Previously published in Border-Lines, Journal of the Latino Research Center, University of Nevada. Vol. IX, 2015, pp. 121-140
BORDER-LINES JOURNAL
ISSN: 1945-8916
VOLUME IX
2015
Border-Lines is an interdisciplinary academic journal dedicated to the dissemination of research on Chicana/o––Latina/o cultural, political, and social issues. The journal seeks to publish scholarly articles draws from a variety of disciplines such as Anthropology, Education, Geography, Public Health, Literary and Cultural Studies, Political Science, and Sociology.
Articles are accepted in English or Spanish
4000-6000 words, plus bibliography
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Border-Lines – Editor
Dr. Emma Sepúlveda, Director
Latino Research Center / MS 434
University of Nevada, Reno
Reno, NV 89557
Border-Lines – Associate Editor
Dr. Darrell B. Lockhart
Latino Research Center / MS 434
University of Nevada, Reno
Reno, NV 89557
Border-Lines – Associate Editor
Dr. Mar Inestrillas
Latino Research Center / MS 434
University of Nevada, Reno
Reno, NV 89557
TWO FLEETING GLIMPSES OF CAPITALISM AND VIOLENCE
William Stark
Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages
The University of Connecticut at Storrs
March 7, 2015
Abstract
This is a critical intervention that offers two views of global capitalism and violence. Both contributions coincide with Slavoj Žižek’s “sideways reflection” that the violence of terrorism inheres in capitalism itself. This work draws the voice of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands: La Frontera La Nueva Mestiza (1988) into constellation with Mexican–cum–Chicano performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s “foto performance” En el hall del genocidio I (2006) to explore and map the relationship between two notions and practices that manifest differently across space and time.
The U.S.-Mexico border changes pesos into dollars, humans into undocumented workers, cholos/as (Chicano youth culture) into punks, people between cultures into people without culture.
— José David Saldívar, Border Matters (1997)
This epigraph points to several troubling notions; most importantly, the United States (U.S.)-Mexico border continues to be a site of socio-economic and geo-political conflict more than one hundred-fifty years after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), and twenty years after the signing of the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) (1994). Historically speaking, borders have constituted natural geographic delimitations and even invisible lines drawn in the sand. They are often transparent frontiers that represent remote regions distantly configured at the vanishing point of the horizon. By extension, the idea of the border between the United States and Mexico has been looked upon as a scar, or better yet, an open wound that is the physical and psychological manifestation of a troubled past that continues to haunt the present.
The U.S.-Mexico border has been at the forefront of academic and public debates. The economic relationship between the U.S. and Mexico has been chief among these deliberations. In the mid 1990s, the Clinton Administration promoted NAFTA to bolster trade between Canada, The U.S. and Mexico. The trade agreement has effectively eliminated the border between all three countries for commercial purposes. At the same time, resolutions that reinforce security at the U.S-Mexico border, such as Operation Gatekeeper, coincide the implementation of NAFTA. Multimedia performance artist and author Guillermo Gómez-Peña underscores the irony of these resolutions that inhibit the free movement of human beings across the U.S.-Mexico border:
It is not a coincidence that along with the implementation of NAFTA we witnessed the construction of a sinister metallic border wall that eerily resembles the old Berlin wall … The new wall contradicted the borderless rhetoric of the free traders, revealing their true intentions.[1]
To the detriment of well-meaning humanitarian concerns, the effects of this economic policy––in terms of human lives––have been disastrous; they have led to deleterious topographic distinctions of north and south, center and periphery, this side of the border or the other, and global and local concerns. Many critics have voiced concerns that the forces of the world market are responsible for uprooting families from their homes and forcing them to live in exile as undocumented laborers in a nation that harbors prejudice toward native Spanish speakers.
