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Conversation with Josh Kun
Chihuahuas, Rockeros, and Zoot Suits :
Notes On Multiculturalism Without People of Color
A Conversation
Guillermo Gßmez-PeĻa and Josh Kun
Josh Kun: I wanted to start this whole conversation off by
asking you to talk about your intellectual relationship to
Subcomandante Marcos. I remember you recently telling me that
you considered yourself an unofficial disciple of Marcos. Why
would Marcos matter to a performance artist?
Guillermo Gßmez-PeĻa: I’ve always regarded Marcos as a
performance artist extroadinaire. I think that perhaps Marcos’s
geniality lies precisely in his ability to understand the
symbolic power of performative actions; the symbolic power of
props and costuming. He also understands the importance of new
technologies as a means to enhance his voice; the importance of
staging press conferences-as-performance, and of course, the
strategic use of poetics in a time in which political language
is completely hollow and bankrupt. He understands the power of
language to help us constantly reinvent ourselves, and that to
me is the essence of performance art. Performance artists are
interested in exactly the same things. Roberto [Sifuentes,
Gßmez-PeĻa’s current collaborator] and I see clear parallelisms
in our methodologies. Of course, we are operating on a much
smaller scale and without the consensus of hundreds of
thousands of people.
JK: You also seem to have begun to echo Marcos in your approach
to technology and your commitments to developing new
technological strategies of representation and activism. In the
last few years, your work has become increasingly invested in
mining the symbolic and communicative power of the web and
exposing the cultural politics of internet technologies and
cyberculture. Marcos is one of the supreme examples of the
subaltern, the ex-third worlder, harnessing what are positioned
as First World technologies and using them to launch a
counter-strike on First World institutions and systems of
domination.
GGP: His is one of the most efficient activist uses of new
technologies. It’s unbelievable. Once the cease-fire occurred,
his revolution became first and foremost a cyber revolution, a
revolution that took place in virtual space. The net has been
his main means of communication with the outside world and the
way to keep his mythology alive and the presence and aura of
Zapatismo alive in the world imagination. And he did it so
successfully at a time in which the debates on new technologies
(1994-1996) were completely apolitical-
JK: -and top down
GGP: And top down. For years, people were wondering how the
hell he managed to overnight send his communiqus and the
discussions of the commandancia Zapatista straight from La
Realidad (where his headquarters are located) at a time when La
Realidad didn’t have electric lights all the way into the
highly designed Zapatista web sites. It was a total mystery.
Now people know how he’s doing it, but it took everybody by
surprise, that this group of insurrectionists living in
pre-industrial conditions in the Mexican jungle would so
successfully broadcast their plight through the internet in a
more sophisticated way than city intellectuals were doing it at
the time.
JK: Absolutely. But what’s also interesting about his use of
technology in combination with the way he and the Zapatistas
manipulate their media images, is that they are also tapping
into how the internet has become a site of performative
activism. That is, so much of Marcos’ agenda has been centered
on the way he performs himself as an insurrectionist— the
masks, the hidden identity, dropping out of sight for months at
a time, showing up at soccer games— in ways not terribly far
from the strategies of say, El Santo and Superbarrio, other
masked heroes of the people. And the internet has, among so
many other things, become a site of everyday performance— its
very structure, its anonymities, its disconnections from
physical visible bodies, have opened it up into a kind of
everyday theater of self re-actuation that is perfectly suited
for Marcos’ campaign.
The internet has become about creating fictional identities,
inviting and in a sense, requiring, its users to take on
alternate selves, virtual selves. I’d be curious to know if
this quasi-normalization of performance has affected the
parameters of performance art. Has it changed the way you work,
the way you think about what constitutes performance art and
performative action in the age of the internet?
GGP: The performance art world is merciless. Since it defines
itself always in opposition to its immediate past and it’s
always inevitably and acritically looking at the future, you
are forced to redefine yourself constantly if you want to
remain seated at the table of debates in the field. Otherwise
you are out…gone. The speed at which the field changes is
vertiginous, unlike any other field, and a performance artist
nowadays has a very hard task, which is that of constantly
reinventing him or herself and developing new and surprising
strategies in order to remain alive and current.
And the performance field is constantly shifting: what is
performance today won’t be performance in two or three years
and what was performance five years ago is no longer
performance. Performance deals in the realm of the immediate,
in the here and the now, and there is a sense of urgency and
immediacy that in many ways makes it be closer to journalism
than to theater.
JK: The difference (one of them anyway) is that journalists
rarely realize that what they’re doing is a performance, that
their bylines signal their own role-playing, their articles
their own fashionings of re-arrangements and in many cases,
extreme misrepresentations of the world they chronicle. Your
work, though—especially recent pieces like Temple of
Confessions, El Mexterminator, and Friendly Cannibals— has
overtly responded to the ubiquity of internet culture—
GGP: One is constantly re-evaluating one’s methodologies. By
1994 my accomplices and I found ourselves faced with a dilemma.
The art world had declared multiculturalism dead, very
conveniently. The backlash against multiculturalism started to
spread into academia, mass media, pop culture, mainstream
politics and suddenly matters of race and gender were seen as
pass. And we found ourselves in a serious dilemma. We needed
to re-define all of our strategies. Suddenly, there was no
longer a place for the angry black man or for the rabid Latino
revolutionary or the angry feminist sister talking back.
Liberal audiences began to experience “compassion fatigue”
and
they were no longer willing to tolerate strident, in your face,
kinds of messages.
At the same time, the art world began to celebrate the arrival
of new technologies in a very acritical way, especially in
California. The utopian discourse about new technologies coming
out of the Bay Area was completely ludicrous. Wired magazine,
and some of the theorists of technology to remain nameless—
JK: —the internet as some new digital manifestation of
egalitarian democracy
GGP: -Sure carnal. People were saying that virtual space was a
truly democratic space, that everybody regardless of race,
culture, class, or gender could participate equally, could
belong” at a time when no one was feeling a sense of belonging
to any community. So because of this new conceptual
configuration we had to crash the new digital art world yet one
more time or we would be left behind. And believe me, there
were no Chicanos in virtual space at that time.
