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1

ATTENTION ALL EDUCATORS
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EEE

ae

I [ " | $ : F S The Latina Collective

l

Editorial Jose/y Carvalho, Marina Gutiérrez, Susana Torruella Leval

Dina Burstyn & Ada Pilar Cruz
Conversations About Us and the Spirits Ada Pi/ar Cruz, Dina Burstyn, Carmelita Tropicana

|

| Consuelo Luz 2 Coco Fusco

l Cartas de Corazón / Letters from Corazón Portfolio Coco Fusco, Guadalupe García-Vázquez, Maria Hinojosa, Merián Soto,

| Coatlicue/ Las Colorado, Celeste Olalquiaga, Maria Elena González, Elia Arce

| 2 Marina Gutiérrez

Nine Voices Vanessa Fernandez, Marina Gutiérrez, Michele Hernandez, Hanoi
Medrano, Lisa Navarro, Alejandria Perez, Susana Ruiz, Haymee Salas, Kukuli Velarde

3 Martha
Gimenez
Latinos E.
/ Hispanics
. . . What Next!
Some Reflections on the Politics of Identity in the U.S.

4 Josely
Carvalho
The Body / The Country Marina Gutiérrez,

52 The Collection
Latina
Amalia Collective
Mesa-Bains, Santa Barraza, Liliana Porter, Sophie Rivera,

Cecilia Vicuña & May Stevens, Josely Carvalho, Ana Mendieta

Claudia Hernández, Gladýs Triana, Miriam Basilio, Ana Linneman, Fanny Sanín, Kathy
Vargas, Regina Vater, Cristina Emmanuel, Ester Hernández, Juana Alicia, Ileana
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Guerrero-cruz, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Gloria Claudia Ortíz, Awilda Sterling,
Viveca Vázquez

i 1 Marta Moreno Vega

Resistance and Affirmation in African Diaspora Latin Communities

a AA

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Portfolio Quisqueya Henriquez, Catalina Parra, Inverna Lockpez, Neither Here nor There . . . Yet

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Consuelo Castañeda, Lillian Mulero

97 Mirtes
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Araujo
& Miriam
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Searching
& Sharing Mirtes
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VistasCorritore
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Mar, Idaljiza
Liz, Alicia Porcel de Peralta,
Marilyn Cortés, Montserrat Alsina, Beatriz Ledesma Miriam Hernández, Regina Araujo Corritore, Ana Ferrer, Elaine Soto

1 1 Cordelia Candelaria d

Letting La L/orona Go, or, Re/reading History's Tender Mercies ' S SA.

a n

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Many thanks to our recent donors

Heresies is an idea-oriented journal devoted to the

Main Collective

Harmony Hammond

ALTERMAN & BOOP, P.C.

examination of art and politics from a feminist per-

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Sue Heinemann

MS. FOUNDATION FOR EDUCATION
AND COMMUNICATION, Inc.
THE SOROS FOUNDATION
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Many thanks to our Rutgers interns
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spective. We believe that what is commonly called

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art can have a political impact and that in the making

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of art and all cultural artifacts our identities as women

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play a distinct role. We hope that Heresies continues
to stimulate dialogue around radical political and
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Guidelines for Contributors

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tary, poetry, experimental writing, page
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some of whom are also socialists, marxists, lesbian
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Manuscripts should be typed doublemitted in the form of a xerox, photo-

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sculpture, writing, curating, literature, anthropology,
political science, psychology, art history, printmaking, photography, illustration, and artists’ books.
While the themes of the individual issues are deter-

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Lü, Xiuyuan

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volunteer editorial staff composed of members of the

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mother collective and other women interested in that

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theme. Heresies provides experience for women who

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work editorially, in design, and in production.

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Heresies tries to be accountable to and in touch with

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work, if accepted. We will not be
responsible for original art. All material

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you wish it to be returned. We do not

publish reviews or monographs on
contemporary women. We cannot
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published work.

the international feminist community.
Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art
and Politics is published twice a year by
Heresies Collective Inc., 280 Broadway,
Suite 412, New York, NY 10007.Subscription

tions between our lives, our arts, and our ideas have

rates for 4 issues: $27/individuals,
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current issue: $8.00. Back issues available
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Heresies, ISSN 0146-3411, Vol. 7, No. 3,

Cecilia Vicuña

As women, we are aware that historically the connec-

been suppressed. Once these connections are clarified, they can function as a means to dissolve the
alienation between artist and audience and to under-

Associates

Elizabeth Weatherford

Ida Applebroog

Sally Webster

Patsy Beckert

Faith Wilding

Joan Braderman

Nina Yankowitz

Gail Bradney

Holly Zox

stand the relationship between art and politics, work
Kathie Brown

Issue 27. © 1993, Heresies Collective Inc.
All rights reserved.

and workers. As a step toward the demystification of

Heresies is indexed by the Alternative Press

art, we reject the standard relationship of criticism to

Advisors

Cynthia Carr
Index, Box 33109, Baltimore, MD 21218,
and the American Humanities Index,
PO Box 958, Troy, NY 12181.

art within the present system, which has often
become the relationship of advertiser to product. We
will not advertise a new set of genius-products just

This publication has been
made possible, in part, with
public funds from the

Council on the Arts.

Lenora Champagne

Ada Ciniglio

Elaine Lustig Cohen

Chris Costan

Eleanor Munro

Mary Beth Edelson

Linda Nochlin

because they are made by women. We are not com-

Su Friedrich

Barbara Quinn

mitted to any particular style or aesthetic nor to the

Janet Froelich

Jane Rubin

competitive mentality that pervades the art world.

C. Palmer Fuller

Ann Sperry

Our view of feminism is one of process and change,

Michele Godwin

Rose Weil

and we feel that through this dialogue we can foster

Pennelope Goodfriend

a change in the meaning of art.

Vanalyne Green

National Endowment for the
Arts and the New York State

Josely Carvalho

In memoriam
Viviane E. Browne

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he collective process
behind this 27th issue of
Heresies began five years ago.

The original title was “¡Viva Latina!” — eventually discarded
because of its evocation of clicking castanets, ruffled skirts, and
Carmen Miranda hats. Latina is an awkward label to encompass the
cultural diversity of two continents over the course of more than five cen-

turies. In the U.S. the term becomes almost ludicrous when the majority outside
a porous border becomes a “minority” within. History has shifted borders geographi<O

cally, politically, and economically, and Latina carries much historical baggage.
From the beginning there was consensus among the editorial collective that the issue was to focus on

FRO

Q

M THE e

cultural identity. Our potential contributors — artists, writers, poets, dancers, filmmakers, sociologists, lawyers,
activists, art critics & historians — had long been engaged (with themselves and one another) in a dialogue on the
topic. This issue of Heresies, renamed “Latina—A Journal of Ideas,” pays tribute to the rich variety of expression in
women's creative work — rigorous & free, profound and funny, timeless & contemporary.

During the five years of the issue's development, questions of identity in the domain of cultural/multicultural power rela-

Editorial Collective

tionships have become even more overt and complex, and the question of difference in ethnic and racial identity has

Josely Carvalho

Marina Gutiérrez

become more and more central to cultural, sociological, and philosophical debate around the world. The importance of

Susana Torruella Leval

Latinas’ contributions to this dialogue has become increasingly clear.
A decade of broadening discourse has thus led to reenvisioning the cultural community that is the United States, but

Project Coordinator

systemic change has been uneven. Major mainstream cultural institutions continue to mount the occasional definitive,
Avis Lang

authoritative Latin American art exhibition. Frequently the scholarship and curatorial premises are problematic. Women
have too often been underrepresented. Latino artists living in the U.S. have recently been omitted as well. One may ques-

Designer

tion the contribution these large, transient exhibitions make to the field of art history. Do they herald an alteration of rou-

Ana Linnemann

tine curatorial practice, or are they finite, self-limiting events intended to mollify a constituency? The re-evaluation of
cultural community has created new funding opportunities. Major institutions outmaneuver grassroots institutions for

Copy Editor

multicultural arts and education funding, repositioning themselves in the face of impending demographic shifts.

Avis Lang

In this landscape of shifting cultural borders, we of the “Latina” collective hope this issue of Heresies will help expand
the ongoing discourse of self-definition. The initial editorial collective outlined the mission of the issue as the creation

Editorial & Production
Assistance

of a space for women of Latin American descent living or working primarily within the U.S., a space where Latinas
could speak and listen to their own creative voices — room for her own. Following the first call for submissions, the
project was delayed at various points. The collective tried several methods of opening up the editorial process. A

Dina Bursztyn

Laura Hoptmann
Joey Morgan

debate about the politics of accepting National Endowment for the Arts money in an atmosphere of censorship inter-

Tina Sher

rupted work for a time. Simultaneously, much-needed funds from the New York State Council on the Arts were being
drastically cut across the board.

The method used to compile this final version of “Latina—A Journal of Ideas” evolved as an attempt to respond to the
diversity contained within the term Latina. Acknowledging that a three-member editorial collective could not presume to

Staff
Jean Casella

represent the multiple communities of the Latin diaspora, an invitation was extended to two dozen Latina artists, writers,

and scholars across the U.S. Each of the respondents was asked to compile a 4—6 page segment for the issue. A dozen

managing editor
Kellie Henry

segments emerged from this process; two were contributed by members of the collective. To these was added a portfolio

administrative assistant

selected by the collective, culled from unsolicited material sent directly to Heresies or solicited by us from some of the
artists whose work we felt should be present in the issue. Avis Lang provided general editorial and administrative sup-

Joel Saperstein
volunteer

port; her infinite patience and good humor were essential to the project. The innovative work of artist/designer Ana
Linnemann involved a true collaboration with the material — personal yet respectful of the contributors’ ideas and
images. We owe special thanks to art activist/critic/Heresies cofounder Lucy Lippard. Her generous guidance and advice
have been invaluable.
High-resolution output:

Although this issue of Heresies exceeds the usual length, it does not begin to exhaust the topic. True to the range of

U.S. Lithograph

Latinas' expressive forms and to our intentions, it offers a kaleidoscopic rather than an authoritative survey. Within the
open forum of Heresies it integrates approaches and issues previously perceived as disparate. We hope Latinas will con-

Printing

tinue to see this forum as theirs.

Wickersham Printing Company

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СОМУЕВЅАТІОМ$ АВОШТ Ц5 ќ ЕОІТЕО ВҮ СІМА

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DREAMŞADA

I am on the subway to the Bronx. A group of Latin women
have asked me to coordinate a Latin American festival. I arrive at a

park and go to some picnic benches where the meeting is taking place. I can feel the brightness of
the sun, and when I look up at the sky, it is perfectly clear and blue. The grass around the picnic
tables is moist and glimmers brightly green; at a distance is a woods of enormous pines. It all seems
very regal. There is a hum of activity. Women are distributing food and refreshments to those at the

meeting. I notice a thin, slightly built man collecting dues. Everyone is very happy and excited
because it will be a beautiful festival as well as an important political event. I meet the women I will

be working with and am told that the festival will comprise a parade, music, dancing, food vending
of Latin American delicacies, and displays of indigenous costumes. I learn that the event is to be for
pure Latin Americans. Then 1 realize that the women at the meeting are wearing two kinds of costumes: indigenous or western. In their indigenous clothing they appear very beautiful but unreal —
S like people on a movie set. When I ask one woman about this,
she tells me that the outfit will attract tourists. I nod. The
Western clothing, by contrast, is unflattering, shabby dresses
— something one could imagine a woman wearing so as not
to ruin good clothes. I ask the same woman about this, and
she again tells me, matter-of-factly, that these outfits will bring
in tourists. I wonder who the tourists will be if this is to be a

festival for pure Latin Americans. The woman goes on talking:
“The rest of society will see that our festival is taking place; we

have to accommodate our image to their expectations.” Then
she laughs and says, “But we know who we are.” I don’t
understand. Her words leave me consumed with self-doubt. I
have learned I will be in charge of public relations. I wonder
which kind. Is the work I will do for the tourists, the “rest of

society,” or for the pure Latin Americans? I also wonder what
they mean by pure. Costumes aside, I saw only Europeanlooking women at the meeting — no Indians or blacks.
I am on the subway, returning from the meeting. I am
with a black woman friend, describing the festival to her. She

is very supportive and asks questions. She wants to know the
date because she would like to attend. I am very worried
about this. All I can say is, “They told me the festival is only

for Latin Americans:” She very seriously reveals that her
great-grandmother was Cuban. I nod, more uncomfortable
than before; somehow I know this is not what the group has
in mind, and it is very disturbing. I feel I should not work on

this festival. I wonder if the women think I am a pure Latin
American. Is this the way I view myself? Is this how I want
society to view me? I keep remembering the sureness of the woman’s response: “But we know who
we are.” Did she mean that in fact we don't know? I don’t know much about my ancestors, but I

Dream Being, 1991
clay.

believe they come from all over. Every once in a while some aunt of mine “lets a cat out of the bag,”

which the other aunts emphatically deny. Do my aunts know?
I now notice that the man who was collecting dues at the meeting has been standing in the
train, listening. I am certain he can read my mind. He makes me nervous. He casually asks me how
many people went to the meeting. Afraid he may think I cannot do a good job at public relations, I lie.

About eight people had been present, but I come up with a different figure. He nods, as if reassured, and exits at the next stop. As the doors close, I realize he had collected the dues and the
numbers will not add up when he counts the money. Will he think me a thief or know I’m a liar?

HERESIES 5

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MY FIRST S

Shortly after I arrived

in this country, I

ENGLISH applied for a job at
LESSON : DINA | Korvette’s during the
Christmas season.

There was no interview; however, I had to do a simple
math test. I did it well and was then given a large but-

ton to wear that read CASHIER TRAINEF. I and many
others would undergo training for two weeks. Then we
would have to pass a test in order to be hired for the

whole season.
All of this I learned from a Puerto Rican man whom

I had asked to interpret for me. My English was very
poor at that time. Fortunately there were many Puerto
Ricans in the group, and they took me under their

wouldn’t be noticed) all about credit cards, sales tax,
price codes, exchanges, making change, counting
money, rolls of coins, coffee breaks, and fire exits.

I learned every word by heart and practiced at home.
I had lunch every day with them, and I was

touched by their friendliness, warmth, and wit. Soon
they decided they had to interpret another kind of
information: “Beware of the Jews,” I was warned. I pretended to have a temporary hearing problem.
With a faltering voice I passed the test. I was given

another large button that read CASHIER — DINA
BURSZTYN.
I was assigned to a cash register next to a heavy

white woman. She put her glasses on to read my name.
“Where did you say you were from?”
“I didn’t say, but I am from Argentina.”

“Ah, there’s a large Jewish co munity there.”
I nodded.

She and the other Jews took me under their wing.
They helped me with my newly acquired cashiering
skills. But soon they decided I needed more: “Beware of
the Puerto Ricans,” I was warned. I pretended my English was failing me.
All this time the manager of the greeting cards

department, a handsome Haitian man, said nothing but
smiled brightly at me. We started to have an affair, and
although we tried to be inconspicuous, it became obvious to everyone. The Puerto Ricans, the Jews, and a couple of Black American women I had just started to
befriend — all of them stopped talking to me.
While having lunch all by myself, I decided I had
learned more than I had intended. I quit the job, but
similar experiences never quit me. Sometimes I laugh,
sometimes I cry, and often I tell how I learned English
and something more at Korvette’s.
Ada Pilar Cruz
Desasosiego, 1991, clay, earth, stone.
Photo: Becket Logan.

HERESIES X 6

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Here, I thought, was my identity. I got involved
with a Puerto Rican guy who was a junkie. I
thought I could change him. One day he got
arrested and was sent to Rikers Island. He had
A to confused than
in, who said, “Forget

F went to Hunter College. Manhattan. I moved |
out of Queens. At last. 1 expected to meet some a
o Ricans. I was studyin art. There weren't

: SaN back

Ada Pilar Cruz
Mere Effigies of Shells and Men...

- 1991, clay, earth, stone.
Photo: Becket Logan.

HERESIES Y7

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Carmelita Tropicana * You know, when people ask me where I

“Carmelita, die kunst means art in German; waffen, your weapon.

was born, all I can say is, well, it depends on what day of the

Go forth to the world, to the Lower East Side, to New Jersey, to

week it is. If it’s Tuesday, it might be Venezuela.

Germany, and give them your kunst.”

Dina Bursztyn * It doesn’t matter for most people.

DB * And then?

CT * I arrived in Miami and had an

CT * It depends. When I go to those places — for example,
when I go to Brazil, iAy dios mio! I get so saudade de Brazil.

epiphany. In fact, I have a lot of epiphanies every day.

Everything in Brazil is so sexy! The men, the women, the

DB * You're lucky. The Virgin must be protecting you.

dogs — and the language. Even when they say the name of the
CT * Well, all you have to do is believe, because

bank: Banco do Brasil. Or Venezuèla. I mean, when you go to a

the Virgin spoke with a Jewish accent.

restaurant in my country, they ask you, “What do you want to
eat?” Then you go to Venezuela. You go into a restaurant there, and

DB * I’m impressed by the fact that you speak so many

s

a waitress asks you, “¿Que te provoca?” (“What provokes you?”).

\ e y languages.

What can you say? You don’t know what to say! You are

CT * If you live in New York you have to be mucho

without words, sin palabras. This is spiritual stuff.

multi — multilingual, multisexual — because if

I spent one year in Brazil waiting for the New Year.

you are not, you don’t get the grant. If the grant

It was the Blue Moon, and I went to one of the

guidelines require a Chinese, I might discover

ceremonies they have on the beach of Ipanema.

that way back I had a great- great-grandfather

They have these beautiful statues and offerings

who was a chino cubano.

for Yemanjá, the goddess of the sea. It’s wonderful!

# DB * How did you manage to become a per-

I waited on line for one of the spiritual women. You’re

. . formance artist?

waiting and waiting there. She would go into this trance:

CT * One day the filmmaker Ela Troyano

she would close her eyes, touch you, and give you beads.

called me to tell me that New York Foundation for

When it came my turn, she just held my hand and
touched my face. Then she started to laugh, then just

the Arts had a grant for performance art, and I said,

shut up, and that was it!

“Performance art — que es eso, chica?” And she replied,
“Five thousand dollars.” Then I thought, performance

DB * What does that mean?

art, of course . .. I went con esas palabritas americanas que

CT * I don’t know. It was

ellos tienen y les meti “deconstruction, deconstruction,

wonderful! I think she knew

8 gr

deconstruction,” and I got the grant.

I’m à comedian. It was like

DB * Where do you get the material for your pieces?

the Mona Lisa — what does
v

she mean, what.does she mean?

CT * From the 1950s and from the spirits. That

Which is wonderful, because you

comes from my Afro-Cuban heritage. Carmelita is

can go anywhere with it when you

always touched by the spirits. She has a lot of belief in

don’t know.

her spirits. It can be the Virgin, it can be the animals
— that’s why I’m dressed like this — a leopard,

DB * I feel honored that Carmelita Tropicana

a tiger. I am an animal, but all plastic, no real fur.

has granted me an interview. Could you talk

about your personal history — when and why š

DB * Why is that?

you came to this country? s

CT * Don’t endanger the animals. If I wear their skins, maybe
id

CT * In 1955 when I was, as always, 6
nineteen years old. The Virgin said I would
always be nineteen. I came because I was part
of a revolution in Cuba. This revolution is not in the history

o

&

they don’t like it too much. I just borrow their spirits. This is why
Uzi Parnes and I wrote this story about Hernándo Cortés. We
wanted to know exactly what happened in Mexico. Mexico is an
incredible country! What happened between Hernándo Cortés,

books yet. My brother Machito and I were the masterminds, and

Moctezuma, and the Aztecs there? Sometimes, to get to the truth

the guns were hidden in the Tropicana

— well, there’s history . .. and sometimes Carmelita can write

nightclub. I am a revolutionary artist: “I

her-story. But we needed something else — you know, another

sing, I fight” is my motto. But Machito,

witness: horse-story! And so we went to Hernándo Cortés’s
horse, and we asked the horse what happened.

and I had to escape in a rowboat. In the middle of the ocean,

Come to the show, you'll see.
D

near the Bermuda Triangle, the Virgin appeared to me and said,

INĄ DB * Do you often work with other people?

“Carmelita, you have a mission: Die kunst is your waffen.”
CT * Yes, I work with many different

DB * Is that German? What does it mean?

people, among them many Latinas. Also I have put several pieces
CT * That’s exactly what I said: “What do you mean, Virgin?

together with the collaboration of Ela Troyano and Uzi Parnes, two

That kunst sounds a little weird to me.” And she replied,

Cubists and a Jew.

HERESIES X8

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DB * How do Cubans receive your pieces?
CT * They like them, but they think I am a Puerto Rican

Rael surprised
when my first-grade

B)al [e DINA

because a Cuban wouldn’t do what I do.

teacher asked me, during class, to leave the room

DB * Do you consider yourself a Latina artist?

and spend some time in the school patio.

CT * Yes, but I do other things. I also act, and when I act my
accent somehow changes. People who see me as Carmelita think
of me as just a Latina artist. However, I also have a foot in this
country, and I would like to play Chakespeáre. Why not?
DB * Are you based in the Lower East Side?

