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"(Mexicans) are simple
people. They are happy with the little they
got...They are not ambitious and complex like us. They don't
need all this technology to communicate. Sometimes I just feel
like going down there & living among them."
Anonymous confession in the web
The Virtual Barrio @ The Other
Frontier
(or the Chicano interneta)
by Guillermo Gómez-Peña
(An earlier version originally appeared
in the book "Clicking In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture,"
edited by artist Lynn Hershman, Bay Press, 1996. This version
is considerably different. I have rewritten certain sections
and elaborated on certain points.
Some colleagues have pointed at various contradictions in the
text: Mexican artist Pedro Meyer and Le Monde journalist Francis
Pisani pointed out to me that I criticize the role of "victims"
that Latinos assume regarding high-technology and yet, I often
assume myself the "tone" and positionality of a victim.
Meyer also noted that "it was strange that I chose to write
the text in English since I criticize the use of English as lingua
franca in the net." I have chosen to not "correct"
my "contradictions". Rather, I have incorporated the
objections to the internal debate of the text.
I wish to express to the reader that this text, like most of
my theoretical texts, suffers from an acute crisis of literary
identity; partly because it reflects my ever shifting positionalities
as a Mexicano/Chicano interdisciplinary artist and writer living
and working in between two countries and many communities; but
also because the text attempts to describe fast-changing realities,
and fluctuating cultural attitudes which in a couple of years
might be dated. As of now, I am still not sure of which might
be the ideal format to articulate these ideas: a "personal"
chronicle (as in the first two sections); a theoretical essay
capable of containing contradictory voices (an anathema in academia),
or an activist manifesto-like narrative (as in the last part).
I constantly shift from "I" to "we", and
the "we" means at different times "my main collaborator
Roberto Sifuentes and I"; "my (techno-art) colleagues
and I"; "all Chicanos in the net" or "all
outsiders/insiders in the net". The "we" is clearly
contextual and temporary. I am fully aware of the risks of the
use of "we", yet I cannot escape the following predicament:
"We" all criticize the problems of a "master narrative"
in the '90s and yet,"we" all wish to belong to a community
larger than our immediate tribe of collaborators. How to solve
this, I still don't know).
I: Fighting my own endemic "tecnofobia":
I venture into the terra
ignota of cyberlandia, without documents, a map or an invitation
at hand. In doing so, I become a sort of virus, the cyber-version
of the Mexican fly: irritating, inescapable, and hopefully, highly
contagious.
My "lowrider" laptop is decorated with a 3-D decal
of the Virgin of Guadeloupe, the spiritual queen of Spanish-speaking
America. It's like a traveling altar, an office and a literary
bank, all in one. Since I spend 70% of the year on the road,
it is (besides my phone card of course), my main means to keep
in touch with my agent, editors and performance collaborators
spread throughout many cities in the U.S., Mexico and Europe.
The month before a major performance project, most of the technical
preparations, last minute negotiations and calendar changes,
take place in the mysterious territory of cyber-space. Unwillingly,
I have become a techno-artist and an information superhighway
bandido.
I use the term "unwillingly" because, like most Mexican
artists, my relationship with digital technology and personal
computers is defined by paradoxes and contradictions: I don't
quite understand them, yet I am seduced by them; I don't want
to know how they work; but I love how they look and what they
do; I criticize my techno-savvy colleagues who are acritically
immersed in las nuevas tecnologías, yet I silently envy
them. I resent the fact that I am constantly told that as a "Latino",
I am supposedly "culturally handicapped" or somehow
unfit to handle high-technology; yet once I have the apparatus
right in front of me, I am tempted and uncontrollably propelled
to work against it; to question it, expose it, subvert it, and/or
imbue it with humor, radical politics and linguas polutas such
as Spanglish, Franglé and cyberñol.
Contradiction prevails. Two years ago, my collaborator Cybervato
Roberto Sifuentes and I bullied ourselves into the hegemonic
"space" of the net, and once we were generously adopted
by various communities (Arts Wire, Chicle and Latino net, among
others) we suddenly started to lose interest in maintaining ongoing
conversations with phantasmagoric beings we had never met in
person (and that I must say is a Mexican cultural prejudice:
if I don't know you in person, I don't really care to converse
with you). Then we started sending a series of poetic/activist
"techno-placas" in Spanglish. In these short communiqués
we raised some tough questions regarding access, identity politics
and language. Since at the time we didn't quite know where to
post them in order to get the maximum response; and the responses
were sporadic and unfocused, our
interest began to dim. And it was only
through the gracious persistence of our techno-colleagues that
we decided to remain seated at the virtual table.