JK: Or at least anyone identifying themselves as such—
GGP: Yeah. So we began to not shyly venture into cyberspace as
web-backs, as cyber-immigrants, fully aware that we were going
to face the cyber-migra eventually. Then there is this other
issue. Being “transgressive,” “alternative,” or
rebellious,”
are notions that have become very hollow in the nineties
because the mainstream has realized that they can profit from
the more thorny margins, the more poisonous margins. Now you
can witness extreme performative behavior on cheesy talk shows,
HBO programs, and Hollywood films that surpasses the outrageous
behavior of performance artists. You are then forced to
re-evaluate your position as a social provocateur. If Jerry
Springer or Howard Stern are capable of engaging in more
transgressive” social or sexual behavior than your colleagues,
what does it mean to be “transgressive”? Or what does it mean
to be kinky when in the trailer parks of rural America or in
the halls of the White House there is more kink, raw kink, than
in the most sophisticated vampire Goth clubs of New York City?
It’s disorienting ese.
JK: Which is precisely why the question that, for a brief
moment, plagued reception of the Jerry Springer Show was: are
your shows real? or is it all staged? Talk shows always walk
this line between the “actual” and the “performed,”
and it’s a
line that millions of TV watchers are fascinated by.
Performance is made everyday in this way. We are getting more
and more accustomed to seeing “real life” as staged, more
and
more accustomed to assuming that what is being offered up as
real TV, real life, reality programming, is a product of
elaborate performances.
GGP: Performance art is national daily spectacle. There is no
question about it.
JK: This issue you raise of marketing transgression makes me
think of these new GAP ads for khaki pants. Have you seen them?
They feature multi-racial skaters, rave kids, swing kids,
punks, and b-boys all performing their subcultural difference
in the same brand of pants. The first one was swing, then hip
hop, now they have “Khakis Soul” and “Khakis Country,”
and you
realize just how good mass culture has gotten at harnessing and
containing difference while letting people think they are still
being different— perform your difference by wearing our pants.
Be marginal, be transgressive, just do it wearing the same
pants.
GGP: Illusions of difference can be easily commodified.
Retro-lounge culture and swing are like multiculturalism
without people of color. That’s what they are. Martini bars in
San Francisco or Manhattan- choose the theme. Polynesian?
Afro-Mambo? Miami Galore? Tex-Mex? You choose the subject
matter. In these clubs there are no people of color. The
impresarios of this new hype managed to somehow create a sexy
multicultural” scene without having to suffer the anger of
being confronted by people of color and being accused of
appropriation or bad dancing. They have successfully managed to
erase the political text of difference. It’s brilliant. They
always outsmart us.
JK: Let me try to re-direct us back to the role of the
internet. What I find interesting in relation to your use of
it— especially if we can talk reductively about your work as
moving from a site-specific approach to the border to a more
elaborated, extended, or symbolic approach to it— is that one
place you hear always hear about “erasing borders” or “going
borderless” is in internet discourse. According to the
boosters, the internet is the ultimate borderless zone. And of
course there are any number of ways to critique this:
borderless as long as you post in English, borderless as long
as you can afford a computer with ample memory and the
passport software required to enter this zone, and on and on.
But in your work you deal with the internet on the one hand as
a space of possibility in terms of cross-cultural circuitry and
transgressive identity enactment, but on the other as a place
that is still policed.
GGP: I think that by 1995-96, the tone of the debates began to
change because cyberspace was crashed by feminist
theoreticians, by anarchists, by hackers, by pirates, by people
of color, by Third World intellectuals, by postcolonial
theoreticians who learned the new lingo in a few years. And
suddenly it became highly politicized and all these white guys
who felt they had found a safe place of escape away from the
complexities of the times, were once again scared of the cyber
streets— there went the cyber-neighborhood, so to speak.
JK: So would we be willing to say that there’s a relationship
between the erosion of radical multiculturalism as a cohesive,
viable discourse on the left, i.e. before multiculturalism
became the discourse of the right, and the birth of the
internet as an alternate sphere of possibility? There’s an
interesting connection between the decrease of public sphere
multiculturalist intervention and the potential gain of the
internet as a space of radical intervention.
GGP: Yes and no. The two main organizations, at least in the
art world, dealing with new technologies— CyberConf and ISEA
(International Symposium on Electronic Art)— have found a
seasonal place for Roberto, myself and a handful of other
politicized Chicano/Latino colleagues. But just like in the
early days of multiculturalism, we’re the unwanted, necessary
guests at the party; the temporary insiders; the mariachis with
a big mouth; the savages who unexpectedly fart. We are given
the microphone for a couple of hours, and we use it fully
knowing that we may not be invited again. But as we keep
crashing those conferences year after year we don’t see more
representation coming. In fact in the last couple of years,
what we see is the emergence of a “friendly backlash” type
discourse…”Oh, we already dealt with this or that issue two
conferences ago.”
To give you an example. Roberto and I proposed to ISEA a huge
international town meeting with techno disc jockeys in
cyberspace coordinating multiple activities happening in
so-called marginal communities and third world countries
simultaneously for a span of two days, where performance
artists, theoreticians, and activists were going to participate
in a very exciting unmediated dialogue that would be the
centerpiece of this year’s(1988) international ISEA gathering.
Then two months before it was about to happen, they canceled on
us alleging they couldn’t fundraise all the necessary money to
make it happen. I truly believe they suddenly realized how
complicated and potentially dangerous it was going to be.
Because of incidents like this one, I am much more realistic
than I was during the multicultural era, much more pragmatic. I
know Chicanos and Latin Americans will always be temporary
insiders or insider/outsiders, and that is in fact a condition
we will bear until we die. And I don’t mind it because it
grants us a special kind of freedom. I don’t want to be an
official cyber artist by any means. I remember when I became
the official border artist and believe me it was a pain in the
ass. The fact is that the art world only knows what we do with
our right hand but they never know what we do with our left.
Half of our activities, often the most interesting ones, go
unnoticed. The art world is only interested when we hit the
Corcoran gallery, the Walker Art Center or the Brooklyn Academy
of Music.
JK: But not when you’re meeting with farmworkers in Ohio—
GGP: or with troubled teens in San Antonio or Native Americans
on reservations in Canada and the U.S., nobody pays attention.
None of our work taking place in extra-artistic contexts over
the past five years has been covered by the art world and it’s
definitely the most interesting work we’ve done so far. So this
condition of being insider/outsider is in fact a very
convenient one- it keeps us from being entirely co-opted. I
don’t know if this is clear.
JK: It is and it also doubles back on something we were
discussing the other day, when you asked me if I thought it was
possible to successfully be a public intellectual in the US.
Perhaps it’s this insider/outsider position, never fully being
one or the other, that is the condition necessary for the
emergence of a public or “organic” intellectual. Because you’re
not fully inside the art world or academia, it forces you to
inhabit the gap between them and that’s where community enters.
