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The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule.1 --Walter Benjamin
For a Mexican born in the United States, internal exile and displacement are second nature. The late 20th-century U.S. Mexican is often seen by society-at-large as part of a sub-working class with little education, scant economic resources, and no future. Add to this the ironic historical fact that most U.S. Mexicans are born in what is now called the American Southwest but was once a significant part of Mexico proper, and you have a case of spectacular social marginality. Being internally exiled within their former homeland--a place founded and named by Mexicans--has engendered a complex set of external and internal contradictions: resistance and acculturation; pride and self-loathing; denial and flamboyant self-glorification. These juxtapositions form the basis of the U.S. Mexican's identity: a migrant consciousness that constantly crosses the intersections of opposed cultural fields. It is an identity that simultaneously "speaks" English while holding a perspective at odds with the culture that gave birth to English. There are striking similarities between the conditions of the U.S.-born Mexican and the Irish. James Joyce could just as well have been speaking for a Mexican in the United States as for a Gael in Ireland when he wrote about his alter ego's (Stephen Dedalus) encounter with an Englishman:
Beyond this, it is also important to recognize the racial roots of the contemporary U.S. Mexican. Like the Mexican national born and bred south of the Mexican-American border, the U.S. Mexican is a mestizo--a hybrid racial being who is not Indian, yet of the Indian, not Spanish, yet of Europe. As races go, the half-millenium-old mestizo race, sometimes referred to as la cosmica raza (the cosmic race), is quite young. This relative newness has an inherent potency that has yet to be harnessed and fully defined. In addition to a complex racial reality, the U.S. Mexican is not even Mexican in the strictest sense of the term. And, to add yet another layer to an already ambiguous identity, the U.S.-born Mexican is rarely considered American as in the term, "all-American." As many have noted, history is hysterical. And Mexicans born in the United States have survived more than their share of cultural and racial hysteria. Beginning with the humilation of defeat in the Mexican-American War of 1848, and continuing into the 20th century with forced deportations to Mexico, lynchings, farm labor exploitation, and general social repression, U.S. Mexicans have had to confront a profound level of violence, fear, and loathing from American society. In spite of nearly 150 years of ongoing oppression, U.S. Mexicans have not remained prone or passive. Although they have not recovered any geographical territory, U.S. Mexicans have created a tradition of cultural resistance that stands in opposition to the economic and social domination imposed by the colonizing Anglo-American culture. Whether it has been corridos (Mexican ballads) in the Mexico-Texas region that mythologized folk heroes, or the radical Spanish-language newspapers such as Regeneracíon that were published throughout the Southwest in the early decades of this century, or the pachuco's (Mexican Zoot suiter) defiant stance during World War II that contradicted the myth of social consensus and frequently led to beatings and jailings, U.S. Mexicans have mapped out a cultural territory marked by an alternative consciousness. The most successful oppositional movement has been Chicanismo. Born out of the civil rights and farmworkers' struggles of the 1960s, this movement was founded on the idea of building a self-created identity, independent of Anglo-American mainstream values. The eruption of the Chicano movement was a step in the long process of decolonization. To identify as a Chicano is to be emphatically political. In addition, by taking the word Chicano as its conceptual basis, the movement was appropriating and transposing a term seen by many U.S. Mexicans as vulgar and lower class. In essence, then, terminology dictated form and content. Beyond the political aspect, there was a powerful accompanying artistic movement. Most likely, Chicano art was born in 1965 when the late labor leader Cesar Chavez gave budding theater director Luis Valdez permission to mount primitive actos on the very picket lines of the Delano fields in central California. In what became a classic example of Chicano ingenuity, incipient artists created a theater out of nothing. As the story is told, Chavez said, "There is no money, no actors. Nothing. Just workers on strike."3 To make something out of nothing became the implicit articulation of the sine qua non of early Chicano art. In the mid- to late sixties, there were no government or foundation grants, no art degrees, only a burning need for artists to say something about themselves and their situation. That's what Chicano art was then. Now it is displayed in high-priced galleries or prestigious museums, not on street-corner walls. The plays are performed in state-of-the-art theaters, not on dusty roads. But its roots are far less glamorous. They're the smell of the earth itself, scrawled signs exuding generations of pent-up fury, and the naked will to create under any conditions. For better or worse, today's Chicano artists face a new set of challenges. The aura of the fin de siecle hovers over them as does the still-evolving reality of a post&endash;Cold War reality. Artists must cope with neo-Reaganism and its sodomizing of multiculturalism. Over