CT * I am the beauty queen of Loisaida. I am also a superintendent. Superintendent-performing artist!
DB * Do you get any complaints from the tenants?
CT * They complain about everything, but they love me.The
only problem is now the Chinese restaurant downstairs. They

ANGau seemed a treat: out and free with no one to
compete for the swings.
But I knew that my unexpected reward had to do with
the fact that I was different. Somehow I could tell that my

classmates were going to do something related to their
being Catholics.
I am a Jew, and at that time I was not quite sure what it
all meant. But I accepted, without questioning, the intan-

faio) frontier that separated me from the rest of the

Yos vore) A i

It was a greater surprise to discover that one of my
new language. New York is very, very exciting. Always something
. . a scene a minute.

A*A AAAA akaaka

classmates was also being dismissed. Her name was
DEIA
Together we walked to the swings but didn’t climb on
them, only stroked their cool, smooth chains.
It seemed sacrilegious to sit on them. The playground

One afternoon while | was giving an art
workshop to a group of teenagers, one of
the students got involved in a heated argument with the group.
Maisha, who was angry, said that Alex said he wasn't Black. |
looked at Alex, surprised he would say this. Alex was emphatic.
“I am Hispanic,’ he said. Then he looked at me and said, “You
know because you're Hispanic.’ | asked the students if they
thought | was white. They all said no.
I've thought about this a lot. | have never considered myself

was too quiet. We whispered.
“Do you believe in Jesus Christ?” she asked.
“No, and do you believe in the Virgin Mary?”
“No way.”
“Then we are the same.”
We both also knew that we were different, but neither
of us wanted to know the details.
A couple of years later we indulged in comparing the

white — always Latino, Hispanic, Puerto Rican, Nuyorican, Latin

Jewish star with the Moslem crescent moon and star. We

American. . . . I had always thought it was easier, regarding identity,

agreed that these were much prettier symbols than a

if one was Black. Blackness, to me, was apparent. For some reason,

naked man hanging from a cross.

Whiteness eluded me. | grew up in a Black community. | went to
schools that were predominantly Black. When the school statistics were compiled, | was in the “I0 percent Puerto Rican” or
“I0 percent Hispanic” category. There was a “I percent white”
group of which l was not a part. All my friends were Black. | had
one Jewish friend, who was part of that I percent that | wasn't
part of. Therefore, I never considered myself white; in fact, neither did my Black friends or my Jewish friend. | was always very
proud of my nonwhite status. Further, | belonged to a community that did not seem to have any problems with my Latino-ness.
How, then, should | explain to Alex that although the categories in the census and his immigration papers state he is
“Hispanic,’ society will regard him as Black — and that because |
am “Hispanic,' society will not regard me as white? Moreover, in

Yamili and I started a close friendship that lasted all
through seventh grade.

She was epileptic and often had attacks during class.
Without warning she would collapse on the floor, put her
eyes in blank, stick out her tongue, and pee in her pants.

Most children became afraid of her. Even the teacher
looked pale on these occasions.
Not me. Her sickness was a natural part of her, like
being a Moslem.
After completing seventh grade I moved to a different
neighborhood, then to a different city, and later to a dif-

KIYSA

I have never seen Yamili again, but I remember ley

telling Alex this, what am | teaching him about society? And why

clearly. I remember the exact pitch of her voice when she

is it so important for Alex to deny he is Black and for me to deny

asked, “Do you believe in Jesus Christ?”

l am white?

And I remember how easy it was to start a aaeeeo

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Dina Bursztyn
Potato Spirit, 1990
ceramic, 24” x 18” x 10”.

Together we climbed twisting trails
I followed precisely your maps and steps
but sometimes lost you among the ferns
or stayed behind hiding inside a cloud
you could never find.
But again and again
together we
tiptoed on a cliffs edge
climbed backward in time
inside a Mayan chief’s grave
The bikes and the birds
wild roses by the road

PHOTO ALBUM (for Judy) $ DINA
Many photos ago

songs of dead leaves
our smiles coated with snow
seasons turning

you and I were eating bread and cheese

days and nights

on a mountain peak

years sliding by.

hiking on the tail of summer
until we found the leaf
where the fall begins.
You me

and the canoe

We grew together and apart :
redistributed the weight in the packs |
took detours, shortcuts in routines
until we reached the abyss
where there was no bridge,
no rock, no rope.

August slowly sliding by.
The two of us

on the beach with dinosaurs’ footprints
in the field of sheep
on the mountain of blushing trees
with the spirit of night
the conversation of trees
the anchor of your hug.

The last photos I took
are loose.
The Andes from my home town
in the August winter light
by myself

trying to remember
how my very first trip began
calling my ancestors

(Many photos are missing.

the mountains of my childhood

We underexposed

they who were

and overexposed

before you
before me.

the light of our love.)

HERESIES 10

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СОМЅОЕГО 102
“САВТАЅ$ ОЕ СОВАХОМ” ЕОВМ$ ТНЕ ЅЕСОМО РАВТ ОҒ АМ
ІММОУАТІУЕ ВАОІО ОВАМА, “СОМ СОВАХОМ,” ТНАТ АІВЕО
МУЕЕКІҮ ОМ ЕВІОАҮ$ ҒВОМ АОСУ$Т 1991 ТНВОЦСН ЈЕУ
1992. “СОМ СОВАХОМ,” УУНІСН І УУВОТЕ АМО НО$ТЕО,
УУАЅ МАОЕ РОЅ$$ІВІЕ ВУ А СВАМТ ЕВОМ ТНЕ МАТІОМАІ
ЕМООУУМЕМТ РОВ ТНЕ АКТ$ АМО УУАЅ ІМСОВРОВАТЕО
ІМТО ТНЕ МАТІОМАЦ.Ү ЅҮМОІСАТЕО ОРАУ ЅРАМІЅН
КАОІО РКВОСВАМ “ВОЅСАМОО ГА ВЕШ Е2А.”

СОВКАТОМ 1$ А МЕХІСАМ ІММІСВАМТ ЅІМСІЕ МОТНЕВ УУНО
НАЅ СОМЕ ТО ТНІ$ СОЦМТКҮ ІМ ЅЕАВСН ОҒ АМСЕІ, А МҮ$ТЕВІОЦ$ Ѕ$ТВАМСЕКВ $НЕ НАО АМ ЕМСООМТЕК УУІТН АМО ҒЕЦ.
ІМ ГОУЕ УУІТН ВАСК ІМ МЕХІСО. ТНЕ ОМ-ТНЕ-АІВ СНАВАСТЕВ
ОҒ СОКАХОМ УМАЅ СВЕАТЕО АМО РГАҮУЕО ВУ ТНЕ МЕХІСАМ
АСТВЕ$$ ЕГЕМА РАВВЕЗ$. ІМІТІАЦ.Ү ТНЕ РВОЈЕСТ СОМЅІ$ТЕО ОҒ
СОМЅОЕЬО (МҮЅЕГР) ООС А УУЕЕКЬҮ ІМТЕВУІЕУУ ОР СОВАХОМ.
ТНЕ АООІЕМСЕ 1$ МОТ ІМЕОВМЕО ТНАТ ТНЕ ІМТЕКВУІЕУУ 1$ А
ОВАМАТІТАТІОМ, АМО ІТ 1$ ГЕЕТ ОР ТО ТНЕІВ ІМАСІМАТІОМ$ УУНАТ
ТО ВЕЦЕУЕ.

ІМ ТНЕ СООВЅЕ ОҒ ТНЕ РІВ$Т РАВТ ОҒ ТНЕ ЅЕВІЕ$ СОВАХОМ 1$ АВЕ ТО
СОСАТЕ АМСЕІ. ТНВОЈСН ТНЕ НЕР ОЕ А ЕІСТІОМАІ. ВАОІО ШІ$ТЕМЕВ, АМО
ЅНЕ ОЕСІОЕ$ ТО ҒОШ.ОУУ НІМ ТО ТНЕ ІЅОІАТЕО УУҮОМІМС ТОУУМ УУНЕВЕ НЕ
МИОВК5. ТНЕ МЕХТ РАВТ ОҒ ТНЕ ЅЕВІЕ$ СОМ$1$Т$ ОҒ ТНЕ УУЕЕКІҮ ГЕТТЕВ$ ТНАТ
СОВАХОМ УУВІТЕ$ ТО СОМ$ОЕЬО АМО ТНАТ СОМЅ$ЦЕЦО ВЕАО$ ОУЕВ ТНЕ АІВ.

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Letter No. 5

G ri

feel Onsu

Ven t time elo,
the mi, a pi Wi
in,
g Mirror
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an of
eme

ar

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y , You m S3id to barrassme YOU read

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n | .h hearn

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a a ti m a

yal à ingo Chen eard m İng and Yself

dia s pu a t an g a t M £ringa N c

yO a thi; n

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HERESIES 12

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Letter No. 13

Maclovia of
Estimada Consuelo,
Esto de milagros no €s juego, 0 si es juego, debe ser que Dios Y todos los santos Se
entretienen sonriendo de oreja a oreja con el milagro escondido atrás mientras se nos Va

perdiendo la paciencia. th e Han d
FEl Domingo los consejos que distes en tü program? para como resolver problemas S

me cayeron Cono limonada fría en agosto. Hablaste de regresar a lo primero que of Heaven
aprendimos, de pensar en habilidades que tenemos y de visualizar lo mejor. Me puse a
pensar en mi bisabuela, Maclovia de las Manos de Manjar, así le decían porque era
sobadora y tanta era su fama que dicen que el mismo Pancho Villa viajó noventa millas
solo para antes de morir saber lo que era sentir esas manos milagrosas €n SU cuerpo de
héroe cansado y ansioso. Dicen que sus palabras a Maclovia despues fueron, “Ahora sé lo
que es la victoria.” Y cuando el murió le vinieron las noticias a mi bisabuela que entre
sus últimas palabras se escuchó, “Maclovia, buscaré tus Manos de Manjar en el Paraíso.”
Bueno, creo que todo eso lo inventaron, pero, fíjate que
esa noche a Angel le comenzó a doler el cuello por un
tropiezo que había tenido en el trabajo. Yo, acordándome

j o S

de lo que me enseñó mi bisabuela Macdclovia, le comencé „ar

a sobar y pronto Se le quitó el dolor. Le contó esto a har his 6 Ste,
e

su patrón John, y el día siguiente me llamó Laura, la "Eh A a q Des, o

P J aP q fem Sun C/E he Si, "ao,
e 77 O,

esposa de ohn, a pedirme si le quería dar un ip. KA. N

masaje porque le dolía la espalda. Después del the ` Wa, d% tA dip, nt, s Ss i

s S; e a a e, P

masaje me pagó treinta dólares y me dijo que the ó Psp thi "ke cory Vee O hi, g “Srta, ca Sam

7 Q, i / if d,

yo tenía manos milagrosas Y que conocía Yang, Ss / 8s W, fe o Fo iry A m, s Or jp
/ C
mucha gente que les interesaría una So Sre oF fe ieg Sarn, ade n ve On ks W, e s t

: U, Si e a, t

buena sobadora. ¿Qué más te puedo ” P Wa, ' Ven, 7 o th e iny, Aig 1 P S Ving F e

decir, Consuelo? Somos todos un af; Cu, fes j er h y A O7» ng Oy am Se O O a, E

milagro. An S arg, SA V “to £ è rar d h, SN ilipi, key bO Pati, i Sar
is S, Sa
a, Fe
Ta amigs, t, d bps s a, 7
oy,7 ; Wo
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Corazón ha 4 e ds"ds
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e m n n, i o, tn a, Y a

t, SIE : 9 so “Cer, a hrg „0 ay ovi “Stea, s Vier, p tha È
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rs e d Se S Eng R
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OUr p Íe , ma O/a, Cay, “fe ; hi s "em at

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e Me a/, te nac, 1, Fep

Fa a1ha

HERESIES 13

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Estimada Consuelo,
En solo una semana ya he tenido cuatro clientes en mi nueva carrera de sobadora. La
primera ya te conté fue Laura, la esposa de John (el patrón de Angel), y ella me recomendó a 10s
otros, una mujer Y dos hom bres: Con las mujeres me fue muy bien, pero la verdad es que me
puse nerviosa Con la idea de darle un masaje a Uñ. hombre, pero me tomé un fuerte té de manzanilla (sin miel), me persigné tres veces y me Use mi mejor cara de vieja arremangada, y todo
nos fue bien, él se mantuvo COn la toalla tapándole sus regalos privados de Dios, Yy Y0 hasta le
encontré un empacho en el estómago que» con la ayuda del Espíritu Santo, aflojé y puse en
marcha afuera.

Entonces ya para Eddie, el segundo diente hombre, me tenías toda confiada. Pero n0 sé
si es porque no Mme tomé el té de manzanilla, no me persigné o entré con una sonrisa de mono
recién caído de mata de c0C€9, pero todo me fue mal. Primero S€ le cayó la toalla, o quizás
Eddie, que hace negocioscon John (el patrón de Angel) la hizo caer a propósito, porque cuando la fuí a recojer dijo, “Never mind,” que preferiría el masaje sin toalla.
Comencé a masajearlo de boca abajo y me fijé que tenía
un bulto como caliente en el costado izquierdo y se lo comenté. Entonces fue cuando él me agarró la mano y me dijo, «Pi
show you where I’m really hot,” jalándome la mano hacia ya İn just ahe “ar Consy elo
tú sabes donde. Me salió un grito de “No!” como de gato alrea y tale Week have k
enfermo y triste Y jalé mi mano para atrás, pero él me Ommen OU Was [. 3d four cana

agarró de nuevo y duro, esta Vez tratando de forzarme ed m aura, t TONS in
encima de é], mientras trataba de desvestirme. En ese

momento, te juro, Consuelo, me entró la imagen del times o
Angel de los Rompecabezas (el SESS W , and | pyt on ''OnNg cha 8ot nervo . With t
rompecabezas de un angel mestizo que armó mi hijo €l cove ri,
Jandro) y ™e comencó a dar un mareo y la mayor Which, With th N Private s; ady f, hout hon

parte de mi almuerzo de arroz, frijoles refritos y è help of th if: ae e»),
huevos terminó encima de Eddie y de sus regalos

privados de Dios. ` İn with 4 i idn’t drink Ê Second ned up nd Ockage jp; € kept his
Salí corriendo, oyendo sus obscenidades Wrong È mil, M t Mho s
y sus gritos que si yo le contaba a alguien él Anger’ IFSt his Onke | ile te
haría perder el empleo a Angel. No te imagi- ind boss) dro
nas que feo me siento, violada, contaminada > that he P
y amenazada. No se qué hacer pero no ten- Í s
gas pena de leer esta carta €B el aire, ya no Wollen on hi; i
pasan tu programa POF acá, parece que la 3nd told ihe s !

t YOU w|

estación cambió de director y el nuevo Where, l le Ti ow Men
director de programación no sabe lo bac,
que es bueno.

È gel of y
Corazó
Jigs
orazón h gsaw
Puzzles

Tu amiga

Letter No. 14 WOUld see tg

e hou

, More: ; th 3a j S that j

The Private Ore, t letter n t l'eatened | job, You c hat if | told
Gifts of God

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Letter No. 15

The Miracle of
t

q,

sastroUS- Forget itto be curning into t

would cell Eddie who A

would tell john whoId fire Angel. Forget it- 7

he Vomited Lunch

og tim, ee e Po
y o Se
n di
he mj
a

lbo, $ ú]; s. an

C|

€;

alone with SO,
MiCoye,Rogón

y Eddi, Sn,

SA da t

and disi g because
one
İlihta4 Ua
sisshoot
from
Bey
ÁSon,
“7a sj n
that gives Meof
casure
he jy
memory

n Pip

HERESIES X 15

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y pile P"

p onsu! ` h junta O recente
ysúmada iu anora N goð fisca s
huevos * ros d osa ara, n3 zado PO jolar 3 °
Aos
O / gue $ . ent? enj amo

e es , ica"

Ma
«e ice
e C0
y 3
OXE
cO E,
ma
m

Cuando 3° pse adie, ei s asce WE È S

nir Kent as sse nes ypuest?* .

resú8? g na, n S s se P

y se?
DNE y le dÝ v > SVY sen wii zdes
eY:
A naCES

s pect
| o Ya eaA \0S
res VOWSP9
s la €%
s \
eyOSO
SOE ae . SPY
S saie nico
i zee

SSS jeyOSd0/, ojeN' iP
(stas, e s8 N | g

. a 5, Y

en unos o d \e Ajo a v s ya s00 v L ura q € w

§ minista*
le d:jod orgue
eya a| eg”
sablo, | 3 Ala
yita que
sobado"® coP e c09

queSOgEye, gast
an aYÈ osoXO
`30mo
: M ril,
po s ejarno* si a sai, W y?

n V , U abus

: SUPERSAN

e amos
deset"
eseo Èmbre
nda QEY
ados
` jey Hen
s

™ gi"
ya ibis
cye eY
ni ger

ndocV
t y; ja
human
„åy ela
WE $0aoradoaMadoV
: como
vY acab

m

es SST mjere C s u abidvi y ` áo S9 a

SETE

no a. ġeJiva
M ye

aV
o va^
, com
N R:

puede hace" jo a bia ense? y dolo en N

de Yas Mano? e güen y nat

zera S! = soD

k rey
O O
> `si," : .PE
, s9.
est’ sO
>”
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o YRA
: :

105 comp? cpenta a0

hizo duyan Dear Consuelo,

hacer C nsuel0» o st sier
n ToWhen
the John
scrambled
eggs
my his
lifewife,
has now
chile.
found
outofthat
Laura,been
had added
gone some
to thehot
District

N jeona e sN? yev i Attorney to offer him a witness (me) against John’s client, Eddie (who, it turns

Jeon out, is being put On trial for raping another woman), that really stirred Up a

Jeon? good one, YOU can imagine. Laura tells me that her husband called her an imbe-

u ani cile, and she called him a criminal. He told her that her misplaced emotions Were
CoraZ0* going to destroy lives; she told him that men rape, destroy lives,redand
then
PrO- He
about
was mone).
tect each other. He told her that the only thing she cared about were her selfish
that the only thing he ca

feminist ideas; she told him
tol

she told him to go to a worse place.
e because | told Laura, that
Angel screams at m
At the same time,
o around as a sobadora, that

d her to go to the devil;

at he never liked that | g

women talk too much, th

lain if someone abuses

e don't have the right to comp

as undocumented ones W

Letter No. 18

e me,

ody has the right to abus
at as a human being nob

d that men learn

us, and | scream back th

d the truth an

that it is time that women scream to the worl

nt with us. And that my great
om and

that they no longer can do whatever they wal

Lioness of

grandmother Maclovia of the Hands of Heaven
ould share them withou
her secrets SO that İ c
did during more th

had taught me her wisd
c shame and help to alleviate the
ing and

an eighty years of massag

pain in the world like she

a Poor Jungle

eel like a

making miracles.
Oh, Consuelo,

I don't know how this is going to end, but | f

lioness — 2 lioness but a lioness.
of a poor jungle, that Yes.