Outspoken critics like Noam Chomsky note that globalization has had the effect of pushing “trade deals and other accords down the throats of the world’s peoples to make it easier for corporations and the wealthy to dominate the economies of nations around the world without having obligations to the peoples of those nations.”[2] Other critics signal globalization’s role in bringing the populations of the world together to form a “new world order,” in which all of the world’s information, economies, military, ecologies, and social and political systems are integrated and operate in harmony.
The purpose of the present study is to offer two views of global capitalism and its relationship to violence. On one hand, this study explores the violent conflict of two worlds colliding at the site of the U.S.-Mexico border in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1988), where the border zone is seen as “una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.”[3] On the other hand, it points to the effects of global capitalism and the representation of violence in Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s “foto-performance” En el hall del genocidio I (2006).
While Anzaldúa’s description of the U.S.-Mexico border points to the clash of an ancient metaphorical past with a technologically advanced future, where Catholicism and Protestantism, mestizaje and a predominantly Anglo Saxon world collide, and new, hybrid identities are formed, Gómez-Peña’s “foto-performance” portrays the dark underside of globalization. In his essay “The New Global Culture,” Gómez-Peña writes:
The macro-economic communities such as the European Union and NAFTA have replaced the “dated” functions of the nation state. Politicians are now “trading partners,” and their religious dictum is called transnational “free trade” (“free” meaning that it benefits only those who have power to determine its terms).”[4]
Gómez-Peña’s work speaks to the notion that globalization increases Western, especially U.S., power and hegemony, militarily, economically, politically, and culturally. However, it is important to note that along with the signing of NAFTA, the region saw the advent of subsequent free trade agreements: “the Chile Free Trade Agreement (Chile FTA), signed on June 6, 2003; the Uruguay Bilateral Investment Treaty (Uruguay BIT), signed on October 25, 2004; the Central American-Dominican Republic Free Trade Act (CAFTA-DR), signed on August 12, 2005; the Peru Trade Promotion Agreement (PTPA), signed on April 12, 2006; and the Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement (CTPA), signed on November 22, 2006.”[5] The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is yet another iteration of such trade accords. The TPP “promises to ease trade restrictions among the United States and 11 Pacific Rim nations, which together represent an annual gross domestic product of nearly $28 trillion, or 40 percent of the world’s G.D.P.”[6]
Because capitalism and violence are two notions and practices that manifest differently across space and time, it is necessary to clarify the use of each of these terms within the context of this study. In Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, Marxist philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek elaborates on how the violence of terrorism inheres in capitalism itself. He endorses emancipatory violence at the same time that he rejects those who are opposed to violence. He demonstrates that it is fear of one’s neighbor and language itself that are the ultimate causes of violence. Žižek underscores the hypocrisy of a system in which those who want to combat subjective violence are the same agents who perpetuate an even more lethal form of invisible violence that is cloaked within the very systems that economic and political systems rely upon to run smoothly. For Žižek, global capitalism is a lethal agent whose corrosive powers pit human beings against human beings and nations against nations. Violence is thus intrinsic to a system “which undermines all particular lifeworlds, cultures, and traditions, cutting across them, catching them in its vortex.”[7] As this study proceeds, it will look to these notions of global capitalism and violence to elucidate Anzaldúa’s poetic descriptions of the conflicted realities of the United States-Mexico border, and Gómez-Peña’s photographic performance of the effects of violence and global capitalism.
Žižek’s notions regarding global capitalism and violence are similar to those expressed by Louis Althusser’s most illustrious pupil Étienne Balibar. In particular, the concept of primitive accumulation is reiterated in both Balibar and Žižek. Primitive accumulation relies upon the exploitation of labor: free or cheap labor ensures profits and surplus value, where “peripheral”, or Third World nations supply labor and resources to “core” nations, or First World countries. Žižek thus views the capitalist system as a lethal agent that uses slavery, extortion, and violence to achieve its ends.
