05 Claire Fox, The Portable Border

7/27/2019 05 Claire Fox, The Portable Border

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The Portable BorderSITE-SPECIFICITY, ART, AND THE U.S.-MEXICO FRONTIER

All major metropolihave been fully borderized.n fact, there are no Claire F. FoxlongervisibleculturaldifferencesbetweenManhattan,Montreal,Wash-ington, Los Angeles or Mexico City. They all look like downtownTijuanaon a Saturdaynight.-Guillermo G6mez-Pefia,"The New World B)order"'Its exactlocation s problematical;he awkward act is, Borderland anapparentlybe found by headingfor the ruins of just aboutany largetwentiethcentury city.This reporter ound it in the rubbleof Detroit.-Life on theBorder2

Today, "the border" and "border crossing" are commonly used criticalmetaphors among multicultural and postmodernist artists and writers.According to Chon Noriega, these terms were first employed in the 1960sand 1970s by Chicano and Mexican scholars to refer to the experience ofundocumented workers from Mexico crossing to the United States.3Indeed, in Chicano arts and letters, "Borderlands" has replaced Aztlin asthe metaphor of choice to designate a communal space.4 But even thoughthe U.S.-Mexico border retains a shadowy presence in the usage of theseterms, the border which is currently in vogue in the U.S., both amongChicano scholars and among those theorists working on other culturaldifferences, is rarely site-specific.5 Rather, it is invoked as a marker ofhybrid or liminal subjectivities, such as those which would be experiencedby persons who negotiate among multiple cultural, linguistic, racial, orsexual systems throughout their lives. When the border is spatialized inthese theories, that space is almost always universal. "The Third Worldhaving been collapsed into the First,"6as the argument goes, the border isnow to be found in any metropolis-wherever poor, displaced, ethnic,immigrant, or sexual minority populations collide with the "hegemonic"population, which is usually understood to consist of middle- and upper-class WASPs.In this essay, I shall examine two sets of aesthetic texts in which theborder figures prominently as a space of fantasy and sociopolitical alle-gory, with a view toward challenging the project of expanding bordersand the types of experiences understood by the term bordercrossing,which I have outlined above. The first group of texts is documentationrelating to two performances by Guillermo Gomez-Pefia, BorderBrujo(1988-90) and Yearof the White Bear: The New World (B)order (1992-93).


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Emphasizing thesocial andcultural dimen-sions of theU.S.-Mexicoborder overtopographicalones immediatelygave borderconsciousness acertain mobility.As a phenomeno-logical category,the border wassomething thatpeople carriedwithin them-selves, in additionto being anexternal factorstructuring theirperceptions.

Gomez-Pefia, a former member of the Border Art Workshop/TallerdeArte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF), made U.S.-Mexico border issues a centraltheme of his work from the mid- to late 1980s. The video version of Bor-derBrujomarked a shift in G6mez-Pefia's thematic concerns; its release in1990 roughly coincided with the artist's decision to deemphasize theU.S.-Mexico border region while nevertheless retaining the bordermetaphor as a means to address general issues of cultural imperialism.The second group of texts is a subgenre of speculative fiction which hasbeen termed "contemporary urban fantasy" by one of its creators.7 Cur-rently there are a dozen or so writers in the U.S. and Canada who havecollaborated in creating an imaginary metropolis called Bordertown.8Their shared world has been elaborated in three collections of short sto-ries and three novels;9 at the time of this writing, another anthology wasin press. An active fan culture has sprung up around the Bordertownseries which ranges from raves held in Los Angeles warehouses, whereguests re-create "The Dancing Ferret" (a Bordertown nightclub), todance troupes in several U.S. cities which derive inspiration from Bor-dertown's "Horn Dance" commune. Bordertown's various fan subcul-tures promise to become more mainstream in the near future, as one ofthe Bordertown novels is presently being adapted as a two-hour TV pilotfor NBC, and world rights for the stories were just negotiated.Both G6mez-Pefia's work and that of the Bordertown collective con-form with the type of "global border consciousness" I have outlinedabove; neither claims to be exclusively about the U.S.-Mexico border. If Iam rather perversely trying to tie them to this particular geographicalregion, it is indirectly, through the common issues that these aestheticprojects share with popular mass media coverage of the North AmericanFree Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Like the news media, the former textsare grappling with ways to broach the subject of "North American iden-tity" in light of NAFTA's putative threat to national identities. In the U.S.and Mexico, national news and documentary sources constantly representthe border as a synecdoche of the nations it divides.10 That is, develop-ments on the border are perceived to be symptomatic of the overallstatus of U.S.-Mexican relations, and the importance of border events ispresented from the point of view of national actors rather than localinhabitants. Most recently, NAFTA's advocates and detractors appropri-ated this way of seeing the border in order to cast it as "the future" or"the cutting edge" of what would occur throughout the North Americancontinent if NAFTA were ratified. The Bordertown stories and G6mez-Pefia's recent work also place their border zones in a not-too-distant,apocalyptic future, a future which nonetheless incorporates many ele-ments from our immediate present.

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Globalizing the Border: Guillermo G6mez-PehaIn his recent work, Guillermo Gomez-Pefia, Chica-lango performanceartist," has increasingly unmoored his border from the "transfrontiermetropolis" of San Diego-Tijuana, where he was a founding member ofBAW/TAF in 1984.12 BAW/TAF was, and still is, a group of Mexican,Anglo, and Chicano artists who engaged in collaborative multimedia andinteractive art projects specifically about the U.S.-Mexico border region.13BAW/TAF artists were both present-minded and oppositional, insofar astheir work responded critically to border issues such as immigration,human rights violations, and racism, and they were utopian in that theyasked their audiences to "imagine a world in which this internationalboundary has been erased."14Site-specificity-not just in terms of instal-lation but also in terms of audience address and thematic issues-becamea guiding principle of the group.Jeff Kelley described BAW/TAF'sprojectas an "art of place":

An artof place s concerned ess withthephenomenal ndgeologicalaspectsof a placethanwith the cultural,historical,ethnic,linguistic,political,andmythologicaldimensionsof a site.To somedegree,of course,site andplaceare mattersof interchangeableperception.Thus, we see site-specificarttransformednto a place particular racticewhichrepresentshe domestica-tionand/orsocialization f the '70s site, anddefinesapproacheso art-mak-ing in whicha place,a condition,or an occasion s seen andworkedas thematerialsof humanor socialexchange.A place is not merelya medium ofart,but also its contents.15For G6mez-Pefia, as for other BAW/TAF members, the border was alwaysmuch more than a line demarcatingnationalspace. Emphasizing the socialand cultural dimensions of the U.S.-Mexico border over topographicalones immediately gave border consciousness a certain mobility. As a phe-nomenological category, the border was something that people carriedwithin themselves, in addition to being an external factor structuringtheirperceptions.G6mez-Pefia's endeavors in performance art prior to formingBAW/TAF (e.g., with Poyesis Genetica)16 suggest that he was alreadyworking through ideas about liminal subjectivitiesbefore he attached themto the San Diego-Tijuana region. Emphasizing subjectivity as predomi-nant over social geography, however, facilitated his later expansion of theborder to encompass "the World."This shift is clearly evident in severalessays he published in U.S. arts media during the period immediatelyprior to and following his break with BAW/TAF In his 1988 essay "Doc-umented/Undocumented," for example, G6mez-Pefia referred to the