Your friend,

Corazón

HERESIES 16

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Letter No. 21

Estimada Consuelo, Shouts of

Las buenas noticias son que Angel ha conseguido al fin sus Papeles, con la ayuda

de John, á documentado Y estasiado, dice que se siente como que ha estado enterra- All Colors

historia, Peľ entonces Comienzo ą Pensar, ¿para dU ensuciar más al Wip 7e An S/o

Se o, s

mundo? Laura me dice que debo €Xpresar mi frustración Y enojo h f. ` he w Oe ey,

h s £

PeTo no quiero a3sustar a Jandro Y además me acuerdo lo queme y ée ^ as if s Lo, n, Šan S hat

“5e mi bisabuelo Maclovia de las Manos de Manjar que “una £o o Y Of aj haq Sen he s Yo, Se/ ha "

Čin l Sde 3 blr; : “Me, ha 1y

Č ba 1; C; e, 7A
qa/ ©, ©, . Fg

Sobadora es COMO una artista qUe usa los colores SON Conciencia Wip, 3, o the / s Nng e Ung, teq ang Stt,

Y Sabiduría, no los tira al aire sino los mezcla Y 10s aplica con bein af © Nq Sh en Sq t e Saray, “Stary, j his Pap,

O Z ZA F a

ŜMOFr Y paciencia, así vivirás tu vida, asi Curarás,” Whe. !'am hany Y tha, he, ve Sho s “hs A Pa arg s Says rar |

S č O a,Sy a,(o) 2d

& S;

Consuelo, Pase lo que pase, mis gritos de todos colores “Oy ^ SUr ng, ” fop him Wi Q eA, al SA Oh, he s p
S€rân Canciones de amor de esas de nuestros pueblos dul- Plas, n h ” S dre Hin, ve he £ ` har. ` Nq Sin xs, n

(Z ? e O
. e Of V ar& Ye
m 8

Ces Y fuertes como la Sangre mestiza canciones blancas he Wea, Pe “ere She o. A has 7 s A Sng Sing

Canciones rojas Canciones azules y multicolor cantadas "87 ng ar he W fop hep A ” 18t hj, ne rea ” Sohn

SOn la paciencia de siglos y con la speranza de un ë Ours re Pen ha Pety, Saq, Zo & bup ho x re, aa ur

mundo mejor, ho Ven bay a// o lor Čo Co, n hep Fiter, : US N ts n,

Tu amiga, Peray, ; Py tha > bue Str : ™ SOn n, bue S A Fer Nq ` Play, S

Corazón / E1 TEs. * Edo;W,
OnefeCof,
; Neti,
Vp,fang,
e WOp, Poeg,
o Ss z;

Ë 5,
S,
O4,7, NA.. Se Sc
e S
Ors , Se like 1n his, Ciy c re S. 4 nq, San h Se

hen Fy a// the AO " : a| Snin žo c ehe y, sE the

nd, Fes, Pa e /, 9o čo
SA es liQ Wo, d p $ ,a/,
ho Alas, em, atg Otk Ore, C ”
3/18. he 4

Aa Ug y fo riny, in a// th t uty "Une, b ohp

Of
7 rg,
th Nq
Ss, ba.
Sty :£ heF Qs
a SUESla,
/, : Son he

S hy Y, A e, ,

> h | Ses “Von e s be. w No, : li e7 lay, : hist, L AW

(Se tVp
e Ca
c th,
but Co,
EnS Yat
San Wap
tors St
Pix, SA
ka NqWi
i a SopMa,
Dnr, s San
So,
c;ja hZou,
o,
he
7
S,
h
So,
o
AC, e
6, LSS aA S/o, h, i pp Ng O, A Sh s liko yiz
Pay, ? he A Wit, St ny my £r; Yon hs he V

O yy Rate Olp. Pali, She o SE
. , Wh;
e th
Ury,
Wit
te se
hanCLfe;
t, SA t os "lisp
the s N9. fo Sn at, Wi, Fo

Yoy Patio, s 8d, Ur “fa i hy SA 1o r W

Con, Peng e Gn a S, Wi" Win, °nq
Oa Ón p etri, Ue SOn Ser ng a// of, hea /o

f

°? th, £5, NY SO | A Wilp y,

O, Sty;
Ste . SOn o

Pop, of P Utie, : $ ke 7

Or i Ung
HERESIES X17

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Dear Consuelo

Letter No. 23 :

Velvet of

, we

the Devil cover his mouth

uth so that

Estimada Consuelo,
on como testigo contra Eddie en su
Ayer me llamar
juicio por violar a la Doctora Goodman. Cuando les conté al ti

jurado sobre el Milagro del Almuerzo Arrojado, que me ooked at Ed or if he h , and| as
pude escapar de Eddie cuando vomité encima de él, yo les ke a si s. accused, si i nem get n myself if the judge
vi unas sonrisitas, hasta el juez tuvo que taparse la boca OW many humle that hasn’t bes ii boka And then

. e life of a

para que n0 lo vieran reirse. Pero cuando les conté sobre a And I never women? watered. Had his im- sad and dry,
Or, and | saw an ex ngel sitting on th uld play this part in th
mi bisabuela Maclovia de las Manos de Manjar quien me y, n, and then | saw ed that 1 wo e Come? After
arte de sobar, los vi muy interesados,

había enseñado el

otros a mover la
barse el cuello,

algunos comenzaron a SO

, not r

esti oti

todos sus cuerpos parecían

cabeza de un lado a otro,

estar moviéndose, pidiéndole
ayudahim
a misn manos.
yt
q did
the
end,
no
cleared
his th
any
goodi mony.
Th even
Y me acordé de una vez que mi bisabuela
. And
ticed the
and velver oat

and

an

Maclovia me dijo, “Corazoncito, el cuerpo 29 hand
pueden ser como terciopelo del H
la verdad,” y mè pre-

miente, las palabras

even kno

e cou

diablo, pero el cuerpo dice

< 1 v ddi Wh nt
rpos O si S€ deja-

gunté si el juez sabía leer a los cue

ba engañar por as palabras y en eso miré a Eddie, to put €n a great ha rY, he aske dme Wing that so

Pi ypena,
: somethi
rof
in fea
mixes
with
a .ry
el acusado,
me dioy pena,
se veía triste
Y God
SECO the
PPiness
to mar
On him.
Í woul d
close ar,
» and
»and
Dut aothar
» IUS
som
e tears
fe
ething
to pur
lae, sudden
that
melts j

-Of the
Y Uyo
vilOdevi
tlove.
er,ught
passito
SION
P see
with wi
your very soul
gado su hora, después de cuántas mujeres vet.of |

como una mata de sandía sin regar- iLe había lle- how c| INg rich, deep, and YOu, Consuelo, b 8'eat sadness, it

nto

u

humilladas?

Y yo nunca me hubiera imaginado que Your friend who €ace, death to life
yo jugaría este papel en la vida de un hombre, Corazón 1S very, very full of » and the vely amor que me
y en eso via unaAngel
sentadoaciónen
el banco de
atrásque emotion,
tan caliente
expresión de admir
ntí sonrojar

adeció

junto a la puerta Y le vi

llevó el corazón a la garganta Y el estómago 2 los pies y Òme SC
n mi piel morena el juez se dio cuenta y S€ aclaró la garganta Y me agr
creo que hasta co
or mi testimonio.
Y al final, aún el terciopel

encontraron culpable,

os de miel
o del diablo en sus palabras no le hizo nada bien a Eddie,
lo
a mano, me miró con esos 9)
n sabiendo que den-

y después Angel me tomó de |

en la mera Sala

de Justicia de un pueblito en Wyoming, aú
pidió que me casara COn él.

espesa Y allí,

tro de poco me deportarían fuera del país, me

a gran tristeza €S algo que da miedo,
nte Ves

Cuando una grat felicidad se mezcla con Uun
un miedo caliente que Se derrite en algo rico,

Consuelo, pero

hondo y puro, Y de repe
la paz, la muerte a la vida, y

stán las lágrimas a la risa, la pasión a

a alma qué cerca e

con tu mer

del diablo al amor.
el terciopelo

emocionada,

Tu amiga muy, muy

Corazón

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Estimada Consuelo, Letter No. 25

Por fin me pude juntar en persona COn la Doctora Goodman. (Yo le dije que su

nombre debería ser Goodwoman.) Ella está muy interesada en el sistema de sobar que .
me enseñó mi bisabuela Maclovia de las Manos de Manjar y también me dijo que estaba Tripe
muy agradecida e impresionada por el valor que mostré al ofrecerme como testigo €n el

juicio y arriesgar mi residencia €n este país. Ahora ella me está ayudando a conseguir mis to Heart
papeles y la próxima semana comenzaré a trabajar en su clínica.
Al hacer de tripas corazón, nunca me imaginé que todo saldría tan bien. John
(quien emplea a Angel y hacía negocios COn Eddie) me vino a pedir perdón por tratar
de chantajearme COB la documentación de Angel y él y Laura están yendo a terapia juntos para tratar de salvar su matrimonio. Resulta que Eddie era solo uno de los dueños
de la cadena de tiendas que ofrece 10s productos de John y los otros dueños han querido seguir comprándole a John. Eddie servirá cinco años en prisión POT el crimen de
violación.
Jandro está contentísimo porque pescó su primer pescado. Ely Angel se van de
pesca juntos Y Angel ahora lo llama «Trucha.” Nunca he visto una
sonrisa cComO la que le sale cuando Angel le dice, “Hey, Trucha,” se
infla como un globo de luz y le salen sonrisas hasta de los bolsillos.
Yo le he dicho a Angel que quiero conseguir mi tarjeta
verde antes de casarme COn é], porque así todos sabrán que
me caso por amor Y no por papeles-

Me siento fuerte como un álamo Yy nueva como la İM
primavera, alegre como si me hubieran invitado a las iat y
fiestas quinceañeras de todas las santas- En mi corazón
hay una estampida de caballos enamorados cabalgando hacia el mar, hacia el monte Y hacia el cielo a la Woulq A// i
vez, con un millón de alas haciendo música libre ame to Urn Our
y profunda para que bailemos en comunidad y
amor en esta tierra, hombres completos Y
mujeres completas compartiendo el fruto
del tiempoTu amiga siempr€,

Corazón Seen

HERESIES 19

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[PORIFOLI

EDITED BY COCO FUSCO

Coco Fusco Guadalupe
García-Vásquez Maria
Hinojosa Merián Soto
Coatlicue/Las Colorado
Celeste Olalquiaga Maria
Elena González Elia Arce

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Coco
Fusco

The Origins of
Intercultural Performance
in the West

Performance art in the west did not begin with

Dadaist events. Since the early days of the
Conquest, “aboriginal samples” of people from
Africa, Asia, and the Americas were brought to
Europe for aesthetic contemplation, scientific
analysis, and entertainment. Those people were
forced first to take the place that Europeans had
already created for the savages of their own
medieval mythology; later, with the emergence of
scientific rationalism, the human specimens on
display served as proof of the natural superiority of
European civilization, of its ability to exert control
over and extract knowledge from the so-called
primitive world, and ultimately of the genetic inferiority of non-European races.
Over the last five hundred years nonwestern
human beings have been exhibited in the taverns,
theatres, gardens, museums, zoos, circuses, and
world fairs of Europe and the freak shows of the
United States. The first impresario of this sort was
Columbus, who brought several Arawaks to the
Spanish court and left one on display for two years.
Among the most famous cases were many women:
Pocahantas was taken to England to promote

many artists.
In commemoration of five hundred years of
practices that inform contemporary multicultural-

Virginia tobacco; Saartje Benjamin, popularly

ism in the west, I undertook a series of site-specific

known as the Hottentot Venus, was thought to

performances with Guillermo Gómez-Peña over the

embody bestial sexuality because of her large

course of 1992. We lived in a gilded cage for three

buttocks; and the Mexican bearded woman Julia

days in Columbus Plaza in Madrid, Covent Garden

Pastrana continues to be displayed in embalmed

in London, the Smithsonian Institution, the Field

form to this day. While the quincentenary celebra-

Museum in Chicago, and the Australian Museum of

tions focus primarily on European voyages to the
Americas, it was actually these human exhibitions

Natural History in Sydney. In each case, we presented ourselves as aboriginal inhabitants of an

that enabled most Caucasians to “discover” the “other.”

island in the Gulf of Mexico that had been over-

In most cases, the persons who were exhibited

looked by Columbus. We performed authentic and

did not choose to be put on display. More benign

traditional tasks, such as writing on a laptop com-

versions continue to take place today in festivals

puter, watching television, sewing voodoo dolls, and

and amusement parks with the partial consent of
the “primitives.” Contemporary tourist industries
and the cultural ministries of various countries still
perpetrate the illusion of authenticity to cater to

doing exercises. Interested audience members paid
for authentic dances, stories, and polaroids of us
posing with them.
More than half our visitors thought we were real.

HERESIES

21

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Guadalupe
García-Vásquez

Regression 500

1992 was a year of rediscovery for me as for all
the peoples of the Americas. When I went to
Mexico in the fall to perform Regression 500, I
learned that to declare yourself Mexican in Mexico
is now a political statement. In fact, it’s easier to
deal with the imposed “othering” of U.S. culture
than with the condescending attitudes of your
“own” people. The art world in Mexico is so hung
up with being “international” (as in “free trade”)
that it brands artists like me who live in the U.S.
and deal with the complexities of Mexican identity
as “Chicanizers.” Fortunately, when the gallery fails,
the streets come to the rescue. On October 12,
1992, I did a performance as part of a demonstration by indigenous groups at the Arbol de la Noche
Triste, where Cortes is said to have wept after his
single defeat by the Aztecs. We corrected official
history by renaming this tree the Arbol de la Victoria.
My work as both visual and performance artist
unfolds on two distinct levels: the gallery/theatrical
space and the street. On the one hand, I collaborate with writers, musicians, stage directors, etc.,
on multimedia pieces that collage mythopoetic
scripts with visual elements (costumes, slide/video
projections, installations). On the other, I enter the
public space of the street to express a direct
response to urgent social and political issues. I seek

Photo: Hilda Spaan.

to open myself to my immediate environment, to
transform art into life and vice versa, and most
important, to involve four simultaneous planes in
this process: the physical, the mental, the emotional, and the spiritual. Politics and metaphysics, as far
as I am concerned, are not mutually exclusive.
In the future I want to use my work to go more
deeply into forgotten or ignored traditions, including Mexico’s indigenous rituals and languages and
the contributions of African cultures — the tercera
raiz — to the Mexican world. The time is always
now, and I must enter into it.

HERESIES 22

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Магіа

Ніпојоѕа

УУЕ КЕАШ.Ү ТНІМК ҮОЦ АКЕ СВЕАТ. . МОМУ УУЕ МЕУЕК МЕТ АМҮОМЕ ПКЕ ҮОП. НОУ ОО ҮОЦ ЅАҮ

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ЅТАМО ІТ: СОЦІО ҮОЦ ТКҮ АМЕВІСАМІЙЛМС ІТ? А$ ТНЕҮ ЅАҮ, ІМ ВОМЕ РО АЅ ТНЕ ВОМАМ$ ОО... ІМ

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НЕВЕЗЅІЕ$ 23

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dance has become necessary today when so much
culture seems to have become numb to the soft,

Merián
Soto

Sensuality and Pleasure

open receptivity which I equate with sensuality —
the opening-up of the pelvis, or indeed any part of
the body, to allow energy/emotions/thought/sensa-

Since the early 1980s I have been working with

tions to flow through.

improvisation in what I call energetic work. Based

I have addressed these issues directly in my

on a deep experiential knowledge and awareness of

dances since 1989. Tú y Yo is a simple choreographic

functional anatomy and inner geography and

structure that is in essence a strip act. The dancer

informed by my love of salsa and my experience as a

presents herself to the audience, revealing herself

go-go dancer, I’ve developed a series of evolving

through the successive removal of layers of clothing,

structures or improvisational modes to access a per-

all the while directly confronting the audience and

sonal movement language and approach that bypasses

dancing in response to her perception of the audience’s

Eurocentric forms and expressions and speaks

reactions and her own feelings.

directly of my reality as a Puerto Rican woman living
in New York. The celebration of sensuality and pleasure
is a strong component of this work.
Improvisation demands a total use of the dancer’s

In Broken Hearts I created a mode where we gently follow and sense the movement initiated in the
pelvis and its repercussions through the body.
There is an emphasis on placing the pelvis deliber-

sensory, mental, physical, and emotional capacities

ately on the floor and then allowing the rest of the

— all of which are a result of her history (cultural,

body to settle softly onto it. The women’s section

temporal, physical, emotional, spiritual, etc.). It

works with this settling as solo material and incor-

demands total presence, senses open — listening,

porates elements recognizable in go-go dancing:

watching, observing; molding, conjuring, directing,

crawling while looking over the shoulders, sitting

following energetic/electrical/emotional impulses. The

positions in which the legs and hips and open, eye

immediacy of the moment that is evoked through

contact with the audience, swaying the hips. In one

this presence is what interests me in performance.

section we use magnifying glasses to “reveal” parts

Through presence we reveal ourselves to our audience.
This generous and sensual act allows us to share with

of our semi-naked bodies to the audience.
In the duet for James Adlesic and Evelyn Vélez
the placing of the pelvis on the floor evolves to

A reexamination of sensuality (that which per-

placing the pelvis on the other’s pelvis, increasing
in pace as the dancers move from lying to standing.
The effect of two bodies scrambling to settle their
pelvises on each other’s is a highly erotic duet in
which traditional sexual roles are obliterated.
Sacude is a work in salsa and shake modes. While
dancing a rumba, the dancer allows the impetus of
shaking to move from the pelvis and torso through
the rest of the body. The shaking is explosive, constantly renewing itself. The dancer rides the speed and
momentum like a surfer riding a wave. The moment
she reaches a place of exhaustion, the shaking establishes itself again, rising from unexpected places. It
is exhilarating for the dancer (and the audience): a
celebration of the pleasure and power of our bodies.
I find it interesting that only once has a critic
addressed the sensuality of these works. What is it about
sensuality and pleasure that critics fear or are blind to?

HERESIES

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Coatlicue
Las Colorado

For over ten years we have been performing together as actresses, writers, and storytellers in and
around New York City. We are founding members

of Coatlicue/Las Colorado Theatre Company
(Coatlicue is the Aztec goddess of the earth — the
creation goddess) and also founding members of
Off the Beaten Path, Inc., a traditiona|/contemporary Native American theatre ensemble.
We draw from our ancient culture and traditions, weaving stories of the goddesses as well as
personal and family stories. The Nahautl language is
incorporated into our work, affirming our survival
as urban Indian women.
Our recent plays include /992: Blood Speaks, a
look at Columbus through Native eyes, and Huipil:
Power of Our Dreams, in which we combined ancient
myths woven on our huipil with present-day stories

of social and political injustice, genocide, and
racism. In 1990 we created Coyolxauqui: Women
Without Borders, about a goddess who was beheaded
by her brother, cut up in pieces, and buried in the
earth. Her story is one of silence, sexuality, and
spirituality, and we wove it into stories of the borders imposed upon us by society as well as by ourselves. In our version of La Llorona she seems to
float along country roads, rivers, and streams, Crying for the loss of a child, the loss of Indian nations.
Her wail/cry/song represents the voices of all
women, our pain and joy as we empower ourselves.

TOP:

Coatlicue/Las Colorado
Walks of Indian Women: Aztlán to Anahuac, 1989.
Photo: Jean Claude Vasseux.

BOTTOM:
Coatlicue/Las Colorado
Huipil: Power of Our Dreams, 1992.
Photo: Jean Claude Vasseux.

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Megalopolis: Contemporary
Urban Sensibilities

amid neon and trash, they rode supersonic Japanese
motorcycles and played rock music, wearing the Tupi
look: brightly colored sneakers, phosphorescent
feathers, and blenders as the headgear. Its carros

an excerpt*
alegóricos showed a high-tech urban scenario comAn interesting illustration of the way postcolonial

plete with highways, skyscrapers, and neon signs.

parody works can be found in an episode of what must

The humorous Tupinicopolitan aesthetic recycled

be the most well-known South American popular festiv-

Hollywood’s postcolonial pop image, producing a sort

ity — Brazilian carnival. An old tradition involving both

of Carmen Miranda in 1987 Tokyo. It carnivalized

the local community, which prepares year round for the

both the perception of Latin America as “primitive” and

three-day extravaganza, and the international market-

the glamour and distance of high technology by

ing of tourist goods, the carnival features as its main spec-

putting them together: executive Tupi Indians skat-

tacle the parade of samba schools. Each school parades

ing around glittery cityscapes and consuming city life

an enredo (theme) with a magnificent display of outfits and

to the utmost. In so doing, this enredo brought for-

dances called fantasías (fantasies). Made up of thousands of

ward two constitutive issues for Latin American and

dancers and singers and several carros alegóricos (allegori-

Latino culture. These issues help explain how the

cal carriages) through which the theme is recreated,

habit of simultaneously processing different cultures

each school dances its enredo for forty-five minutes along

in Latin America anticipated postmodern pastiche and

the Sambódromo, a long stadium that serves as an arti-

recycling to the point where it could be affirmed that

ficial avenue.
One of the most brilliant of such thematic allegories focused on the mechanics and consequences of
global urban reality. A retrofuturistic Indian metropolis, Tupinicópolis, the second finalist in 1987's competition for best samba, described the Tupi Indians,
happy inhabitants of an unbridled cosmopolis where,

Latin American culture, like most postcolonial or marginalized cultures, was in some ways postmodern
before the First World, a pre-postmodernity, so to speak.
The first issue is the ability to simultaneously handle multiple codes. Accustomed to dealing with the
arbitrary imposition of foreign products and practices,
this culture has learned the tactics of selection and
transformation to suit the foreign to its own idiosyncrasies, thus developing popular integration mechanisms
that are deliberately eclectic and flexible. Rather than
reflecting a structural weakness, this infinite capacity
for adaptation allows Latin American culture to select
what is useful and discard what it deems unimportant.
The second issue has to do with Tupinicópolis’s
depiction of the self-referentiality of urban discourse.
The growing visual and iconic qualities of contemporary perception have turned to the city as the foremost
scenario, an endless source of ever-changing images.
Intensified by the mirror reflections of corporate architecture, cities become a place to be seen rather than
to be lived in. This spectacular self-consciousness (the
consciousness of being a spectacle) is familiar to cultures that have been regarded “from above” by colonization. What can be more self-conscious than the allegorical parade of an imaginary city on an artificial avenue?

* Celeste Olalquiaga, Megalopolis: Contemporary Urban Sensibilities
(Minn.: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1992); Megalopolis: Sensibilidades
Barto Simpson

HERESIES

Culturales Contemporaneas (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1993).

26

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Магіа ЕІєпа
Сопгаіег.

Мағіа ЕІепа СоптаіІех
ипіеа, 1992
моод, теѓа!, гауиһіде, Іеад
8"х 32" х 30".

МИСНИ ОЕ МҮ УУОКК 18 СОМСЕВМЕО УИТН. УІЕУЛЕВ РАВТІСІРАТІОМ АМО ІМТЕВАСТІОМ. І АСНІЕУЕ ТНІ$ ТНВОЦСН ТНЕ ЦЅЕ ОЕ
ОКИМЅ/ВАУУНІОЕ АМО ЅЕМ$ЦОЦ$ ЅЦВЕАСЕ$. ЕМСОЦВАСІМС А
НАМОЅ$-ОМ ІМТЕВАСТІОМ СНАМСЕ$ ТНЕ УТАМОАВО УУАҮ ОЕ
ҮУІЕУУИІМС АКТ, ЕІМІМАТІМС ТНЕ ОІЅТАМСЕ. ТНЕ ІММЕОІАСҮ ОЕ

ТОШСН, А РНУЅІСАІ. ГАМСЦАСЕ ШМОЦЕ ТО ЅСЦІРТИВЕ, НАЅ
ТНЕ АВПШТҮУ ТО СОММИМІСАТЕ АМО ТВІССЕВ ІМЕОВМАТІОМ.
МҮ У/ОКК 1$ ІМЕОВМЕО ВҮ А СОМВІМАТІОМ ОЕ ОВСАМІС, ЅЕЕО,
РГАМТ, ВОМЕ, АМО ЅНЕП. ЅЗНАРЕЅ$ ТНАТ АВЕ ОЕТЕМ ЈОХТАРОЅЕО
ҮЙІТН СЕОМЕТКВІС АМО МЕСНАМІСАІ. ЕГІЕМЕМТУ.