In the essay “La violence: idéalité et cruauté,” Balibar notes that violence is inherent in a system where “cruelty” disrupts “civility”.[8] When Balibar talks about the concept of a world market, he notes that nations “form against one another as competing instruments in the service of the core’s domination of the periphery.”[9] In terms of world market trends, one sees the web of global economic connections emanating out from First World markets to former colonial holdings. The world market, according to Balibar, is “always already hierarchically organized into a ‘core’ and a ‘periphery’, each of which have different methods of accumulation and exploitation of labor power, and between which relations of unequal exchange and domination are established.”[10] This scenario puts Europe and North America at the “core” and their “colonial” holdings at the “periphery.” Although it is not quite accurate to speak of Mexico as a colonial holding, it is possible to consider neoliberal trade agreements such as NAFTA and the TPP as reiterations of imperial economic expansion, where politicians participate as capitalist trading partners in the world market.
When Žižek elaborates on violence, he distinguishes between two varieties: “objective” and “subjective.” He notes that clearly defined agents perform subjective violence. This kind of violence is outwardly obvious in acts of terror, crime, international conflict, and civil unrest.[11] Objective violence, on the other hand, “is invisible as it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we judge something as subjectively violent.”[12] In other words, objective violence is almost imperceptible.
Žižek observes that objective violence is either “systemic” or “symbolic.” Systemic violence is embedded in political and economic systems and is responsible for their smooth functioning.[13] Symbolic violence is so deeply engrained in social and cultural practices that people are unaware it exists. It manifests in people’s unconscious actions and in the attitudes they express toward one another. It manifests most often in language. Žižek states, “Verbal violence is not a secondary distortion, but the ultimate resort of every specifically human violence.”[14] This is particularly evident when one considers the production of ethnicity and the verbalization of race that occur when people of different cultural backgrounds come into contact by chance, by choice, or by force.
Borderlands/La Frontera
When one takes into account the history of racial conflict at the site of the U.S.-Mexico border, one begins to understand the artistic motivation of authors of literatura de frontera who have historically attempted to demystify the idea of the U.S.-Mexico border through the prism of discrimination, sexuality, rancor, and suffering. Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza offers a powerful, personally informed reflection of the border experience. Like that of many Chicana feminists who emerged from the Chicana/Latina movements of the 1980s and 1990s, Anzaldúa’s work disrupts traditional white, male-centered, essentialist cultural attitudes toward gender and identity. Anzaldúa and other Chicana authors, bolstered by postmodernism and poststructuralist theory, opened spaces for alternative feminist discourses. Looking for new sites of belonging, these authors began to reimagine Latina identity and rethink subjective and communal strategies of selfhood.
Anzaldúa’s text is structured such that the first half of the book is divided into several topical chapters that describe the Chicana/Mexican experience over the course of the last 500 years. The second half of the book is divided into several sections of personal poetry that metaphorically describes the mestiza experience. It is here that Anzaldúa signals the existential need to live sin fronteras, as a “crossroads.”
The first half of Anzaldúa’s text is documented with footnotes and bibliography. It traces a line back to pre-Columbian times and to the subsequent sixteenth-century European invasion of Mexico. Anzaldúa links the European conquest of America to genocide, but also notes the formation of a new hybrid race that emerged like a Phoenix from the ashes:
Before the Conquest, there were twenty-five million Indian people in Mexico and the Yucatán. Immediately after the Conquest, the Indian population had been reduced to under seven million. By 1650, only one-and-a-half million pure-blooded Indians remained. The mestizos who were genetically equipped to survive small pox, measles, and typhus founded a new hybrid race and inherited Central and South America.[15]
Anzaldúa’s statements point to more than five hundred years of interracial violence in the Americas. This in turn underscores a history of racial profiling, discrimination, marginalization, and exclusion.
