border art, in critiquing old, traditional, and erroneous representations of the Mexico-United States border, attempts to represent the "real world" de la gente going about their daily lives...
...Border art deals with shifting identities, border crossings, and hybridism...
...The retablos are placed inside open boxes made of wood, tin or cardboard...
...9 I question this-to be disoriented in space is the "normal" way of being for us mestizas living in the borderlands...
...Power and the seeking of greater power may create a self-centered ego or a fake public image, one the artist thinks will make her acceptable to her audience...
...Some of us have a highly developed facultad and may intuit what lies ahead...
...Oil, enamels on metal, 8" x 9" I stare at the huge round stone of la diosa...
...Retablo...
...The border artist constantly reinvents herself...
...The border is the locus of resistance, of rupture, of implosion and explosion, and of putting together the fragments and creating a new assemblage...
...It is the sane way of coping with the accelerated pace of this complex, interdependent, and multicultural planet...
...There are many obstacles and dangers in crossing into nepantla...
...Border art remembers its roots-sacred and folk art are often still one and the same...
...All people in it, whether natives or immigrants, colored or white, queer or heterosexual, from this side of the border or del otro lado, are personas del lugar, local people-all of whom relate to the border and to nepantla in different ways...
...Money means power...
...The border is a historical and metaphorical site, un sitio ocupado, an occupied borderland where individual artists and collaborating groups transform space, and the two home territories, Mexico and the United States, become one...
...If one looks beyond the tangible, one sees a connection to the spirit world, to the underworld, and to other realities...
...Yes, I say to myself, the earth eats the dead, la tierra se come los muertos...
...The process is repeated until the original meanings of images are pushed into the unconscious...
...Beware of el romance del mestizaje, I hear myself saying silently...
...For a discussion of Chicano posters, almanacs, calendars andcartoons that join "images and texts to depict community issuesas well as historical and cultural themes," and that metaphori-cally link Chicano struggles for self-determination with the Mexi-can Revolution, and establish "a cultural and visual continuumacross borders," see Tomas Ybarra-Fausto's "Grbfica/UrbanIconography" in Chicano Expressions: A New View in AmericanArt, April 14-July31, 1986 (New York: INTAR Latin AmencanGallery, 1986), pp...
...Most of us are politically active in our communities...
...I seek out the table with the computer, key in my birthdate and there on the screen is my Aztec birth year and ritual day name: 8 Rabbit, 12 Skull...
...We bleed in mestizaje, we eat and sweat and cry in mestizaje...
...The border is in a constant nepantla state, and it is an analog of the planet...
...The marginalized, starving Chicana artist who suddenly finds her work exhibited in mainstream museums, or being sold for thousands of dollars in prestigious galleries, as well as the once-neglected writer whose work is on every professor's syllabus for a time inhabit nepantla...
...This form goes beyond the traditional self-portrait or autobiography...
...As a people who have been stripped of our history, language, identity and pride, we attempt again and again to find what we have lost by imaginatively digging into our cultural roots and making art out of our findings...
...The nepantla state is the natural habitat of women artists, most specifically for the mestiza border artists who partake of the traditions of two or more worlds and who may be binational...
...And if so, does this constitute a self-imposed imperialism...
...how to get the dollars without resorting to "mainstreaming" the work...
...Her bones 0 jut from their sockets...
...I call this form of visual narrative autohistoria...
...Through our artworks we cross the border into other subjective levels of awareness, shift into different and new terrains of mestizaje...
...We enter the silence, go inward, attend to feelings and to that inner cenote, the creative reservoir where earth, female, and water energies merge...
...The border artist constantly reinvents herself...
...Yes, cultural roots are important, but I was not born at Tenochitldn in the ancient past nor in an Aztec village in modern times...
...Others who find themselves in this bewildering transitional space may be those people caught in the midst of denying their projected/assumed heterosexual identity and coming out, presenting and voicing their lesbian, gay, bi or transsexual selves...
...The access to privilege that comes with the bucks and the recognition can turn the artist on her ear in a nepantla spin...
...I make an instantaneous association of the bat man with the stage of border artists-the dark cave of creativity where they hang upside down, turning the self upside down in order to see from another point of view, one that brings a new state of understanding...
...I pull out my "birth chart...
...Codices hang on the walls...
...Her "codices" are edged with milagros and ex votos...