I’m really interested in your anxiety about your own status as
a public intellectual. I was surprised to hear you say that. I
was surprised to hear you say that you’re looking for models.
GGP: In the US, because we don’t have a tradition of organic,
public intellectuals, and my generation is just in a process of
trial and error, trying to develop models, because of this we
never quite know what our real impact is. For example, my role
as only one of two Latinos who ever get to speak on All Things
Considered (National Public Radio)— does that mean that I
truly have a national voice or not? I am not sure. I know that
there is a potential audience of five million people for my
radio essays and that the programs in many cities get to be
re-broadcast twice in a day so there might even be a potential
audience OF ten million, and that makes me feel very good. I
mean with one of my radio commentaries I get to reach more
people that I ever will with all of my live performances put
together. It’s wild. So I put as much time into my three or
seven minute radio pieces as I put into a very elaborate
performance piece, because I know that to go on the air is a
real political victory for a politicized performance artist.
But then I never know if the fact that if I have to craft my
voice to fit the All Things Considered format means that I’m
taking the chile and the spices out of my food.
I mean, I try to push the envelope but in public radio, the
envelope is quite stiff. Sometimes, when I do a piece that
truly challenges radio tolerance, I inevitably receive a call
from my editor, “Guillermo, you have…How can I put it? Make
your ideas more understandable.” Or if the piece slips through
the cracks and gets recorded exactly as I wanted it, then
suddenly the tape disappears mysteriously from the shelves or
its broadcast gets postponed indefinitely. It’s fine with me.
It’s like a little game, each side trying to reposition the
borders of permissiveness.
JK: It’s the same with my music writing, though on a much
smaller scale. Whether it’s for alternative weeklies or
national musical magazines, I’m always faced with trying to put
something out to a potential audience— making a political
point, introducing a new artist, raising issues that I feel
other writers ignore— while making sure not to alienate that
audience. Because I do see each piece as a rare window of
opportunity to actually make an intervention in a public way.
GGP: It’s also a great challenge of simulacrum, a great
exercise in expropriation of the form. It would be ludicrous if
you attempted to be as experimental as you can when you write
for the Guardian or if I were to use my most transgressive
performance techniques when I do a radio commentary for NPR. It
would be politically kamikaze-
JK: And thoroughly counter-effective.
GGP: The point is to expropriate the format and push it one
more degree and find an outer limit within the format. That is
the challenge. And it is not an individual task, it must be a
communal task, a task that a whole generation of thinkers,
artists, activists, politicized journalists, must undertake.
JK: Sure, because if not, then the one person suffers from
burdens of collective representation and suddenly you find
yourself as not just NPR’s leading Latino but as standing in
and speaking for the Latino community as a whole, which as you
know, is incredibly problematic to say the least, for everyone
involved.
GGP: Very problematic.
JK: And you become the token brown voice-
GGP: the Andrei Cordescou of Tijuana (laughs), or the Joseph
Beuys of the grassroots (laughs more)-
JK: You laugh, but that kind of qualification, that kind of
re-contextualization, happens all the time when I try to get
editors at national English-language magazines to approve story
ideas involving rock en espaĻol bands, punkeros, Latino pop
artists, Mexican rapero crews, etc.. Usually the only way I can
get them to say yes is to couch the artists in the context of
the world the editors privilege. Speaking of Cafe Tacuba as an
avant-pop band from Mexico City who transform traditional
Mexican and Latin American musics means nothing, but calling
them the “REM of Mexico” or something equally ridiculous perks
an editor’s ears.
When US publicity for the Monterrey-based hip
hop/lounge/electronica duo Plastilina Mosh started rolling out,
they were the “Beck of Mexico” or the “Mexican Beastie
Boys.”
That kind of comparison may serve some degree of purpose in
terms of cross-cultural translation, but it also works to elide
the very real and important fact that in Latin America the kind
of pastiche and recycling that both the Beastie Boys and Beck
practice have been fundamental aesthetic strategies for
centuries, if not from the very moment of colonization itself.
So suddenly all that history is erased and Plastilina Mosh is
just some Mexican copy of a First World original. It’s
frustrating and deeply problematic. There’s never a way to talk
about it that upsets the balance of cultural power. It keeps
them exotic, foreign, and marginal and always reinstates
colonialist hierarchies of representation. And when they do get
written about, it’s only one band every few months; running
more than one review or article on a Latino/a or Latin American
band in the same issue is a complete impossibility.
For example, a recent issue of Details, their “music issue,”
was themed as a sort of “world music” issue and was supposed
to
focus on artists across the planet. I was assigned a piece on
the Venezuelan group Los Amigos Invisibles, but because there
was also a piece on narco-corridos at the border, my article
got killed. The exact words of my editor were, “Because of
space, we couldn’t have two articles on Spanish music.” Spanish
music! It wasn’t even the old case of lumping together acts as
nationally and stylistically distinct as a Venezuelan
disco-funk band and Sonora corridistas into the vague “Latin
music” generalization. It was seeing them only in terms of
either their shared language— which would emphasize the extent
to which so much of this comes down to an English-only language
politics— or their shared colonial links to Spain.
Regardless, it always comes down to this attitude of
patronizing and paternalistic inclusion, of being generous
enough and taking enough of a perceived demographic risk with
advertisers, to allow one of these groups in. It’s the old
bringing the margins to the center saw— never realizing that
the center is marginalized, never realizing that Rolling
Stone’s white male demographic of Fleetwood Mac and Pearl Jam
fans is rapidly becoming an imaginary one that the magazine is
working over-time to re-create and keep alive.
GGP: We always make fun of that. When I was part of the
so-called performance monologue movement in the late eighties,
I used to call myself “Spalding Wet” in reference to Spalding
Gray and like espalda mojada—wet back—, and I had a
performance called “Swimming to Tijuana.” I always like to
joke
about the fact that we are always being referenced through the
filter of US and European art and pop culture and never seen on
our own terms— like Roberto and I being called the Cheech and
Chong of the art world.
JK: Maybe this is a good juncture to get back to this question
of being a public intellectual. As an artist who inhabits the
US and Mexico simultaneously as a state of mind-
GGP: -and as a conceptual cartography
JK: -do you think that being a public intellectual in Mexico
works differently? I ask this because a term like “public
intellectual” is always nationally moored. Your work and your
performance itinerary, the map you are always moving across, is
transnational in its scope, and this transnationalism, be it
geopolitical or cultural or performative, I think poses a
challenge to how we generally characterize public intellectual
work. So how does it work for you being in both Mexico and the
US. Is it easier to play that role there?