and over again, there is the jarring mixture of contradictory realities: art world success vs. everyday racism; aesthetic maturity vs. rampant indifference; Anglo patrons vs. Chicano content. The juxtaposition of antithetical facts, images, and realities is simply an extension of the cultural and psychic contradictions noted earlier. This is the strength of the Chicano artist: the ability to take oppositions-- whether cultural, personal, or political--and create a new and visionary narrative. It is the ability to transpose the ambiguities of identity into the features of such a vision that, ironically, comes from the often fragmented but revelatory experience of being Chicano. That is why there is a similarity between the nature of Chicano identity and the technique of montage as formulated by Walter Benjamin: "the ability to capture the infinite, sudden, or subterranean connections of dissimilars."4 To live, as the Chicano does, in a constant state of dissimilarity, yet to see the "sudden" or "subterranean" connections between specific dissimilars is, in Benjamin's view, the essence of the artistic imagination in the age of technology. By necessity, Chicano artists tap into this realm of hidden or veiled associations for the source of their art. One artist who delves deeply into the womb of Chicano consciousness is Amalia Mesa-Bains, an artist and intellectual based in San Francisco. In the spirit of the "traditions of the ephemeral" and Mexican devotional art forms, Mesa-Bains has developed a highly refined response to the Chicana conundrum. By drawing on her own life and memories, she has redefined the nature of being a female in an outcast but patriarchal culture. As a woman, she has taken the Chicano aesthetic, particularly as it has been expounded by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto in his analysis of the rasquache5 (a funky, irreverent sensibility), and created a new critical category: Chicana Domesticana.6 Mesa-Bains recasts "the domestic chamber" from a "space imbued with saliency and isolation" into a metacommentary on the place of woman in the Chicano family, the Catholic Church, and mainstream society. Through on-site installations that use the Mexican home altar tradition--altares--as her point of departure, she has brought forth a spiritually restorative vision for the culturally battered Chicana. In her 1993 altar installation for the Whitney Museum, Venus Envy, Chapter One (Or the First Holy Communion Moments Before the End), Mesa-Bains reclaims not only her own life through the use of mirrors, texts, photographs, personal memorabilia, and items from pop culture, but also charts a new direction in what Whitney curator Thelma Golden calls "the artist's formation of the altar aesthetic." Sensuous visual layerings characterized, as Mesa-Bains notes, "by accumulation, display, and abundance . . . allow a commingling of history, faith and the personal." It is with this ceremonial fusion of spheres that she offers deliverance from the restricted gender roles within Chicano culture, as well as liberation from the narrow, stereotypical image of the Chicana imposed by Anglo-American society. Mixing the feminine with the religious and tactile--almost palpable physical texture--is something Mesa-Bains has always been drawn to in her life. In noting her childhood memories, one in particular provides a sense of her personal influences:
In Venus Envy, Chapter Two: The Harem and Other Enclosures, at Williams College Museum of Art, Mesa-Bains further refined the idea and image of evolving Chicana identity. In particular, in the installation The Library of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, she takes the Mexican poet-nun's famous salon space and distills it into three basic elements: the chair, the mirror, and the book. As Mesa-Bains writes, "The chair symbolizes the cultural body and is a historic reference to the colonial trauma of the 1492 invasion. Wounds to the chair narrate the suffering of that colonial age and reference the cultural context of Sor Juana's writing." Sor Juana's library/salon becomes not an enclosure, but a sacred space that sets the spirit free from the petty orthodoxies of the seventeenth century as well as the bigoted conventions of our own time. One is reminded here of these lines from the great poet herself:
As an intellectual herself, Mesa-Bains can identify with the feminist struggles of Sor Juana as she fought against the constraints of the male-dominated Catholic hierarchy. Even more, taking Sor Juana as an artistic mentor, Mesa-Bains creates in the manner of the famous Mexican nun. She constructs her works with methodical and meticulous attention to detail yet weaves in a personal and emotional point of view. By entering her ceremonial chambers of truth, we enter the zone of illumination; we enter what Mesa-Bains herself calls the "evanescent intensity of a moment" that yields life itself. Recovering sense from the depths also preoccupies Los Angeles painter and muralist John Valadez. A third-generation native Angeleno, Valadez sees himself as a product of what he calls "schizo-ethnicity." As a Mexican growing up in an Anglo-dominated world, he learned to see everything from "two radically divergent points of view"--as if he were torn between two ways of being. This deep contradiction within himself, coupled with society's denial of life's inherent duality, bred a deep anger and rage in Valadez. As a survival mechanism, he took a copy of an old volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica and reconstructed it through the use of found images.