Anzaldúa’s text, written in English, Spanish, and Spanglish, points to people who are “nameless, invisible, taunted with “Hey Cucaracho.””[16] She describes sometimes invisible and other times physical borders that separate “the squint eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the half dead.”[17] Underscoring the marginal existence of Chicanas and Mexicans in the borderlands, Anzaldúa points to the symbolic violence that inheres in the language of discrimination. Her words rise up out of the darkness to speak on behalf of the masses of Chicanas and Mexicans whose “hands like boot soles gather at night by the river where two worlds merge creating what Reagan calls a frontline, a war zone. The convergence has created a shock culture, a border culture, a third country, a closed country.”[18] This “war zone” is really a locus of fear, where two worlds have lived side by side as “neighbors,” but have always viewed one another as enemies. According to Žižek, this fear is due to the fact that neither party has ever listened to the other’s story.[19] Viewed in this light, Anzaldúa’s text recounts in “Tex-Mex with a Brooklyn accent” the history of the voiceless, faceless multitude living right next door.
Anzaldúa offers this compelling history of the Mexican people against the backdrop of European conquest, Manifest Destiny and U.S. imperialist expansion. She notes that in 1848, Mexican residents of what would one day become Texas did not cross the border into the U.S.; rather, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo left 100,000 Mexican citizens on the U.S. side of the border. She observes:
The land established by treaty as belonging to Mexicans was soon swindled away from its owners […]. The Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority, seized complete political power, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it.[20]
Here Anzaldúa points to systemic violence. In global terms, it is the political system of the U.S. government that took possession of Mexican territory. In local terms, it was the same political system that allowed whites to strip Mexicans of their personal property, making them foreigners on lands that had been in their families for thousands of years.
Anzaldúa underscores the subjective violence of “Anglo terrorism”: “we were jerked out by the roots, truncated, disemboweled, dispossessed, and separated from our identity and our history. Many, under the threat of Anglo terrorism, abandoned homes and ranches and went to Mexico.”[21] Here Anzaldúa refers to the lynch mobs and vigilante groups who murdered Chicanos, while the U. S. government institutionalized race hatred and fear of the other.
Anzaldúa’s text speaks for the faceless, voiceless multitudes that work in maquiladoras owned by American Motors, I.T. & T., and DuPont on the other side of the border, in Mexico.[22] She spoke on behalf of women who must leave their children to fend for themselves while they themselves must slave away at dead-end jobs that pay too little.
By the end of the 1990s, it was clear to critics of NAFTA that the well-meaning trade agreement had done much to accumulate capital for a few transnational corporations while simultaneously uprooting thousands of people, forcing them into exile, separating them from their families, and plunging them into a longstanding tradition of racism “in Chicano barrios in the Southwest and in big northern cities.”[23] Žižek notes that the economic policies that inhere in global capitalism create irreconcilable inequalities, which in turn feed fundamentalist flames. According to Žižek, the only true solution is to tear down the socio-economic walls that separate the Third World from the First, so that people do not need to escape the gaping wound of their own world.[24]
In the poem To live in the borderlands means you, Anzaldúa describes what the mestiza must do in order to survive in the Borderlands. Here Anzaldúa does not discriminate between physical and metaphorical borders. She does not distinguish between interior and exterior spaces. Nor does she differentiate between lands and geography that divide North and South or center and periphery. Anzaldúa’s poem speaks to existential borders that metaphorically delimit populations, citizenry, patria, and language. She notes that the mestiza is “neither hispana india negra española.”[25] She points to the mestiza’s betrayal of her own indigenous, Mexican, Black, and Anglo ethnicity, and notes that this transformation has been more than 500 years in the making. She signals the “forerunner of a new race, half and half – both woman and man, neither – a new gender.”[26] Here Anzaldúa breaks from traditional racial and gender binaries that oppose male to female, active to passive, and brown to white. In this way, she speaks not only to a new race, but a new gender, and thus to a new strategy of subjective and communal selfhood that is firmly anchored in the borderlands experience. According to feminist author Emma Pérez, Anzaldúa understood that “colonization may have destroyed […] indigenous civilizations but colonization could not eliminate the evolution of an indigenous psyche.”[27] At the same time, Anzaldúa’s words illustrate how hard the mestiza has had to fight to resist the temptation to check out, to end it all, to feel “the pull of the gun barrel” and the rope crushing the hollow of her throat.[28]
Anzaldúa’s poem culminates in the third to last stanza, where metaphorically she emphasizes that “In the Borderlands,” the mestiza herself is “the battleground/where enemies are kin to each other.”[29] This subjective internalization of geography, and the mapping of national territories, makes of the human body a site where colonization, decolonization, and transcultural debates play out.