GGP: It was up to the early 90s. Since Mexico wholeheartedly
jumped into the troubled waters of neo-liberalism and
globalization, my beloved native country has gone from being a
partially industrialized society to an information-based,
advanced capitalist society in a matter of say eight years
without ever enjoying the goods of capitalism or information;
without ever completing its industrialization phase. So we
have engaged in the most dysfunctional form of capitalism and
media culture, but nevertheless Mexico has thoroughly become a
virtual nation that only exists in the cultural-scape of
Televisa, the mega-media conglomerate. More and more, Mexico is
experiencing the malaise of a post-industrial information based
society and as a result of this the intellectuals are becoming
less and less national players and more and more media
celebrities and only those who know how to play the media have
made that leap. The great majority haven’t. They are still
writing for newspapers and only a small educated portion of the
population reads the paper. And there’s nothing wrong with
this, but there was a time when in Mexico intellectuals could
be heard regularly on radio, seen on television, could write
for the national papers, could engage in debates with the
political class, where everybody knew them in the country, much
more so than in the US. And this is no longer the case.
Probably the best example as a marker is Octavio Paz’s
relationship with Televisa. When suddenly Paz was adopted as
the official intellectual of Televisa about ten or twelve years
ago, a new type of intellectual was inaugurated in Mexico, the
official media intellectual. So now intellectuals in Mexico are
experiencing the same marginality that US intellectuals
experience. Here (in the US) it is perhaps a little worse
because the only real space an intellectual has to survive in
is academia and academia is not exactly connected to media or
pop culture or community praxis. It’s self-contained and
self-referential, like a reservoir of intelligence, and only a
handful of intellectuals existing in academia are really
allowed to broadcast their views in national media, and we know
they are not the most critical voices. If the US was a healthy
and truly democratic society, we would see Naom Chomsky and
Mike Davis and Michelle Wallace and Susan Harjo and Ed Said, we
would see them regularly on television talking about politics
and culture. Instead we get obscure social scientists and
lawyers, lots of lawyers, and idiots like Bill Maher (on
Politically Incorrect) explaining society to us.
JK: Part of the reason I brought this up again was because the
more musicians I speak with and write about in Mexico, the more
instances I find of musicians as intellectuals, or
intellectuals as musicians— musicians who in Mexico truly are
cultural workers. Musicians who double as journalists,
columnists, community leaders, video makers, writers. There’s
much less of that in the US. Someone like Pacho in the Mexico
City rock fusion band Maldita Vecindad. He uses his music to
address cultural and political issues and in a sense, either
rehearses those ideas or extends them, in his columns for the
Reforma newspaper. It’s rare to see entertainment and political
dialogue co-exist and inform each other in the public sphere in
the US— being a rockero and a critic, a drummer and a cronista.
GGP: No, you’re right. There’s still some instances of this—
Felipe Ehrenberg, the performance artist, and Roger Bartra the
social anthropologist. They write in daily papers for example—
but there’s less and less of it. Besides, people like Felipe,
Roger, and Pacho should have their own TV shows. Can you
imagine que locura? Another factor that contributes to
intellectuals and artists becoming increasingly less visible is
the fact that it is practically impossible for them to live
strictly from their work. So they are forced to engage in
double or triple production and wear many hats and masks in
order to survive.
JK: But isn’t part of it also that in the US, in the case of
rock music, there’s a very different mythography and a very
different culture attached to rock than the one in Mexico? In
Mexico, if you’re a rockero, you’re not just performing as
a
musician, you are, whether you like it or not because of the
politicized history of rock in Mexico, enacting a certain kind
of resistant, subcultural identity. This was of course
especially true in the seventies and eighties, from Avandaro
until after the Mexico City earthquake, before Televisa decided
to support rock and introduce it into the federally sanctioned
national media culture.
GGP: True, There was a time when the rockeros were the great
alternative chroniclers of “la reconstrucion” of the city
after
the earthquake-
JK: Exactly. There’s more of a slippage between these two
spheres— cultural expression and politics— in Mexico than
in
the States, or at least the two have been more frequently
brought together out of necessity, as a survival strategy.
GGP: But NAFTA has made it harder, neo-liberalism has made it
harder, globalization has made it harder. Mexico is looking and
behaving more and more like the US, and soon, in five or ten
years, there won’t be visible cultural differences across
borders in this continent- both ways.
JK: So what do you do with that? How is this different from
what you yourself have written of as ‘the new world border,’
an
artistic transcontinental border zone?
GGP: In my performance work and writings I have attempted to
articulate this “other cartography,” a transborder culture
not
imposed from above but organically emerging from within-
JK: An anti-NAFTA transborder zone?
GGP: Exactly. At times, it looks similar at a far distance but
when you get closer you realize they are fundamentally
different. On the one hand you have the CNN or Discovery
Channel type of continental or “global culture,” the Benneton
worldview, the pseudo-internationalism of world beat and the
internet, and on the other hand you have this more proletarian
or grassroots “transworld culture” that is emerging organically
from within, from street level up so to speak, in which chavos
banda (rock kids) from Sao Paulo or Mexico City are not
behaving that differently from youth in the Bronx or Oakland.
The rockeros in the outskirts of Buenos Aires are dealing with
similar issues as…
JK: -as North Africans in Paris
GGP: -or Chicanos in East LA or Pakistanis in London-
JK: Something like a subaltern transnationalism.
GGP: An ex-centris kind of internationalism, a new
internationalism that has nothing to do with fifth avenue
tycoons or Parisian ethno-music impresarios. I mean, this
internationalism escapes the CNN cameras.
JK: In a talk I gave once, I proposed rock en espaĻol as a good
example of how this happens, how as a movement and now a genre,
it has created a series of aesthetic and political
transnational bridges between Mexicanos/as and Chicanos/as. And
someone responded by saying that he couldn’t think about
transnationalism apart from imperialism. My point was precisely
the opposite, that thinking in that way is a trap, thinking
that way blinds you to the workings of cultural expression that
works within the very channels of economic imperialism. Rock en
espaĻol has been a force of re-connection between rockeros in
Mexico City and rockeros in say, Chicago or San Jose. Jaime
Lopez called it “un canto fronterizo” for good reason. We
have
to remember that there can be transnational resistance within
economic transnationalism.