Today, despite the fact that Roberto and I spend a lot of time
in front of our laptops (when we are not touring, he is in New
York, and I'm in San Francisco or Mexico City) conceptualizing
performance projects which incorporate new technologies or re-designing
our web site, every time we are invited to participate in a public
discussion around art and technology, we tend to emphasize its
shortcomings and overstate our skepticism. Why? I can only speak
for myself. Perhaps I have some computer traumas, or suffer from
endemic digital fibrosis.
Confieso: I've been utilizing computers since '88; however, during
the first five years, I used my old Mac as a glorified typewriter.
During those years I probably deleted accidentally here and there
over 300 pages of original texts which I hadn't backed up in
discs, and thus was forced to rewrite them by memory. The thick
and confusing "user friendly" manuals fell many times
from my impatient hands. As a result of this, I spent many desperate
nights cursing the mischievous gods of cyber-space, and dialing
promising "hot lines" which rarely answered, or if
they answered, they provided me with complicated instructions
in a computer Esperanto I was unable to follow.
My bittersweet relationship to technology dates back to my formative
years in the highly politicized ambiance of Mexico City in the
'70s. As a young self-proclaimed "radical artist,"
I was full of ideological dogmas: for me, high-technology was
intrinsically dehumanizing (enajenante in Spanish), and
it was mostly used as a means to control "us"
little techno-illiterate people, politically. My critique of
technology overlapped with my critique of capitalism. To me,
"capitalists" were rootless (and faceless) corporate
men who utilized mass media to advertise their useless electronic
gadgets. They sold us unnecessary apparatuses which kept us both,
eternally in debt (as a country and as individuals) and conveniently
distracted from "the truly important matters of life".
Of course, these "important matters" included sex,
music, spirituality and "revolution" California style
(meaning, en abstracto y bien fashionable). As a child of contradiction,
besides being a rabid "anti-technology artist," I owned
a little datsun; and listened to my favorite U.S. and British
rock groups in my Panasonic importado, often while meditating
or making love as a means to "liberate myself" from
capitalist socialization. My favorite clothes, books, posters
and albums, had all been made by "capitalists" with
the help of technology; but for some obscure reason, that seemed
perfectly logical and acceptable to me.
Luckily, my family never lost their magical thinking and sense
of humor around technology. My parents were easily seduced by
refurbished and slightly dated American and Japanese electronic
goods. We bought them as fayuca (contraband) in Tepito neighborhood,
and they occupied an important place in the decoration of our
"modern" middle-class home. Our huge color TV set for
example, was decorated as to perform the double function of entertainment
unit and involuntary postmodern altar with nostalgic photos
of relatives, paper flowers, and assorted figurines all around
it; and so was the humongous equipo de sonido, next to it, with
an amph, an 8-track recorder, two record players and at least
15 speakers which played all day long a syncretic array of music
including Mexican composer Agustin Lara, Los Panchos (of course
with Eddie Gorme), Sinatra, Esquivel, and Eartha Kitt. Cumbias
followed Italian operas and rock & roll alternated with racheras.
(In this sense, my father was my first involuntary instructor
of postmodern thought). Though I was sure that with the scary
arrival of the first microwave oven to our traditional kitchen,
our delicious daily meals were going to turn overnight into sleazy
fast food, soon my mother realized that el microondas was only
good to re-heat cold coffee and soups. The point was to own it,
and to display it prominently as yet another sign of modernidad.
(At the time, in Mexico, modernity was perceived as synonymous
with U.S. technology and pop culture). When I moved North to
California (and therefore into the future), I would often buy
cheesy electronic trinkets for my family (I didn't qualify them
as "cheesy" by then). During vacations, to go back
to visit my Mexico City family with such presents ipso facto
turned me into an emissary of both prosperity and modernity.
Once I bought an electric ionizador for grandma. She put it in
the middle of her bedroom altar, and kept it there unplugged
of course, for months. When I next saw her, she told me: "Mijito,
since you gave me that thing (still unplugged), I truly can breathe
much better." And she probably did. Things like televisions,
short wave radios and microwave ovens; and later on ionizers,
walkmans, crappy calculadoras, digital watches and video cameras,
were seen by my family and friends as alta tecnologia (high technology),
and their function was as much pragmatic as it was social, ritual,
sentimental, symbolic and aesthetic.