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process of world "borderization,"but he also privileged the deterritorial-ized perspective of the (U.S.-Mexico) border artist, which allowed him orher to act as facilitatorof interculturaldialogue among ethnic groups.17Inhis 1989 "Multicultural Paradigm," G6mez-Pefia extended the role of"border crosser" to all North Americans and all readers of his work:Today, f there s a dominant ulture, t is borderculture.Andthose who stillhaven'tcrosseda borderwill do it verysoon. All Americans fromthe vastcontinentof America)were,areor will be bordercrossers."AllMexicans,"saysTomasYbarra-Frausto,arepotentialChicanos."As youreadthistext,you arecrossinga borderyourself.18

Gomez-Pefia's next step was to make the border global. "From Art-mageddon to Gringostroika,"an essay published in 1991 in High Perfor-mance, found him speaking of many geographical borders, from theAmericas to the iron curtain. But geographical borders were all butupstaged in this essay by a new, temporal threshold. G6mez-Pefia wrote,"We stand equi-distant from utopia and Armageddon, with one foot oneach side of the border, and our art and thought reflects this condition."19This apocalyptic look toward the next millennium, signified by a vertigi-nous time-space compression, has since become a major theme ofG6mez-Pefia's work, and I will discuss it in relation to the Bordertownseries later in this essay.I would like first, however, to discuss how G6mez-Pefia's incremen-tally expanding borderhas impacted upon his visual work.As I stated ear-lier, the release of the video version of BorderBrujoin 1990 can be read asa signpost of the shift in his thinking about borders in relation to place. Insome ways the video is an anomalous conclusion to his involvement withBAW/TAF, for it was released just as the collective was in the throes ofreorganizationand shortly before Gomez-Pefia denounced border art alto-gether in several highly publicized articles in 1991.20 Isaac Artenstein, aMexican-born filmmaker well known for his movie BreakofDawn (1988),about the rise of Spanish-language radio in Los Angeles, produced anddirected BorderBrujo after G6mez-Pefia had successfully toured the per-formance for two years (1988-90) in North America and Europe.21The publicity for Border Brujo describes it as a performance "inwhich Guillermo G6mez-Pefia transforms himself into 15 different per-sonas to exorcise the demons of dominant cultures. In English, Spanish,Spanglish, Inglefol and Nahuatl-bicameral." People familiar with BAW/TAF's previous work would note immediate continuities of theme, cos-tume, iconography, and sets between BorderBrujo and previous BAW/TAF projects. This was also not the first time that a BAW/TAF memberhad used video to record a performance.22For the most part, BorderBrujoprivileges documentation of G6mez-Pefia's performance over experimen-

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tation with the video medium itself. Its camera movement and editing arerelatively nonintrusive; other than alternation between medium shots andclose-ups of G6mez-Pefia, the camera only cuts for brief moments toextreme close-ups of the props that comprise the altar-set. There is onesequence in which Artenstein's camera work breaks markedly with thistendency. In the "Casa de Cambio" sequence, Gomez-Pefia plays aTijuana barker who advertises the various transformations of personalidentity available to those who dare to cross the border.23 The videorapidly cuts from camera positions to the left and right of G6mez-Pefia,establishing an imaginary line that actually bisects his body. This tech-nique represents a drastic departure from the way that Hollywood editinghas used an imaginary borderline in narratives set in the U.S.-Mexicoborder region, namely, as a structuring device that segregates ratherthanintegrates opposing elements of "cultural identities."The piece's transformation from performance to video was markedbyadditionalfeatures,however, which suggest a shift in the way Gomez-Pefiaconceived of his mass media audience. For one thing, in the earlierin situversions of the piece, he interacted with the audience during the perfor-mance. He would shine a flashlight on them and interrogate them in aparody of a Border Patrol agent, for example, and at the end of the per-formance, he collected items from various members of the audience whichhe added to his altar-set for future performances or buried on the U.S.-Mexico border. The video does not portray an audience at all, nor doesthe camera ever cut to give a point-of-view shot from G6mez-Pefia's per-spective. In the live versions, G6mez-Pefia often changed portions of hisscript to include the name of the place where he was performing andother site-specific information. Three published versions of the script, forexample, include a great deal of material about California, specificallyabout San Diego-Tijuana.24 In the video version, on the other hand, thereare fewer references to the location of the performance, and at one pointG6mez-Pefia refers to "Sushi," the performance space-gallery that sup-ported the video's production. Finally, and perhaps most importantly,Gomez-Pefia ultimately deleted from the video version almost all of thelarge chunks that were in Spanish, as well as some of the more politicallypointed critiques in English.25

It is worth remarking that many of these outtakes were eventuallyrecut into another, much shorter piece, entitled Son ofBorder Crisis:SevenVideoPoems(1990). The latter video is a sort of alter ego to the former. Itcontains more material in Spanish, and because its roughly fifteen minutesof footage is broken up into seven segments, the pace is aphoristic ratherthan sermonic. It even opens with an exterior shot of Gomez-Pefia infront of Sushi, pitching the show to potential spectators through a mega-phone. This video was released largely due to demand from Chicano and



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G6mez-Pena,who hasconsistentlycalled attentionto the already"borderized"stateof U.S. cultures,subverts the ideaof an Anglomajority in North

America byasking: What ifNAFTAiftedbarriers toimmigrationon the continent?What if the rolesbetween Gringosand Mexicanswere reversed?

Latino film festivals in the U.S., and also from festivals in Latin Americaand Spain, for a sample of Artenstein and G6mez-Pefa's project that fit inwell with the time constraints of short-subject programming.26As Gomez-Pefia was moving toward a solo careerbased in New Yorkand gaining access to a broader "alternative art" audience through hisvideo, he was simultaneously attacking the co-optation of the border-artmovement by major museums and galleries in the press.27A key com-plaint on his part was that BAW/TAF, which had in some sense broughtborder art to the attention of the national arts community, was now beingignored by that same community. He criticized the La Jolla Museum ofContemporary Art (now the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego)for raisinghalf a million dollars to "bring big names from out of town" fora four-year border-art project.28Perhaps for G6mez-Pefia, being "deter-ritorialized" from the U.S.-Mexico border region itself provided him withthe rationale for abandoning an "art of place" in favor of the more general"New World (B)order."The New World (B)order is a 1992-93 performance written anddirected by Gomez-Pefia and performed by G6mez-Pefia and CocoFusco. An essay by the same name and closely following the text of theperformance has also been published in High Performance,and a scriptwas recently published in the Drama Review.29The format of the perfor-mance is loosely based on a news or radio broadcast in which the twocharacters, El Aztec High-Tech (G6mez-Pefia) and Miss Discovery92(93) (Fusco), alternate in presenting their descriptions of the newworld. As in BorderBrujo, each characteractually comprises many differ-ent voices and personae. TheNew World B)orderwas conceived as part ofa larger, year-long project relating to the quincentenary, entitled The Yearof the WhiteBear, which included a trilogy of performances, as well asessays and radio broadcasts. Gomez-Pefia assembled a team of Mexican,Chicano, and Caribbean artists from the East and West Coasts to collab-orate on various aspects of the productions.30Like BorderBrujo, The NewWorld B)orderwas adapted for television by filmmakerDaniel Salazar;itwas scheduled for distribution in fall 1994.31