Магіа ЕІепа СопхаіІех
Герѕ, 1992
гаууһіде апд Іеад
32" х 24" х 12".

НЕВЕЅІЕ$ 7

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Mom said last night that one should have children
Elia

in order to have something to live for. And all of a

Arce

dreamed that I wanted to have a baby. A tiny little

sudden I felt like I was pregnant. I fell asleep and

girl. I wanted to be able to do with her all the
things I would have wanted my mother to do with
me. I wanted to hold her in my arms and tell her
how much I loved her, over and over till she fell
asleep. I wanted to teach her things like — oh, I
don’t know, maybe I just wanted to hang out with
her for a while. I would tell her that she could be
anything she wanted in her life, that she could go
places and see things. I would also tell her that she
was beautiful and that she could touch her crotch
whenever she wanted. And that other people could
touch it too, ONLY WHEN SHE WANTED IT AND IF
SHE WANTED IT. And that it didn’t matter if it was
a girl or a boy, that those are just labels big people
use in order to control their psychoses. And I
would go with her to the supermarket to buy all
different kinds of condoms so she could try them
all and choose the ones she liked best. And I would
give her dental dams for Christmas presents. And I
would cry a lot with her and laugh. And I would
tell her to get angry and scream whenever she felt
she needed to. And I would tell her, STAND UP FOR
YOURSELF, STAND UP FOR YOURSELF. Don’t let anybody humiliate you; nobody is better than you;
never think that somebody is better than you
because of the color of your skin. Stand straight,
with pride, with confidence, like you own the
world. Fulfill all your dreams; don’t let anybody or
anything stop you. DON’T LET ANYBODY OR ANYTHING STOP YOU ...NOT EVEN ME! And then she
would turn toward me and slap me. And I would
say, GO AHEAD, SLAP ME. Don’t let me embarrass
you. HIT MEF, I said, HIT ME! Don’t let me get in
your way. KICK ME! Do all the things I always wanted to do but couldn’t. HIT ME! GO AHEAD, I’M WITH
YOU! PLEASE SLAP ME! PLEASE KICK ME! PLEASE BE
WHO 1I WANTED TO BE BUT COULDN’T! PLEASE BE
ALL THE THINGS I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE BUT
COULDN’T! PLEASE! HIT ME! KICK ME! SLAP ME! HIT
ME! KICK ME! SLAP ME! HIT ME! KICK ME! SLAP ME!

Ah!
HERESIES

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Nine Voices

Hearing from the Next Generation
edited by Marina Gutiérrez
Page art 36—37 by Kukuli Velarde
I was born and raised in New York City and
became an artist through no fault of the elementary or junior high schools I attended. As a ninth

grader asking for an application to the High
School of Music and Art I was told by a counselor,

“They wouldn’t be interested in students like
you.” Only through the forceful encouragement of
an African American girlfriend did I go on to
Music and Art. I have in turn tried to provide a
similar service to 150 students a year as director

of the Cooper Union Saturday Program. Since
1979 Pve struggled, despite underfunding and
institutional adversities, to provide opportunities
for NYC public high school students — a population estimated to be 87 percent minority: African,

Latin, and Asian American. My students have
been, to varying degrees, underserved by the
decaying discriminatory school system. While we
successfully prepare approximately 80 percent of

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our graduates for college, an outstanding percentage in the public school context, the effect
of racism in art education is devastating, especially for minority females. The impact is most

lege. There are themes I got from high school that
I’m still working on.
LN: My mom told me that when I was five or six, I
used to like to draw figures. Then when I got to be

acute on young African American women, with

eight, I would write stories and make up pictures

young Latinas experiencing similar levels of

for the stories.

devaluation. The exclusivity of the art world is
systemic. Thus, for this issue of Heresies Vve invited seven current and former students to share in a
conversation. These young women are Survivors

SR: I have a very bad memory, but I remember
when I lived in Spain there was some sort of contest. I remember doing a colored-pencil drawing of
the princess and the tiger. I submitted it to a con-

of the New York City public schools and potential-

test, and then my family moved here. About three

ly part of the next generation of “Latina” artists:

months later I got a letter from my friend saying

Vanessa Fernandez 18, born and raised in New

I’d won. It was a shock. There was a neat prize,

York (high school student);

but I couldn’t get it.

Michelle Hernandez 21, born and raised in
Trinidad, West Indies, now living in New York
(high school graduate, applying to colleges);
Hanoi Medrano 16, born in Dominican Republic,
living in New York six years (high school student);
Lisa Navarro 18, born in Colombia, raised in
Queens, New York (high school graduate, applying

VH: I remember doing an Easter basket in the second grade. Me and a guy, we were the best,
because everybody else used to go outside the
lines. The teacher kept the best ones up on the
board, and I just remember being up there.
MG: How did you choose to become an artist?
What helped you make the choice?

to colleges);
Alejandria Perez 19, born in Dominican Republic,
living in New York six years (high school student);
Susana Ruiz 19, born in Spain, living in New

HS: I still don’t know! It was never a question for
me. I never said to myself, well, what am I going to
do? Somehow I always knew, and I never deviated
from that. That’s it.

York ten years (Cooper Union student);
Haymee Salas 19, born in Dominican Republic,
living in New York thirteen years (Cooper Union
student).

HM: I used to be a ballerina, but I was always
drawing. Then I came here in 1988. Here you have
special art schools. Things are different in Dominican Republic. I got here and my mom said, You
can do this. School teaches you this. You can be an

MG: What is your first memory of making art?

artist. And I did it.

AP: I remember in fifth or sixth grade my mom
bought me a watercolor set. We had records, and I
used to draw the covers and glue the drawings on
the wall. I had the whole room full of ugly drawings, though some of them were really nice. Those
were my first drawings. I didn’t know it was art; it

AP: When I was small I didn’t know you could

was just fun. I never went to a school for art until I

make a career out of painting. I knew about acting

came here.

because of my mom. She used to sing when she

JH: I started working with watercolor, but it wasn’t

was young. I wanted to be an actress or a dancer,

serious at all. The teacher didn’t really care. She

and I was really good when I was small. I knew I

wasn’t a teacher — she was just there.

liked to draw, but I didn’t know you could make a

HM: I remember I was four or five — a kid! I
used to have colored glue and a white sheet of
paper; you do something on one side, fold it, and
open it up again. Some weird mixed-up shape
comes out like a butterfly. Like wow!
HS: I was always drawing. In junior high it was just
do whatever. When I got to high school I found

career out of it until I came here and started reading
about artists and museums. I never went to a museum of the arts till I got here, and it was really great.
I didn’t make the choice actually. I had the feeling
that I was good at painting and if you would leave me
in a room to paint by myself for a month, it would
be great. If I don’t make it as an artist in galleries
and stuff like that, I want to be an art teacher.

something I could hold onto. It wasn’t just knowing how to draw; I brought the same ideas with me
constantly, and that’s what I’m doing now in col-

MH: I’ve always known I wanted to be an artist but
not just stick to drawing and painting, to extend

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the work a little more, because art is an everyday

your mind. You can’t cross the line because you'll

thing, like math. You use it every day. There’s a lot

get in so much trouble. Here they let you be free

to it.

LN: I decided to become an artist because at first
it was a diversion for me as a child, and I knew it
was a way of expressing my feelings and ideas.
VH: I don’t think the question addresses me. I
haven’t chosen to be an artist yet. Actually I?m not
an artist, but I do admire art so much! I look up to
it! It’s really hard for me, but I have respect for it,
I love it.

— that’s why I love it here! I got beat up by a
teacher in Dominican Republic. They threw me
out, and my father went there, and they fired the
teacher. It was a big scene. I don’t think it’s better
there. You know nothing. It’s a big cover-up. Here
they’re so open-minded. It’s sad when you come
from D.R.; you have to learn about racism, about
being careful because—
LN: Because of reality!
AP: Yeah, like getting raped. You’re a little kid, you
come here, and you learn about all these sad things
that are happening. Drugs, don’t do this, don’t do
that. You just freak out. When I came I was scared.
People tell you things, and you don’t think they’re

MG: What are your memories of school, and

true until they happen to you. You don’t believe in

how would you compare the U.S. educational

racism until it hits you. I?m happy because it never

system with other systems?

hit me. I will never talk back to a teacher, and I

AP: Over there you’re so innocent!
HM: Like when you’re in your country, you know
about nothing—
AP: No racism.
HM: No, there’s no racism, none of this stuff like
today’s diseases. You don’t hear that in school over
there—
AP: It’s covered up.
HM: It’s totally different over here. When you go to
school you dress however you want. Over there it’s

don’t believe this country’s like this because they
give you too much freedom — that’s bull crap!
Give freedom, and youw’re going to go outside and
kill somebody or rob a bank?? That’s bull crap! It’s
all from your background, the way you were raised.
LN: My memories from going to school in Colombia are vague, but I do remember it being very
strict, a lot of taboos. You can’t be an individual,
you can’t be yourself.
HM: You have to be someone for someone else.
LN: Especially being a woman.

disciplined: you have a uniform, regulation black
shoes, white socks, combed hair, clean nails. Over
here you don’t want to do homework? — that’s
fine, you just fail. Over there you have to stand up
every day. You’re a number, not a name. Here you can
argue with the teacher. Some people even curse at
them, and they pass you anyway. Over there they
have the right to beat you up in front of the class.
MG: Which is better?
HM: Over there! Way better.
AP: I don’t think so.
HM: Over here you get freedom. That’s why there
are criminals.
MG: So it was better for you over there?
HM: It wasn’t better for me, but it’s better for

MG: Especially being a woman?
HM: Especially being a woman!
LN: Yeah, in Latin America.
HM: Over there it’s a macho thing, a macho country.
SR: It’s very strict in Spain, especially Catholic
school. Here many more things have to be integrated into the educational system, especially in
New York City.
MG: Which system was better for you?

some people!
MG: But you didn’t become an artist over there.
HM: True. I didn’t know about it, that’s why. I get
more freedom here.

SR: I remember coming here and learning in fifth
grade what I had learned in third grade there, and
being very upset because it was a waste of time.
But I had to go through it because of language. As

AP: In Dominican Republic it’s so strict, all these

intellectual education the system here is at the bot-

rules, and they really make you afraid to speak

tom; American grammar and high school students

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rated number one as to how they feel about themselves but lowest in actual level of education,
according to a poll in The New York Times.

well), and I know how to read. So I said to my mom,
Write the school, I want to be in the regular program.
I’m stuck not learning, having fun with my Dominican friends.

HS: I don’t really remember Dominican Republic.
I was four. What I do know is that education is
connected to the parents, because the family in
D.R. is the center of everything, and I guess it’s

HM: That’s another thing. They put you in ESL
and leave you there.
LN: When I first came here I was six years old,

connected to religion, Catholicism, that’s why it’s

and they stuck me right into an all-English class. I

so strict.

was so confused. I got in trouble so many times

MG: How many of you went to a Catholic school

because I just didn’t understand what was going

— everybody? What about you, Michele? You

on. Then they decided to switch me into bilingual,

went to school in Trinidad.

and I was there until fourth grade.

MH: Yes. It’s strict like Dominican Republic, and

HM: Sometimes you get outcast. The other kids

the education is much better than over here. Here

have been there two to three years, and they’re

they slow you down, they put you back. When I

learning English, but you know nothing. Some-

came here I had finished high school, and they

times they laugh and curse at you.

wanted me to go back! To do all that work over

AP: It happened my first class here. The teacher

again was upsetting. It was really stupid. I had to

was just talking and talking and I was just out of

drop out and continue with something else.

the boat. She was going blah, blah, blah, and I was

MG: And you spoke English, so that wasn’t the issue!
HM: I’m sixteen and a senior — two years ahead
— so Im doing good. But when I came here I had
finished seventh grade, and they wanted to put me

thinking, Holy shit, what the hell is she saying? She
was always in the way, too. I couldn’t see the board
and kept asking my friend, How do you say
perdóneme? It took me a week to learn excuse me.

in seventh grade again, just because I didn’t know

HM: You used to say ekuse me.

the language.

AP: Ekuse me, man. I was amazed by learning a new
language. It was really embarrassing, so I made a
lot of jokes. I was like the class clown, so nobody
made fun of me. Actually, I made fun of people.
MH: It was different for me. I have a Spanish
name, and they put me in a Spanish class, but I
don’t speak Spanish. The teacher started talking to

AP: It happened the same way to me. I was in the
sixth grade, so I went to the seventh grade here,
but then they failed me because I didn’t know the
language. That’s why they have the ESL [English as
a Second Language] program here in New York
City. You’re not supposed to fail a grade.

me, and I was looking at her like she was crazy.
MG: So how did you feel in the end about the
transition from one school system to another?
LN: I wanted to leave — I didn’t like it.
AP: I loved it!

HS: Being put into a bilingual program in second

HM: I was so excited because, Oh my god, I was

grade was good for me. You learn the language

going to New York, and in Dominican Republic,

quickly, but my parents made sure I remained in

everybody dreams, Ay lo[s] paises. That’s what they

bilingual until the fifth grade. m glad they did
that, because now I know both languages. In the
fifth grade I entered the Spanish spelling bee,
which was really good for me.

call it. Everybody’s like, Oh my god, americano!
AP: No joda.

HS: I got here much younger, so they put me in
kindergarten, but I cried every day going to school. I

AP: I had the opposite of that. They put me in an
ESL program and it sucked so bad, it was incredible! I didn’t learn anything, yet I went on to high
school. Freshman year I’m in ESL again, and I’m
still not learning. I say, Come on, what’s going on?

didn’t understand a word, of course. I hated it for
a long time, even till the fifth grade. God, I wanted
to get out of this country, to go back. And that was
my parents’ attitude too. The point was to come
here, get economically improved, and then leave.

— I’m hanging out with my friends in ESL class
and talking in Spanish! I?m not in D.R. anymore; I
already know Spanish, I know how to write (not too

SR: Nobody improves.
HS: No, of course not.

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LN: I was bad, just a very angry child, nothing to

started. Then when I was in first grade, I was

do with being foreign and feeling inferior. Certain

attacked and robbed of my jewelry. Later on I went

things as a kid growing up in Latin America con-

to a predominantly Hispanic and Black junior high

tributed to my being such a violent child.

for a year, and I got into trouble a lot because I

AP: It was wonderful for me. I came here around

didn’t really mix in with the Hispanic kids. I didn’t

Christmas, and it started to snow. Id never seen

dress like them or talk like them or act like them, I

snow and was in the window all night long: O papi,

guess because I grew up in a neighborhood where I

sácame afuera, I want to play with the snow. It was
great, but the only disappointing thing was I saw

was with a lot of Greek, Polish, and Irish kids. I
didn’t know if I wanted to be like them. I had a

big piles of black plastic bags in the street. I didn’t

terrible year. Then from seventh grade I went to

know what it was. ¿Rapi, qué to’ eso? What the hell

junior high for gifted kids. I felt really good

is that on every corner? “That’s garbage, darling.”

because I was surrounded not only by Hispanics

Ahhh, garbage. I thought New York was really love-

but oriental and different cultures.

ly and beautiful, because the people go back to
Dominican Republic with fake jewelry, ten-karat
gold shit, and they show off. They put things in
your head that New York is wonderful, everything’s
handed to you, the country of opportunities.
MG: So you got opportunities?
AP: Hell, no! I was really disappointed. I was
expecting a beautiful clean place, and I get all this
garbage in the street the first night I get here. The
first week of junior high — the hormone age —
you try makeup, you go to the bathroom and start
smoking. It’s incredible. I was amazed at the way

MG: Michele, coming from Trinidad, how were
you treated here?
MH: Well, here the Black Americans think that
West Indians are too full of themselves, and so they
put you down. I remember the teacher asking what
we wanted to do after school, and I said art and

these girls were talking in Spanish. Oh my god! I

architecture. One of the guys said, “Oh, you think

started trying things to know what’s happening. I

you’re white!” — a very stupid statement.

did really bad in junior high.

MG: Anybody know any female Latin artists?

MG: You mentioned racism. How did you learn

LN: You.

about that?
AP: Being in a class with Black kids and living in
the neighborhood, the first year I was attacked by
four or five Black teenagers. I was alone and didn’t
know the language that well. It was really scary,
and since then I’m wearing silver.
HM: They still jump you?
AP: Not anymore. When you come from another
place you're scared, and it shows in your face, the way
you walk, and everything. It won’t happen to me
anymore. I guess I?m more tough and more careful.
HM: It never really affected me as being racism.
I’ve been living in neighborhoods with Jewish and
Russians — whites. We moved a lot, but my mom

HM: Carolina Herrera. She’s a fashion designer.
AP: I know a jewelry designer.
VE: Oh yeah, Paloma Picasso.
MG: What about you two in college, taking art
history courses?
SR: I can’t think of any.
HS: You mean contemporary?
MG: What about male Latin artists?
SR: Oh, of course.
HS: Juan Sanchez.
MG: But you met him here, in The Saturday
Program.
AP: Renee — The Graffiti Dude. We went to his

won’t move if she knows there’s certain types of
people or things going on. She first look and ask
people, Who lives here, what do they do, is it quiet?

studio. He’s from Venezuela and so proud of it,
and bilingual, Hispanic, just like us! I really look
up to him.

HM: Really good. In my building they don’t mind.

LN: There are lots of Latin Americans at the Art

If you live there, it’s yours.
Students League — immigrants from Mexico,
LN: Me and my mom moved here when I was six.
We were trying to find a place to live, and it was
obvious that people didn’t want to rent us an

Colombia, and Puerto Rico. Some of them have
gallery shows.
MG: You all share some kind of Latin cultural

apartment because we were foreign. That’s how it

HERESIES 33

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base. Does that come across in your work?
LN: It’s a recent thing for me. I look back and
regret not relating to the kids I grew up with.
There are so many beautiful things about my culture that I don’t know and want to find out.

AP: Yes, definitely. I’m a feminist, and that’s what I
write about in my work. I feel very strong about
being a female artist. As females, we still have to
break more chains. There’s a lot of doors still
closed for us, while the doors are always going to
be open for guys. We still have to knock and

MG: How do you think that will express itself in

knock, and sometimes the door won’t even open.

your art work?
LN: Especially being a minority woman.
LN: I’ve been reminiscing about my childhood and
trying to express in my paintings what I remember
about Colombia. Actually, one of the first inspirations was Haymee’s artwork in the LaGuardia High
School gallery.
AP: Was it a class project?
HS: No, it was just relevant to me. It was senior
year. You know how you get so many assignments
in school? I guess I reacted to work that was irrelevant to what I wanted to do. So I painted plantains
— plátanos — on a rice bag. I started saving Goya
bean bags and rice bags, playing. I don’t know how
I came to the idea. I just did it. But afterwards I’m
not sure how seriously I took it. It’s kind of a
Dominican joke.
MG: Where has that taken you?

AP: That’s right! That’s a fact I make a point of in my
artwork. It comes out in my writing. Sometimes I
get so depressed. In my sketchbook I have a female
figure in ink captioned, “Let’s put an end to art.”
HM: We had an assignment: How do we feel about
men? How feminist can we be? I did a collage
which says, “Introducing a whole new area of disagreement for husbands,” and at the bottom is a
face that’s half man and half dog.
AP: I tried to include my Dominican background and
couldn’. I’d have to do research to really know where
I came from and how rich my culture is. Later on
I’m going to do that, because I’m interested.
LN: I made an attempt in a collage, a self-portrait.
It being my first collage, some people thought it
wasn’t good, but I'll keep trying.

HS: I’m still painting plátanos. I’m preparing
another painting now, but I don’t know how my
teachers are going to react. Freshman year I just
showed assignments. I only did one piece that
related to me and the teacher responded positively.
It encouraged me. But in general, the school experience I’m having is that most teachers address a
piece in terms of art history — like, this is a

MH: I made the same attempt, but Marina didn’t
like it. It was about expressing time, Africans reaching a certain point. I have some difficulty placing
myself because I am of different cultures. I still
have problems relating myself to Spanish, Black,
Greek, Indian. That’s my background. I still have
to go back and look into my history and ancestry.

cliché, so don’t do it, or, this is sentimental, so
don’t do it. So if I present a painting of plátanos, I
don’t know how seriously they’re going to take it,
because it’s very personal. They don’t even ask you
about the meaning. They just categorize.
MG: Do you think that’s particular to who or
what you are, or is that just a general approach
to teaching?
HS: It’s general.

MG: Presuming most people in this room are
younger than most people who will be contributing to or reading Heresies, do you perceive generational differences?