...We consistently reflect back these images in revitalized and modernized versions in theater, film, performance art, painting, dance, sculpture and literature...
...Or it may mean transposing the former self onto a new one-the death of the old self and the old ways, breaking down former notions of who you are...
...Though I sense a latent whirlwind of energy, I also sense a timeless stillnessone patiently waiting to explode into activity...
...SeeEdward T. Hall and Mildred Reed Hall, "The Sounds of Silence,"in James P. Spradley and David W. McCurdy, eds., Conformityand Conflict Readings in Cultural Anthropology (Boston: Little,Brown and Co., 1987...
...In part, the true identity of all three has been subverted-Guadalupe to make us docile and enduring, la Chingada to make us ashamed of our Indian side, and la Llorona to make us long-suffering people...
...These are adjectives labeling identities...
...Popular culture and the dominant art institutions threaten border artists from the outside with appropriation...
...8. See ex profeso, recuento de afinidades colectiva plAstica contem-poranea: imagenes: gay-Issbicas-&roticas put together by CirculoCultural Gay in Mexico City and exhibited at Museo Universitariodel Chope during Gay Cultural Week, June 14-23, 1989...
...I stare at the hieroglyphics...
...The foursides of the diamond represent the boundaries of space and time...
...I stick my chart under the rotating rubber stamps, press down, pull it out and stare at the imprint of the rabbit (symbol of fear and of running scared) pictograph and then of the skull (night, blood sacrifice, and death...
...Metaphors are gods...
...I ask myself, What direction will el arte fronterizo take in the future...
...Will I find my historical Indian identity here at this museum among the ancient artifacts and their mestisaje lineage...
...Yet the political climate does not allow us to withdraw completely...
...Perhaps the murcielago questions the viewer's unconscious collective and personal identity and its ties to her ancestors, los muertos...
...8 According to anthropologist Edward Hall, early in life we become oriented to space in a way that is tied to survival and sanity...
...In the "old world," art was/is functional and sacred as well as aesthetic...
...White poets don't write "white" in front of their names, nor are they referred to as white by others...
...My thoughts trace the jaguar's spiritual and religious symbolism from its Olmec origins to present-day jaguar masks worn by people who no longer know that the jaguar was connected to rain, who no longer remember that Tlaloc and the jaguar and the serpent and rain are tightly intertwined...
...When folk and fine art separated, the metate (a flat porous volcanic stone with rolling pin used to make corn tortillas) and the huipil (a Guatemalan blouse) were put in museums by Western curators of art.s with a stone in its open mouth nestles on cloth...
...used by the Church to mete out institutionalized oppression: to placate the Indians and mexicanos and Chicanos...
...Chicana Artists: Exploring nepantla, el lugar de la fronteraI thank Dianna Williamson and Clarisa Rojas, my literary assis-tants, for their invaluable and incisive critical comments, NatashaMartinez for copy editing, and Deidre McFadyen...
...I wonder who I am...
...1. See Amalia Mesa-Bains,"El Mundo Femenino: Chicana Artists ofthe Movement-A Commentary on Development and Produc-tion," in Richard Griswold Del Castillo, Teresa McKenna andYvonne Yarbo Bejarano, eds., CARA, Chicano Art Resistance andAffirmation (Los Angeles: Wight Gallery, University of California,1991...
...The dominant culture shapes the ethnic artist's identity if she does not scream loud enough and fight long enough to name herself...
...But it renders that world and its people in more than mere surface slices of life...
...As cultural icons for her ethnic communities, she is highly visible...
...To be disoriented in space is to be psychotic...
...No 1 JuLY/AuGusT 1993 37 Gloria AnzaldCa is a major Mexican-American/ Chicana literary voice...
...It deals with who tells the stories and what stories and histories are told...
...The artist on some level, however, still connects to that unconscious reservoir of meaning, connects to that nepantla state of transition between time periods, and the border between cultures...
...This is why the border is a persistent metaphor in el arte de la frontera, an art that deals with such themes as identity, border crossings, and hybrid imagery...
...The exhibition was part of Festival Internacional de la Raza '92.The artworks were produced in the Silkscreen Studios of SelfHelp Graphics, Los Angeles and in the Studios of Strike Editionsin Austin, Texas...
...One of her devotional retablos is of la Malinche, made with maguey...
Vol. 27 • July 1993 • No. 1