From this experience, Valadez eventually created an authentic expression of the new Mexican reality of downtown Los Angeles with The Broadway Mural, an eighty-foot-long wall work that glorifies the Latinization of Broadway Street. The mural, with its giant images of Mexicans and other outcasts in a profusion of exuberant color and energy, is a monumental example of what Umberto Eco calls "semiotic guerrilla warfare." The mural, now housed inside the Victor Clothing store, says more through visual imagery than all the studies and demographic profiles could ever explain. Perhaps one of Valadez's most revealing paintings is his 1992 pastel, Immamou. It is a classic expression of Chicano self-excavation: montage as confession. A headless, naked torso with Kahloesque cuts, bruises, and hieroglyph-like tattoos is submerged under a swirl of murky, troubled water. The sunken torso sits waist-deep in the detritus of our post-modern society. This is the region of the unconscious, a site of desires unspoken, perhaps even unnamable. The word Immamou is taken from an old Haitian earth religion and refers to the god of the sea. "At first, Immamou frightened me," Valadez notes. "There are many frightful truths in the world that many of us don't want to deal with. I want to bring these things out into the open. "In Immamou, the markings on the figure are actual ritualistic symbols from the religion," the painter says. "You don't need the head and face. All you need you need to know about this person is known from the marks on the body and the tattoos. The signs stand for the spirit, and every spirit in this religion has rituals that call forth a particular spirit. I put in the cuts and wounds because it shows the reality of life. We all have marks --physical and otherwise. It about being wounded, and in Immamou I'm trying to show that we can transcend the hurt, the trash."10 Immamou is the depiction of the wounded survivor, the Chicano who triumphs despite the accumulated weight of twisted history. By invoking imagery from an ancient island religion, Valadez has drawn a connection between urban Mexican experience and the sea of life. This is the inner self proudly displaying its spiritual damage and the markings of its ritual healing. For Valadez, release from the demons of hate and negativity can only come through art, an art that plumbs the bowels of our suffering in an ongoing war between two opposing world views. The nature of war and military strategems of survival in an information-driven world fascinate artist-provocateur Daniel J. Martinez. Fueled by a remarkably obsessive yet coolly controlled anger, and drawing upon everything from Futurism's aim of integrating life with art to the suprasensorial ideal of the late Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica (who prized only art capable of releasing individuals from their oppressive conditioning) and the often nihilistic, in-your-face aesthetic of urban Chicano art, Martinez has begun to create a hybrid vision of the artist in a postmodern, global society. Although he now identifies as a Chicano, Martinez is a classic case study of the colonized U.S. Mexican. Growing up in a working-class city near Los Angeles, he never learned to speak Spanish (even though both his parents were fluent). He says it was strictly forbidden by his grammar school teachers, and his parents fell right in line with that repressive ethic. He says he never learned anything positive about his ethnic background. Instead, he was immersed in American pop culture complete with its pervasive stereotypes about Mexicans. So, like many kids of his generation, he just drifted into an unthinking identification with "whiteness." He acted white, talked white. For all intents and purposes, he was white. In other words, he lived a total denial of himself. Over time, he began to recover and reclaim his heritage. His long journey into ethnic self-awareness makes his notorious buttons for the 1993 Whitney Biennial a lesson in high irony. Martinez created exact replicas of the Whitney's standard admission tags but had them read various segments of the