Rhetorically speaking, The New World(B)order akes up a strategywhich Gomez-Pefa has identified elsewhere as common in border art. Inthe piece he plays with role reversals in order to "adopt a position ofprivilege and speak from a position of privilege even though we know it'sa fictional position."32Gomez-Pefia creates these hypothetical situationsout of contradictions presently operative in U.S. political discourse. Onesuch contradiction is the promotion of a united North America by advo-cates of free trade even as the continent's national populations remainjuridically segregated from one another. G6mez-Peia, who has consis-tently called attention to the already "borderized" state of U.S. cultures,

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subverts the idea of an Anglo majority in North America by asking:Whatif NAFTA lifted barriers to immigration on the continent? What if theroles between Gringos and Mexicans were reversed?Following the arrivalof "Gringostroika"33o the North American continent,

geo-politicalbordershave fadedaway.Due to the implementation f a FreeRaid Agreementand the creation of a Zona de Libre Cogercio34he nationsformerlyknown as Canada,the United States and Mexico have mergedpainlessly o create he Federation f U.S. Republics.FUSR is controlledbya MasterChamberof Commerce,a Departmentof Trans-national ourismanda MediaJunta.35

Laggard, separatist Gringos in turn have flocked to the former U.S.-Mexico border and have become the next wave of low-wage maquiladoraand fast-food workers.Gomez-Pefia's fin de siecle continent is no utopia, despite the disso-lution of the Anglo-dominated state and the adoption of Spanglish and

Gringofiol as the official languages. Even as the FUSR promotes an offi-cial commerce-oriented version of multiculturalism through its giganticmedia apparatus, a flurry of separatist nationalisms demand sovereignty:"Quebec, Puerto Rico, Aztldn, Yucatan, Panama, and all Indian nationshave managed to secede from the new Federation of U.S. Republics. Inde-pendent micro-republics are popping up everywhere in the blink of aneye."36Gomez-Pefia also devotes considerable attention to describing theyouth of the New World (B)order, whom he divides into two camps:robo-raza I and robo-raza II. The former, "the new citizens of horizontalnothingness," are technophilic mall rats who lack the consciousness andpassion to become engaged in any type of "cause." On the other hand,robo-raza II, together with former artists, form part of the resistancemovement known as Arteamerica Sociedad Anonima:

Everyblockhasa secretcommunity enterwhere herunaway ouths,calledrobo-raza I, publishan anarchistic aser-xeroxmagazine,editexperimentalhomevideoson police brutality yes, policebrutality tillexists)and broad-cast pirateradio interventionsover the most popularprogramsof RadioNuevo Orden.37

Robo-raza II are presented as a nonsectarian bright spot in this otherwisebleak scenario of transnationalist/nationalistbinarisms. Their role as thehope for the future is underlined by Gomez-Pefa's contrasting andderogatory treatment of the retrograde "Mafias" at the essay's (and per-formance's) conclusion. The Mafias are ethnic and nationalist purists,such as the "Chicano Aristocracy from East L.A." and the "Real African



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Nation," who "cling to the past in order to experience an optical illusionof continuity and order."38In interviews, G6mez-Pefia now refers to himself as a "cross-culturaldiplomat,"39and one notes in his recent work an ever-increasing faith inthe political effectivity of art and artists. BAW/TAF conceived of its artis-tic projects as working in concert with other activities such as journalism,education, and political activism. That is, art projects were but one aspectof the group's site-specific work. In a recent essay, in contrast, Gomez-Peiia argues, following a prophecy of Joseph Beuys from the 1970s, thatart became politics and politics became art by the second half of the1980s.40He proceeds to create a continuum of "Performance Politics orPolitical Performance Art,"41under which he assembles many artists andactivists in the U.S. and Latin America, based upon their common use ofperformative strategies to achieve political goals. To this new breed ofgrassroots artist-politician, G6mez-Pefa contrasts certain conservativeforces that have on several occasions appropriated performance art andprogressive popular-culture icons in order to bolster state power.The idea of the performance artist's power transcending that of the"nonaesthetic" political activist is identified in several sources with a tripG6mez-Pefia took to the Soviet Far East as part of a binational humanrights commission, when he realized that "the artist as interculturaldiplomat is able to cross many borders that political activists are unableto."42The idea is consistent with a trend in the work of many of the post-modern theorists, such as Henry Giroux, lain Chambers, and D. EmilyHicks (former BAW/TAF collaborator and ex-wife of G6mez-Pefia),who highlight certain professions as those which facilitate "border cross-ing." In texts by the latter theorists, "cultural workers," identified asartists, writers, educators, architects, and lawyers, among others, are por-trayed as having "primacy"43 in processes of social transformation,because their jobs give them a unique position from which to "dialogue"with "Others."44

There are other reasons, however, which may account for the ease ofsuch border crossings by professionals and intellectuals.The U.S.-Mexicoborder has rarely presented itself as a hindrance to artists, intellectuals,and tourists, for example, but then again, these crossings are not demo-graphicallyrepresentativeof other large-scale flows of border traffic whichcurrently characterize the region, such as that of undocumented workersnorthward and that of U.S. capital southward. The de facto emergence ofthe metropolis as the site of border crossings in the work of postmoderntheorists, in the wake of allegedly collapsed national boundaries, has in asense made it possible for these intellectuals to conceive of crossing bor-ders while remaining in the same place, simply by carrying out the dutiesof their profession.

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G6mez-Pefia's periodization of the art-politics merger in the late1980s is concomitant with the emergence of an oppositional "artist-administrator"figure that Grant Kester has identified as characteristic ofthe "alternative arts" sphere in the U.S. during the same period.45Artistswhose work was deemed controversial or obscene by the NEA and othergovernment-supported art-funding agencies during the Reagan-Bush erawere often publicized as victims of censorship stemming from racism,sexism, or homophobia. On a thematic level, these artists linked their ownvictimization at the hands of the right wing to other forms of oppressionsuch as poverty and homelessness. According to Kester, many "alterna-tive" artists who gained notoriety during this period based their artworkupon a declared solidarity between artists and "the oppressed" and posi-tioned themselves as spokespersons, if not as members, of their avowedconstituencies. G6mez-Pefia's self-presentation as a shaman in perfor-mances such as BorderBrujohas clearly been read by academics, journal-ists, and others as that of a spokesperson for all border crossers. Hisdescriptions of "border consciousness," for example, appear repeatedly ina recent article by an anthropologist about a transbordermigration circuitof undocumented workers between Aguililla, Mexico, and Redwood City,California, but at no point in the article does the author quote his owninformants regarding their lifestyle and consciousness.46

