Ethno-cyborgs

 "Today, I'm tired of ex/changing identities in the net.
In the past 8 hours, I've been a man, a woman and a s/he.
I've been black, Asian, Mixteco, German and a multi-hybrid replicant.
I've been 10 years old, 20, 42, 65. I've spoken 7 broken languages.
As you can see, I need a break real bad, just want to be myself for a few minutes.
ps: my body however remains intact, untouched, unsatisfied, unattainable, untranslatable"
                           (From “Friendly Cannibals,” 1997)
 

Ethno-cyborgs and Genetically engineered Mexicans

(Recent Experiments in “Ethno-Techno” Art)    

I

        In the mid 90’s, when the artworld went high-tech overnight, the debates about the human body and its relation to new technologies dramatically polarized the experimental arts community and particularly the performance art milieu. There were those in the "machine art" movement who advocated the total dissapearance of the body and its replacement with digital or robotic mechanisms; others believed that the body, although archaic and “obsolete,” could still remain central to the art event if physically and perceptually enhanced with technical prostheses. The artists of "Apocalypse Culture" responded viscerally to these proposals by adopting a radical Luddite stance, attempting to reclaim the body primitive as a site for pleasure, penance and pain, and to "return" to a fantastical and imaginary neotribal paganism, very much in the tradition of  US anarchist "drop out" culture. None of these options were viable, however, for Chicano/Latino performance artists and other politicized artists of color interested in new technologies. Roberto Sifuentes and I tried to explore other possibilities by infiltrating virtual space as “cyber-immigrants” (Web-backs) and smuggling suvbersive ideas as conceptual coyotes. Our goals were to politicize the debates around digital technologies and to infect virtual space with Chicano humor and linguas polutas (such as Spanglish). We wanted to employ new technologies to enhance mytho-poetical interactivity between performer and live audience, and as a tool for researching fundamental expressions of inter-cultural fear and desire.
         In 1994, Roberto and I began to incorporate in situ digital technologies in our “diorama” work. The project premiered at Diverse Works Gallery in Houston, Texas, under the rambunctious title of “The Ethno-Cyberpunk Trading Post & Curio Shop On The Electronic Frontier." We invited our compadre Native American performance artist James Luna and some local artists to join us. Part of our goal in the project was to make visible to the audience the types of transformation that performance artists go through as they move from the realm of the personal to the public, and from ritual space to cyberspace.  Visitors entering the gallery found a visible “dressing room” area, where we applied make-up and changed costumes. They passed through a “high art area” where our props and personal objects (along with various folk artifacts and pre-Columbian figurines) were carefully displayed as aestheticized museum pieces, contextualized by fictional labels. They finally came to a “human exhibition area” where we displayed ourselves as “exotic specimens” and “performance artists at work.” The exhibition area also featured taxidermied animals(a puma, a horse, etc.) and curiosity cabinets containing ironized post-modern or pseudo-primitive “archeological artifacts” that commented on the hybrid nature of contemporary culture and our dying “Western civilization.” Computer screens, video monitors, neon signs and digital bars flashing taxonomic descriptions of the “ethnographic specimens” (ourselves), added a sci-fi flavor to our techno-tribal environment.
         Part of our project included the construction of a website that featured images of our performance characters, along with our first version of an “ethnographic questionnaire” asking internet users to share their projections and preconceptions about Latinos and indigenous people. Though we were still not fully aware of the implications of what we were doing, we hoped to partially surrender our will and allow both gallery visitors and Internet users to collaborate with us in determining the nature and content of our performance.  Roberto was costumed as Cyber Vato, a “robo-gang member” consumed by  techno-gadgetry, including a computer keyboard which he used to communicate with internet users during live performances.  Each day, James and I transformed ourselves into different performance personae, including "the Shame-man," "el Postmodern Zorro," "El Cultural Transvestite," and "El Natural Born Asesino.” Roberto in his diorama environment conspired with a filmmaker who moved through the space, capturing the details of these transformations and transmitting them live onto the internet via video teleconferencing. People who saw the webcast or visited our internet site were invited to send us images, sound files, or texts that expressed how they felt Mexicans, Chicanos and Native Americans of the 90s should look, behave, and perform. Responses were displayed on gallery monitors manipulated by techno-disc-jockey CyberVato, and influenced the ever-changing personae created by James and myself. We also accepted performance “commands” verbally from live audience members, as well as directives submitted by fax or by phone. As “replicants on call,” James and I were a bit nervous about the unpredictable nature of the experiment and the outrageousness of some of the responses we received (especially from people sitting at the other end of a modem or fax machine, who were thus able to protect their anonymity and distance themselves from the possible implications of live interaction), we clumsily tried to incorporate as much as possible of the material we received. Much of our performance was (unavoidably) improvised, but audience members seemed to enjoy their perceived power over us. James, Roberto and I only performed live for one week, but the installation and artifacts remained in place, allowing local artists and gallery visitors to continue  playing in our virtual house of mirrors and labyrinth of ethnic projections.