It is no coincidence then that in my early performance work (1979-1990),
chafa - cheap or low technology performed ritual
and aesthetic functions as well. Verbigratia: For years, I used
TV monitors as centerpieces for my "video-altars" on
stage, and several "ghetto blasters" placed in different
parts of the gallery or theatre, each with a different tape and
volume, as sound environments for my performances. Fog machines,
strobe lights and gobos, megaphones and voice filters have remained
since then, trademark elements in my performances. By 1990, I
sarcastically baptized my aesthetic practice, "Aztec high-tech
art". And when I teamed with "Cyber Vato" Sifuentes
(1991), we decided that what we were doing was "techno-razcuache
art". In a glossary of "borderismos" which dates
back to '94, we defined it as "a new aesthetic that fuses
performance art, epic rap poetry, interactive television, experimental
radio and computer art; but with a Chicanocentric perspective
and a sleazoide bent." As of today (1996), my relationship
with high technology remains unresolved. I am able to theorize
about its aesthetic possibilities and political implications,
but I am incapable of implementing "hands on" any of
my theories. Luckily, thanks to Roberto and other cyber-accomplices,
at times, I can pass for a "techno-performance artist."
II: Mythical Differences
The mythology goes like this.
Mexicans (and by extension other Latinos) can't handle high technology.
Caught between a pre-industrial past and an imposed modernity,
we continue to be manual beings; Homo Fabers per excellence;
imaginative artisans (not technicians); and our understanding
of the world is strictly political, poetical or metaphysical
at best, but certainly not scientific or technological. Furthermore,
we are perceived as sentimentalist and passionate creatures (meaning
irrational); and when we decide to step out of our anthropological
realm, and utilize high technology in our art (most of the time
we are not even interested), we are meant to naively repeat what
others mainly Anglos and Europeans have already done
much better.
We, Latinos, often feed this mythology, by overstating our "romantic
nature" and humanistic stances; and/or by assuming the romantic
role of "colonial victims" of technology. We are always
ready to point out the fact that social and interpersonal relations
in the U.S., the strange land of the future, are totally mediated,
filtered, distorted, or managed by faxes, phones, computers,
and other more sofisticated technologies we are not even aware
of; that the overabundance of information technology in everyday
life is responsible for the U.S.'s social handicaps, sexual neurosis
and humanistic crisis.
Is it precisely our lack of access to these goods that makes
us overstate our differences? "We," in the contrary,
socialize profusely, negotiate information ritually and sensually;
and remain in touch with our (still intact?) primeval selves.
The mythology continues to unfold: Since our families and communities
are not exposed to the "daily dehumanizating effects of
high technology" we are somehow untouched by "illnesses"
such as despair, fragmentation or nihilism, so characteristic
of the postmodern condition in advanced capitalist societies.
"Our" problems are mainly political, not personal or
psychological, and so on and so forth. This simplistic and extremely
problematic binary world view portrays Mexico and Mexicans, as
technologically underdeveloped, yet culturally and spiritually
superior; and the U.S. as exactly the opposite.
Reality is much more complicated and ridden with contradictions:
The average Anglo American does not understand new technologies
either; people of color and women in the U.S. don't have "equal
access" to cyberspace. Furthermore, American culture has
always led the most radical (and often childish) movements against
its own technological development and back to nature (In the
'90s, American Luddites tend to be much more purist and intolerant
than their Mexican counterparts). Meanwhile, the average urban
Mexican (more than 70% of all Mexicans live in large cities)
exposed to world transculture on a daily basis is already afflicted
in varying degrees with the same "First World" existential
malaises allegedly produced by high technology and advanced capitalism.
In fact the new generations of Mexicans, including my hip generación-Mex
nephews and my 8-year-old fully bicultural son, are completely
immersed in and defined by MTV, personal computers, Nintendo,
video games and virtual reality (even if they don't own a computer).
In fact, I would go as far as to say that in contemporary Mexico,
generational borders can be determined by the degree of familiarity
with high technology and by cyber-literacy. Far from being the
rrrroomantic pre-industrial paradise of the American imagination,
the Mexico of the '90s is already a virtual nation whose cohesiveness
and fluctuating boundaries are largely provided by transnational
pop culture, television, tourism, free market (a dysfunctional
version of course), and yes, whether we like it or not, the internet.
But life in the ranchero global village is ridden with epic contradictions:
Despite all this, still very few people South of the border are
online, and those who are "wired," tend to belong to
the upper and upper-middle classes, and are mostly related to
corporate or managerial metiers. The Zapatista phenomenon is
a famous exception to the rule ("The subcomandant of performance").