GGP: That’s a very good way to put it. When you see a Lacandon
Indian wearing a t-shirt of Ozzy Ozbourne ten years later in
the Yucatan jungle, that doesn’t mean that he has been
colonized. He has, in fact, co-opted it and turned it into a
symbol of resistance, in this particular case against the
government sponsored folkloric culture that Indians are
supposed to wear and represent. So even though at times,
corporate transnationalism and grassroots transnationalism can
look very similar, one has to be very careful to distinguish
them.
And also, at the end of the century, in this era of rabid
globalization, alliances of political affiliation are of a
different order; they’re very eccentric and don’t necessarily
respond to ideological patterns.
JK: So take a band like Molotov, who mix Chicano-inflected hip
hop with metal, who are from Mexico City, and who are signed to
Universal. Their politics are supposedly progressive. They’re
anti-Zedillo, anti-PRI, anti-Televisa; they rap about political
corruption and media hypocrisy, about economic injustice and
call for redistributions of power. And yet, they are fully
misogynist and homophobic and supposedly come out at one point
as big supporters of the PAN. Yet people have been writing
about their music as radical and revolutionary. They’ve gotten
support from leftist intellectuals like Carlos Monsivais. But
is this musical leftism? Is this progressive? How do we talk
about this kind of production that frustrates existing
political alliances and allegiances?
GGP: I’m not sure. A culture that is used to suppressing anger
in the public sphere, maybe it allows the commodification of
anger. But on the other hand, groups like Plastilina Mosh and
Molotov are more about the performance of anger than the
content behind that anger. It is this sexy performative anger
that appeals to people more than the political ideals behind
it. It is the possibility of saying “chingada” in a song
JK: or in Molotov’s case, “puto” and then “dame
todo el poder”
GGP: and not the content of what these words actually translate
into. I think this is very much a nineties phenomenon. We are
already living in a society beyond content, in a world without
theory, without ideology, where style is what matters, the form
is what matters, the total experience is what matters. Complex
ideas seem to be dated. It’s really scary.
JK: My favorite thing about Molotov is that the gringo from New
Orleans in the group, the drummer, landed in Mexico City
because his father moved the family there when he was working
for the DEA.
GGP: That’s A perfect example! It makes total pinche sense!
That’s the thing. We have to be cautious when we assume an easy
binary position because it simply doesn’t work anymore. All the
progressive conceptual territories that used to be sanctuaries
of freedom and tolerance and contestation are now undergoing a
process of redefinition and reconfiguration. So we cannot be
blindly Zapatistas or entirely Chicanos. It doesn’t work
anymore. Our alliances are shifting with the shifting
topography of the end of the century. Excuse my metaphors but
we are in the middle of the earthquake. All the buildings and
bridges are falling around us. And what is progressive in one
context is not necessarily progressive in another. And this
might change tomorrow.
JK: Which complicates the way rock and hip hop have started
bringing Chicanos and Mexicanos together, the way that so many
Mexican musicians are sounding more and more Chicano.
GGP: The Mexicanos who haven’t had an immigrant experience in
the US have a much harder time accepting this fact than the
Chicanos and other US Latinos. The process of Chicanization in
reverse that Mexican culture in all territories— in pop
culture, in the arts, in fashion— has experienced in the last
five to seven years is profound and irreversible and the
Mexicanos are having a very hard time accepting it, especially
the privileged intellectual and political elites.
JK: Rubn MartŲnez wrote a great piece about—and I’m greatly
summarizing here— how gang names in Neza are borrowed from
gang names in East LA and South Central when none of these kids
have ever been to LA. But they have seen American Me and Mi
Vida Loca. So with this coupled with the way, say, Mexican
raperos like Control Machete, Plastilina Mosh, Molotov, El Gran
Silencio, are emulating cholo style and language— for the
first time in a long time, Mexicanos aren’t looking at Chicanos
through Octavio Paz’s eyes as cultural huerfanos, as empty of
identity and culture, as Mexican sell-outs. They’re looking at
Chicanos, especially Chicano youth culture, as models for new
identity. But this gets complicated by what you’ve said,
because what would be a progressive Chicano politics in 1999
might meet with resistance on the streets of Monterrey or
Tijuana or Mexico City.
GGP: In the early days of rock en espaĻol, when the rockeros
started syncretizing rock with traditional Mexican music, they
were so invested in being perceived as original. So when they
were confronted with the fact that Chicanos were already doing
that in Los Angeles and San Antonio, they didn’t like it and
didn’t want to acknowledge any overt influence. That was
ludicrous. I remember engaging in very tough conversations with
post-earthquake rockeros Mexicanistas in 1987-88 and saying,
You guys are sounding more and more Chicano and that’s really
cool,” and them getting really pissed. This also happened in
the performance art world with many of my colleagues as well as
in literature and cinema. The diaspora always ends up
influencing the homeland. But artists in Mexico are so insecure
vis-a-vis the US and Europe and so ethnocentric regarding
Chicanos that they have this desperate impulse to always be
perceived on their own terms, as original, and innovative.
Luckily things are changing and I’d like to venture a theory.
Before Zapatismo erupted, Mexicans thought that Mexico had
already overcome its identity crisis since the Mexican
revolution. And that it was those Chicanos, those ex-Mexicans
living on the other side of the border, who were afflicted by a
permanent identity crisis. In those days, the notion of
identity was closely linked to language and territory. If you
spoke Spanish and lived in Mexico, you were Mexican. And if you
crossed the border you ipso-facto became a renegade, a traitor,
a pocho. That was a complete fallacy based on a very
old-fashioned binary model of identity. The Zapatistas came to
prove this model wrong. When their revolution exploded in 1994,
the country realized there was not just one Mexico; there were
many. And many of which had been forgotten and had never been
part of the national life of the country. There were certainly
a number of indigenous Mexicos that had nothing to do with the
hegemonic views of national identity, and who were finally
demanding recognition. So suddenly Mexicans became aware of
their acute crisis of identity and they realized their crisis
was at least as grave as that of the Chicanos on the other
side. The potential for a new alliance, a new reconciliation
began to emerge. On both sides of the border we are children of
crises and orphans of two nation-states.