II

        The success of this initial “ethno-techno” art experiment marked a radical change in the direction of our work. Roberto and I decided to mantain our “techno-confessional”  webbsite as an ongoing source of performance material. In the first year, we received over 20,000 "hits" (visitors to the site) according to the counter, and a large percentage of them answered our pseudo-anthropological questionnaire. The responses were of a uniquely confessional nature, decidedly more graphic and explicit than those gathered during live performances of the Temple of Confessions (the other major project we were working on at the time). Why the differences? Perhaps the distance and total anonymity offered by the internet, along with the indirect invitation to discuss sensitive matters of race, sexuality, and identity in an artificially safe environment, provided people with the necessary courage to reveal their most secret fears of cultural invasion and their most explicit interracial desires and sexual fantasies in ways they would never be willing to do face to face. During the mid-90s, when we began these projects, the US was in a collective state of repression and denial regarding matters of race and gender. The virulent backlash against “political correctness” was at its peak, and so were the anti-immigration sentiments promoted by ultra-nativist politicians like Pat Buchanan, Jesse Helms and (thankfully now ex-)California governor Pete Wilson. The marginalization and silencing of progressive views, combined with the openly xenophobic trend in national policies and conservative rhetoric, may have been taken by many as a tacit endorsement of prejudice and Mexiphobia.
         Roberto and I decided that the next logical step in our ongoing project of reverse anthropology would be to use the confessional material submitted by our live and virtual audiences to design visual and performative representations of  the new mythical Mexican and Chicano of the '90's. The most recurrent and emblematic responses from live audiences and internet users became the inspiration for a series of performance personae or “ethno-cyborgs” co-created (or rather “co-imagined”) in dialogue with gallery visitors and anonymous net users.  Since a majority of the responses we received portrayed Mexicans and Chicanos as threatening Others, indestructible invaders, and public enemies of America’s fragile sense of  coherent national identity, we titled our new performance project Mexterminator, referencing the superhuman, robotic assassins of the Schwarzenneger movies. Our intention in this new project was to allow internet users and live audience members to help determine the physical and psychological profiles of our ethno-cyborgs, thus influencing both the design and content of our living diorama performances. We relied on their input to decide how we should be costumed, what kinds of music we should listen to, what sorts of props and objects we should handle, and most importantly, what types of ritualized actions we should perform and how we should interact with audience members. Our goal was to incarnate the intercultural fantasies and nightmares of our audiences, refracting fetishized constructs of identity through the spectacle of our “primitive,” eroticized bodies on display. The composite personae we created were stylized representations of a non-existent, phantasmatic Mexican/ Chicano identity, projections of  people’s own psychological and cultural monsters -- an army of Mexican Frankensteins ready to rebel against their Anglo creators.
         The results of our experiment in anti-colonial anthropology turned out to be much stranger than anything we could have imagined on our own. The “sleepy Mexican” was banished from the colonial unconscious of contemporary America, deported back to Hollywood. The exotic border “señorita,” who populated folk songs, movies and poems for decades, was nowhere to be found (except as incarnated in the more overtly eroticized figure of Selma Hayek). Neither were Frito Bandito, Speedy Gonzalez, Juan Valdez, the “greaser” bandit or the suffering Frida Kahlo. They  had been replaced by a new pantheon of  mighty robo-Mexicans. Armed with mysterious shamanic artifacts and sci-fi automatic weapons, their bodies enhanced with prosthetic implants and their brown skin decorated with Aztec tattoos, these hyper-sexual “ethnocyborgs,” clothed in high Tex-Mex/gangster-rap regalia, both defied and perversely incorporated every imaginable Hollywood and MTV stereotype, every fear and desire secretly harbored in the fragile psyches and hearts of contemporary Americans. “We” were perceived to be unnecessarily violent, yet fashionably seductive; techno-literate, yet primeval.  Politically strident yet gifted with inexplicable shamanic powers and spiritual awareness, these mythical Mexicans were contradictory, unpredictable -- and strangely familiar. After reading thousands of pages of internet submissions, my colleagues and I concluded that a perverse dialectic of intercultural violence and interracial desire was central to America’s perception/ projection of cultural otherness.
         My performance accomplices and I created complex personae that reflected these constructs, refracted through our own particular “robo-baroque” aesthetics.  Sponsored by Mexican drug lords, the Zapatista comandancia, Chicano radicals, and MTV, “we” -- the indestructible cyber-mojados  -- had already succeeded in occupying the US of Aztlan. Our new mandate was to seduce, abduct, possess and take control of our audience’s psyche, language, country and institutions. We were the flesh and blood incarnation of America’s millenial fantasies about immigrants from the South, Latinos from the inner cities, pagan sexuality, indigenous witchcraft, and the Spanish language. What the audience ended up experiencing during the performance was a stylized anthropomorphization of its own post-colonial demons and racist hallucinations, a kind of crosscultural poltergeist. While my collaborators and I were fully responsible for the aesthetic realization of the performance, the unusual creative process we employed to generate material, making (involuntary) collaborators of thousands of anonymous internet users, meant that we were by no means that only ones accountable for the content of the piece. Like it or not, our audiences (both live and virutal) were unavoidably implicated in our panic worldview.
 