Since mid-1995, techno-performance artist extraordinaire Subcomandante
Marcos has been communicating with the "outside world"
through extremely popular web sites sponsored and designed by
U.S. and Canadian radical scholars (It is still a mystery to
me how his communiqués get from the jungle village of
"La Realidad" in Northern Chiapas, which still (as
of 1997 when this version was re-written) has no electricity,
to his web pages literally overnight). However, these web pages
are more known outside of Mexico for a simple reason: Telmex,
the Mexican telephone company, makes it practically impossible
for anyone living outside the main Mexican cities to use the
net, arguing that "there are simply not enough lines to
handle both telephone and internet users."
Every time my colleagues and I have attempted to create some
kind of binational dialogue via digital technologies (i.e. to
link Los Angeles to Mexico City through satellite video-telephone),
we are faced with myriad
complications and asymetries: In Mexico, the few artists with
ongoing "access" to high technologies and who are interested
in this kind of transnational techno-dialogue, with a few exceptions,
tend to be socially privileged, politically uninformed and aesthetically
uninteresting. And the funding sources willing to support this
type of project are clearly interested in controlling who is
part of the experiment.
"Rebecca (Solnit) thinks America
Online is like K-Mart and keeps getting lost in the aisles somewhere
between press-on-nails and flash-sessions. This morning aol fell
asleep while I was forwarding your text to my brother (the Anglo-Sandinista
one) and it disappeared. Maybe it's like a combination of K-Mart
and the Argentinean military. What with all this disappearing,
loco?."
(Excerpt from an E-mail)
III: Cyber-migras & "Webbacks"
Roberto and I arrived late to
the debate, along with a dozen other Chicano experimental artists.
At the time, we were shocked by the benign or quiet (not naive)
ethnocentrism permeating the debates around art and digital technology,
specially in California. The master narrative was either the
utopian and dated language of Western democratic values and/or
a bizarre form of new age anti-corporate/corporate jargon; the
unquestioned lingua franca was of course English, "the official
language of science, information and international communications"(*1);
and the theoretical vocabulary utilized by both the critics and
apologists of cyberspace was hyper, I mean hyper-specialized
(a combination of esperantic "software" talk; revamped
post-structuralist theory hadn't we already overcome post-structuralism
in the early '90s? and nouvelle psychoanalysis), and largely
de-politicized (i.e. post-colonial theory and the border paradigm
were conveniently overlooked). If Chicanos, Mexicans and other
"people of color" didn't participate enough in the
net, it was solely because of lack of information or interest,
(not money or "access"). The unspoken assumption was
that our true interests were "grassroots" (and by grassroots
I mean, the streets in the barrio and our ethnic-based community
institutions), representational or oral (as if these concerns
couldn't exist in virtual space). In other words, we were to
remain painting murals, tagging, plotting revolutions in rowdy
cafes, reciting oral poetry and dancing salsa or quebradita.
(Some colleagues believe that the mere fact that Roberto and
I and a handful of other Chicanos are now temporarily sitting
at the cybertable is already a huge political victory. Others
more cynical believe that the reason why we get invited to the
great rave of consciousness is to bring some Tex-Mex galore and
tequila to an otherwise fairly puritan fiesta. Hopefully not).
When we began to dialogue with U.S. artists working with new
technologies, we were also perplexed by the fact that when referring
to "cyber-space" or "the net," they spoke
of a politically neutral/race-less/gender-less and classless
"territory" which provided us all with "equal
access", and unlimited possibilities of participation, interaction
and belonging, specially "belonging" (in a time in
which no one feels that they "belong" anywhere). Yet
there was never any mention of the physical and social loneliness,
or the fear of the "real world" which propels so many
people to get online, stay "there" and pretend they
are having "meaningful" experiences of "communication,"
"belonging" or "discovery" (three very American
obsessions). To many of them, the thought of exchanging identities
in the net and impersonating other genders, races or ages, without
real (social or physical) consequences seemed extremely appealing
and liberating, and by no means, superficial or escapist.(*2)
The utopian rhetoric around digital technologies, specially the
one coming out of California, reminded Roberto and I of a sanitized
version of the pioneer and frontier mentalities of the Old West,
and also of the early century futurist cult to the speed, size
and beauty of epic technology (airplanes, trains, factories,
etc.) Given the existing compassion fatigue regarding political
art and art dealing with sensitive matters of race and gender,
it was hard not to see this feel-good philosophy (or rather theosophy)
as an attractive exit from the acute social and racial crisis
afflicting the U.S. in reality #1.