JK: One of the biggest effects of neo-Zapatismo on the rock en
espaĻol scene, on both sides of the border, has been the
increase of support for the Zapatistas. And it’s happened to
such an extent that voicing support for Marcos or playing a
Zapatista benefit show has almost become de rigeur to the point
of ideological emptiness, like wearing a red AIDS ribbon in the
States. In the beginning, only a handful of bands, Maldita
Vecindad, Tijuana NO, Santa Sabina, were doing benefits for the
Zapatistas, pledging public support, using images of Zapatistas
on record covers, using Marcos speeches on their albums, then
it became a more widespread political gesture. And by 1998 or
so, the Zapatistas had become a central part of what we were
talking about, the commercialization of rebellion, with Marcos
as just another revolutionary on a t-shirt.
GGP: But it’s also true that without the support of the
rockers, of the internet, and without the sponsors of
international hip, without ethno-sexual tourism— the myriad
Europeans who arrive in Chiapas in search of an Indian maiden—
without the support of all these bizarre things, the Zapatistas
would have been wiped out by the Mexican government.
JK: This happens in the US all the time as well, the way
subcultural performance and expression often relies on its very
co-optation for survival.
GGP: Look at the lucha libre (Mexican wrestling) phenomenon in
San Francisco, all these “Mexican wrestlers” who are in fact
post-punk white kids performing a fictional identity. But as
much as we criticize these new bohemian yuppies who are
hardcore consumers of S&M, of fringe performance art, and world
foods, tattoos, piercings, they are half of our audience in the
nineties. Therefore we have to mimic the very objects of desire
of these new audiences in order to appeal to them and turn them
around. It is a very interesting predicament for us. We don’t
want to shy away from those audiences, so we are very
interested in mimicking a certain aesthetic that from a
distance appeals to them because it explores the fringe desires
and extreme aesthetics they are into. But once we have them, we
turn it around them.
JK: How do you explain this shift in your audience’s desires?
GP: In the past years, performance art audiences have
experienced an acute case of compassion fatigue. They have
grown increasingly more intolerant of intellectually
challenging and politically overt work, and at the same time
much more willing to participate acritically in performance art
events which allow them to engage in what they perceive as
radical behavior.” As a response to this, my colleagues and
I
have been experimenting with new performance formats which can
effectively speak to them, and catch them by surprise with
their guards down so to speak.
JK; Can you give me some examples?
GP: We are designing political raves and peep shows in which
audience members get to become cultural transvestites and
voyeurs at the same time. We are also working on interactive TV
programs and designing a conceptual web page in which audience
members assume some of our performance personas, are given
tasks by us, then go and carry them out in public and then
reconvene at a live performance event. We are hoping to be able
to crossover with dignity into the pop cultural terrain and
stage large populist spectacles without losing our souls, our
political clarity, our thorns and edges. The new goal is to
accept the Faustian deal, but hopefully to outsmart the devil.
I still don’t know if this is possible. It is still too early
to wage the success of these experiments.
JK: You have to be paradoxical in order to make your point. And
it seems to me this is a very particular paradox that belongs
to a very particular moment in the history of multiculturalism.
One of the ways you’ve chosen to deal with and, in a sense,
embrace this paradox is to highlight the extent to which
so-called multiculturalism in the nineties has really become
less about transformative politics and more about cultural
confessions and collective racial therapy sessions.
In Temple of Confessions you entered this very territory, the
connection between multiculturalism and cultural confession.
I’m interested in how multiculturalism has become just another
form of confession, of confessing our sins. And especially how
this mode of confession has shifted agency and voice away from
people of color and toward Euro-Americans, how multiculturalism
is now very centrally about white folks confessing their
multicultural sins, desires, guilt, phobias— a lot of guilt
and phobia. The key then is to recognize how deeply confession
has saturated multiculturalist discourse and to then regain
control of it by controlling the mode of confession itself.
Temple of Confessions attempted to do this, I think. You took
the confessions. You manipulated the confessions.
GGP: Earlier, we were talking about the similarities and
differences between journalism and performance art. Another
difference is that performance art deals with the invisible
forces of social phenomena, with what I term “the geology of
social and cultural phenomena.” It also deals with subtle,
hidden or indirect psychological and spiritual forces. In other
words, performance deals with the subtextual more than the
textual; with the forbidden, and the unspoken. Because of this,
as a performance artist, I am particularly interested in
revealing the hidden texts of multiculturalism, those that were
never part of the public debate. For instance, in early 1994
when Roberto and I began our confessional experiments, I was
particularly interested in tapping into the collective
subconscious of my audience in order to articulate all the
unspoken relationships between the South and the North, between
Mexico and the US, between Anglos and Latinos. And this meant
dealing head-on with issues of fear and desire; interracial
sex, and all the sensitive stuff that academicians and the
mass media rarely talk about. Mexico and the US have always had
a very complicated relationship of intertwined fear and desire.
Anglos and Latinos are both scared and seduced by one another. T
he marines in San Diego who are trained to go and kill Central
Americans, they all have Mexican wives or go to Tijuana on the
weekends in search of a mythical “seĻorita.” Meanwhile, Mexican
nationalists listen to US rock and roll, watch American movies,
wear puro US fashion and if they can, they fall in love with
blonde foreigners. I mean, our fears contradict and complement
our desires. It’s inevitable.
JK: Ralph Ellison once wrote about a group of white kids
harassing black kids while listening to a Stevie Wonder record.
GGP: That’s the territory we are interested in, the forbidden
texts. There are many undercurrents beneath the US-Mexico
border and that’s what I want to get at. For example, I want to
understand the connection between racism and sexual attraction;
or the connection between racism and the exoticization of the
other. A lot of people, many of whom are racists, fantasize in
this country (the US) about wanting to be of another race,
about wanting to escape their own race and ethnicity. I mean, a
great majority of Americans. Whites wanting to be black, Latino
or Indian; Latinos wanting to be blonde or Spanish, Blacks
wanting to be white, everyone wanting to be Indian. To want to
become an Indian is a quintessential American desire. Those who
spout racist statements against Indians, they’re completely
seduced by an alleged indigenous wisdom and spirituality and
mysticism. As much as they hate “real” Indians in the big
city,
they’d love to be Indian warriors or shamans. Same with Mexico.