“Are you into tattoos, jalepeños, and ethno-porn? Are you into sexy Tex-Mex art that does not question your privilege? Do you wish to experience a political peepshow? Do you desire to smell or touch a live Mexican?”                   - conceptual classified ad

III

        El Mexterminator premiered in Mexico City in March 1995 under the working title of "The Museum of Frozen Identity."  Experimental dance choreographer turned performance artist Sara Shelton Mann appeared with me in that piece, and eventually became a central member of the collaborative team. Different versions of the Mexterminator performance have been presented in Canada, Puerto Rico, Spain, Austria, Italy and the UK, as well as throughout the US. Although the composite personae we portray reference contemporary Anglo constructions of Mexican identity, the context for our performance has become strangely internationalized due to the global dissemination of US pop cultural images of Latinos, rather than because audiences in other countries initially perceive genuine connections to the situation of their own subaltern communities.
         The scope and magnitude of the project shifts dramatically in relation to the characteristics of the sites where we perform, taking into account such factors as available budget and technological infrastructure, along with the physical possibilities and limitations of the venues where we perform. Roberto and I have toured a low-tech version of the project that requires only two performers (ourselves), a soundtrack and a film that can either be projected onto a screen or  (worst case scenario) played on a standard video monitor; this relatively low-budget version has been popular with small college campuses and marginally funded alternative art spaces. More technically ambitious versions of the piece incorporate as many as eight collaborating performers, along with sophisticated visual projections and digital technologies. One of our most elaborate productions of Mexterminator took place in a giant warehouse in San Francisco and ended up looking like a kind of techno-rave, with six ethno-cyborgs on display and sound mixed live by audio-diva Rona Michele. When we are invited to present Mexterminator in more traditional museum settings, we try to mimic the presentational style of the institution, incorporating post-Columbian codexes, archeological artifacts from the “Second US-Mexico War,” and velvet paintings of border superheroes, masterpieces in the genre of Tijuana tourist art. The modular and ever shifting nature of the project permits us to adapt to very different types of venues, and to appeal to a broad range of audiences.
         Though many visual, conceptual and performative elements of the piece change from site to site, a few constants remain. When the audience arrives in the lobby or entrance of the performance space, they encounter a written or prerecorded text outlining the metafictional premise of the performance. “The nation-state has collapsed. The ex-US of A has fragmented into a myriad micro-republics loosely controlled by a multiracial junta, and governed by a Chicano prime minister named Gran Vato. The Tortilla Curtain no longer exists. Spanglish is now the official language. Panicked by the New Borders, Anglo militias are desperately trying to recapture the Old Order. Our border heroes, El Mexterminator, CyberVato, and La Cultural Transvestite have deserted from the newly formed government to join a strange hybrid militia opposing the reverse authoritarianism and radical essentialism of the ruling party. The new government of Aztlan Liberado sponsors interactive ethnographic exhibits to teach the perplexed citizenry how things were before and during the 2nd US/Mexico war. This performance/installation is one example of these official projects.” 
         As audience members enter this fictional "Museum of Experimental Ethnography," they are met by performance docents in laboratory coats who “guide” them through the menu of possible interactions with the performers. The performance space is filled with fog and dramatically lit to suggest a Blade Runner-in-Tijuana type of  world, inhabited by hyper-racialized replicants and ethno-cyborgs. Dead feathered chickens hang from the tall ceiling at different heights. A (fictional) black and white documentary of  “the Second US/Mexico war” is projected onto a large screen. A loud, high-energy soundtrack includes border rap, Norteño and house music, and rock en español