This notion, coupled with the image of the U.S.-Mexico border as “una herida abierta” speaks to the very personal and primal associations people have with borders. Many of these associations are purely physical and involve the interaction of peoples’ bodies. In this view, the skin of the bodies serves as a kind of enclosure that frames the inner self; that is, the skin holds in the skeletal structure, the venous system, the internal organs, and even contains peoples’ innermost thoughts and emotions. Furthermore, people experience things as being inside or outside of their physical space. The act of eating or drinking, for instance, requires people to put something into their body. Likewise, elimination consists in matter passing from inside to outside of the body. People’s bodies are in effect containers with borders. Individual borders are only ever compromised through acts of aggression, violence, and/or the intimate act of making love. Anzaldúa explores all of these metaphorical allusions and insists:
To survive the Borderlands
you must live sin fronteras
be a crossroads
In the second to last stanza of To live in the Borderlands means you, Anzaldúa underscores the systemic violence of racialization. The image of a mill whose “razor white teeth” strip the mestiza of her “olive-red skin” and crush her heart – a kernel of grain – and “pound and pinch” her, and roll her out “smelling like white bread but dead,”[30] is a radical break from the traditional metaphor of immigrant cultures melting together. This break from traditional notions of cultural assimilation points to violent systemic processes.
According to cultural critics such as Žižek and Balibar, most people are blind to the effects of systemic violence. And, such processes are inherent in the production of ethnicity and the verbalization of race. The personal recounting of the border experiences as they are reflected in Anzaldúa’s Borderlands can thus be seen, in Žižek’s terms, as the result of systemic violence and the corrosive consequences of capitalist globalization.
Ultimately, Anzaldúa’s vision of the future returns to the soil, to the cycle of life, where “Growth, death, decay, birth” are constant processes. At first glance Anzaldúa’s message looks to be much like that of Žižek’s: it calls for revolution. However, Anzaldúa’s emancipatory revolution will return Mexico to la Raza. She notes at the end of the first half of the book:
This land was Mexican once
Was Indian always
And is.
And will be again[31]
And again, at the end of the second half of the book, in the last stanza of Don’t Give In, Chicanita, Anzaldúa reiterates the call for rebellion, revolution, and evolution:
Yes, in a few years or centuries
La Raza will rise up, tongue intact
Carrying the best of all the cultures.
That sleeping serpent,
Rebellion-(r)evolution, will spring up,
Like old skin will fall the slave ways of
Obedience, acceptance, silence,
Like serpent lightning we’ll move, little woman
You’ll see[32]
For Žižek, while the call for revolution is emancipatory, it emerges as a feeling of contempt toward liberal democracy. He notes that mediocrity and anti-human fraud are the only obstacles to revolution, that standing between truth, heroism, and virtue is the un-heroic modern bourgeois individual. Add to this the view that global capitalism creates digital, cultural, and fundamental divides, and culture itself is seen as the source of intolerance and barbarism. In the end, Žižek points to global capitalism as the subjective evil.
En el hall del genocidioI, 2006. 142x103cm. Courtesy of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and photographer, Teresa Correa
En el hall del genocidio I
Mexican-born multimedia performance artist, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, is an important voice in debates on globalization, the transnational flow between cultures and immigrants, and the effects of such flows on multicultural transformations of the nation-state.[33] His performance art transgresses national, linguistic, and ethnographic borders, and virtual and conceptual spaces of gender and identity. He is the founder of several collaborative performance groups including La Pocha Nostra, and in 1991, was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Genius Award for his publications and performance work. He has performed all over the world and is known for his critiques of the art and politics of globalization and multiculturalism.