One of the things we are doing lately— it’s so dangerous we
have only been able to perform it three or four times under
very careful circumstances— we call them “identity make-over
booths.” We invite the audience into spaces where they go
through different stages of “ethnic transformation.” First,
they check out a catalog where they get to choose their
favorite cultural Other. It can be a mythic cultural other, say
a mysterious Arab terrorist, a macho Mexican revolutionary or
an angry Afrocentric activist or they can create their favorite
composite identity, incorporating elements of the various
identities in the menu. Then they go to the next room where
special effects make-up artists begin to transform their faces
and the color of their skin. Then they go to another room where
professional costume artists give them the right clothes and
then, once they are finished with the transformation, they
finally get to perform their fictional identities in a diorama
for ten minutes. At times, they get to choose their poses, and
believe me what they come up with is extremely revealing. Other
times, we as performance artists get to direct those poses, and
we turn them into “human paper cut-out dolls,” which is the
exact opposite of what we do in The Mexterminator, where we
become the passive cut-out dolls for our audiences. We reverse
the experiment.
So you have these audience members at the end of the
performance who are fully transformed into their favorite
cultural others and we often encourage them to go into the
streets with their new identity; to go into a bar or a
restaurant and experience how it feels to occupy these
identities. And it’s only in the morning after, when they wake
up with a horrible cultural hangover, that they realize the
implications of the experiment. Then, they feel angry, pissed
or betrayed. It’s a very delicate experiment.
JK: It may be delicate because it exposes the extent to which
that kind of outfitting, that kind of organized racial
transvestitism, happens everyday in a very mundane,
unremarkable, organic way. Wearing the identity of an Other is
common practice within American culture, particularly of course
among whites— blackface, cowboys and Indians, white Negroes.
Contemporary white youth cultures, for example, are built upon
racial fantasy, appropriation, and cross-dressing. I just went
to a hip hop show in Western Massachusetts a month ago and
virtually the entire audience was white, with very few black
kids around. Everybody in the audience was completely
performing black style, hip hop style— baggy pants, sideways
visors, white guys calling each other “nigga.” What was
especially unsettling about it was the way black kids
themselves were erased, turned into phantoms and traces only
leaving their mark through style.
GGP: This is precisely the point in the nineties. You go to a
high Latino lounge to listen to Esquivel and drink tropical
cocktails. Just experience otherness in a safe environment
without having to suffer the physical, social, cultural, and
political repercussions that entails. The idea is to pretend to
venture into the extreme margins, the most foreign and
dangerous margins and experience them without having to
co-exist with the unpleasant citizens of those margins, without
having to be subjected to accusations of expropriation,
mindless tourism or cultural privilege.
JK: A perfect example of this is this song “Zoot Suit Riot”
by
this band of white swingers from Oregon, The Cherry Poppin’
Daddies. They’ve been at the helm of the whole swing revival,
which we could talk about all by itself, but this particular
song is amazing for the way it uses style— a kind of neo,
de-politicized pachucismo— to erase not just the people of
color who inspire it but the histories of racism so overtly
embedded in it. They’ve built a party song around the 1943 Zoot
Suit Riots, when zoot-suited Chicanos were violently attacked
by US servicemen on the streets of East LA. Of course there’s
no comment on the riots themselves or what their memory means
to present-day Chicanos who might be listening on the radio or
hearing the song live. It just uses the riots for effect,
confusing fashion with racial violence. I remember reading in
the Los Angeles Times that the band’s singer said, “I don’t
mind if people take it as a Latino anthem, but I was just
trying to pay tribute to this new breed of swingers that was
emerging, I just like stylish people.”
GGP: There’s this great pachuco suit store in San Francisco and
it’s all Anglos buying them. The store owner is so perplexed by
it. He’s like, “Man, three or four years ago, I only had a
handful of Chicanos in their 40s and 50s coming in for custom
made pachuco suits and now hundreds of Anglos are coming in
every week, wanting to look like real pachucos. And they’ll
come with their Lowrider magazine in hand and they’ll point to
the very photograph they want me to reproduce.”
It’s a process of cultural gentrification where culture is
reproducing the same process that happens in urban settings.
Take the Latino barrio of the Mission District in San
Francisco. First come the sheriffs with the mandate of the city
officials to make the streets safe and we know what that means:
to get rid of homeboys, prostitutes, the so-called drug
dealers, the homeless, undocumented immigrants, etc. And then
behind the sheriffs come the real estate agents and then the
young impresarios who are looking for little cantinas with lots
of character to refurbish them into martini bars overnight. And
immediately after them come the lounge hipsters and bohemian
yuppies emulating the very otherness that was fumigated in the
same place to make the neighborhood safe for them to be there.
Of course, a few human props must remain. A touch of
authenticity is necessary. The norteĻo trios must remain. The
Latina prostitutes must remain. The tamale vendors must remain.
The flower vendors.
JK: -the paleteros (shaved-ice vendors)
GGP: -the pachuco clothing store, the pinto tattoo parlors, the
best taqueria. There are a few things that are OK to have but
the Latinos must move out to the East Bay. This is exactly what
is happening in culture.
JK: If this is the case, do you feel an urgency as a Latino
artist to address it somehow in your work?
GGP: One of the main subjects of our work is cultural
transvestitism. We are interested in exploring it and doing it
in a non-judgmental way, a non morally righteous way, because I
don’t entirely object to it. Let me explain myself. I
understand that there is a lack of symmetry in that very
proposition— it is not the same to cross the border from north
to south than from south to north and it is not the same for a
Mexican to impersonate an Anglo as it is for an Anglo to
impersonate a Mexican. There are different political
implications, but I don’t rule it out all together.
In the book Gone to Croatan, I read about these sixteenth
century Irish and British dandies who were so appalled by the
intolerance in the Puritan enclaves that they decided to go
native. They went to live with the Indians, they submitted
themselves to scarification and tattoos and body paint. They
got an Indian lover. They went native. Or Geronimo Aguilar, the
Spaniard who ended up living with the Mayans and went native.
He was technically the first hippy of the Americas. At the end,
Aguilar actually fought on the side of the Mayans against
Cortez and lost his life at the hands of other Spaniards.
Cabeza de Vaca the Spanish explorer became an apprentice of an
Indian shaman and almost lost his mind in the process. There
are hundreds of examples. This type of cultural transvestitism
is at the core of continental American culture, and all we can
do as artists is try to understand it.
One of the things we have done in the past years is to
collaborate very openly and very textually with white women, in
defiance of Chicano and Chicana nationalists. They have been
extremely critical of the fact that some of our main
collaborators in the last couple years like Sara Shelton-Mann
and Rona Michelle have been Anglo women.—not all, because we
also work with wonderful Chicana, Latina colleagues. Besides
the fact that we respect their work, Roberto and I collaborate
with these women because they are unapologetic about their
cultural kleptomania and transvestitism. And to articulate
these processes on stage is extremely important to us. We try
to do it critically of course. But our critique is not a
morally righteous one. We are not condemning them of
appropriation. We are again bringing to the surface the
unspoken texts of multiculturalism and trying to do it in a
very creative way.