The Mass Media Border: The Bordertown SeriesG6mez-Pefia's recasting of the border as a global and temporal zone wasin part a reaction to the border hype already generated on a nationallevel, not just by major U.S. art museums but also by popular culture, asin Taco Bell's "Make a Run for the Border" ad campaign, which featuredLatino musicians and celebrities.47 Within popular culture, however,there have also appeared progressive attempts to portray border zones,such as that of the Bordertown series. In contrast to G6mez-Pefia's pointof departure in San Diego-Tijuana, these narratives take as their startingpoint G6mez-Pefia's present global border perspective. That is, the bor-der of the fantasy stories is already non-site-specific, futuristic, andurban. The authors claim that their models for Bordertown are any num-ber of world cities where they have lived. It is difficult, therefore, to readBordertown as an allegory of one particular geographical referent,although the type of globalism in the stories remains very U.S.-centered,as suggested by the youth cultures as well as the range of ethnicities por-trayed.48The creator of the Bordertown series, Terri Windling, is a writer andpainter who through her experience as consulting editor for Ace and Tor



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(both sci-fi and fantasy imprints) is credited with having developed andpromoted "contemporary urban fantasy" literature and with having con-tributed to the current boom in shared-world anthologies.49Demograph-ically speaking, the books in the series are aimed at sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds who watch MTV, although an active fan culture exists amongadults as well. Windling and the writers of the series affirmthat the devel-opment of strong charactersis central to the narratives,and that the prin-cipal border of the series is to be understood as psychological rather thangeographical-it is the border between childhood and adulthood, betweendreams and reality.50The stories are meant to be "narrativesof empower-ment" which show adolescents confronting obstacles and making deci-sions without the intervention of adults.

The externalization of the adolescent psyche in the physical and socialenvironment is what interests me about Bordertown, especially since thecharacters are quite often explained as the products of their "environ-ment" in the first place.51 The stories are set sometime after "theChange," that is, the relatively recent reemergence of the Faerie king-dom (after several centuries' hiatus), which has witnessed the rise ofracial animosity between elves (a.k.a. Truebloods) and humans. Elvesspeak Elvish among themselves, a language inscrutable to humans andlargelyuntranslatable nto English, and they speak English with an accent.They are portrayed as cool, dispassionate, and formal in contrastto sloppy, neurotic, and emotional humans. Physically, the elves areexceptionally tall, with extremely pale skin and white hair. Capable ofmagic and often wealthy, they appear to be dominant over the humans,but each race is both attracted to and repulsed by the other to somedegree. The elves, for example, are often shown to be dependent uponhuman subcultures, which they tap for musical, literary, and artisticinspiration.52The humans, on the other hand, are attracted to elvin beautyand magic.Elfland and "the World"remain relatively isolated from one anotherwith the exception of Bordertown, a contact zone disparaged as culturallyderacinated by both "centers" but serving as a magnet for fortunehunters, dissidents, misfits, and runawaysfrom both cultures. Here, trans-gression of boundaries through smuggling, encroachment on oneanother's turf, or interracial sex is commonplace but not generally con-doned. The series focuses on one particular neighborhood called SoHo,inhabited by teenage runaways from both cultures.53Most of Bordertownyouth culture is violent, separatist, and organized around various streetgangs. This environment is especially difficult for Bordertown's "halfies,"the offspring of elves and humans, who are usually forced to "pass" ifthey want to survive. But the heroes of Bordertown's vignettes are alwaysthose youths who dare to establish nonsectarian communities amidst the

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omnipresent danger of the streets. These brief utopian moments usuallyoccur at narrative closure.Several authors have acknowledged diversity within this imaginary

world, which looks largelyto Anglo-Saxon and Celtic folklore as its found-ing texts, by introducing new ethnic geographies into the city, such asDragontown, a Japanese neighborhood, and Tintown, a barrio, and bydeveloping black, Native American, and Mexican characters. One imper-ative remains constant throughout the Bordertown stories: moments ofculturalunderstanding, be they between humans or between humans andelves, take place on a cultural plane, that is, through group activitiesaround bands, dance clubs, used-book stores, bohemian communes, theproduction and distribution of underground newspapers, and so on. As Ihave argued with regard to G6mez-Pefia's New World B)order,an intel-lectual-lumpen alliance enacted through collaborative cultural projects isheld up in the series to be the antidote to racism and other types ofoppression.The Bordertown writers have tacitly refused to address the reasonsfor Elfland's return and the events that precipitated "the Change" in anycomprehensive way.54We do know that Bordertown is a "trade zone," setup by elves for the purpose of commerce with humans. Elfland is repeat-edly described as being situated to the World's north. The city itself isdemarcated by two salient geographical features-an enormous wall sep-aratingElfland proper from the World, and a red river whose fish are con-taminated (by magic) and whose water turns humans into brain-deadjunkies. Only elves have the privilege to pass back and forth from Elflandto the World through a gate staffed by elvin customs agents. Humansmay only dream about what lies on the other side.All of this should sound vaguely familiar to North American readers:a trade zone, humans lured to the north by promises of magic, a wall, atoxic river, immigration restrictions, customs officials. ... As Border-town is fleshed out in successive works, it more and more closely resem-bles an export processing zone. Though the Bordertown writers have notconsciously modeled their imaginary world on the U.S.-Mexico borderregion, their elaboration of the border as a trade zone and an area of cul-tural integration would probably have been unimaginable before the mid-1960s. Urban, industrialized national borders are a relatively new andgrowing phenomenon in the world economic system, especially in theemerging trade blocs of North America and Europe, yet this type of bor-der is rarelyrepresented in U.S. popular genres. Instead, the border con-tinues to be portrayed as a no man's land or a war zone. The Bordertownwriters recognize these traditional readings of the border in their work,yet they try to imbue this familiar dystopian space with more positiveaspects.



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Though the Bordertown stories do not explore the contradictionbetween the free flow of goods and the restricted flow of people which iscentral to G6mez-Pefia's New World B)order, ne recent Bordertown text,Will Shetterly's novel Elsewhere,touched on this issue. It deals with aconspiracy of "liberal"elf operatives working undercover in Bordertown.One of them discloses his mission to a human friend at the end of thenovel:

"For he Lords of Faerie, he Border s aninconvenientnecessity. t permitstrade,and it keepsout humans,and it allowselvesto pass throughat onlyafew locations.Allof thesethingsare seen as desirable."But there are those who thinkFaerie and the Worldshouldhave greaterknowledge f each other."He glancedatWiseguyandsmiled."Strider ndIare of thatparty."55

In this fantasy of role reversal, Elfland occupies the position of a neo-colonialist power, and humans in turn become exploited "Third World"subjects. Bordertown, however, downplays national identity in favor ofracial and cultural divisions. The nation-state has disappeared in theseries, and the U.S. cities from which Bordertown's human runawaysfleeare now simply places in the World.