SR: Cooper Union is about abstracting your work

HS: Definitely. Just the fact that my mother wasn’t

as much as possible.

raised in New York. She comes from a certain

HS: Yeah, and making yourself as misunderstood as

social situation, and that role is imposed on me. I'm

possible, too.
MG: Obscurity is close to godliness?
HS: That’s the way it seems.
MG: Do you have references in your work that
are particular to your being Latina?

in New York in 1992, and she’s so old-fashioned.
MH: You have to be home at a certain hour—
HM: Not only a certain hour — like six o’clock!
MG: It’s still six o’clock?
VH: ‘Cause we’re girls.

AP: No.

HM: It’s so obvious in my family, the preference.

MG: Or being a woman?

VH: They let the guys stay out all night.

HERESIES 34

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HM: The same story all the time.

AP: If you get a good job and make money, youll

MG: And as parents, would you be different?

end up buying a house there. Everybody does that.

HM: Of course.
AP: My mom is an open-minded woman. She’s
very strong, and I look up to her.
HM: Loud.

HM: You can get used to it, same way you got used to
here coming from over there. And once you start
hanging out with, you know, guys with no socks—
HS: I don’t know. I came really young, with less
baggage.

AP: Loud, too. I don’t have any complaints about my
parents. They’re fabulous parents. But they’re not
encouraging my artwork. That’s the only thing I

MG: Would she be accepted if she went back?
Earlier we were talking about people who return
home flashing cheap jewelry.

would change. None of us would want our kids to go
through what we are going through with our parents. It’s really sad. We’re going to try to be a better
generation. But the minute you become a parent,
everything changes. Now, without the experience,
we’re saying all this blah-blah-blah. We don’t know!
MG: What are your main concerns, the major
issues confronting you?
HS: I would like to say to everyone to understand

HM: She would be accepted. You go back there,
everybody’s Americanized, everybody knows English.
AP: You'll love it.

the importance of origin. I think about culture. I
don’t know anything at all about mine.
LN: Me too.
HS: Also, I still can’t let go of the idea of going
back and living there.
AP: Can I ask you a question? Do you speak Spanish in your house?
HS: Yeah.
AP: Are your parents very strong Dominicans?
They listen to merengue and everything?

HS: I went back two years ago.
MG: Did you feel comfortable?
HS: No. I didn’t want to leave, to come back here,
but I didn’t want to stay either.
MG: Does anyone else want to ‘“go home”?
AP: I want to stay.

LN: I think I could live in Colombia for a couple of
years, but I don’t think I’d raise my children there.
MH: I’d love to go back.

HS: Yeah.

MG: What’s keeping you here?

AP: How can you be a strong Dominican when

MH: I don’t want to stick with my parents. I want

you’re away from your culture? I feel Americanized

to do something for myself, to be far away.

being here only six years, and I can picture how it
is for you being here since you were four. But we
still have these families, and they are so Dominican! My dad has a map of Dominican Republic

HM: Here you can go out with fifteen bucks; there
you need three hundred to five hundred. Man,
when you find a McDonald’s in Dominican Republic that has an under-99¢ menu, I'll go back there.

framed in the living room, and my mom has a pic-

Let me tell you, this is too good. No way I?m going

ture of Balaguer, the president, in her room. She

to leave New York.

loves him. She dresses in red on election day. But
I’m Americanized. I don’t look like a Dominican,
don’t dress like a Dominican, and my parents
complain, but I don’t see that I?m moving away
from my culture.
HS: You see, if I go back today, I won’t fit in. I
been here too long. I can’t change that.

HS: The good thing is that over here you have a
dollar; there it’s thirteen pesos. You know how
much it cost for a box of kotex, ten pads? Fortyeight pesos.
AP: Damn! You don’t wish to be a woman every
month. People are really poor. It’s really hard to
make it in Dominican Republic. You need connections.

AP: It happens to all of us. I won’t go back to
Dominican Republic; I know what’s good for me.
But Im proud of being born there — and it’s a

HS: Or you got to know someone in the U.S.
SR: Solo con tu mirada me dices todo lo que quisiera saber.

good place to visit if you have dollars.
HS: That’s what bothers me the most. I feel I

Technical assistance: Tai Lam Wong

should be able to stay there if I want.

Photography: John Paredes

HERESIES 35

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latinos,

VW] hispanics...
SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY IN THE U.S. MARTHA E. GIMENEZ

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I have always written for academic journals, and
it is for me a pleasure to be able to express my ideas
freely, without worrying about footnotes and ritualistic
“reviews of the literature.” While these views have
been published elsewhere (see bibliography), they
remain hidden from most of those who might find
them personally and politically relevant. This is why |
welcome the chance to contribute to this special issue
of Heresies, for they will now reach many whose lives
have been directly affected by the “Latino” and
“Hispanic” labels, as well as many others whose politics have made them aware of the pitfalls inherent in
identity politics at this time.

I became interested in these issues
when | found out, some years ago,
that I was included among the
“minority faculty” in the university
where | work. As | am a foreigner (l
was born and grew up in Argentina
and came to this country as an adult),
I thought, naively, that the affirmative action office
might have made a mistake. They informed me, orally
as well as in writing, that I was a “Hispanic” and, therefore, they had the right to count me as a “minority.”
This was indeed a surreal and upsetting experience,
first because of the racism entailed in the denial of my
identity and the imposition of a spurious “Hispanicity”
loaded with negative connotations, and also because of
the administrative uses to which | was subject by
becoming part of the statistics used to show compliance with the law. It was also absurd and even funny in
a weird sort of way because, for anyone like myself,
aware of the heterogeneity of the populations thrown
together under the label, the idea is nonsensical, to say
the least.

But this is no laughing matter, for labels have
consequences and these became increasingly clear to

HERESIES 39

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stood in terms of ways of life or as concrete artistic

me as Í began to search for critiques of the “Hispanic”
label. I thought I would find plenty, for I mistakenly

productions by, for example, minority leaders, educa-

considered that the problems inherent in the label

tors, and politicians); and negative when placed in the
context of what the mass media and the average per-

were obvious, but I was wrong: | found only a hand-

son associate with them: drug abuse, low income, high

ful of articles which, critical of the “Hispanic” label,

incidence of AIDS, high fertility, school dropouts,

suggested that “Latino” was more historically and

criminal behavior, high rate of poverty, high propor-

politically adequate. Upon reflection, | concluded that

tion of families headed by women, large numbers of

neither label was acceptable, for reasons | will outline

welfare recipients, and so on.

as follows.

These labels are intended to identify a “minority
To posit
group” — i.e., a group which the “majority” considers
inferior, which has been historically oppressed for generations, and which, objectively, is socially rejected,

some objective
“Hispanicity”

between the historically oppressed populations of

common to everyone
remotely connected to
Spain or born in a

immigrants from Central and South America.

populations and people from Spain. Altogether this

Spanish-speaking

for members of local minorities, for arriving immi-

ignorance about the world beyond U.S. boundaries is

Rican? Colombian? The culture of Spain? When traveling in Central and South America, | was struck with

state-imposed
hegemonic project

with statistics that constantly stress the differences

economic exploitation

countries; when | visited Spain and Italy, | was amazed

Divisions in terms of national origin, social class, ethnicity, race, length of stay in the U.S., and so forth
make it exceedingly problematic to find common cul-

and political

among whites, Asians, Blacks, and “Hispanics” as well
as ethnic/racial politics and practices that minoritize

the differences between Argentina and the other

at how much more at home | felt in Italy than in Spain.

that culturalizes

strengthened by labels that stereotype practically the
entire world. The bombardment of the population

nents of the culture should people be proud of? And
whose culture? Mexican? Mexican American? Puerto

country is a

blurring of distinctions has many negative implications

grants, and for the average American, whose relative

elites, as sources of cultural pride. But exactly what
are the major components of that all-encompassing
culture they seem to have in mind? Which compo-

Mexican and Puerto Rican origin and newly arrived

Moreover, it does not differentiate between those

cern with multiculturalism, the labels are viewed by
many, especially those in the intellectual and artistic

economically excluded, and lacks political power. The
invention of the “Hispanic” label erases the difference

et’s examine the positive side first. In the context
L of the present politics of identity and public con-

oppression.

tural denominators in this population beyond the language. And even the language itself divides, for each

everyone who is not from Europe must contribute to

Latin American country has its own version of Spanish,

the strengthening of racial stereotypes and an oversim-

which is itself divided by region, class, ethnicity, race,

plified view of the world, especially among the very

etc. Just as heterogeneous are the populations of

young, the uneducated, and the prejudiced, for whom

Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Spanish descent living in

the world might easily now appear to be populated

this country, in which the younger generations have at

primarily by minorities.

best a superficial knowledge of Spanish. Here one runs

Both “Hispanic” and “Latino” carry contradicto-

into a concept of culture as a thing that somehow

ry meanings: positive when linked to culture (under-

should be preserved and passed on from one genera-

HERESIES 40

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transform all “Latinos” into Native Americans

tion to the next. But culture is not a thing; it is the
outcome of the lived experience of people, and it

because, as a Chicano scholar noted, the real reason

changes as that experience changes, subject to the

why populations of Mexican, Puerto Rican, and

processes that are constantly changing the society as a

Spanish descent have been and continue to be histori-

whole. To gloss over the living nature of culture, to

cally subject to racist practices has nothing to do with

posit instead some objective “Hispanicity” common to

their “Spanish” culture but with the fact that a large

everyone remotely connected to Spain or born in a

proportion had Native American blood. The minoriti-

Spanish-speaking country while glossing over the his-

zation of foreigners — especially of middle-class, pro-

torical cultural differences that divide this population,

fessional, and technical workers — creates misleading

is a state-imposed hegemonic project that culturalizes

evidence of progress in affirmative action recruiting.
The minoritization of the brain drain of the Third

economic exploitation and political oppression.

World is legal because all the labels used to identify

These populations and a large proportion of

“minority” populations make no distinctions in class

immigrants from Central and South America are
where they are, politically and economically, not

It is as

because of their class location in the economic system.
I would argue that, culturally, the labels distort reality

enlightening

cannot end without restating some of my personal

Borges and Cervantes
rance of the average person about the “real” culture of
these populations. For example, to throw together

are “Hispanic” writers

the many different populations of Mexican and Puerto

| views on these matters. This issue of Heresies was
initially called “¡Viva Latina!” What | have written
would seem to indicate my rejection of the “Latina”

as it is to say that
label. That would be a correct inference. It makes

productions of Spain, Central and South America, the
immigrants of those countries who live in the U.S., and

and oppressed for generations are far from desirable.

to say that

and create false perceptions which deepen the igno-

under the “Latino” or “Hispanic” label the cultural

or national origin. While that might seem good, the
implications for populations who have been excluded

because of their “Hispanic” or “Latin” culture but

Shakespeare and
Faulkner are

sense to me to consider myself, besides Argentine,
Latin American. The labels “Latina/Latino” are, from
my standpoint, adaptations to U.S.—imposed condi-

Rican descent who live in this country can yield only

“Anglo” writers.
mystifications. It is as enlightening to say that Borges

tions of political discourse which disable rather than

and Cervantes are “Hispanic” writers as it is to say

enable the populations so labeled. Why? Because, in

that Shakespeare and Faulkner are “Anglo” writers.

the last instance, these ethnic/cultural labels are

When examining the negative side of labeling,

euphemisms for referring to important sectors of the

the first thing to catch one’s attention is that the labels

U.S. working class. The kinds of political issues which

hide more than they reveal. For instance, they hide the

concern the men and women who self-identify as

fact that a large proportion of these populations are of

“Latino/Latina” tend to be working-class issues, com-

Native American and European descent. The labels

mon to all working-class people regardless of cultural

perform neat tricks; they minoritize foreigners from

heritage or skin color: jobs, good wages, housing,

Spanish-speaking countries (many of whom are of

schools, safety in the streets, health care, etc. But the

European descent), make Native Americans disappear

politics of class has been silenced while the politics of

under the pseudo-European veneer of “Hispanic,” or

identity flourishes. It has become legitimate to state

HERESIES 41

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political claims only as members of ethnic/racial

denounced, accused of having renounced their race,

minorities or majorities, not in terms of class loca-

while they themselves do not understand why they are

tions. As long as this situation is not challenged, these

put down for their success. These contradictions

labels will continue to shape our perceptions, strength-

should alert us to the need to be aware of the many

ening the racial/ethnic divisions among people and,

meanings of culture so that we can differentiate cul-

therefore, strengthening racism itself. On the other

ture as the expression of free creativity and self-

hand, even though the “Latina” label does not resonate

expression from the culture that is the expression of

with me, personally I consider it more acceptable than

state-imposed ethnicity or from the use of “Hispanic”

“Hispanic,” for it grapples with the historical links

as a code word to replace the “culture of poverty”

between people who, while living both north and

standby explanation of the effects of social exclusion

south of the border between the U.S. and Latin

and economic exploitation.
In the end, clarity about the sources of com-

America, do have a common history. The “Hispanic”

mon grievances, needs, and aspirations matters more

label, on the other hand, seeks to obscure that history
while stressing the links to the former colonizer, in

The politics of class

fact granting the former colonizer cultural hegemony

has been silenced

than labels. When such clarity is achieved, we are
likely to realize that unity and strength can emerge
more quickly from the frank recognition of differ-

over its former subjects.

while the politics
of identity flourishes.

ences than from the often instrumental adoption of
panethnic identities.

U Itimately,
how we whatever
call ourselves
is our
own business, although
we do
as individuals,
we are powerless to change the way others label us.
As a sociologist, | am aware that insofar as the politics
of identity remain in command, critiques cannot
change the status quo. Labels can be abolished only
through political practices aimed at rejecting the victim

Bibliography

status the system imposes upon people as the indis-

Gimenez, Martha E. “Minorities and the World-

pensable precondition for listening to their grievances.
People, men and women, cannot at this time voice
their grievances as workers but only as “victims” of
their gender or their race or their ethnicity. In a
process of reaction formation, people may embrace

System — The Theoretical and Political
Implications of the Internationalization of
Minorities.” In Racism, Sexism, and the World-System,
edited by Joan Smith et al. Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1988.
. “Latino/Hispanic: Who Needs a Name?
The Case Against a Standardized Terminology.”
International Journal of Health Services 19, no. 3

these victimized identities as banners of struggle, thus,
for instance, positing “Latino” as against the state-created “Hispanic.” But while there might be short-term

(1989): 557—571.
. “The Political Construction of the Hispanic.”
In Estudios Chicanos and the Politics of Community,

edited by M. Romero and Cordelia Candelaria.
gains in embracing these general identities that cut

Selected Proceedings, National Association for Chicano

across class differences, class divisions have a way of

Studies (1989): 66—85.

reasserting themselves, as those individuals able to

experience upward social mobility are then

. “U.S. Ethnic Politics: Implications for Latin
Americans.” Latin American Perspectives 19, no. 4
(1992): 7-17.

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This content downloaded from
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Constitution

À body belongs only to the individual. The state takes no
claim on bodies or spirits.
The body may be represented, painted, photographed,
and shown in its parts or totality with full knowledge of
the party.

The individual may not be denigrated, raped, tortured,
starved, discriminated or censored.

Each individual has the right to choose health care,
education, food, housing, clothing and the right to die.
No special value is placed on language, color, race,
_ religion, sexual orientation, age, gender, class or ideology.

Individuals may create their own flag. It may be cherished,
burned, torn, idealized, re-invented, patched, loved, hated.

The flag's function is aesthetic. e.e,

. 02° C

£o.. P.

Individuals may create their own passport. Frontiers and
borders are open to all. The country does not have
citizenship. The passport's function is poetic.
Mountains, rivers, oceans, prairies, volcanoes, fishes, birds,
turtles, make up the landscape where individuals inhabit.
They are as valued as the individual.
Differences are appreciated. Cultures are respected. Art is
necessary.
Freedom of expression is for all.
Josely Carvalho
April 1991

Saa J

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COLLECTION

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να ΘΝΙΨΞ ΘΝ ΨΙ ΙΝ
αα ΖΑ Α--ΑΑΞΗΑΕΝΝΑΞ'

Θα «με. ΙΦΙ- ΤΑΙ
ΔΝ ΚΕΙΙΝ[-[9}5)

Θα ΖΞΩΝΥΨΝΉΞΗ ΨΙΔΩΥ ΙΟ

Θα ΨΝΥΙΙ ΘλΩΥ 15
Θα ΟΙΤΠΙΘΥΞ ΝΥ ΙΙ ΙΑ

:
|

κ ΝΑ ΕΙΝ Α

ΞΑΑΙ-Α ΛΕΒ,

Ζο ΗΝ ΛΑ ΑΝ ΙΙΦΊΞΙΣ

Θ ΠΞΠΝΥΝΙΝΞἼ ΨΝΙΗ ΞΙΩΌ

Θ9 ΖΞΩΝΥΨΝΗΞΗ ἩΞ.1651

ΑΝΘ ΑΝΝΑΒῚΝ

Ι

ΟΖ ΨΙΞΙΩΠΝΞΙΝΝ ΝΙΠΞΠΌΨῊ

ΔΖ ΕΞ ΛΛΙΙΙ5 Ψ ΨΌ

ΑΔ ἩΝΡΨΙΝΩΠΙΛΞΝΟΗΞΞΝ 5ΞΌΝΥΜΑ

νΖΗ1-/951:4-[8]-

ΟΖ ΟἩ.ΙΘΥΟ ΨΙΌῊΨΞ ΛΉΥΙΝ

ΨΑ ΖΠῊΟ-ΟΜΞΗΜΞΠΌ ΘΞΉΟΤΊΟΩ

Ζ ΔΕΝ. ο ΑΙαΙΕ ΘᾺ ΑΞ

ΘΔ ΞΝΙΤΠΉΞΙΘ ΨΩΤΙΛΛ
ΖΖ ΚΣ ΖΞΠΌΖΥΨΛ ΨΌΞΛΙΛ

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Уепиѕ Елуу Сһарќег Опе (ог, Тһе Ғігзї Ноу Соттипіоп—Мотепіѕ Веђоге Ње Ела), 1993
Оегаіі: Соайісие іп е Уапіу.

Рһого: Сеогре Нігозе.

НЕВЕЅІЕ$ 54

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SANTA BARRAZA

Santa Barraza
from the Codice de corazón sagrado series, 1992.

HERESIES 55

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BENO y

Liliana Porter
The Way Around, 1989
photograph, 8" x 10".

“The Wan anoumd : 1AA
HERESIES 56

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Soph

ie

R

ivera

Woman & Child

, n.d.

photograph.

HERESIES

57

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WITHOUT BOUNDARIES

These and many of the other large exhibits of Latin American art
have been organized as surveys. Mari Carmen Ramírez has argued that

Recently | was asked by a corporate marketing representative to

the survey format has been used by museum curators to “present and

recommend contemporary “Hispanic” artists who create “ethnic look-

define in one fell swoop the difference that sets apart Latin American/

ing" art. I suppose | should not have been surprised that such attitudes

Latino artists from their First World counterparts. In order to achieve

toward Latino artists still persist. As Edward Sullivan has pointed out,

their purposes, they either applied the categories of the evolution of

there is a pervasive notion among North Americans that Latin Ameri-

modern art in Europe or constructed their own." The Museum of

can culture is monolithic and easily identifiable by stereotypical traits

Modern Art in New York has organized Latin American Artists of the

such as “bright color, irrationality, violence, magic, [and] fantasy.”

Twentieth Century (summer 1993), yet another survey exhibition

“Much debate has centered around exhibitions such as Art of the Fun-

whose point of departure is European Modernist models.

tastic: Latin America 1920-1987, organized by the Indianapolis Muse-

Argentine artist Liliana Porter, having been invited to participate in

um of Art in 1987, and Hispanic Artists in the United States: Thirty Con-

a panel discussion organized concurrently with Art of the Fantastic, was

temporary Painters and Sculptors, which originated at Houston's

asked to discuss whether she considered her art to be “mainstream”

Museum of Fine Arts in 1988. Both exhibitions have been criticized for

or “Hispanic.” For Porter, this implied that in order to be “main-

resorting to some of the stereotypical notions listed above.

stream," she would have to deny her identity. The work of many Latina artists living in the United States demonstrates the falseness of the
choice, a or b, suggested by such a narrow view of possible artistic
strategies. There is a vast diversity of approaches, sources, references,
and identities present in their work, evidence of their unwillingness to
accept predefined notions of reality, history, or identity.

Gladys Triana
Path to the Memory: 1492—1992, 1992
handmade paper, wood, nails, powdered pigments
37" x 49" x 5".

POSITIVE SPIN : LATINA ARTISTS RESPOND

Individual empowerment derives from politicized community awareness, and within the diversity of these groups, barriers between individ-

TO GHETTOIZATION

uals' backgrounds can be addressed. Coast to Coast and Vistas Latinas
have organized and participated in shows that address categorization,

The artworld's systematic exclusion of Latina artists from the main-

dispelling stereotypes through the diversity of their work. Such situa-

stream manifests itself in the common practice of labeling—using

tions allow artists to accurately represent and identify themselves, to

terms such as Hispanic, other, or marginal, which seek only to demean
Latina culture, art, and origin. These terms obscure how Latinas view

“feel a unique freedom to put forth the positive inside me,” as one

ourselves and how others view our culture. Yet the negative reinforce-

artist put it.