JK: You’re making me think again that we can no longer afford
to keep discussions of multiculturalism separate from corporate
culture, because this is the very convergence that makes the
everyday transvestitism possible. In the twenties, for example,
if you were a white singer interested in black music, you went
to a bar or a nightclub to watch black singers and musicians.
If you were say Al Jolson or George Gershwin, you went uptown
to Harlem, watched and listened, and then went back downtown
and re-created what you saw and heard in your own language and
musical grammar. The difference now is that you don’t have to
go uptown. You watch it on cable, on BET. You pay for it each
month. You sit in your bedroom in suburban Ohio or Iowa or
wherever and watch Wu-Tang or Master P videos and there is no
sense of what’s at stake. Because it’s on cable, on your TV,
in
your private bedroom, it in a sense becomes yours and you claim
ownership of it and appropriate it without having to deal in
any way with the physical realities that once had to be
negotiated. And then you go to your local mall, buy the record,
and not think twice about taking that identity on.
GGP: Exactly. The Northern multicultural model as opposed to
the Southern multicultural model is a Danteian model. You leave
the self-proclaimed center, and from the center you either
descend to the seven rings of hell or you venture towards the
margins. And in the process of “descending”, you find
enlightenment. Then you come back to the center and speak about
it. Or you “discover” an exciting type of otherness which
later
on you will sponsor, emulate, or be a ventriloquist of.
JK: How would you say the Latin American “multicultural”
model
differs?
GGP: At its best, the Latin American model is about ascending
the social scale and taking the power away from those who have
it or moving from the margins we’ve been forced to inhabit to
the center and occupying the center, de-centering it. This is
what the revolutionary projects have been about: ascending,
taking power, and de-centering. But since US multiculturalists
are engaged in the opposite process and venturing in the
opposite direction,—from the center to the margins—what
happens is that we merely bypass one another. The result is
mutual misunderstanding. Anglos don’t seem to understand why
Latinos and blacks in this country are so obsessed with going
towards the center. And it’s so obvious. If you have been
marginalized for five hundred years, the margins are no longer
romantic or desirable to you. Once the Chicano and
African-American rappers are able to leave the “ghetto” or
barrio,” and stop wearing those clothes, they will do it.
For
them, it is no longer romantic. But for the Anglo kids who have
been raised in the suburbs, to look like “gangster” rappers
is
definitely a romantic proposition.
JK: I guess what I’m trying to get at is that, as you said in
the context of the Irish dandies “going native,” now to go
native you don’t actually have to go anywhere and you don’t
need any actual natives.
GGP: You have Burning Man-
JK: Sure, but you don’t even have to go there. You order a CD
off the web, you watch BET, you watch MTV. The sampling debate
has touched on this too. In the days of anthropological field
recordings, ethnomusicologists traveled to indigenous
communities to record ritual songs, ceremonial chants, work
songs, whatever. Now you can buy a digital version of those
recordings in a record store in London or New York, sample and
loop it on a digital sampler, put some high-speed breakbeats
beneath it and release your own twelve-inch. Sampling is
traveling without the travel. When Loop Guru, two white British
DJs and producers, or Deep Forest, two white French studio
engineers, sample pygmy music or North Indian ragas, they’re
going native without having to leave the space of their
recording studio.
GGP: This is happening in a different way with border culture.
Since the early nineties, border culture has been fully
commodified. Mainstream culture has stripped border culture of
any of its political content and has turned it into an object
of desire. Border cantinas became in chic in New York in 1993
and Macy’s had a border fashion shop. Border imagery can be
seen on the pages of Colors magazine, and on the album covers
of LA rock bands. MTV is filled with hip images of the border,
Fridamania, Guadeloupabilia, bleeding hearts, Mexican altars,
wrestler masks, Chicano gothic tattoo art, you name it. So
what do you do with that, with the border no longer being a
zone of danger and contestation but a hip conceptual mall? You
then have to re-position the border. That is what is so
fascinating about border culture. The border has to be
re-defined over and over again.
JK: Because for better or worse, the border has always been a
site of image control— how the government portrays it, how
Hollywood portrays it. So as a consequence, there always has to
be this shift in image control, among artists and cultural
workers and activists, to re-direct how the border gets
envisioned and talked about. The border also becomes a set of
condensed floating images, disconnected commodity objects like
the Taco Bell chihuahua. That dog doesn’t represent the border
as such but it—
GGP: It’s the most famous Mexican in the US
JK:- conjures up older archives of cultural stereotyping.
GGP: This friend of mine, Michelle Ceballos, the Colombian
performance artist living in Phoenix, has always been talking
about the invisibility of Latinas in the US. She recently told
me something hilarious, she said that she had finally
discovered how to solve the problem of Latina invisibility:
just buy a chihuahua dog. “I got myself a chihuahua and I have
become visible in America. No matter where I am people talk to
me.”
This is just one aspect of how the border becomes
re-centralized. It went from being a site of contestation, the
source of a binational project of decentralization to a site of
re-centralization by transnational cultural institutions. So,
for example, look at how border art has gone from being a
subaltern cultural movement to becoming a world expo…InSite
(Tijuana/San Diego), a huge binational art expo sponsored by
mainstream museums and the PRI with a decreasing number of
local border artists. It’s border art tourism at its best.
Curators, fashionable artists, and jet-setters get to go hang
out at the border. They get to do the border safari, see real
life migrant workers be chased by the border patrol, see real
life lowriders. They get to go to the border fence, to Tijuana
sex clubs. Then they go back to the art openings and exchange
anecdotes and border trivia. It’s kind of sick. It’s official
multiculturalism gone wrong.
The job of artists and theoreticians, then, is to move away
from hipness once hipness has become institutionalized and to
go where the cultural energy goes. Our job is to follow that
energy and do everything we can to articulate it.
____________________________
my bio….
Josh Kun is a music and cultural critic whose writing has
appeared in The Village Voice, SPIN, Salon, Color Lines, and
The Boston Phoenix. His column “Frequencies” appears bi-weekly
in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, where has been a regular
contributing writer since 1994. He is Assistant Professor of
English at the University of California, Riverside and is
currently completing the forthcoming manuscript, Strangers
Among Sounds: Listening, Difference, and the Unmaking of
Americans.
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