In 2005, Gómez-Peña, Roberto Sifuentes, and Violeta Luna traveled to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands, where they were commissioned to perform Archi-fronteras. This performance art piece took place in the Plaza del Pilar Nuevo, barrio colonial during the early hours of the mornings of the 11th and 12th of October. In addition to the symbolic historical date that references Colón’s arrival in the New World in 1492, the piece was billed as a public, interdisciplinary and trans-border performance that examined the contemporary and historical relationship between Spain and the Americas, and the convergence of Chicanos and native Canary Islanders.
In coordination with El Museo Canario, the three performance artists were also asked to participate in a series of “foto-performances.” The photographs that make up the portfolio titled The Chi-Canarian Expo are nine in total, each black and white, 142 x 103 cm. The photographer, Teresa Correa, worked with Gómez-Peña, Sifuentes, Luna, Silvia Antolín Guerra, Jimmy Dyangani, Rakini Devi, and Pedro Déniz on the morning of the 13th. This study focuses on only one of the photographs in this collection: En el hall del genocidio I.
In a 2010 interview with Director of Communications for the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, Jen Saffron, Gómez-Peña described “foto-performance” as “performance jam sessions between . . . performance colleagues, the photographer, and me.”[34] Saffron notes that Gómez-Peña’s approach to the performance/photographic process constitutes a “new political definition for photography.”[35] It proposes a “new language of authorship” that subverts capitalist models.[36] Gómez-Peña observes that this radical departure from traditional photographer/model/performer paradigms has the effect of “subverting stardom, questioning individualism in the arts, questioning the auteur, [and] always looking for horizontal models of artistic production.”[37]
In the photograph En el hall del genocidio I, Gómez-Peña stands before a wall of shelves lined with human skulls. He is standing in the right half of the composition. His gaze is distant and looks out of the pictorial frame over the right shoulder of the viewer. He is wearing a Native American headdress, shoulder pads, armored gloves, a dark skirt, and high heel shoes. His shoulder pads have stickers that read “POWER.” He props the butt of an automatic weapon on his right hip while he draws his skirts apart with his left hand to reveal a bare thigh and armored knee. Robert Neustadt notes, “Gómez-Peña’s vestimentary manipulation of kitsch represents […] performances that use body language to ‘write’ about power. Power is essentially operating with signs – to write about power is to reconfigure these signs.”[38] The image is fraught with historical tension.
Gómez-Peña notes that his performance personas are what Mexican anthropologist Roger Bartra calls “artificial savages.” Gómez-Peña prefers to call these personas “cultural cyborgs”; they are “composites of multiple cultural traditions and identities, some of them even fictional.”[39] Gómez-Peña’s performance persona En el Hall del genocidio I reveals a grim commentary on early ethnographic photography while also providing an intense image that troubles the history of genocide. It is equally possible to read the image as a critique of the culture of cruelty responsible for more than “30,000 incidents of abuse and mistreatment endured by individuals while in custody of U.S. Immigration authorities.”[40] Gómez-Peña’s performance persona stands defiantly in defense against future violence.
En el hall del genocidio I is thus a photographic performance that trans/acts[41] identities while it transports viewers across space and time to 1492, to the advent of Europe’s extension into the Americas, and to the subsequent genocide of the native inhabitants. The body armor, automatic weapon, skirts, and high heel shoes return the viewer to more recent iterations of genocide and violence: the immediate past and the Holocaust; to the Balkans and Rwanda; and to the recent instances of violence in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Art critic Amelia Jones comments that Gómez-Peña’s projects also perform “across technological media and historical signifiers––the time and space of borderlines, of the past and future tenses called forth in stereotyping, are evoked and provoked as elements of how we come to identify.”[42] In this light, Gómez-Peña’s performed identifications point to historical traditions of classification associated with European colonization of the New World and the subsequent rise of ethnography and anthropology.