Technology and PostnationalismAt one point in "The New World (B)order," G6mez-Pefia self-reflexivelyrecalls his former identity as a border artist and in so doing evokes theimage of a nationally coded space, now defunct:56

A techno-shrine to Juan Soldado, Holy Patron of border-crossersandmigrantworkers,now stands on what used to be the San Ysidro bordercheckpoint.Withmulti-image rojections,he oldborder aintremindspeo-ple of whatonce wasa commonyetdangerous xperience, rossing romtheThird to the FirstWorld, rom thepastto the future.Remember?57

His question, "Remember?" asks his audience to recall the site-specificfocus which has all but disappeared from his recent work, replaced bybicoastal and multinational networks of fellow "cross-culturaldiplomats."G6mez-Pefia continually relies upon long-distance communication andelectronic media to produce and distribute his work. The Bordertownwriters, geographically dispersed throughout the U.S. and Canada, meetfor dinner once a year to discuss problems of continuity among variousepisodes in the series and the directions they would like Bordertown to

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take; otherwise, they communicate to one another informally at confer-ences and via fax, newsletters, and e-mail.58The mode of production of these artistic projects differs markedlyfrom the worlds they depict. In terms of production, this contradictionfinds the artists using international publishing and museum circuits, andvideo distribution, precisely in order to advocate local, community-basedart movements, whose leadership they displace from themselves ontoyouth cultures.59On the thematic level, the cyberpunk hallmark of coun-terpointing high-tech and low-tech is met with ambivalence by the Bor-dertown writers and G6mez-Pefia, whose "future worlds" are hardlymore technologically advanced than present-day U.S. society.60For his part, G6mez-Pefia has repeatedly shunned artists who arefascinated with technology for technology's sake. This tendency has twoantecedents, as he explains it. The first is from the performance-art-monologue movement of the late 1980s, associated with Eric Bogosian,Spalding Gray, Karen Finley, and Tim Miller, who sought to "rescue thespoken word" from pyrotechnic spectacles.61The second comes from arespect for the lack of access to technology under which many Chicano,Mexican, African American, and Native American artists must operate.62In the Bordertown series, the bias against technology is even morepronounced. Elvin magic tends to make human technology go haywire,although magic itself is pretty unreliable in Bordertown. Almost everytype of electric or gas-fueled device, from motor scooters to refrigeratorsto burglaralarms, has become operable through hybridization-now theyare powered by eco-safe "spell boxes." The Bordertown economy is oftenrepresented as informal (street vendors, artists, musicians) or illegal(thieves, smugglers) and focuses on barter rather than on the exchange ofcurrency (given that elves can fabricate precious metals). The introduc-tion to the first anthology offers several possible accounts for the Changeby recalling the folklore concerning the disappearance of Faerie in thefirst place: "Some say it was industrialization and the use of iron thatdrove the elvin folk away, some say the spread of Christianity."63n otherwords, the return of Faerie is in some sense predicated upon the return ofa preindustrial past.The arrest of technological "modernization"in these texts is linked tothe disappearance of other political and social institutions such as thestate, army, and police force.64As I have pointed out, the first pass in cre-ating the New World (B)order and Bordertown is the obliteration of theU.S. nation-state through the processes of Gringostroikaand the Change,respectively. The result is that the most salient remaining geographicalunits of analysis are cities, which increasingly resemble one anotherthrough cultural contact.



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Through theiradvocacy ofcultural bordercrossing andtransgressionof borders,G6mez-Peiaand theBordertownwriters callattention to amajor oversightof NAFTAnegotiations-immigrationrights.

The conjunction of antitechnology, antinationalist, and futuristicdiscourses within these works is at first puzzling, given that in muchmainstream science fiction an antitechnology bias is often associated withreactionary political ideology.65Current discourses about the future ofNorth America again help to clarify how the position of G6mez-Pefiaand the Bordertown writers could so recently have been recoded as a"progressive" stance. In Mexico, NAFTA was sold to the public by theruling PRI party as a plan to modernize the country. Former PresidentCarlos Salinas de Gortari even recuperated the figure of prerevolutionarytyrant Porfirio Diaz, painting him as the leader who brought Mexico intothe twentieth century, in order to underwrite his own neoliberal economicprogram. Mexico's century-long drive toward a modernization supposedlyculminating in NAFTA has had strong affinities with Gomez-Pefia's fin desiecle apocalypticism. In the U.S., competitivenessand efficiency,ratherthan modernization,are the buzzwords of NAFTA coverage, but as inMexico, they are being used to justify a program of massive dislocation,privatization of state-supervised sectors, and increased R&D spending inhigh-tech industries. For Gomez-Pefia and the Bordertown writers, all ofwhom are working in a historical period in which state power and tech-nological advancement are so often coarticulated, opposition to NAFTA'svision of the future may find a logical counterrepresentation in an alter-native world where there are no United States and no advancement oftechnology, but instead an efflorescence of cultural production.

Through their advocacy of cultural border crossing and transgres-sion of borders, Gomez-Pefia and the Bordertown writers call attention toa major oversight of NAFTA negotiations-immigration rights. Fear ofMexican immigration to the U.S. was invoked in the U.S. by both Demo-crats (the Clinton administration ncluded) and Republicans who resortedto coded (and at times explicit) racism in order to justify and denounceNAFTA. In the media coverage of NAFTA debates prior to the congres-sional vote in November 1993, free trade proponents argued that export-ing low-wage jobs to Mexico would keep Mexicans from "stealing" U.S.jobs, while protectionists simply wanted to dig trenches and build walls tokeep Mexicans out.66 From the point of view of Gomez-Peiia and theBordertown writers, culture and immigration are closely related, since theflow of media and people is largely responsible for the diffusion of culture.G6mez-Pefia's recent call for a "Free Art Agreement" seems to challengethe fact that cultural issues were downplayed during the NAFTA debatesand that cultural industries were given cursory mention in the treaty itself.All of this has taken place against the backdrop of an ongoing drivethroughout the continent to privatize cultural industries, which is boundto have its most profound effects on smaller arts organizations, the veryones most likely to promote the work of minority populations.

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Theorizing "the Change": NAFTA and theExportation of Culture

While G6mez-Pefia and the Bordertown writers confront some ofNAFTA's black holes, they also have one feature in common with U.S.media coverage of the treaty.All three neglect the fact that the deleteriouseffects of economic restructuring will be felt in some geographical areasmore than in others. NAFTA is only a recent step in a three-decade-longprocess toward economic globalization. It is difficult to forecast howswiftly or severely the effects of this particular treaty will be felt. Manyactivists who work on trade-related issues, however, view the treaty as themere standardization of many already existing trade arrangements.Among North American regions, the U.S.-Mexico border so far has wit-nessed the most drastic transformations as the result of North Americanfree trade. The flight of U.S. and foreign industries to Mexico in the wakeof the world financial crisis of the early 1970s and Mexico's own financialcrisis in 1982 has brought to the border region heightened labor abuses,environmental degradation, and shortages of housing, water, food, andmedical care.

The uneven development fostered by free trade is marked within theU.S.-Mexico "transfrontier metropolises" themselves. Social scientistshave for years insisted that from a cultural perspective, the border shouldbe viewed as a semi-autonomous social system because the twin citiesstraddling the border have more in common with one another than withU.S. and Mexican cities of the interior.67But the industrialization of theborder through the maquiladoraprogram has made the cities extremelyheterogeneous economically even as it has increased binational ties. Thisheterogeneity, in turn, has given rise to artistic and literary productionconcomitant with the boom in industrial parks.68In most border cities,however, institutional support for local artists and writers remains verymodest.