Though the challenge for Latina artists to define their individuali-

ment of this ghettoization by those who have fallen victim to this ter-

minology has created a foundation for addressing collective struggles

ties in the face of ghettoization is now being met, this should not mis-

lead us into believing that the forces we fight against are not also

and viewpoints, thereby strengthening rather than weakening artists.
Women artists of diverse backgrounds have formed coalitions that

implanted within ourselves. We must prevent ourselves from doing to

may not have come together otherwise, creating, in effect, a common

each other what the mainstream continues to do to us. The draw-

goal. Ghettoization has motivated artists to confront oppressive forces

backs of getting caught up in labeling and stereotyping are too signifi-

and take action.

cant to overlook. Latina artists need to continue to work together to
educate and reinforce one another, examining critically how ghet-

Coast to Coast: National Women Artists of Color (founded in
1987) and Vistas Latinas (founded in 1989) are examples of women
artists coming together for support, encouragement, and empowerment.

toization is perpetuated, in the hope of ultimately changing what the
vA [a| NAAN E a Aia aAA o

mainstream is unwilling to change.

HERESIES 58

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АМА СІММЕМАММ

Апа Сіппетаппт Мотад , 1993 саѕс зоЫеѓѕ, ууаѓег, ѕсее! ууоо!, ѕһоеѕ, сетепс. Рһоѓо: Рас Кіїзоге.

Ғаппу Ѕапіп
Ѕішау {ог Раіпіпе №. 8, 1981
асгуїћїс, 15 х 17 стз.

”

Ў Ъ МЎЫ Ы

НЕВЕЅІЕ$ 59

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This series began as a remembrance of two friends who died
of AIDS. One loved Day of the Dead; the other had met his
mate on Valentine's Day. Their two favorite days seemed
unfortunately “appropriate” to AIDS: to die from love.

At the time each was dying, | sent some milagros to their
mates, all of us praying for a miracle to save their lives.

But the miracle never came. After their deathsthe prayers
for them became transformed to prayers recited to them for
the lives of others still awaiting miracles.

Kathy Vargas
Oracidn: Valentine's Day/Day of the Dead series, |1990-9|
hand-colored photographs, 24" x 20".

HERESIES

61

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Ll

14 THE TREE OF LIFE

=
s

> I wish you to learn what I have to say

<

Z I bring from faraway other spaces

N

Y which

I learned with the "poorest" of my people

They know very. well

VENST

the Design of precariousness
For me it is the "tradition"
to learn from he who knows from NATURE,

the "pragmatical"
the "magical"
the "philosophical"
ways.

Since childhood I learned to respect this strength.

| to Refine and

Some Artists of my land seem to have this ambition

to translate into
the universal

this genuine philosophy:
a humble wisdom which is there
pulsing at the surface
underneath the skin.
Contaminating everyone,
taken for granted
the "Underdeveloped" ones,
who already have so little.
All they have is this intense contact

with NATURE's
way,

with the way the angle is built
the distance is felt,
with the way the space is shared
the smells inhaled.

HERESIES 62

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It is the intention "in" the content
that brings organic invention
to wor(1)ds and shapes.
It is what is daily SEEN, LISTENED, PERFORMED by
this "Tree of anonymous faces"
that recycles the Air which
We all breathe
breed

and brew
HIGH ENERGY

WHICH I experienced only rarely
in few other places on
Earth.

ENERGY that inspires 'mythological hope'

and 'generosity without questions'...
We, the artists of our land,
we know WHAT we learned from them.

And giants, as giants
like Joyce and Mallarmé,
transubstantiated this knowledge into the best wine.
Guimarães Rosa
Glauber Rocha
José Celso Martines Correia
Hélio Oiticica
e . e . e» . . .- .- . . . . -e À À e a e e e e e e e e a e e e e e e e e e e e

But who cares for these names?
Do you know

that in Brazil we speak Portuguese?
Regina Vater - Austin, February 1987

HERESIES 63

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‫ل‬

4

‫ہہ‬

‫ل‬

۲
۸

‫ا‬
5

:

‫ا‬

SNN SHE

ECR

‫ اا یا‬7 4 ‫” ول‬5

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ЮБИ ЫР ФО.

Јиапа АГісіа

ѕікѕсгееп
оп гаў рарег,
26" х1984
40". $м : "А
Л
а ропка/ауега
ейега,

А в

Рһоѓо: Магуіп СоіЇіпз. і с е а
ОММАТОВАШЦ У СЕВОМИМ МИТ
ІМЅЗЕСТІСІОЕ$ - МІТІСІОЕЗ$ - НЕВВІСІОЕ$ - ҒОМСбІСІОЕ$

Еѕќег Негпапае2
Ѕип Мад, © 1983
ѕсгеепргіпі, 17" х 22".

И)

К

Ж 16 ќ

ИСМИ ФН

ФАК

я

ЕТЕ НЕВМАМОЕ 2

НЕВЕЅІЕ$ 66

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OR EM US

PATER FAMILIAS

Padre nuestro

Apellido

que estás en el norte

sinónimo de padre

santificado sea tu dólar

marcando la identidad

que nos llega

cual frágil virtud

con tus préstamos.

o defecto congénito.

Hágase tu voluntad

Apellido

así en el sur
como en el centro.

cómplice ajeno a su complicidad
con el exterminio milenario.
A fin de cuentas

El pan nuestro

mi apellido

del próximo siglo

— el de mi padre, a quien amo —

danos hoy

fue también el de mi abuelo,

y perdónanos

el de su padre de él

la deuda externa

el del padre

para seguir explotando

de su padre

a nuestros deudores.

de su padre

No nos dejes caer

trillonada de espermas

en revolución.

que por vía de mi padre `

Garantízanos la paz.

(a quien amo, y no culpo)
me preceden.

Apellido
sinónimo de padre

envoltura indespellejable,
que aún si fuera de mi madre
no sería sino el de mi otro abuelo
que también fue de su padre

PATER NOSTER

y del padre

Padre

trillonada de espermas

de su padre
de su padre

(de ellos; nuestro, no)
Patricio
Patriarca
Patria
(potestad,

que por vía de mi madre

(a quien amo y compadezco)
me preceden.

Orgullo
Autoridad

que viene de poder,

Herencia

que es de ellos; nuestro, no)

Tribu

Patrimonio
Patriarcado

Familia
Clan

Patria
Patriota

Desposeídas de la historia

Patriotismo
(para otros; nuestro, no)

es la sangre coagulada

El gran silencio hormonal

que acaricia nuestras piernas

que no recoge la historia

y la abnegada vocación

(su historia
de ellos; nuestra, no)
Patricidio

de parir apellidos
del padre
del padre

(sua culpa

del padre

sólo de ellos; nuestra, no).

de otro padre.

HERESIES 67
Mii

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IMAGES — LATINA STYLE

juxtaposed with fluorescent colors; as in a movie scene, a
child's foot appears, anxiously reaching for the next step Up.

Brace yourself. Witness flickering images of street fights
superimposed on silent waters, rose-colored from sidewalk
bloodstains, sweeping from iridescent hydrants. This is not a
television picture. These are indelible childhood memories. l
remember seeing my best friend, Daisy, jump from a fifth-floor
window to escape her father's beatings. I remember having my

Her father, moving in slow motion, extends his hand to catch
the scattering crayolas tumbling from the little girl's underpants. The child cries and pleads. The images clear...
My father resolved the problem of the stolen crayons by
having my younger brother, Roberto, take the blame and
return them to the bodega the very same day. The feelings of

head forced down into a running toilet bowl by school gang

pain, shame, and guilt still linger, particularly because Roberto

members. Still with me?

passed away approximately six weeks later.

Sociology 101 this is not. Ironically, though, it seems to
have worked for some of us. Being raised in “el barrio” has its
positive effects as well as its horrors. Perhaps it provides an
unambiguous sense of day-to-day existence, and the edge
begets an uneasy sort of strength, locking us unsuspectingly

A mother's piercing shriek stopping a would-be kidnapper
of a five-year-old contrast with the joyful recognition of my
artistic skills by a fifth-grade teacher, setting up blurred divisions of focus in my mind.
Undoubtedly these bewildering beginnings have fueled my

into survival mode. I remember at times having to “switch

art making and supplied me with a rich well of ideas. One

channels” while out in the streets. Consequently, to this day |

comes to mind: the painful depiction of the scarred self in the

am acutely aware of the existence of primal instinct.
Today when I'm asked when | first sensed | wanted to be
an artist, | answer, “When I stole my first and last box of
crayons at the age of six.” My memory projects a dark staircase

ADAM—1999 & FAST FORWARD

painting of a young girl kneeling on a punctured metallic grater,
with the words “ugliest knees in 5th grade” scrawled on the
dark canvas. Lisa Steinberg comes to mind.
Quick — switch channels.

artistic or scientific. As an artist I was impelled to inter-

pret the vision and complete the Adam—1999 series
My earlier series, entitled Rituals, concerned itself

with a painting entitled After Frida: The Old-Fashioned

with shamanistic practices I experienced personally in

Way. No other artist has depicted birth more dramatical-

my early youth. Ironically, the series Adam—1 999 defini-

ly and truer to nature than Frida Kahlo.

tively propelled me into the futuristic future, carrying
me from personal history to public history.
Creating as well as seeing art involves examining our

Fast Forward, a series on gene coding, is a natural
extension of the Adam—1999 series. During the fifth
and sixth centuries B.C., one ancient Greek school of

own prejudices and preconceptions. The theme of male

philosophy held the belief that singular and unchange-

birth evidently hits hard against these preconceptions.

able Being was the only reality and that plurality,

At slide lectures, the men in the audience distinctly

change, and motion were only illusory.

groan when I have stated the following:

Recently I worked for a dentist who would attach

One astonishing development that will probably occur in this

himself to the “sweet air” equipment at his office for

decade is for a few men to experience pregnancy personally.

many hours at a time. Similarly, the main character in

A California biologist predicts that by the end of the 1990s
men will be able to have an artificially inseminated egg
attached to the intestine, carry a fetus, and deliver by
cesarean section. Experiments have already begun in
Australia.

To this eye, the announcement created puzzlement
and denial, evident in all new creative ventures, be they

The Lawnmower Man is driven to virtual states of mind.
The ancient philosophy of the illusory may well be pointing to the new Past, Present, Future. Induced realities,
some predict, will infinitely alter generations of children
to come.
Dial 911...

HERESIES 68

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Pura Cruz
Adam—1999 series: Adam Gives Birth, 1990
mixed media, 6'3" x 5'.
Photo: Overview/Whiting Wicker.

HERESIES

69

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E como não falava inglês
fiquei sem ter com quem cismar,
MAS me apresentei a mim,
lembrando os companheiros de além mar.

Com muito prazer, gostei do que vi,
e não tentei mas tradução.

Desde as minhas sedas, tomei partido
pelos descamisados,
Chegou tempo de sẹ sentir história,
vivenciar desejo não compartido,
ter o gosto do ideal repartido
MAS dividida entre ou ser camarada ou ser amante.

Ancorada no futuro,
indiferente as proclamas
sobre a morte da utopia,
tão cantada na imprensa burguesa,
junto ismos, ecologias, € eus,
bordando uma ampla saia vermelha,
Epa He! minha máe
uma grande bandeira vermelha
da luta festa luta

por um socialismo
reinventado no caminho do seu fazer-se
por mulheres, homens, negros, negras,
Raquelín Mendieta

brancos e brancas, jovens, velhos e velhas,
da classe trabalhadora,
respeitando as identidades, mas não a subordinação,

Photo: Barry Considine.

mas não a exploração.
Com as vozes nossas,
MAS de toda la America Nuestra.
La America del Che, de Marti, de Flora Tristan

(EXTRAÍDOS DE UM POEMA)

feminista que no seculo XIX, foi a primeira
a gritar

Peguei o bonde errado,

“cuidado companheiro, o mais explorado dos

saltei no ponto certo,

obreros pode estar oprimindo a uma mulher,”

na hora não mercada,

e sem saber, identificando-se com um patrão.

vestida de festa,
MAS era domingo de praia.

Hoje, Deixei a fixação por portos

Nascida mulher, em mundo de homem,

e aprendi o gosto de ser navio

não disse amém, fui expulsa do coro.

reencontrando os ancestrais,

Fechada em copas, de paus, não de ouro,

em outros mares,

MAS colecionei momentos.

com outras bússolas,
MAS com o mesmo refrão:

Um dia quebrou-se espelho, fugiu a madastra,
e em terras do Norte, disseram-me que nem

“navegar é preciso”

tão branca eu era.

que la lucha continua.

Afastada do rebanho,
desaprendi as artes da sedução.

Sucesso à diretoria para assuntos da mulher
MARY GARCIA CASTRO

do Sindicato.

HERESIES 70

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To express what Latina means to me personally, to an unknown audience, is impossible
without introducing myself. In the U.S. I would be considered a “white” Latina, or as some
Latins have addressed me, a blanquita.
I have had certain privileges that derive from that condition as I have also been discriminated against because of that condition — the misconception being that having a white skin
forbids one from having experienced or understanding discrimination. On a larger scale Latina
means many things, such as a rich panorama of multicultural references, the ability to forge
one's own identity outside of a given concept of group, the versatility that being different
occasions, the capacity to comprehend and learn from other cultures and strategies, to move
inside/outside of shifting parameters.

The Bride is a statement about my struggle as an
artist and as a single parent who had to leave the profession I desired and take another profession in order to
make a living. My divorce played a big part in this struggle, and that's why I used the bride.
It is not a statement against marriage but a statement that one must first be what one really wants to be
before she can be anything else. I used the bride as a
symbol for this because most people believe that marriage is the ultimate happiness, but I believe doing what
you really want is the happiness people are looking for. I
wanted to be an artist and was not able to, so until I
became able to achieve that goal, I could not be complete. This was a death of some sort.
It is very difficult to be an artist when you are by
yourself. It is also extremely difficult to be an artist
when you are married, then a single parent. What my
bride says is that because I am a woman, a single parent
and/or a wife, the artist in me had been neglected in
order for me to be everything else one is taught to be
when growing up.
Women must sacrifice and give up more than men.
Chicanas have a harder struggle simply because we are
Chicanas and we are women. I believe women in general
have this burden because of the way this world has
formed itself. Women growing up in my day and age had
it harder, but I know that for the women of tomorrow,
the struggle will be easier. Hopefully these women will
have advantages and choices to make their lives better.

Dolores Guerrero-cruz
The Bride, 1985
serigraph, 28" x 40".

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Photos by James Wasserman.

BRINCANDO EL CHARCO: FRAGMENTS OF A SCRIPT
PRODUCED, WRITTEN, AND DIRECTED BY FRANCES NEGRÓN-MUNTANER
Brincando el charco (“Crossing the Creek”) is a 57-minute experimental narrative on contemporary

Puerto Rican identities. The film mixes fiction, archival footage, current demonstration images,
processed interviews, music video, and soap opera conventions to weave the story of Claudia Marín,
a middle-class, light-skinned Puerto Rican lesbian and photographer attempting to construct community in the U.S. In the process of confronting the simultaneity of privilege and oppression that
structures her position, the film becomes a meditation on class, race, and sexuality as shifting differences, inasmuch as Claudia's identifications are not limited to her own “identities” but constantly
cross all lines. The voices of Afro-Puerto Rican women, third-generation Puerto Rican young men,
middle-class Island-born intellectuals, and gay men produce a mosaic that cannot be reduced to any
one element — be it national, demographic, or ideological. At this writing the film is in its last stage
of post-production and is expected to be released in October 1993. The following excerpts correspond to a loose chronological order.

Slow-motion image of people on the sidelines as they watch the Puerto Rican Pride Parade in Philadelphia,
1991. Close-up of Claudia in her photography studio. Montage of Claudia's photography. Black-and-white
photographs of interviewees in the film. An image of two men and a huge American flag with 51 stars.
Slow-moving shot of one of the parade's beauty queens looking straight to the camera. Slow-moving shot
of gay and lesbian contingent of parade, showing a Puerto Rican flag with a pink triangle instead of a star.

Claudia (Voiceover):

Claudia (Voiceover):

Por más de un siglo, las voces que han logrado res-

The voices that have resonated in my country for

onar en mi país repiten una letanía incierta:

more than a century repeat an uncertain litany:

¿quiénes somos? ¿hacia dónde vamos? Como si una

Who are we? Where are we going? As if a univo-

respuesta unívoca nos fuera a hacer libres. Como si

cal answer would make us free. As if the “we”

el “nosotros” fuera posible más allá del lenguaje y

were possible beyond language and image. | have

la imagen. Yo he sido un eco de ellas. Fotógrafa de

been an echo of these voices. A photographer of

rostros isleños desperdigados . . . A veces creo

scattered Island faces. | sometimes believe | have

encontramos, sin encontrame yo. ¿Contradicción?

found us without finding myself. Contradiction?

No siempre. Las esencias siempre huyen, inscribién-

Not always. Essences are always escaping, inscrib-

dome los múltiples deseos de unos cuerpos.

ing instead the multiple desires of body surfaces.

7

2.
Claudia finishes a portrait of Puerto Rican voguer Ray González. After developing the portrait, Claudia takes
the subway home, making one stop to pick up a package at the post office. Claudia's lover, Elizabeth, is on
her way out the door, but before she leaves, the phone rings, bringing the news that Claudia's father has
died and that the family requests her presence at the funeral. A brief discussion follows as Claudia struggles

FRANCES NEGRON-MUNTANER

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Father:

Father:

Mira, míralo, muchacha. Con el trabajo y el sacrificio

Look, girl, with the hardships one has to endure to

que da para criar a un muchacho en este país y tú

raise a child in this country, and you pay me with this!
[Throws her a photograph he found.] I'm going to tell

me pagas con esto. [Throws her a photograph he

you something, and listen up good. If you're going to

found.] Te voy a decir algo y óyeme bien. Si te

continue to be mixed up with those bad women —

quieres seguir revolcando con esas mujeres malas,

porque son malas, yo no te quiero más por aquí. ¡Y es because they are bad — | don't want you here. |

Claudia: Claudia:
Father: Father:

más, ahora mismo te me vas de aquí! mean, | want you out of here right now!

¡Yo la quiero! I love her!
No me contestes con esas suciedades, coño, vete. Don't answer me with that shit, damn ít.

Mother: Mother:

Claudio, es tu hija, por Dios. Claudio, she's your daughter, for god's sake.
The argument continues, and after Claudia calls father hypocritical and intolerant, he hits her. Younger
brother defends her, and mother gives Claudia her blessing as father banishes daughter from the home.
Claudia recedes from scene. Point-of-view shot of family members framed by doorway.

3.
Elizabeth cancels a meeting in order to address the situation at home with Claudia, who is still undecided
about attending the funeral. As Claudia watches Elizabeth hang up the phone, she recalls a conversation
among the two of them and Toni Cade, an African American friend who as a child growing up in Harlem
experienced the massive influx of Puerto Ricans into New York. B&W archival footage of Puerto Rican and
African Americans in New York from late 1940s through 1970s.
Toni (Voiceover):
It was the year of the big snow in New York. Some new people moved into the building. A large
family — babies, children, married couples, three sets of elders. These new tenants didn't seem to have any
winter clothes. This was not too strange. Folks up from down South didn't have heavy clothes either. The little
girls wore pierced earrings; the women wore jewelry and bright clothing. We thought they were gypsies. A
new kind of gypsy, though, the kind that apparently intended to live in an apartment building rather than a
storefront. One of the boys was in our class for about a minute. We didn't even get to hear his name
and hear him speak. They put him on a bench outside the principal's office. We heard later that
he'd been put in remedial class, the assumption being if you have no English, you have no IQ. We were
curious about him. Some of his relatives looked just like gypsies. But some of his relatives looked just like us.
Who were these people?

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4.
In Claudia's package, sent by a friend, is a videotape of the first gay and lesbian parade in Puerto Rico. After
reading the accompanying letter pointing to the event's many contradictions, images of the gay and lesbian
contingent in New York's Puerto Rican Pride Parade flash in her memory.

Claudia (Voiceover):
Is the language expanding the boundaries of my desire, English? Does it then get translated, appropriated, and
transformed only later, after layers of mediation? Yes. The debt is obvious. No. There are so many other debts. Yes
and no because I make love in Puerto Rican Spanish with a soft bolero in the background and an attitude picked

5.

Moises:

Moises:

Al principio que estábamos trabajando en la idea de ir

When we were considering going to Puerto Rico,

a Puerto Rico, una de las cosas que yo me cuestioné

one of the things that | questioned was how |, as a

fue como yo, como miembro de ACT UP Nueva York,
iba a lograr que en Puerto Rico se llevaran a cabo

member of ACT UP New York, was going to
make certain activist actions against AIDS happen.

acciones de activismo en contra del SIDA. Como yo

As | see it, the South Bronx, the Hispanic barrio in

lo visualizo es que tanto el sur del Bronx, como el bar-

New York, is like another neighborhood of Puerto

rio hispano aquí en Nueva York son como otro banio

Rico. This made me realize —and also seeing the

de Puerto Rico. Lo que me hizo a mí entender viendo la

ease with which people travel here because they

cuestión del puente aéreo con la facilidad que la gente

know that they belong and can obtain treatment

de Puerto Rico viaja acá porque saben que aquí hay un

and feel comfortable among Puerto Ricans — that

lugar de pertenencia a donde pueden venir a conseguir

we could use that same air bridge to develop this

tratamiento y también pueden sentirse en una atmós-

kind of political action.

fera entre puertomiqueños, me justificó a mí la idea de
que sí podríamos usar ese mismo puente aéreo para
desarrollar este tipo de acción.