Peruvian sociologist and cultural critic Aníbal Quijano observes, “European modernity was part of a radical mutation of society, feeding off the changes prepared by the emergence of capitalism.”[43] The history of European and U.S. imperial expansion, and the collusion of capital and violence, however, did not stop at the U.S.-Mexico border. Gómez-Peña’s photo performances draw attention to the modern Mexican crisis of continued U.S. corporate expansion into Mexico. These performance personas point to neo-imperialist iterations and give new life to faces and shapes of cultural fears and fantasies.[44]
Gómez-Peña’s “foto-performances” inhabit a Fourth World, “a conceptual space where the indigenous peoples of the Americas meet with the de-territorialized peoples, the immigrants and the exiles” [45] of the First, Second, and Third Worlds. In Latino Dreams: Transcultural Traffic and U.S. National Imaginary, Paul Allatson notes that Gómez-Peña’s ideologically charged performance(s) signal a “post-national imaginary,” where the performance artist interrogates the “astonishingly resilient myth of the United States as a space of utopian promise.”[46] It is possible to view Gómez-Peña’s “foto-performance” as a link to a Fourth World with “the virtual space of the Fifth World, where [Gómez-Peña] locates ‘mass media, the U.S. suburbs, art schools, malls, Disneyland, the White House & La Chingada.’”[47] In this way, Gómez-Peña’s En el hall del genocidio I articulates systemic violence with the ideologies of capital and production.
Gómez-Peña’s performance persona points to the representation of a new “mankind,” a new breed, a hybrid by-product of the subjective and objective violence inherent in global capitalism. University of Connecticut Professor Laurietz Seda suggests that Gómez-Peña’s performance personas trans/act “bodies in search of a community.”[48] From this point of view, Gómez-Peña’s image resists binary oppositions associated with ethnicity, nationalism, and gender, and even moves beyond notions of acting and performance.[49] This resistance to racial and gender classification embodies the excluded, dispensable, homeless, and unemployed figures that are the automatic products of systemic violence associated with global capitalism.
Conclusion
In this intervention I have offered two fleeting glimpses of capitalism and violence. Clearly, my homage to Žižek runs askew of the ephemeral peep show that he offers with his “sideways reflections.” Looking through Žižek’s eyes even for an instant reveals the abhorrent, the perverse, and the violent nature of the social conditions of global capitalism. In Gloria Anzaldúa’s hybrid Borderlands and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s “foto performance,” En el hall del genocidio I, we have seen the lethal consequences inherent in global capitalism’s social contract: invasion, conquest, subjugation, colonization, slavery, and genocidal violence.
I began with the premise that globalization increases Western, and especially U.S., power and hegemony, militarily, economically, politically, and culturally. I elaborated on this to reveal Žižek’s notions of subjective and objective violence as they manifest in Gómez-Peña’s reflection on the border experience, NAFTA, and globalization. I also observed the way in which emancipatory revolution and violence manifest against the backdrop of a Third World nation grating against a First World nation in Gloria Anzaldúa’s personal reflections on the U.S.-Mexico border.
As I consider the War on Terror and the War on Drugs, I am reminded of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler’s admonition: “War is a Racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives” [50] I am also reminded of Mark Twain’s notion that history does not always repeat itself but it rhymes.[51] From the point of view of the global capitalist élite––the so-called “liberal-communists”––we are on the brink of world peace and a new world order. Their agenda points to advances in well-being for all human beings. This kind of thinking is clearly a reiteration of universalist and imperialist mandates that in today’s digital culture promote cultural and fundamental divisions.
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- Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism and Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 2005), 11.
- Noam Chomsky, Profit over people: neoliberalism and global order. (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999), 5.
- Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: La Fronera The New Mestiza. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007), 25.
- Laurietz Seda, “Trans/Acting: The Art of Living “In-Between.” Ed. Jacqueline Bixler and Laurietz Seda. Trans/Acting Latin American and Latino Performing Arts. (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2009), 22.