Although border art is produced under much more comfortable con-ditions than TVs and other consumer products are, it too is subject toexportation, as G6mez-Peiia asserted when he repudiated the genre.When an "art of place" finds itself decontextualized and distributed formass consumption on a national or international level, it becomes all themore important to differentiate between two borderized cities like Mata-moros and New York;often the distinction not only is spatialand nationalbut also divides production from consumption and distribution. The glob-alized border of postmodern theorists misses the specificity of regionssuch as the U.S.-Mexico border, where nation-states continue to enforcedifferences within urban space. The border as global metaphor of oppo-sitional discourse to NAFTA also falls prey to facile appropriation by an



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equally globalizing U.S. nationalist expansionism. A recent headline inthe New York Times, proclaiming northern Mexico to be "America'sNewest Industrial Belt" and referring to Mexico as "the 51st State" interms of the U.S. economy, illustrateshow easily the border can be assim-ilated by U.S. industrial interests. There still is a border between "us"and "them,"according to the logic of the Timesarticle;it has simply beendisplaced southward.69

Seemingly in defiance of the way that their own works collapse thisdistinction between production and consumption, the Bordertown writersand Gomez-Peiia continually denounce the process of cultural appropri-ation. Another part of the Yearof the White Bear project was the well-known "Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit .. ."performance, in whichGomez-Pefia and Fusco, from inside a ten-by-twelve-foot cage, presentedthemselves as indigenous inhabitants of an island in the Gulf of Mexico.The idea for the piece was based on the colonial practice of exportingNative Americans, Asians, and Africans to Europe for "aesthetic contem-plation, scientific analysis and entertainment."70Fusco and G6mez-Pefiaexhibited themselves in public areas in Europe, North America, and Aus-tralia, where many spectators mistook them for "authentic" natives, inspite of their eclectic costumes and props such as a laptop computer.71Fusco and Paula Heredia subsequently produced a video about thisinteractive performance, entitled The Couple in the Cage:A GuatinauiOdyssey, n which they recorded the reactions of many unsuspecting view-ers, who did not realize that what they were witnessing was a perfor-mance. This Eurocentric way of perceiving "native"populations is by nomeans obsolete along the U.S.-Mexico border, and those who commitoffenses are not individual spectators but nationally and internationallyrecognized cultural institutions. I was a research fellow at the Center forInterAmerican and Border Studies in El Paso in 1992-93, when repre-sentatives from a majorU.S. museum came to the city to find materialfora border art exhibition. One of their ideas was to export a group of cholosto the exhibition site to paint a mural. Another was to ship a group ofmaquiladoraworkers to the exhibition for the purpose of displaying themin a maquiladora et. But the mere aestheticization of the maquiladoraandthe coloniabegs the question of what possibilities for productive interac-tion could possibly arise from such an encounter between these U.S. spec-tators and Mexican "performers."In the summer of 1991, a labor group called the Tri-National Com-mission for Justice in the Maquiladoras (TCJM) staged a similar "exhibi-tion" of maquiladoraworkers at a conference on NAFTA held in KansasCity.72But in this case, the maquiladoraworkers were also active partici-pants in the conference; furthermore, Canadian and U.S. workers illus-

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trated their working conditions for the Mexican workers, and all threenational groups were united in the cause of changing the system underwhich they lived. For this group, visual spectacle and cultural under-standing were not ends in themselves. Rather, they were communicationstrategies to mutually achieve a greater level of social and economicequality.Locally based art movements linked to activist agendas, as exempli-fied by BAW/TAF and the collaborations of Louis Hock, Deborah Small,Elizabeth Sisco, and David Avalos, are still relatively rare on the U.S.-Mexico border; meanwhile, border art flourishes in national arts media.73One cannot see this phenomenon in terms of a simplistic opposition ofsite-specificity to mass media, as though incursions into mass mediaimmediately signified inauthenticity and co-optation. Indeed, many grass-roots organizations currently engaged in cross-border organizing employcommunication strategies similar to those used on a smaller scale byGomez-Pefia and the Bordertown writers, including video, fax, and e-mail.74In contrast to professional artists, however, the grassroots organi-zations do not necessarily isolate their videos, installations, and the likefrom the rest of their activities, as "aesthetic" artifacts. Perhaps, then, theemphasis in promoting an art of place should be less on the formal or the-matic qualities of a given work than on the supposition that performersand spectators alike are potential actors in a common social struggle oncethe performance or exhibition is over.

NotesI would iketo thankDudleyAndrew,CharlesHale,TomLewis,KathleenNew-man, Chon Noriega, and AndrewRoss for their valuablesuggestionsas I waswriting his essay.I wouldalso like to expressmy thanks o TerriWindlingandMidoriSnyder or the wealthof information hatthey provided o me about theBordertown eries. Portionsof this essayweredeliveredat the SixteenthAnnualWhitneySymposiumon ArtandCulture,New York,May 1993.1. GuillermoG6mez-Pefia,"The New World(B)order,"High Performance15 (summer-fall1992), 60.2. TerriWindling,ed., LifeontheBorderNew York:Tor, 1991), 8.3. ChonA. Noriega,"ThisIs Not a Border,"Spectator 3 (fall 1992), 6.4. See, e.g., HectorCalder6nandJoseDavid Saldivar, ds., Criticismn theBorderlands:tudies n ChicanoLiterature, ulture, ndIdeologyDurham,N.C.:Duke UniversityPress, 1991); GloriaAnzaldua,BorderlandslLarontera:TheNewMestiza(SanFrancisco:Spinsters/auntute, 1987).5. The following s a partial ist of recentscholarlyworkwhich features heborder metaphor: D. Emily Hicks, Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text(Minneapolis:Universityof MinnesotaPress,1991);lain Chambers,BorderDia-logues: ourneysin Postmodernity London: Routledge, 1990); Henry Giroux, Bor-



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der Crossings:Cultural Workers nd the Politics of Education (New York: Rout-ledge, 1992); Trinh T. Minh-ha, When the Moon WaxesRed:Representation,Gen-der, and Cultural Politics (New York:Routledge, 1991); Maggie Humm, BorderTraffic:Strategiesof ContemporaryWomenWriters New York:St. Martin's, 1991);Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston:Beacon, 1989). The border metaphor also appears in semiotic and poststruc-turalist critical theory. See Jacques Derrida, "Living On: Border Lines," trans.James Hulbert, in Deconstructionand Criticism, by Harold Bloom et al. (NewYork:Seabury, 1979), 75-176; "The Parergon," October9 (summer 1979), 3-41.See also Thomas G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 1986).6. E.g., Giroux writes: "In the postmodern age, the boundaries that onceheld back diversity, otherness, and difference, whether in domestic ghettoes orthrough national borders policed by customs officials, have begun to break down.The Eurocentric center can no longer absorb or contain the culture of the Otheras something that is threatening and dangerous. As Renato Rosaldo points out,'the Third World has imploded into the metropolis. Even the conservativenational politics of containment, designed to shield "us" from "them," betraythe impossibility of maintaining hermetically sealed cultures'" (BorderCrossings,57-58).7. Terri Windling, letter to the author, 24 April 1992.8. The area is also called "the Border," "Borderland,"and "Borderlands"inthese texts.