sentence, "I can't imagine ever wanting to be white." Of course, Martinez has imagined being white; he has lived it. Ironically, that paradox was completely lost to the critics. Instead, the tags became emblems of the mainstream's disdain for multiculturalism. In the fall of 1992, Martinez's I Pissed on the Man Who Called Me a Dog opened at the New Langton Arts gallery in San Francisco. The installation piece was a claustrophobic labyrinth strewn with old clothes and cardboard boxes that reeked of mildew. All of this was surrounded by a shrieking soundtrack of deranged gospel music compiled by VinZula Kara and video loops of pop violence. At one point, Martinez presented sets of images superimposed with quotes from famous thinkers. One photograph depicted a grisly atrocity from the Bosnian war. Above it was Aristotle's well-known dictum: "Anyone can become angry-- that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way--that is not easy." Aristotle's words could very well be Martinez's motto. Indeed, anger and insult are the throughlines of his work. Every installation, each show, becomes another opportunity to agitate. It's another chance to deliver a well-deserved punch into the gut of mainstream America. In the process, Martinez joins with other artists whose work only succeeds to the extent that it offends. With them, he must be judged for his ability to incise and incite. It is not enough to belittle or berate. To be successful by the standard he has set for himself, the work must go straight to the heart of the matter and deliver a death blow. Anything less is just flaccid posturing. Recently, Martinez has also immersed himself in Irish culture. Having spent the summer of 1994 in Ireland has allowed him to absorb the often remarkable similarities between the Irish and U.S.-Mexican experiences with resistance and decolonization. In many respects, he is a quintessential hybrid artist who crosses disciplines, mixes technologies, applies radical theories, and appropriates disparate elements from the tangled web of post-modern society. He embodies a migrant nomadism, the exilic urge that, as cultural critic Edward Said puts it, comes out of an "elusive oppositional mood" pulsing subversively through our cool, digitized culture. At the same time, Martinez is a construct, a decolonized individual who has made himself over from the fragments of his original culture and the debris of postindustrial society. Like Mesa-Bains and Valadez, Martinez is an example of Chicano Montage: the ability to capture through art the sometimes fragmentary but always provocative juxtapositions of identity. In their own way, each is formulating the language and sensibility of a new art, a new approach to the ongoing "state of emergency." One of the most powerful symbols in Chicano mythology is Aztlán, the ancient mythical Mesoamerican homeland located in the American Southwest. As Chicanos see it, Aztlán is their Promised Land. In Aztlán, Chicanos will be whole again: estrangement will be finally shed like dead skin, and in its place they will find cultural and psychic unity. That is the dream. And, until that day comes, Chicano artists will continue to create an Aztlán of the imagination, a memorable counterpoint to the mass hypnosis of our age. Notes: 1 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969). 2 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking, 1964). 3 Max Benavidez, "Cesar Chavez Nurtured Seeds of Art," Los Angeles Times, 28 April, 1993, sect. F, pp. 1, 4. 4 Benjamin, Iluminations, ibid. 5 Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, Rasquache: A Chicano Sensibility (Phoenix: MARS Artspace, 1988). 6 Amalia Mesa-Bains, "Domesticana: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache," see p. 156. 7 Amalia Mesa-Bains, "Memories of Childhood," unpublished manuscript. 8 Octavio Paz, Sor Juana Or the Traps of Faith. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). 9 Max Benavidez, "The Schizo-Ethnic View: John Valadez," Los Angeles Times, 18 November, 1992, Sunday Calendar, pp. 6, 80. 10 Ibid.
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