- Michael D. Shear, “Issues and Obstacles in a Pacific Trade Deal.” The New York Times. (June 17, 2015), A18.
[8]. Étienne Balibar, “La violence: idéalité et cruauté.” La crainte des masses: politique et philosophie avant et après Marx. (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1997).
[9]. Étienne Balibar, “The Nation Form.” Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, nation, class: ambiguous identities. (London: Verso, 1991), 89.
[10]. Ibid.
[11]. Slavoj Žižek.,Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. (New York: Picador, 2008), 1.
[12]. Ibid., 2.
[13]. Ibid., 1.
[14]. Ibid., 66.
[15]. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: La Frontera The New Mestiza. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007), 27.
[16]. Ibid., 33
[17]. Ibid., 25
[18]. Ibid., 33.
[19]. Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. (New York: Picador, 208), 46.
[20]. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: La Frontera The New Mestiza. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007), 29.
[21]. Ibid., 30.
[22]. Ibid., 32.
[23]. Ibid., 34.
[24]. Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. (New York: Picador, 2008), 104.
[25]. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: La Frontera The New Mestiza. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007), 216.
[26]. Ibid.
- Emma Pérez, “Gloria Anzaldúa: La Gran Nueva Mestiza Theorist, Writer, Activist-Scholar.” (NWSA Journal, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2005), 2.
[28]. Ibid.
[29]. Ibid.
[30]. Ibid., 217.
[31]. Ibid., 113.
[32]. Ibid., 225.
[33]. Thomas Foster, “Cyber-Aztecs and Cholo-Punks: Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Five World Theory.” (PMLA 117.1, 2002), 45.
- Jen Saffron, “Stylized Dissent: A Conversation with Guillermo Gómez-Peña.” (Afterimage; 38,6, 2011), 17.
- Robert Neustadt, (Con)Fusing Signs and Postmoder Positions Spanish American Performance, Experimental Writing, and the Critique of Political Confusion. (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999), 13.
- Jen Saffron, “Stylized Dissent: A Conversation with Guillermo Gómez-Peña.” (Afterimage, 38, 6, 2011), 19.
- Robert Neustadt, “Looking Beyond the Wall: Encountering the Humanitarian Crisis of Border Politics.” (Utne Reader, May/June 2013), paragragph 1.
- Laurietz Seda defines trans/acting as “the conscious use of performance and negotiation as strategies to reinvent and redifeine the art and politics of living in-between cultures, ethnicities, nations, professions, and genders, among others.” See “Trans/Acting Bodies: Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Search for a Singular Plural Community.” Trans/Actin Lain American and Latino Performing Arts. Ed. Jacqueline Bixler and Laurietz Seda. (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univeristy Press, 2009), 228.
- Amelia Jones, “Wake up, the Other is Here – es más. The Other is You.” Guillermo Gómez-Peña: Homo fronterizus (1492-2020). ed. Orlando Britto and Omar-Pascual Castillo. (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, 2012), 83.
- Aníbal Quijano, “Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America.” (Boundary 2, Vol. 20, No. 3) (1993), 144.
- Diana Taylor, “Still Performance.” Guillermo Gómez-Peña: Homo fronterizus (1492-2020). Ed. Orlando and Omar Pascual Castillo Britto. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, 2012, 245.
- Ibid.
- Thomas Foster,“Cyber-Aztecs and Cholo-Punks: Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Five World Theory.” (PMLA 1, 2002), 46.
- Laurietz Seda, “Trans/Acting Bodies: Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Search for a Singular Plural Community.” Trans?Acting. Ed. Laurietz Seda and Jacqueline Bixler (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2009), 228.
- Ibid.
[50]. Smedley Darlington Butler, War is a Racket. New York: Round Table Press, 1935.
[51]. Mark Twain, The Jumping Frog: In English, Then in French, and Then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated Toil. (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1904), 64.
Reflections from the Colonial Divide 