Insight : The Idea Behind the Award

I wake up as a Mexican in U.S. territory. With my Mexican psyche, my Mexican heart and my Mexican body, I have to make intelligible art for American audiences that know very little about my culture. This is my daily dilemma. I have to force myself to cross a border, and there is very little reciprocity from the people on the other side.

I physically live between two cultures and two epochs. I have a little studio in Tijuana, and one in San Diego, separated from each other by a one-hour drive, but also by a thousand light years in terms of culture.

Tijuana is partially industrialized, compact, rebellious and extremely tolerant of otherness. San Diego is high-tech, spread out, ultraconservative and xenophobic. The only features they have in common are their historical amnesia and the inevitability of their togetherness.

I also spend time in Mexico City, San Francisco and New York. As a result, I am a Mexican part of the year, and a Chicano the other part. I cross the border by foot, by car and by airplane as often as 10 times a month.

When I am on the Mexican side, I have strong artistic connections to Latin American urban pop culture and ritual traditions that are centuries old. When I am on the U.S. side, I have access to high technology and specialized information. When I cross back to Mexico, I get immersed in a rich counterculture: the post-earthquake movements of opposition. When I return to California, I am part of the intercultural thinking emerging from the interstices of the United State’s ethnic milieus.

My journey not only goes from south to north, but from the past to the future, from Spanish to English and from one side of myself to another.

I walk the fibers of this transition in my everyday life, and I make art about it.

My experience is not unique by any means. Thousands of artists in the United States and other countries are currently crossing different kinds of borders. And, as they do it, they are making a new kind of art, an art of fusion and displacement that shatters the distorting mirrors of the “Western avant-garde.”

Not everything can be expressed through group work. There are always certain issues that one can only deal with alone. And, perhaps because of this, I have never stopped doing solo work. In my monologues and solo pieces, I speak about the most delicate matters that pertain to my place in this world as a child of the Mexican diaspora in search of “the other Mexico.” This country exists both beyond the national borders and inside my psyche.

In my solo work I don’t have to depend on complex infrastructures and large-scale numbers of people. I use a megaphone, a mike and a ghetto blaster as my only technical support. I perform behind a table filled with votive candles and ritual props. My props, costumes and masks can easily fit in a suitcase. The portability of this type of work allows me to travel extensively. As I travel, I become a performance pilgrim, a migrant poet, a civilian diplomat and a vernacular anthropologist. On these trips from coast to coast and from one country to another, I inevitably reproduce the migratory patterns of my people, the Mexicans outside Mexico. And the places and communities I come across become part of the cartography of my next piece. Through violent juxtapositions of languages, characters and props, I try to replicate the feeling of vertigo produced by my/our ongoing border crossings.

As a rite of passage, my solo characters are born by physically crossing the U.S.-Mexico border checkpoint in costume. If the Border Patrol allows them into the country, that to me is a sign of their strength and raison d’etre. Dressed with an altar/jacket and a rowdy wig, and carrying an old-fashioned bullhorn, “Border Brujo” first crossed the border in June of 1988. I/he spoke through 10 different personae in four languages (Spanish, English, Spanglish and tongues) about the fragmentation of the border self.

I/he toured throughout the Southwestern United States, northern Mexico, the East and West coasts, England and Canada, performing indistinctively at alternative spaces, museums, theater festivals, political rallies and community centers.

At the end of this exhausting saga, I received several surprises: the 1989 New York Bessie performance award, the Prix de la Parole at the Interna- tional Theatre Festival of the Americas, a bleeding ulcer and lots of trouble with the California police upon my return to the border.

The San Diego district attorney managed to bust me three times within a period of two months. The charges weren’t even that imaginative: I had stolen a radio--my own; I didn’t respond to a court citation concerning a paternity suit from an unknown woman who claimed “she was the mother of three children (of mine);” and I happened to have “the same name and address as, and look exactly like, a drug dealer they were after.”

In the last bust, the marshals broke into my home, held me naked at gunpoint, right in front of my 8-month-old son and my ex-wife and handcuffed me without even reading me the Miranda act. Thanks to my journalist friends who denounced these actions, and to a national radio show I did for “Crossroads” (National Public Radio), the harassment stopped. I discovered an interesting fact: performing political material outside the safe parameters of the art world can be as dangerous in the United States as it is in Latin America.

I finally buried the Brujo in February of 1990 at Life on the Water (San Francisco), and new characters emerged from his ashes. My compadre Isaac Artenstein made a film about him, which is currently being distributed on video. The Brujo is stubborn. Despite my will, he still exists in virtual space, now as the video Brujo.

My new character, “the Warrior for Gringostroica,” is a hybrid between a mariachi and a disc jockey; and his alter ego is a cross between a conchero, a Mexican wrestler and a lowrider. Like the Brujo, I/he uses irreverently pop culture artifacts and tourist art as sacred objects and a ghetto blaster as a musical instrument. He often appears on stage framed by hanging dead chickens, which to me are powerful archetypal images of racism against Mexicans. In the 1930s, the Texas rangers used to hang migrant workers. Today, migrant workers are still referred to as pollos.

In “1992,” my performance trilogy, the Warrior appears as “alternative chronicler of the rediscovery of America,” a kind of disempowered and undocumented Christopher Columbus who comes back across the border to discover the New World within the New World.

The piece is a meditation on the abrupt transition of decades, during which my personal biography as a Mexican immigrant in the Southwest overlaps with fictional biography of my performance character. Both narratives are intertwined with historical and political references as well as with several poetical voices in different languages. In “1992,” I step away from the border as a specific site to begin looking elsewhere for multicultural America, or for what Mexican artist Daniel Manrique calls “the universal barrio.”