(all genres “suggested” by audience members or internet users), along with prerecorded text that orients audience members to the performance and invites them to interact with the specimens on display.
         Each ethno-cyborg is displayed in its own distinctive “habitat,” a platform outfitted with gadgetry and objects appropriate to the specimen. Roberto poses as a new, upgraded “Cybervato,” a teched out “robo-gang member” manipulating (fake and real) technology and weapons. His diorama employs a projection screen as a backdrop, and he controls the display by  punching commands into a computer keyboard. Costumed as a pop mariachi diva with a fake mustache and sequin-embroidered mini-skirt, Sara appears as “La Cultural Transvestite,” an androgynous figure who gleefully acts out Anglo-America’s myriad cultural, spiritual and erotic fantasies about “romantic Mexico,” shamelessly impersonating tragicomical Mexican bandits, dancing Adelitas, and masked Zapatistas who move in a Chaplinesque fashion. Unlike Roberto and I, who appear in the performance as fetishized objects of conflicting fears and desires, Sara performs the role of a desiring subject, a “clepto-Mexican gringa” suffused in cultural trasvestism and colonial nymphomania. Against a backdrop of projected images that make up a condensed history of Mexican stereotypes in American Television, movies and cartoons,  I display myself as immigrant superhero “El Mad Mex,” a transgender Tex-Mex shaman on a custom-made lowrider wheelchair with chrome fenders and a seat made out of fake leopard skin.
         Other cyborgs that have been featured in different versions of the Mexterminator performance include “La Supreme Chicana” (Isis Rodriguez), feminist superheroine and defender of the rights of sex workers; “La Morra Diabolica” (Violeta Luna), a deranged teenage schoolgirl who tortures blond dolls, pisses on stage, and obsessively injects herself with hypodermic needles;*2 “El Paramilitary Samurai” (Yoshigiro Maeshiro), a Supernintendo mercenary who practices crossdressing and Aztec Karate; and “El True Illegal Alien” (Juan Ybarra) a naked green extraterrestrial who moves like a Butoh dancer on speed, incarnating Anglo-Americans’ fears of invasion by beings from an alien (cultural) planet.
         Audience members are encouraged to interact with these replicants “at their own risk.” They are instructed that they can feed us, touch us, smell us, massage us, braid our hair, take us for walkes on dog leashes, or point prop weapons at us to experience the feeling of shooting at a real, live Mexican. More extroverted audience members initiate their own forms of interaction, which range from beating or stabbing us with (prop) weapons to attempting to initiate explicit sexual contact either with us or with objects in our diorama environments. We try to comply obediently with whatever interactions audience members may choose to initiate, unless they are simply too dangerous or personally invasive. We invite some of the more audacious audience members to modify our identities by changing our make-up, hair or costumes, or even to replace us for a short time to vicariously experience what it feels like to be objectified and exoticized. In some venues, we set up an extra platform where audience members are encouraged to exhibit themselves as their “favorite cultural others,”aided by docents who provide them with appropriate props and costumes, and professional make-up artists who help them fulfill their fantasy of a brand-new “temporary ethnic identity.”
         Whenever we can, we try to set up a bar inside the performance space to carnivalize the experience even more. When this happens, the behaviour of the audience changes dramatically as they become less inhibited through the ingestion of tropical cocktails, creating a much more revealing and volatile performance experience. The playfulness and seductive imagery of these performance “games” creates an atmosphere in which audience members are not always immediately aware of the implications of their actions -- until the next morning, when they wake up with a cultural hangover. The intent, as a Japanese Butoh dancer once metaphorically described to me, is for the audience to leave our performances without realizing that they’ve been stabbed in the back with an invisible knife. They wake up the next to discover that there is blood on the sheets, but they feel no pain and can find no visible trace of a wound. 