Like the pre-multi-culti art world of the early '80s, the new
high-tech art world assumed an unquestionable "center",
and drew a dramatic digital border. And "on the other side,"
there lived all the techno-illiterate artists, along with most
women, Chicanos, Afro-Americans and Native Americans in the U.S.
and Canada, not to mention the artists living in so called "Third
World" countries. Given the nature of this hegemonic cartography,
those of us "illegal aliens" living south of the digital
border were forced to assume once again the unpleasant but necessary
roles of webbacks, cyber-aliens, digital viruses, techno-pirates,
and virtual coyotes (smugglers).
"In the barrios of resistance,
contemporary versions of the old kilombos, every block has a
secret community center. There, the runaway youths called Robo-Raza
II or "floating greasers" publish anarchist laser-Xerox
magazines, edit experimental home videos on police brutality
(yes, police brutality still exists) and broadcast pirate radio
and TV interventions like this one over the most popular programs...
These clandestine centers are constantly raided, but Robo-Raza
II just moves the action to the garage next door. Those who get
"white-listed" can no longer get jobs in the "Mall
of Oblivion." And those who get caught in fraganti, are
sent to rehabilitation clinics where they are subjected to instant
socialization through em-pedagogic videos (from the Spanish verb
emperor, meaning to force someone to drink, and the Mayan noun
agogic, o sea, a man without a self, like many of you)."
-From "The New Word Border", City Lights, 1996
V: 1st Draft of a Manifesto: Remapping
Cyberspace
In the past years, many theoreticians
of color, feminists and activist artist have finally crossed
the digital border without documents. This recent diaspora has
forced the debates to become more complex and interesting. But
since "we" (as of now, the "we" is still
blurry, unspecific and ever-changing) don't wish to reproduce
the unpleasant mistakes of the "cultural wars" (1987-1994),
nor do we wish to harass the brokers, impresarios and curators
of cyberspace as to elicit a new backlash, our strategies and
priorities are now quite different:
"We" are no longer trying to persuade anyone that we
are worthy of inclusion (we now know very well that we are either
temporary insiders or insiders/outsiders at the same time). Nor
are "we" fighting for the same funding (since serious
funding no longer exists specially for politicized experimental
art, and the computer tycoons we all thought would eventually
become progressive philantropists turned out to be oversized
teenagers with no political understanding of culture whatsoever.
For the moment, what "we" (cyber-immigrants) desire
is:
to "politicize" the debate;
to re-map the hegemonic cartography of cyberspace;
to develop a multicentric theoretical understanding of the (cultural,
political and aesthetic) possibilities of new technologies;
to exchange a different sort of information (mythopoetical, activist,
performative, imagistic);
and to hopefully do all this with humor, inventiveness and intelligence.
Chicano artists in particular wish to "brownify" virtual
space; to "spanglishize the net", polute and "infect"
the linguas francas.
These concerns seem to have echoes throughout Latin America,
Asia,
Africa and many so called "Third
World" communities within the so called (ex) "First
World."
With the increasing availability of new technologies in "our"
communities, the notion of "community art" and "political"
or politicized art is changing dramatically. Now the goals, as
defined by activist artists and theoreticians, are to find innovative
grassroots applications to new technologies (i.e.. to help the
Latino youth literally exchange their weapons for computers and
video cameras), and to link all community centers and artist
collectives through the internet. Artist-made CD-roms and web
pages can perform an extremely vital educational function: they
can function as community "memory banks" ("encyclopedias
chicanicas" so to speak), sites for encounter, dialogue,
complicity, and exchange; as well as virtual bases of operation
and action for trans/border grassroots projects.
To attain all this, the many virtual communities must get used
to a new cultural presence the webback (el nuevo virus
virtual); a new sensibility; and many new languages spoken in
the net. As for myself, hopefully one day I won't have to write
in English in order to have a voice in the new centers of international
power.
San Francisco, Califas
July of 1997
----------------------------------------------------
*1: Why then,- several colleagues, including Meyer and Pisani,
asked me, did I choose to write this text in English? First,
because I only know two languages, and Spanish-speaking users
in the net are still a micro-minority. How else could a Mexican
communicate with say an African, a Hindu and a German? How else
would you, whoever you are, be reading this text right now? And
second, because in order to fight a hegemonic model I strongly
believe we need to know and speak the language of hegemonic control
and hegemonic exchange of information.
*2: Many feminist colleagues have expressed
to me the fact that for women "exchanging genders"
in the net can be both "liberating" and transgressive.
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