9. A shared-world anthology is one in which parameters for an alternativeuniverse are created by several authors who then collectively contribute stories tothe series. In the case of the Bordertown group, each author is associated with acharacter or group of characters, but they may borrow other authors' characterswith permission. For a general history of shared-world anthologies, see Peter S.Beagle, "Authors in Search of a Universe," Omni 10 (November 1987), 40-41.10. This is an idea which I am developing in my doctoral dissertation. Ibegin my study of this pattern of spectatorship with the U.S. Punitive Expeditionin Mexico during the Mexican Revolution.11. The term is G6mez-Pefia's neologism for half Chicano, half Chilango(i.e., Mexico City native).12. The term transfrontiermetropolis s used by Lawrence A. Herzog, WhereNorth Meets South: Cities, Space, and Politics on the US.-Mexico Border (Austin:Center for Mexican American Studies, University of Texas, 1990). See alsoLawrence A. Herzog, ed., Planning the InternationalBorder Metropolis, Mono-graph 19 (La Jolla, Calif.: Center for United States-Mexico Studies, 1986).13. BAW/TAF's membership varied from 1984 to 1989, although a core offounding members remained. In 1989 many new artists joined the collective, andonly one original member stayed. G6mez-Pefia discusses the dissolution of thegroup's core in "A Binational Performance Pilgrimage," Drama Review 35 (fall1991), 39-40; and "Death on the Border: A Eulogy to Border Art," High Perfor-mance 14, no. 2 (spring 1991), 8-9.14. Guillermo G6mez-Pefia and Jeff Kelley, eds., The BorderArt Workshop:Documentation of Five Yearsof InterdisciplinaryArt Projects Dealing with U.S.-Mexico Border Issues, 1984-1989 (New York; La Jolla, Calif.: Artists SpaceMuseum of Contemporary Art, 1989), 20.15. Ibid., 18-19.16. G6mez-Pefia, "Binational Performance Pilgrimage," 27-32.

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17. Guillermo G6mez-Pefia, "Documented/Undocumented," in The Gray-wolf Annual Five: Multi-Cultural Literacy, ed. Rick Simonson and Scott Walker(St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf, 1988), 130.18. Guillermo G6mez-Pefia, "The Multicultural Paradigm:An Open Letterto the National Arts Community," High Performance12 (fall 1989), 21.19. Guillermo G6mez-Pefia, "From Art-mageddon to Gringostroika," HighPerformance14 (fall 1991), 21.20. See note 13. BAW/TAF responded to G6mez-Pefia in "ErrataHistorica"(Unpublished manuscript, December 1991). Recently, David Avalos, founder ofBAW/TAF, published his own recollection of the early BAW/TAF years, in whichhe responded to many of G6mez-Pefia's claims about the demise of border art:"A Wag Dogging a Tale/Un meneo perreando una cola," in La Frontera/TheBor-der: Art about the Mexico-United States Border Experience (San Diego: CentroCultural de la Raza, 1993), 52-93.21. For more background on the production of BorderBrujo, see G6mez-Pefia, "Binational Performance Pilgrimage," 40-42; Jason Weiss, "An Interviewwith Guillermo G6mez-Pefia," Review: Latin American Literatureand Arts 45(July-December 1991), 8-13.

22. Other examples include Border Realities (1986), I Couldn't Reveal MyIdentity (1988), and Backyard to Backyard (1988).23. The character of Border Brujo was "born" at a BAW/TAF installationentitled "Casa de Cambio." See Shifra Goldman's review essay of the installationin G6mez-Pefia and Kelley, BorderArt Workshop, -9.24. G6mez-Peiia, "Binational Performance Pilgrimage," 49-66; GuillermoG6mez-Pefia, "Border Brujo," in Being America: Essays on Art, Literature,andIdentityfrom Latin America, ed. Rachel Weiss, with Alan West (Fredonia, N.Y.:White Pine, 1991), 194-236; Guillermo G6mez-Pefia, "Border Brujo," in War-rior for Gringostroika:Essays, Performance Texts, and Poetry (St. Paul, Minn.:Graywolf, 1993), 75-95. The script was often modified in performance.25. For example, he has deleted the voice of a member of the Latin Ameri-can oligarchy, a Central American war victim, and many of the transvestite'slines. He has also left out a part about affirmative action and the critique of Chi-cano nationalism and radicalism at the end of the piece, which greatly changesthe tone of the ending.26. I am grateful to Chon Noriega for providing background informationabout Son of BorderCrisis.27. G6mez-Pefia subsequently relocated to Los Angeles in 1993.28. G6mez-Pefia, "Death on the Border," 9.29. Guillermo G6mez-Pefia, "The New World Border: Prophecies for theEnd of the Century," Drama Review 38 (spring 1994), 119-42. The quotes fromThe New World B)orderwhich appear in this essay are taken from the High Per-formance essay, with the understanding that the live version has varied greatlyfrom performance to performance.30. Weiss, "Interview with Guillermo G6mez-Pefia," 11.31. G6mez-Pefia, "New World Border: Prophecies," 120.32. Kim Sawchuck, "Unleashing the Demons of History," Parachute 67(July-September 1992), 29.33. Defined by G6mez-Pefia as "a continental grass roots movement thatadvocates the complete economic and cultural reform of U.S. capitalism" ("NewWorld (B)order," 65).34. A play on Zona de LibreComercio.Cogermeans "to screw" in Mexico.



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35. G6mez-Pefia, "New World (B)order," 60.36. Ibid., 61.37. Ibid., 63.38. Ibid., 64.39. Weiss, "Interview with Guillermo G6mez-Peia," 11; see also G6mez-Pefia, "New World (B)order," 63.

40. G6mez-Pefia, "Art-mageddon," 24.41. Ibid.42. G6mez-Pefia, "Binational Performance Pilgrimage," 43; Weiss, "Inter-view with Guillermo G6mez-Pefia," 10.43. Giroux, BorderCrossings,224.44. On the importance of "dialogue" with "Others," see Chambers, Border

Dialogues, 50, 76, 104-5; Giroux, BorderCrossings,28-35. On reading and writ-ing as border crossing, see Hicks, "Introduction: Border Writing as Deterritori-alization," in Border Writing, xxiii-xxxi. See also G6mez-Pefia, "MulticulturalParadigm," 21; and his quote of Carlos Fuentes in "Binational Performance Pil-grimage," 44.45. Grant Kester, "Rhetorical Questions: The Alternative Arts Sector andthe Imaginary Public," Afterimage20, no. 6 (January 1993), 13.46. Roger Rouse, "Mexican Migration in the Social Space of Postmod-ernism," Diaspora 1 (spring 1991), 8-23.47. G6mez-Pefia, "Multicultural Paradigm," 27.48. In an ironic reversal of G6mez-Pefia's trajectory, series creator TerriWindling recently relocated to Tucson, Arizona, and she told me that the newestanthology in the series may include elements that reflect her proximity to theU.S.-Mexico border. Midori Snyder and Windling suggested that SoHo wasmodeled on squatters' neighborhoods in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Ams-terdam, and London. See Snyder, interview with the author, 30 March 1993;Windling, letter to the author, 26 March 1993; Windling, interview with theauthor, 28 April 1993.49. Bordertown is not the only example of an alternative universe set on "theborder." Several popular role-playing games such as Rifts and Shadowrunexplic-itly develop a postapocalyptic U.S.-Mexico border region, although they adheremore closely to traditional representations of the border: a war zone without the"multicultural"alternative.

50. Snyder, interview with the author, 30 March 1993; Windling, letter tothe author, 26 March 1993.51. I am referring to statements such as "'He's got a lot of anger,' Mickeysaid. 'It isn't easy growing up a halfie in Bordertown"' (Will Shetterly, Elsewhere[New York:Tor, 1991], 134).52. Bordertown elves are differentiated from Elfland elves by their accent orby social class. In Bordertown, class and race are not always coterminous. Forexample, lower-class elves may dye their hair so that they can look more human.And Bordertown has its own upper-class neighborhood, Dragon's Tooth Hill,which is divided into elf and human sides.