IV    

        Many parallel and complementary projects have developed alongside the Mexterminator installation. Often, before or after a performance, the ethno-cyborgs make unannounced appearances at local museums, restaurants, bars or malls. Since early 1997, Mexican photographer Eugenio Castro has been documenting the visual and performative evolution of the replicants, both during live performances and in staged photos shot at his studo. Many of his evocative, stunning images have been used as conceptual postcards, posters, and illustrations for magazines and books. Selected photos will also be incorporated into a new website currently under construction, allowing internet users to see some of the hybrid creatures and cultural chimeras created on the basis of their original suggestions.
         In 1998, after we had been immersed for some time in this multifaceted process of creative investigation, my collaborators and I felt that it was time for the ethno-cyborgs to be given voice. In dialogue with Roberto and Sara, I wrote a proscenium piece titled BORDERscape 2000, which incorporates the personae of the ethno-cyborgs, providing them with texts delivered in a range of computer-processed voices. The soundscape for the piece, a montage created by Rona Michele, combines prerecorded rap and rock en español with live arias by opera singers. Roberto shifts from his robo-gangmember persona to a rastafarian preacher announcing the arrival of a “new, post-democratic era,” and a martyred, transgender Christ, while I alternately embody a kind of cybernetic Stephen Hawking , a hermaphrodite shaman (aka Gran Vato, President of the US of Aztlan), and an S&M Zorro. In addition to the various manifestations of her “Clepto-Mexican Gringa” cyborg, Sara also appears in BORDERscape as a schizophrenic Southern Belle transvestite/essentialist Chicana academician, satirically commenting on sensitive issues of race and gender. Dancer and performance artist Juan Ybarra, as the Butoh Alien, also performs a central role in the piece.
         The ethno-cyborgs have also invaded the realms of  video and radio. They have made cameo appearances in our recent films, Borderstasis*3 and The Great Mojado Invasion.*4  Some of my commentaries for the National Public Radio programs All Things Considered and Latino USA have been delivered in the computer-processed voice of  “El Mexterminator.”  These strategies of recycling and recontextualizing  ideas, images and texts continue to be a central aspect of our performance strategies, consistent with the techno-rasquache nature of our aesthetic.
         For the past two years, theatre historian and performance theorist Lisa Wolford has quietly conspired in our project of reverse anthropology, observing and documenting the outrageous behaviour of our audiences in different cities and institutional contexts. She has gathered voluminous fieldnotes including conversations with audience members who initiated unusual or paradigmatic interactions with us, or who seemed to be strongly affected (positively or negatively) by what they witnessed in our performance. She has helping us sort out, categorize, and make sense of  the ongoing responses to our conceptual websites and ethnographic questionnaires.  Drawing on Lisa’s research and analysis, and always in dialogue with her, Roberto and I continue to add layers of complexity to our palimpsestic replicants, designing new “ethno-cyborgs” and creating new scenarios and scripts. Lisa’s participation in this project as researcher, informant, and dramaturg has become so intricately woven into our creative process that the boders between scholar and artist, creator and observer, have been completely re-defined. In the past few months, we have begun to experiment with co-writing. The fruits of this unique collaboration and multi-leveled dialogue will become the basis for an upcoming book tentatively titled Mexterminator: Ethno-Techno Art, which we hope to publish in Routlegde in the year 2001 if Talia agrees. The content, structure and style of the book, as well as the still-emerging process of its creation, will hopefully model a new and more engaged form of dialogue and collaboration between artist and theoretician, as well as a new, multi-centric way of writing about performance.
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*1  A term coined by Mexican anthropologist Roger Bartra
*2 Violeta Luna also created another cybord, La Frida Prisoniera, for a version of Mexterminator presented at the Detroit Institute of the Arts which used Diego Rivera’s famous murals as a backdrop. 
*3  Borderstasis is a “video diary” comissioned by German TV Arte. The idea was to select fifteen artists working in politically sensitive “border zones” throughout the world. My “diary” combines staged interviews, skits developed for the camera, excerpts of Mexican B-movies, documentation of past performances, and old family films. The structure of the film is very much like the structure of my live performance work. The video aired in seven European countries in 1998.
*4 The Great Mojado Invasion was made in collaboration with Mexican filmmaker Gustavo Vazquez. This “Chicano sci-phi mocumentary” uses found footage from multiple sources (racist ethnographic films, border B-movies, marginal sci-phi movies from the 50’s, and “historical” archival footage) intertwined with staged performance narrative by one of my personae. The film is contextualized within the meta-fiction of the  “Second US/Mexico War,” and purports to recount the history of Mexico from pre-Columbian times to the year 2001. Different versions of  The Great Mojado Invasion have been projected (without sound) as part of the Mexterminator performance, as well as in productions of BORDERscape 2000. 
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A Selection Of Internet Confessions

