1

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

2

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

i

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

8

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

10

(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.

11

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.

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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

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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

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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-

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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)

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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

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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

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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.

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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)

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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