6.

7.

Agnes:

Agnes:

Mira, la invisibilidad de las lesbianas tiene que ver con

Look, the invisibility of lesbians relates to the gen-

la invisibilidad en general de la sexualidad femenina

eral invisibility of women's sexuality in society. The

en la sociedad. La idea de que para una mujer lograr

idea that for a woman to achieve erotic pleasure,

placer erótico siempre es en relación a la presencia
del pene. Entonces, es como impensable que una
mujer pueda tener relaciones sexuales con otra mujer
porque ¿que van a hacer dos mujeres juntas en una
camda? Es impensable, no hay un pene. Entonces, digamos, yo creo que por ahí va la cosa. Es decir, la
incapacidad, la imposibilidad o la dificultad de repre-

it's always in relation to the presence of the penis.
It's like unthinkable that a woman can have sexual
relations with another woman, because what are
two women going to do together in bed? It's
unthinkable: there's no penis. That's where | think
things are at. It's the incapacity, the impossibility, or
the difficulty of representing feminine sexuality.

sentar la sexualidad femenina.

8.

lesbian eroticism.

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Gloria Claudia Ortíz
Two Men Urinating, 1987
oil on canvas, 66" x 58".

Orphans I: Men and Prostitutes, 1987/88
oil on canvas, 50" x 100" diptych.

HERESIES

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AWILDA STERLING

The struggle of Caribbean art and society is to decide,
develop, and correctly and precisely define Caribbean identity.
Our people have always been attacked by the economic inter-

are sacred rituals, but not to the imperialist mind.
l and the women-mothers-sisters-friends who comprise
our labor, artistic, and professional communities deal continu-

ests of the so-called First World nations. They have conve-

ally with this reality, each in our own way, because it is

niently called us Third World, being themselves responsible for

ingrained in us.

this situation. Almighty nations, they have acted and forced
their powers upon us for the last 500 years, thus planting an
underdeveloped attitude in Caribbean consciousness.
Every cry for freedom has been violently shut off, except

As a child, my main personality-forming references were
Hollywood musicals. On the other hand, my family was and
still is a very festive one that always celebrated with music,
food, drinks, and dance. My corporeal sense system was organ-

for countries that now have sufficient power to fight back.

ic, while my intellect was completely abstract. No wonder con-

Puerto Rico is one such country. It has been struggling, fight-

fusion arose.

ing, and shouting back since the first colonial imposition in

Watching Gene Kelly, Ginger Rogers, and Fred Astaire

1492. Catholic and Calvinist morality have pressed upon us the

gave rise to a desire to fly not only onstage but away from real-

castrating sensation of not expressing ourselves as sensuously

ity. As an adult woman, | have confronted the reality of stereo-

complete. Ancestral African manifestations related to fertility

types, and I work with them, within them, and against them.

Music: Francis Schwartz. Choreography: Awilda Sterling.
Photo: Ricardo Alcaraz.

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(I. to r.) Viveca Vázquez, Karen Langevin, Mari Martín
in Mascando Inglés ("Chewing English"), 1984.

Choreography: Viveca Vázquez.
Photo: Tom Brazil.

encased as latins. The mold can start to break. Students
yet-developed art in Puerto Rico: ballet has a young tradition

respond to permission to move, to find breath, to discover

of 30 years, and modern dance has existed for 15—18 years

possibility — defying pre-established codes, limiting norms

but only in spurts. Some of our popular dances survive but

that predispose our expression. Improvisation is food for

have become endangered species, for they are no longer part

movement. The body is the self laboratory. Anatomical

of our everyday life or entertainment. False progress and con-

acknowledgement, explanatory, auto-informing . .…. integra-

sumerism have taken over. We are the shining star of the U.S.

tion of bone, muscle, breath, thought, and sense . . . structure

While I teach I learn. I have directed dance workshops at
the University of Puerto Rico since 1985. There is no dance
department at our 86-year-old university, but at least some

has stunted . . . movement invention and body consciousness,
motivation for growth.
The “system” predisposes shapes and rhythms. The inner

classes are offered as electives. I teach mostly to nondancers, who

self becomes unrecognizable as an option. I want the option

usually represent the most interesting material in the class.

to explore music not as command nor as the rule for climax

Those who have danced come from ballet or jazz. For the majori-

in a dance. Though music has magnificence, it is not the only

ty the concept of dance develops from watching television.

source for ecstasy in movement.

My class deals with body consciousness, breathing, and

The Caribbean body does not have to look accepted,

an experimental approach to dance and movement — inquir-

intruded upon. What is expected? — pictorial, incapable of

ing into personal raw output to establish movement creation,

abstracting. The abstract belongs to another mind. The color

expanding the limits of comfortable terrain to discover inner

of our culture is seen as permanent exoticism. It is the educa-

organic power, stressing imaginative thinking and applying it

tion of the colonized, the imitation of the masters.

to the body.

We are confronted with stereotypical molds about dance
as dance, dance as art, women as women, men as men, latins

Redefining education, recycling thought . . . out of cue,
out of “count,” out of step/stepping out of pattern . . . using
movement as part of liberation.

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I. En la Ciudad de Puerto Rico, a cuatro de agosto de mil ochocientos cin-

condición de otorgar carta de libertad a la referida esclava tan pronto como

cuenta y uno: ante de mí, el infracrito Escribano Público, y testigos, compare-

cumpla veinticinco años, contando ahora diecinueve años, cuatro meses y

ció Don Eleuterio Giménez y Moreno, de este vecindario, a quien doy fe

quince días (Proceso Abolicionista I, 88).

CONOZCO, y dijo: que está escritura por auto de doce de julio último, dictado

In this excerpt from a bill of sale, the reader learns that Olalla, an

por el juzgado de primer instancia de esta Capital en el expediente seguido por

enslaved nineteen-year-old woman who has experienced ill treatment by

la esclava Olalla contra Doña Josefa Caira de Carreras sobre su libertad y “por
mal trato,” que corre por esta escribanía de mi cargo, de que doy fe: que en
tal virtud, en la vía y forma más legal, otorga: que vende real y efectivamente

a white Spanish woman named Doña Josefa Caira, is being sold to Don
Francisco Márquez for eighty pesos. Olalla is to be freed at the age of
twenty-five, and any children she has are to be freed as well.

a Don Francisco Márquez, de este propio domicilio, la referida esclava Olalla,
que a sus causante Doña Josefa Caira corresponde en propiedad por donación

II. .../Włhile the owners, overseers and managers who sought these associa-

que de ella le hizo el Presbítero Don José Joaquin Lalinde por la cláusula

tions and pleasures with black women kept a countenance of sternness and

12.a de su testamento, que dice así: “Item. Es también mi voluntad que, tan

even exhibited attitudes of hatred and often contempt for Africans, they were

luego como yo fallezca, mi esclava Olaya [sic] vaya al poder de Doña Josefa

not slow to take advantage of the cover of night to take up liaisons. It was

Caira de Carreras, vecina de la Capital, con quien permanecerá sin excusa

clear from these associations that the racial superiority and colour superiority

alguna hasta que, cumplidos sus veinticinco años quede libre para siempre

which these white men peddled were merely palliatives for the actual reality of

[lo] mismo que los hijos, si durante este tiempo en que queda sujeta a la
servidumbre los tuviera”; cuya esclava vende al referido Márquez a uso de feria
y sin lugar a redhibitoria en precio de ochenta pesos macuquinos que confiesa

economic domination and the exploitation of human beings. The attitude of
the white women was conditioned more often than not by the fact that they
saw the black ‘wenches’ as their natural rivals in situations in which the white

tener recibidos a su satisfacción; y por no ser de presente la entrega, renuncia

women were temporarily relegated to the background, though they were the

la excepción del dinero no contado y la prueba del recibo; con la precisa

legally recognized spouses (Thompson 178).

Thompson’s statement and the bill of sale, taken together, encapsulate the process of objectification: the conversion of human
beings into property and the institutionalization of racism, sexism, and enslavement. These quotations assist in framing the reality
of enslaved African men and women in the Latin Caribbean and the Americas, a reality closely paralleling those in English- and
Dutch-speaking countries. The designation of Africans and their descendants as property allowed Europeans to exploit and dehumanize us. Cuba, we should remember, was one of the last countries to abolish slavery, and the United States abolished segregation
just forty years ago. Today African descendants who identify with their African Latin cultural legacy are doing what other African
descendants are doing: developing strategies to dislocate the Eurocentric paradigm.

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INTRODUCTION

The legacy inherited by women of African descent in the Americas constitutes an
ongoing problem, especially within the Latino community. An inability to deal with
internal racist attitudes, sexist practices, and racial diversity continues to foster the
promotion of blancamiento while maintaining — tapando el cielo con la mano — that
there is no racism in the Latin Caribbean and Americas. By assuming the attitude pro-

jected by Jamaican tourism advertisements (“out of many, one people”), Puerto
Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Panamanians, and others perpetuate the myths of racial
and gender equality through the mutual conspiracy of silence, the goal being to display a united “Latino front.” Distinguishing our Africanity from that of African Ameri-

cans is bound up with expectations of developing a distinct political/cultural power
base. Women and men of African descent, the majority of our population, are under-

represented in leadership positions, while self-appointed Latino leaders, overwhelmingly white and male in both race and consciousness, continue to serve as power bro-

kers and negotiators with the European American community. The comfort level thus
provided European Americans in dealing with “Latinos” who look somewhat like them.
“but not really” maintains the Latino community divided, because alliances and objectives that would forge a solid national|/international agenda grounded in our interests
are blurred by the integrationist agenda of being more like/acting more like/looking
more like the white European power brokers who maintain our oppressive conditions.

According to those in the general community who maintain internal racist attitudes, the Latin INTERNAL RACIST ATTITUDES:
brand of Africanity is more polished and civilized than the American brand. We are made to feel ¿Y TU ABUELA, DONDE ESTA?
that we must remain apart and distinct so that we can get our own piece of the pie. Evidently,
although our community has no problem forming alliances with our European American oppressors, there is a problem with forging alliances with other groups of color experiencing similarly
oppressive conditions. The notion of a common agenda for mutual empowerment being
unthinkable, the African Latino/African American/African Caribbean community continues our
colonial oppressors’ divide-and-conquer mentality, guaranteeing that the discriminatory and sexist practices fostered by the legacy of enslavement continue to flourish within our Latin sector.
The Dominican Republic continues to enslave Haitians. Brazil continues to list gradations of skin
color, announcing that the whiter you are, the better you are. The Cuban and Puerto Rican communities continue to exalt mulatas del pelo bueno. Blancamiento is celebrated; darker skin and
African presence and contributions are devalued. The image of Black and mulata women remains
the sexual, animalistic, primitive creature of desire who is ready to be seduced. E/ Negro/La Negra:
si no lo hace a la entrada, lo hace a la salida. Tiene la alma blanca unque sea Negra unfortunately continues to permeate the thinking in our communities, perpetuating the concept that everything good
is European, European American, or Hispanic — and that everything African or Native American is valueless and primitive. Thompson suggests that the so-called color problem masks other
divisive factors: “Slavery provides the root cause for the survival of shade gradations, thus inducing social stratification as well as wide variations of economic power in the social structure.
Colour differentiation was induced as part of the strategy which militated against the cohesion of
the rank and file of all the oppressed peoples dwelling in slave societies” (165).
As Latina/os we tend to forget that our societies, with their strong Native spiritual and cultural
bases, have maintained numerous African beliefs and practices. Though it is beyond the scope of
this article to discuss them all, some at least should be mentioned: ancestor worship (espiritismo),

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orisha, Santeria, Cabocolo, Candomble, and spiritualism; kinship and extended family systems
(compadre-comadre), musical forms such as bomba, plena, merengue, son, rumba, mambo, and
chachacha; foods such as sancocho, pasteles, cuchifritos, and vianda; and the community economic system of el san, or sou sou. The cimarrónes of our communities built spaces of resistance
and affirmation throughout the Latino diaspora, ensuring that Africanity would be passed on to
future generations and that we would be grounded in nature’s vital forces and energy, ashé.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCES

How does an African Puerto Rican woman child survive racism, sexism, miseducation, and limited access to opportunities that by right should belong to all human beings? How does one negotiate the dual identity of being African and Puerto Rican within a community that overwhelmingly negates its African heritage while romanticizing its Native American heritage?
Besides being an African descendant and a Puerto Rican, I am a woman, a parent, a grandparent,
a community worker, an institution builder, an educator, and a student. I was born in New York
City of parents born in Puerto Rico and was raised and nurtured in El Barrio. Traditional values
and survival methods have been critical to my present racial and cultural identification and
groundedness. The multiple realities of growing up in El Barrio, also known as Spanish Harlem
or East Harlem, reflect the juggling of value systems generated by both the inner community and
the outer community. Simultaneously negotiating often diametrically opposed outer value systems, criteria, and strategies leads toward assimilation and cultural dislocation into an “American
mainstream” lifestyle that continues to be overtly racist.
What I experienced is experienced throughout African diaspora communities and environments
like El Barrio, which reflect purposeful underdevelopment and lack of support of their organizational infrastructures. Two childhood incidents remain vivid in my mind, making it clear that as
an African Puerto Rican child, I did not have the same access to opportunities as the European
American children who lived nearby.
The first incident revolved around an examination for “bright students,” who at that time were in
classes with numbers like 5-1 or 5-2 to signal the special intelligence of the children, while the
“dumb” classes had numbers like 5-14 and 5-15. I went to PS. 121 at 102 Street in El Barrio,
where the students were primarily African American and Puerto Rican. PS. 168 was located at 104
Street in East Harlem; students who went there were mostly Italian, and the few Puerto Rican and

The image of

Black and mulata
women remains
the sexual,

animalistic,

African American children who attended were relegated to the “dumb” classes. Through an Italian
friend whose daughter went to PS. 168, my mother became aware of an entrance examination for
prestigious Hunter Junior High that was being administered to classes 5-1 and 5-2 at her daughter's school. This friend asked my mother if, like her own bright child, I too was being given this
exam. I knew nothing about it. My mother decided to visit the principal, Mr. Oak.
He explained that the students in my school were not bright enough to take the test and that he
did not want to hurt or embarrass us by giving us a test he knew we would fail. My mother insist-

primitive creature
of desire who is
ready to be
seduced.

ed. Was I not like her friend's daughter, who was also in a 5-1 class? Did I not do my homework
faithfully and daily, with extra-credit homework besides? With A averages, how could I and the
other students not do well?
'To make a long story short, we all failed the exam. After cursing out Mr. Oak in English, which I
hadn't been aware my mother spoke, she transferred me to PS. 168, using her friend's address.
There I was placed in class 5-14. Trying to make the best of a disastrous situation, my mother
transferred me back to PS. 121's class 5-1. Clearly there were two systems of public education:
one for European Americans and another, inferior one for People of Color.
The second incident involved a teacher calling in my mother to request that she not dress me “so
clean and pretty” every day. This woman, a European American, felt that my parents were dressing me up to look like a “white child” and that other students might get jealous. Knowing I was
always surrounded by friends, my mother asked her for examples of acts of jealousy. There hadn’t

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yet been any, said the teacher, but she was sure there would be, because my parents were dressing
me beyond their means. Again my mother pulled out her English vocabulary, telling the teacher
that her business was to teach, not to speculate about people’s finances, and that she was obviously doing a very poor job of it, since all her students had failed the Hunter entrance exam.
In the 1930s there were battles for quality education; in the 1950s, for equal opportunity; in the
1960s, for equal access; in the 1970s and 1980s, for inclusion; and in the 1990s there are battles
for equal resources. Puerto Rican and African American parents continue to wage all these battles
as the entire New York City public school system becomes one big class 5-14. At the same time,
the City University system (CUNY) and the State University system (SUNY) exhibit greater and
greater disparities in resourcing as CUNY increasingly becomes a system serving primarily students of color.
As the income levels of the rich increase at a more rapid rate than at any other time in history,
the poor are getting poorer at a correspondingly rapid rate. We have two Americas: one for the
rich and white, the other for the poor of color. For the Latino community, especially the women,
the struggle for the survival of our families and communities is getting harder. Nonetheless, we
continue our efforts to survive and thrive as warrior women, and our need to continue developing sacred spaces of resistance and affirmation increases as our economic resources shrink.

There is limited documentation of women’s role in building free communities of resistance and WARRIOR WOMEN AND THE
affirmation during enslavement. Most published research has been conducted by men focusing on RECREATION OF COMMUNITY
men’s role in building maroon societies, though increasingly women are investigating the “sheroic”
contributions of maroon women in these free, runaway societies that ranged from tiny communities that disbanded in less than a year to communities that lasted centuries and included thousands
of cimarrónes. In isolation the cimarrónes were able to recreate collective, traditional African societies. Richard Price has stressed that viability usually required that villages be located in “inhospitable, out-of-the-way areas” (5). Latin America had its Yoruba and Kikongo communities; Cuba,
Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Brazil, and other countries had their palenques, quilombos,
mocambos, cumbes, ladeiras, and mambises that kept African traditional practices alive.
Las Casas de Santos (the houses of Orisha) of Cuba and Puerto Rico, the Candombles of Brazil,
the Vodun temples of the Dominican Republic, and the Ile Orisha of the United States exemplify
the maroon spirit of resistance. “Resistance was an integral part of Caribbean slave society. Its
pervasiveness demonstrated the slaves’ consciousness of themselves as human beings with their
own values and aspirations different from those of the slave owners. From the point of view of
the slave masters, anxious to maximize their material wealth, slave resistance displayed the bothersome nature, and one of the inherent contradictions, of this peculiar species of property. Slaves
resisted in myriad ways. These could range from the subtle and passive, constantly acted out on a
routinized daily basis, to the violent, whether singly or collectively, planned or spontaneous. But
perhaps the most vexing of the slaves’ resistance techniques to the owners was the act of running
away to establish their own habitations — Maroon Societies” (Campbell 1). Price, too, has
emphasized the centrality of resistance: “All the African religious phenomena of the colonial era,
or almost all, must be understood in the context of this climate of cultural resistance” (199).
Women predominate in contemporary African-based religious practice within Latino culture, perpetuating a philosophy and a practical framework that speaks to the African historical continuum.
“Women (black women) were thought to have special magical powers, such as being more susceptible to ritual trance” (Price 196). We not only affirm cultural values by recreating family and community but also resist oppression by passing on practices that speak to a world vision grounded in
nature and the vital energy force of ashé. Ancestral spirits and divination are integral components,
providing historical context and experiences. Divination through the corpus of the odu of Ifa provides a philosophical framework. The orishas, or divinities, of the Yoruba and Kikongo nations pro-

HERESIES %81

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vide African-based role models of warrior women. The sacred warrior spirit is embodied in the
female principle, Yemaya, who is present in the ocean; in the whirlwind, personified by the warrior
Oya, who precedes Chango into battle; in the active spirit of community building, friendship, and
love (one must work at friendship and fight for loved ones) that are reflected in Ochun, the orisha
of sweet water.

While developing contemporary methods of operation, modern warrior women have followed

Self-appointed
Latino leaders,
overwhelmingly
white and male
in both race

and consciousness,
continue to serve as
power brokers with

the European
American community.

the African warrior spirit — women such as Afro-Cuban Mariana Grajales, mother of revolutionary Antonio Maceo; Benedita da Silva, Brazilian congresswoman; Nydia Velasquez, member of the
U.S. House of Representatives; Dr. Antonia Pantoja, founder of Aspira Inc., Universidad Boricua,
and Producir, a collective economic project in Puerto Rico; and so many others. Insisting upon
the inclusion of Puerto Rican and African culture as integral parts of the school curriculum, AfroPuertorriqueña Dr. Evelina Antonetty understood that identity, self-determination, and the development of our own organizations are critical our people’s survival. She created United Bronx
Parents to provide parents with the understanding and training needed to control their communities and their children’s education. With other women and men she founded the People’s
Board of Education, charging the New York City Board of Education with educational genocide
of our young. Such institutions focus on a paradigm of affirmation and resistance and on a practice culturally centered in the historical legacy of our community.
My own work over the past twenty-four years has been grounded in my identification with my
own racial and cultural location in the historical continuum. During the early 1970s, after Community School Board 4 of East Harlem terminated funding for El Museo del Barrio, I was
involved in founding Amigos del Museo del Barrio, Inc., which today is the museum’s governing
body. I was also a founder of The Association of Hispanic Arts (though I disagreed with the use of
the term hispanic, I was outvoted by the other ten founders). It was clear that we needed.a networking/information/service agency that could define, negotiate, and advocate a common-ground
Latino perspective — an agency that would protect the discrete space of each of our cultures
while politically presenting a common aesthetic/cultural agenda based on criteria of excellence
and value established by our own communities. To dislocate Eurocentric-American “universal”
perceptions and practices, it was and is necessary to identify, promote, document, and celebrate
the pluriversal perspectives of the global cultures that form our national ethos. In creating the
Franklin H. Williams Caribbean Cultural Center/African Diaspora Institute, the concept was and
continues to be the conscious linking of African-based cultures. The internationalist Pan-African
world view reflected in the Center’s work is grounded in the unifying belief systems and philosophical vision that travelled to the Americas in the bodies of enslaved Africans. The Africanbased expressions manifested in contemporary cultures throughout the Americas speak to the
power of these images and practices to assist in maintaining our communities and reflecting their
historical and contemporary realities. In order to understand the heritages that are part of the
Latino experience — Native American, Asian, European, and East Indian — the Center has
forged networks and projects, such as national and international forums, to reunite these communities. Our focus on the development of policies that reflect the right to culture, equity, and a
pluriversal standard of excellence has motivated the creation of the International Network for
Cultural Equity.
The political activism of the Young Lords Party and the militant Puerto Rican Student Union are
models of this same cimarrón spirit that we must continue to internalize in order to achieve
racial and cultural liberation, an end to our marginalization through the active dislocation of
Eurocentered paradigms. African Latino communities have always understood the need to build
organizations that reflect a dual purpose, and it is not an accident that the most powerful organizations we have built as a community have been created by African descendants, both women and
men. Their clarity regarding racial and cultural issues has made it possible for them to construct
theory and praxis inclusive of our primary concerns, to develop a national stance and oppose an
integrationist stance. This cimarrón spirit of affirmation and resistance is, in my opinion, the
proper model for our community to follow, the way for us to thrive.