53. SoHo is literally "South of Ho Street."54. Each writer in the Bordertown series has his or her own opinion on thematter. Terri Windling says that the interdependence between elves and humans,which we see on a cultural level, may be grounded in something as basic as theelves' need for "raw materials" (interview with the author, 28 April 1993).55. Shetterly, Elsewhere,229.

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56. In the published script, this part continues:GP and CF: (Horny and agitated) The crossing from the Third to theFirst World;from the past to the future, remember?El cruce,el bordo,el abismo,el sismo, la migra,the spiderweb, the TV cam-eras, my old performances, your oldest prejudices, the original migration,your great mojado grandparents. Remember? (Blackout.)

(G6mez-Pefia, "New World Border: Prophecies," 138).57. G6mez-Pefia, "New World (B)order," 64.58. Snyder, interview with the author, 30 March 1993.59. G6mez-Pefia continues to express faith in young and newcomer artists inhis recent work: "The teenagers have tremendous things to teach us; they havefewer hang-ups about race and gender, they are much more at ease with crisisand hybridity, and they understand our cities and neighborhoods better than wedo. In fact, if there is an art form that truly speaks for the present crisis of ourcommunities, this form is rap" ("The Free Art Agreement/El Tratado de LibreCultura,"High Performance16, no. 3 [fall 1993], 63).60. The most "technologically advanced" artifacts in Bordertown are aging"pre-Change" videocassette decks, most of which no longer work because theyare too close to Faerie's magic. G6mez-Pefia has always combined popular mass-produced icons from U.S. culture (Mickey Mouse, boom boxes, etc.) with hand-made "folk" icons from Mexican culture (e.g., Dia de los Muertos calaveras), ashe does in Border Brujo. He has also commented on the need to distinguishbetween popular culture and mass culture for U.S. and Mexican contexts. In theU.S., he argues, there is a superimposition of folklore and technology, given thatpopular culture usually refers to commodities such as video games and Holly-wood movies, which have their origin in the U.S., while indigenous and ethniccultures are either co-opted or invisible to the mainstream. Mexico, he cautions,is moving in the same direction through the creation of large media conglomer-ates such as Televisa (Marco Vinicio Gonzalez, "Guillermo G6mez-Pefia," Sem-anal de La Jornada 117 [8 September 1991], 20). In The New World B)order,hisdescriptions of technology are perhaps more prominent; however, they are stilldystopian (e.g., the giant media conglomerate Reali-TV and robo-raza I'stechnophilia).61. Weiss, "Interview with Guillermo G6mez-Pefia," 12.62. Speaking of the U.S. Latino arts community, G6mez-Pefia wrote: "Wecome from a culture which doesn't venerate irreflexivelythe principle of newness,or better said, a culture which considers that an apolitical reverence for original-ity carries dangerous ideological implications. What we consider 'avant-garde' or'original' generally deals with extra-artistic concerns and precisely because ofthis, it never seems 'experimental enough' for the art world" (G6mez-Pefia andKelley, BorderArt Workshop, 7). See also his piece in Lilly Wei, "On Nationality:Thirteen Artists,"Art in America 79 (September 1991), 159.63. Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold, eds., Borderland(New York:Tor,1992), vii. The first edition of this collection appeared in 1986. The "wild elves"depicted in the series still have an aversion to iron.64. Bordertown does have a police force, called the Silver Suits, but theyhave little jurisdiction in SoHo and are portrayed as ineffectual. In the NewWorld (B)order, "the role of the presidents is now restricted to public relationsand the role of the military has been reduced to guarding banks, TV stations andart schools" (G6mez-Pefia, "New World [B]order," 60).65. Douglas Kellner and Michael Ryan, for example, argued that technology



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was opposed to "family values," human intimacy, and the private sphere in sev-eral Reagan-Bush-era science fiction film productions ("Technophobia," in AlienZone: Cultural Theory and ContemporaryScience Fiction Cinema, ed. AnnetteKuhn [London: Verso, 1990], 58-65). Charles Ramirez-Berg pointed out in hisstudy of aliens and Hispanic imagery that films like The Terminator nvisioned aconfrontation between an embattled human race and superhuman technology-the corollary being that only a eugenics in the present, which would eliminate"the weaker races," can create a humanity fit for survival ("Immigrants, Aliens,and Extraterrestrials:Science Fiction's Alien 'Other' as [among Other Things]New Hispanic Imagery," CineAction! 18 [fall 1989], 3-17).66. The 1992 U.S. elections witnessed a very strange spectrum of positionson NAFTA, which did not neatly correspond to party lines. The extreme rightwing of the Republican Party, such as Pat Buchanan and David Duke (one advo-cated building a great wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and the other partici-pated in a "Light Up the Border" vigilante photo-op), shared the protectionistcamp with Ross Perot and "Rust Belt" and pro-labor Democrats, while the cen-ter-left and -right of the two major parties tended to be pro-NAFTA. For anexcellent overview of the U.S. political parties' stances on free trade, writtenfrom a liberal pro-NAFTA position, see Alan K. Henrikson, "A North AmericanCommunity: 'From the Yukon to the Yucatan,"' in The Diplomatic Record,1991-1992, ed. Hans Binnendijk and Mary Locke (Boulder, Colo.: Westview,1993), 70-95.67. Robert A. Pastor and Jorge G. Castafieda, "The Border," in Limits toFriendship:The United States and Mexico (New York:Vintage, 1989), 283-313.68. San Diego-Tijuana in particular has seen a rise in artistic production,which may be due to several factors. Buffered by poorer cities like San Ysidro,San Diego is wealthy in comparison to other U.S. border cities, which gives it arelatively large art-consuming public. Secondly, the city has a history of militantChicano art movements dating from the late 1960s. Finally, both San Diego andTijuana have universities with strong arts and humanities emphases. For anoverview of the San Diego visual art scene, see David Joselit, "Report from SanDiego," Art in America77 (December 1989), 120-35.69. Louis Uchitelle, "America's Newest Industrial Belt," New YorkTimes,21March 1993, late ed., sec. 3, 1.70. Sawchuck, "Unleashing the Demons of History," 27.71. Ibid., 22. Coco Fusco also wrote an essay in which she vividly describedher experiences while performing the piece at different venues, as well as the crit-ical reception of the project ("The Other History of Intercultural Performance"Drama Review 38 [spring 1994], 143-67).72. Jack Hedrick, UAW Local 249 and TCJM, telephone interview, July1992. The set in this case included a maquiladoraand a colonia, complete withdrums of spilled "toxic waste."73. As this essay was going to press in fall 1994, in SITE94 a large-scaleexhibition of site-specific art was being planned by San Diego's InstallationGallery. Works by local artists were to be installed in public places around theSan Diego-Tijuana metropolitan area.74. Many of those organizations are listed in Ricardo Hernandez and EdithSanchez, eds., Cross-BorderLinks (Albuquerque, N. Mex.: Inter-HemisphericEducation Resource Center, 1992).

Claire F Fox

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05 Claire Fox, The Portable Border

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