Question: Do you think that immigrants are contributing to America's downfall?

Answers:
 
"Latino immigrants are bringing down my standard of living. Never had this problem before the wetbacks came here. They hang out on the fucking street corner. Working for peanuts I assume."
 
"If simple workers can cross our borders, imagine what true criminals or terrorists are able to achieve."
 
"Mexicans cost too much money to educate and acculturate. They believe that have the right to free services."
 
"Put a stop to immigration! We have enough colored people. Require everyone to speak the native language, and in this country it's English!! I'm not predujiced. Don't get me wrong. I hate everybody equally. If you want to live here, you must adapt to our way of life, or get the fuck out!"
 
"It is the illegal aliens who do the most damage to the school system, as they are not supposed to be there".
 
“Yes, ever since the early fifteen hundreds immigrants have been bad news. We can thank them for smallpox, Catholicism and monrachism. They came over and elbowed aside the locals ‘for our own good.’ We could send them back, but Europe doesn’t want them.”
 

Question: Should the US/Mexico border be opened, and if so why?

Answer:
 
“Yeah, beacause of the drogas, man, the drogas! Also so that las señoritas can come up and buy better quality Madonna fashions and we can more easily traverse as tourists down to buy some virgenes. But more importantly, the ego of the Estados Unidos needs to bypass the superego of the border military to get on ‘down’ to our long-lost unconscious. Long live the libido! Long live Mexico to satisfy the repressed urges of Norteamericanos!!!”
 

Question: If you had a gang member covered with tattoos, a
Native American in full regalia, and a romantic over-sexualized Mexican macho dressed as a post-modern Zorro alone in a gallery, what wild fantacies would you have them re-enact for you?

Answers:
 
“My first wild fantasy is a drive-by shooting where I get to do the shooting and really kill somebody in cold blood.”
 
“For the vato, the reality of my raza, to show me revolution by the alien nation”
 
"I would have the cholo tattoo the native with cave drawings."
 
“I would have the gang member do a rap number about police harassment. I would ask the Native American to perform a ritual ceremony to cleanse this continent of the pollution and blight brought by Europeans. I would have the Mexican macho do a striptease.”
 
"I would like for him(the Mexican) to rip my clothes off with a Machete, so I can bathe in Chile Ancho sause, in order for him to wrap me up in a warm tortilla, so at the end he can have me with a shot of tequila."
 
“Make Pete Wilson the guest of honor at sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli, and serve the drumsticks basted with salsa, like in Conquest of New Spain.”
 
“I would have all three of them in a wonderful sexual orgy. I would have the gang member as the top man forcing the Native American and Mexican into submission -- the poor Native American is always getting screwed.”
 
"I would want the Zorro Mexican to sling me over his shoulder, stick a chicken up his ass and run around yelling 'Bob Dole is a homosexual.' Ajuaa!”
 
"I would like them to connect their genitals together with a golden rod running through the ends of the penis that is the shape of a circle, while holding hands and singing, 'Praise the asshole our lord Jesus Christ for he is risen against anal pollops and canine rectal itch.'"
 
"My fantasies would involve bondage and whipped cream, like the girls on the cover of the Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass album.”
 
“Gangbanger - shoot himself in the head. Native American -- perform a healing ritual to mend our nation’s broken spirit. PoMoZorro - give me free body piercings with his blade.”