HERESIES 82

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In the process of remaining racially, culturally, and politically grounded, we African Latina/os

LA LUCHA CONTINUA

must provide our children and future generations with a philosophical and historical context
that can frame our contemporary reality in the barrios as well as in European American settings. Of greatest importance is ensuring that systems of survival and strategies for the future
are intrinsic to our communities so that we are able to safeguard present and future generations, who are at greater risk than we were two generations ago. The possibility of genocide is
real when poverty, joblessness, and health risks are escalating in our communities at a faster
rate than within any other cultural group.
Our young who are fighting the present racial and cultural wars must hear us document
and speak on our own such experiences in order not to feel isolated as they become confronted
by increasingly overt racism, discrimination, glass ceilings, and increasingly limited access to the
few opportunities we were able to achieve during the late 1960s and 1970s as part of the Black
Power movement. Students are hungry for historical information, a philosophical framework,
successful methods for working together .to achieve common objectives, the identification of
sheroes and heroes who can serve as mentors and advisors. It is our responsibility — those of us
who know that we are of color, that we are not hispanic, that we have a rich legacy of African
warriors — to become part of this self-definition and community affirmation. It is empowering
and invigorating for me to have increasingly been invited to participate in joint activities in many
parts of New York State by Latino, Caribbean, and African American college students actively
seeking to unite and understand the common historical, racial, and cultural linkages we share.
The Northeastern Unity Conference of Fuerza Latina, organized by students at SUNY-Albany;
the African Diaspora Week activities at Cornell; and the Unity African-Latino Conference at
SUNY-Binghamton all reflect the sense that our Latino-ness is broad and must be inclusive, part
of an overall struggle for equity and equality with other communities.
Envisioning a future in which the African descendant Latino community will thrive
requires that our thinkers, our parents, our community activists, and our youth come together in
work sessions to hammer out an action agenda informed by our present conditions. Certainly a
Latino bill of rights and constitution are not out of the question. Various communities have exercised self-determination concerning their interests and their relationships with other communities. So must we. Because of our racial and cultural diversity we should be able to forge an inclusive system that respects differences and safeguards our racial, social, human, cultural, and
political rights within a nonhegemonic framework. We need to strengthen Puerto Rican,
Caribbean, and African Studies departments in colleges and universities and establish more of the
kinds of independent cultural, educational, social, legal, health, and other organizations that
together form a strong community infrastructure. Our most vital organizations have been influenced, built, and directed by Latina women, and we must nurture this tradition. Other groups
have built institutions to speak to their struggles and their survival issues, to ensure that society
does not forget or ignore their presence, does not repeat its wrongs. So must we build, build, and
continue to build the contemporary quilombos and palenques of our communities. Our young
women must continue the work of forging spaces of affirmation and resistance as a method of
survival. Ashé — may it be so.

Our need to

continue developing
sacred spaces
of resistance
and affirmation

increases as our
economic resources
Notes

shrink.

1. Centro de Investigaciones Historicas — Universidad de Puerto Rico Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. E! Proceso
Abolicionista en Puerto Rico: Documentos Para Su Estudio. Vol. 1, La Institución de la Esclavitud y su Crisis: 1823—1873.
2. Thompson, Vincent Bakpetu. The Making of the African Diaspora in the Americas 1441—1900. New York: Longman, 1987.
3. Campbell, Mavis C. The Maroons of Jamaica 1655—1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration & Betrayal. Trenton, N.J.:
Africa World Press, 1990.
4. Price, Richard, ed. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.

HERESIES 83

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QUISQUEYA HENRIQUEZ

Catalina Parra

INVERNA LOCKPEZ

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons

CONSUELO CASTAÑEDA

T
Inverna
Lillian Mulero

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let th

THE E(X)TERNAL DEB!

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session and under the sway of the United States of America, four

Y) eefe oe CNT R aE n laia 3 force of American

I C O S l ASS i

arms on land and sea (Cuba and The Philippine Islands); one has

American assistance, advice and dominance in the organization of

her new life (Puerto Rico); one has come to us of her own free will,
to join the western republic and obtain greater measure of prosperity, progress and security (The Hawaiian Islands) . .….
For good or ill, the United States has entered upon a colonial policy,
a policy of expansion, a policy which forces us into the position of a
the Eastern Question. It is now too late to turn back...

RRRA Ailia
Our New Possessions, 1898

INVERNA LOCKPEZ
Our New Possessions

HERESIES

87

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Umbilical Cord, 1991 (detail).

MARIA MADALENA CAMPOS-PONS
Umbilical Cord

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reyel lanle F anlagt: eeit
Idénticas heridas, accidentes,
destrucciónes y resurgimientos.
Cada una de nosotras
atravesada por infinitos caminos,
cruces de aguas, remolinos fluviales.

Nosotras somos la misma cosa.
Con iguales dolores que estallan sin avisos.
Somos la imagen extendida y lineal
que proyectamos las unas a las otras.

Grandma
MARIA

AFRICA

All of us women are the same.
Identical wounds and accidents,
equal havoc and recovery.
An infinite number of roads
and rivers of swirling waters

have crossed our paths.

All of us women are the same.
We share our sudden bursts of pain.
A straight and narrow line
connects us all into a single image.

HERESIES , k)

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1991
b & w photographs.

HERESIES

90

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招 ﹒ 一 / y
( 『

(OfJo HMacer LJna Opra de Arte Hoy

心

HERESIES

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ere .

yet |
CELINA ROMANY
Whenever | am called upon to set forth intellectual analyses imbued with feeling and to write them
down in English, | experience unease, defiance. Those feelings that ultimately make intellectual categories
meaningful call for Spanish-only — at least for the moment. Maybe time spent in this country will see a
Celina with bilingual dreams flourish. Maybe my maternal experience will enable me to give birth to a bilingual soul.

I surprise myself. During the last five years | have been in America’s academia, using English to address
topics that are dear to me, yet | have only now discovered that | am letting just a glimpse of light through a
crack in my window and that it will be a while before | open it. I have discovered that my exposition is
rather limited. Taking advantage of intellectual theories in vogue, | filter out a few drops of my own version.
A Latin American woman born in a colony, who attempts to address her enlightened colonizers on their
own turf and with their very own linguistic arsenal, I speak about the ravages of colonization. A close friend
of mine reminds me that this has already been done. I don’t reject that possibility, but as Fanon knew so
well, a colonized mentality is a minefield, and the mines are hard to deactivate.
My Puerto Rican students in New York City confront me daily with the transcultured mentality of
colonial migrants. The double burden with which they face racism in their daily lives has wounded them
deeply. I am classified as an exotic bird, dressed in the attractive plumage of the role model they need in
order to healthe deep pain of their migration. They feel proud of the recognition that the colonizers afford
me. During my Jurisprudence class — a class predestined for the white élites from here — my students lavish
gratitude on me when they realize that they too can think, that a critique of law arising out of their marginal
experience counts very much indeed.

HERESIES

93

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Postmodernism has dethroned essential identities, has turned them into archaeological material. With
the dis-covery of the subject's positionality we have entered a stage in which anything goes. To discuss
oppressed/oppressors, with its concomitant binary oppositions, or to speak of linear cause-and-effect underestimates the complexity of economic and political relationships. From my self-imposed exile's position, | feel
like a tropical creature, and now, from here, | attempt to make sense of.my monolingual emotions while in
my colonized schizophrenic psyche | sail on the colonizer's metropolitan waters guided by a bilingual intellect.
My privileged exile unfolds as a colonized woman's experience. It allows me to write my own version of
La Guagua Aerea (“Midnight Airbus”), Luis Rafael Sanchez's excellent rendition of Puerto Rican migration. It
confirms for me the experience of otherness best expressed in the experience of a woman born in the 1950s
in a colony, the experience of being neither here nor there. It parts ways with its typical counterparts, since
almost half of all Puerto Ricans reside outside their native Island. Mine is a privileged exile because it did not
involve riding the Island's postwar migratory wave, when thousands of its children bailed out toward salvation
from their misery under the slogan “Operation Bootstrap.”
I do not wish to indulge in recounting the experiences of an affirmative action brownie, the many condescending looks cast by my fellow Latin Americans who fail to understand that Puerto Rico is a Caribbean
nation with strong Latin American ties, or the astonishment of North American feminists who fail to grasp my
persistent criticism of their universal premises about women, nor do | wish to linger on my Lone Ranger status in law school circles. Exotic adventures they are, and with them, a new field of wounds.
One thing at a time. Now that | am neither here nor there, I would rather address my other wounds,
those | have in common with my Puerto Rican students without really sharing them — for instance, MaryLou-from-Ohio, a girl who moved into my neighborhood in 1958 and whom | can't seem to get off my mind. |
remember Mary-Lou-from-Ohio befriending a child in the Catholic school her parents had chosen for its topnotch curriculum in English. Mary-Lou-from-Ohio's friend is a diligent student who receives good grades in
English and communicates in street slang with a heavy Puerto Rican accent. She hates her accent and herself.
Mary-Lou-from-Ohio's father, a general manager at Woolworth's, receives VIP treatment from Islanders.
Ohio gains stature in a well-to-do neighborhood in Rio Piedras, and Mary-Lou-from-Ohio lands in its most
luxurious house, built on a former sugarcane plantation that was eventually parceled up for the sake of a
builder's profits — a foretaste of the Island's modernization.

Being neither here nor there, he girl-woman who has a knack for languages and
studies in U.S. centers of learning holds onto the remarkable accent with which she once talked to MaryLou-from-Ohio.

Being neither here nor there, the girl-woman learns about North America’s heroes and
their historic feats, with no mention of the history of resistance of her invaded countty, even after years of
that penetration known only to the rapist.
Being neither here nor there, she recalls her sexual awakening, a trapeze of mixed messages — dancing the pirouettes demanded by the liberal development of an American citizen, dealing all
the while with the sexual repression demanded of Puerto Rico’s young women.

Being neither here nor there, viewing the front-page photograph in the San Juan
English-only newspaper, which depicted the oath-of-office ceremony of a new naval commander on
assignment to the Island, accompanied by his doting wife showing off her wide-brimmed hat in the style
of Princess Di, she remembers how much the commander resembled the big movie star who made motherCelina swoon. He was a tall North American, blond and ethereal, stationed in the Island’s best neighborhood, occupied by the United States Armed Forces.

HERESIES %94

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Being neither here nor there, she tries to explain to her International Law students how Borinquen passed from the status of war booty to that of Free Associated State via an
imposed American citizenship and how the occupied Island freely chooses (a situation that outside of
legal mythology takes on dizzying connotations) a permanent union with the United States, with the
nod of the United Nations. She tells of a “compact” through which the colony on the one hand and the
metropolis” on the other reach an agreement that would provide the former its own limited form of government. The compact is ratified by a 1952 referendum in which the colonized people give their consent
and approval to the constitution of the Estado Libre Asociado — a Free Associated State whose political structure dictates that all U.S. federal laws reign supreme and allow passage of local laws insofar as
the latter do not conflict with the former, thus controlling the economy, international relations, labor
relations, immigration, environmental policies, and so on.

Being neither here nor there, the repeated attempts to redefine the Estado Libre
Asociado turn into a pitiful circus, culminating in the circus maximus featuring the plebiscite bill. The
almighty U.S. Congress determines the rules of the game in a decision-making process that supposedly
(and once again with the people’s consent) would definitively decide its status in the sort of electoral climate that can prevail only on an island whose majority depends on federal public assistance — an electorate whose daily lives are best represented by an alarming set of statistics pertaining to alcoholism, drug
addiction, and criminality, all of which give expression to a mounting process of social decay. The
plebiscite will turn the country into either the 51st state, a refurbished Estado Libre Asociado, or an
independent nation.

Being neither here nor there, those from over here clamor for a ticket to the circus with a passion that wilts in the struggle for participation in the American political process, which
daily confirms their second-class citizenship, while those over there, staggering in the peculiar ambiguity brought on by colonial hurricane winds, claim the show is sold out.

Being neither here nor there, the circus maximus cancels its performance, forced by
the resistance of metropolitan lawmakers who dread the idea of a possible state made up of Caribbean
mulattos who defend their culture and language (a state that threatens to have more representatives in
Congress than many other states, thereby doubling its qualifications for federal public assistance programs), or of an updated Estado Libre Asociado with tax privileges not enjoyed by other states, or of an
independent country that would challenge U.S. military presence on the Island.

Being neither here nor there, the colonial supervisors of the day, who advocate a
refurbished Free Associated State, strike back, shielded behind a smoke screen of cultural and nationalistic
values, by formally establishing Spanish-only — that is to say, Spanish — as the official language of
the Puerto Rican nation. Hispanophilia overtakes the Island, best represented by the Principe de
Asturias, a prestigious Spanish literary prize awarded upon the approval of the Spanish-only legislation;
by 90 percent of the government’s TV programming coming from Spain; and by a million-dollar pavilion
at the 1992 Seville Fair commemorating the Fifth Centennial of America’s Discovery. This sentimentalized love of things Hispanic also represents the legacy of an antiseptic nationalism reluctant to get contaminated by the vital forms of resistance manifested by the popular culture of the nation’s working classes.

Being neither here nor there, I tell my students here about sexism-in-the-colony,
the Macondian relationships among a male metropolis, male colonizers, and colonized males, revealing the
socialization for dependence and passivity felt by every female, which takes on special dimensions in the
colonial setting. Mothers pass on the mess, and fathers transmit patriarchy’s explosive tango alongside
colonized otherness, provided these fathers have not already flown away. Domestic violence, the Danteesque labyrinth in which colonized patriarchy ambulates, brings shame to Horkheimer’s treatise on how
the oedipal struggle, in its search for authority, is transferred to the sphere of public life. A surreal existence
possesses even the liberation movements, which take on sexist overtones in full caudillo style. Feminist theory and
practice, chock full of color, pattern, and design, threaten the superficial coherence of the liberation uniform.

HERESIES 95

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The positionality of liberation movements underscores the need to refer to postmodernist jargon, to the multiplicity of centers, to the intersection of the subject's positions. Dreams come in handy. Dreams of the neither-here-nor-there type are particularly telling, especially feminist ones. Take, for example, the recurring one
in which | appear as a Caribbean alchemist, surrounded by independence leaders, caudillos, and patriarchs:
I pass around what seems to be a potion with a strong mango taste. It enables me to
become visible after many long hours of anxious invisibility. I speak. I underscore the complexities in dealing with gender subordination in the colony, pointing out how the feminism |
claim can contribute to both the theoretical conceptualization and the praxis of the struggle
for independence. I talk about the need for such reevaluation as well as about my personal
lack of sympathy for a leadership that sets a patriarchal tone in both style and content. |
articulate my apprehensions and fears with respect to life in postindependence, inquiring
where we, daughters of the underclass generated by years as a Caribbean K-Mart showcase,
would be. A leader-with-a-condescending-look replies by alluding to my conceptual misunderstanding. I ought to take stock of the fragile commitment of Puerto Rican feminists to the
Island's independence. My fears are yet another instance of the disengagement typically
manifested by privileged women intellectuals. In other words, I am looking for trouble. Maleinflicted trouble, I suppose.
With a little help from my mango potion, I appeal for the elimination of vulgar reductionist formulas, for the need to approach culture with the rigor its complexity merits — a complexity
that, on the one hand, makes us recognize the need to systematically defend our nation’s cultural values, while, on the other, demands their problematization, given their collaboration and
complicity with patriarchy; a complexity that requires unmasking the unhappy marriage of
patriarchy and cultural freedom. Just like other women on the planet, I have experienced (l go
on talking deliriously, not even stopping to catch my breath, afraid that my potion will run its
course and | will be consigned again to the realm of the invisible) culture and national values
being routinely used to justify and legitimate oppression of the worst kind..
I remind them of the historical context, a fin de siècle in which it is becoming increasingly difficult to stage any liberation struggle, given the successfully packaged, undisputed victory of liberal capitalism. A high official makes a sour face, signaling the upcoming end of Operation
Potion. I decide to color my speech with a selection of lullabies to slow down the retum from
what seems to be a collective hypnotic trance. In time with their sweet rhythms | ask how the
Puerto Rican liberation project contemplates translating the personal into the political. I underline the necessity of broadening the theoretical/practical foundations, making them inclusive
enough for those who repeatedly experience multiple subordination. | stress the need to elaborate either an inclusive script or scripts that interact and intersect with one another.

Fortunately | am in the habit of waking up before being silenced once more. There is no doubt
that at this stage of the game, the pieces of the puzzle that make up the colonized experience of a
Puerto Rican woman have been fitted into place. Perhaps in the near future my neither-here-northereness will allow me to translate it all into a bilingual discourse.

Í An earlier version of this article was published in Callaloo 15:4 (1992): 1034-1038. Special thanks were
given to Virginia Moore for her translation assistance.
2 The term metropolis means the colonizing country.

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Having lived in the United States since 1980, I was
struck to discover upon my arrival that I am a Latina. I was
born in São Paulo, Brazil, and from 1971 to 1978 was a polit-

ical exile in Paris, where as a sociology student I was
exposed to the ferment and speculation that resulted in
what is today called postmodernist thinking. Are we once
more getting trapped in what Roland Barthes used to call
“the disease of thinking in essences”? | tend to perceive all

these conceptual meanderings as laborious ways to escape
the apparently unthinkable political perplexities of our time.
I’m also stunned to see the extent to which artistic products
tend to display themselves as the embodiment of a peculiar
sort of linguistic consciousness looking to explore, identify,
or manufacture signifiers of verbal discourse.
Women of my generation are survivors of many decades

of exposure to a binary approach to critical thinking, a

edited by MIRTES ZWIERZYNSKI
MARILYN CORTÉS

recent expression of which seems to be the opposition

MONTSERRAT ALSINA

between essentialist and deconstructionist. It reminds me of

BEATRIZ LEDESMA

the naive oppositions we used to contront

in the past — theory vs. practice,
material vs. spiritual, etc. — as though
the essentiality of the world would lie
in their resolution or synthesis. We'd

better remind ourselves how these
fragile and ephemeral dualistic novel-

ties led in most cases to a well
behaved nihilism that was never
able to withstand the full consequences of its premises. Isn't it
high time to dare to confront politics again? Shouldn't we be searching
for a wholeness that is political in nature
and expresses itself through a vision of radical social reform

shared commitment to struggle. For this issue of Heresies

and personal transformation? Our living space looks like a

I have invited three such artists — Montserrat Alsina, Mari-

territory in which the clamor of words appears to be more

lyn Cortés, and Beatriz Ledesma — to discuss their

frightening than all the possible ways to be silent.

experiences as Latina artists involved in community

To survive transplanting | first had to acknowledge

work.There is certainly a generational gap between myself
and them, a sort of ideological break withthe way the

place for struggle and discovery. I immersed myself in com-

world has been únderstood by women of my generation,

munity art in order to work with evolving, marginalized

whose perception and consciousness translated themselves

urban communities through a process of participatory

into thè language of the traditional left. We struggled to

research. I had to make sense of the diversity of my cultur-

change History, while they are struggling to change daily

al experiences and interrogate my childhood and my lan-

life. Today they bring some of the same passion and

gtage for meaning. The work of women artists as well pro-

urgency to working with and within communities in which

foundly influenced my view of the world.

empowerment is the issue, while I have had to de-ideolo-

Ån important part of this process has been talking to

gize myself and thoroughly relearn the importance of daily

younger artists, to whom | look to inform our mutual

life and the way it translates itself through differences of

experiences of inventing/reinventing ourselves and our

age, race, and gender.

HERESIES 97

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Marilyn Cortés
Innocent Bystander No. 1, 1992
photo-etching, aquatint, 29" x 45".

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As with everything in American society today, I feel Im just
another minority, just another statistic. Here I am a Latina artist. I am
considered a woman of color and a minority.

egories. Latinas are tossed in a “melting
pot” with every other ethnic group in the U.S. today. Yes, we are
women of color, but we are all different in every aspect of our lives.

Spanish is my connection to my Latina sisters — South American, Central American, Caribbean, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican — and that is only if we exclude Portuguese and all the
indigenous dialects of the native peoples of these nations. Perhaps language is the only true link we have. Perhaps our true connection is in our struggle as minorities, as women artists defining
our unique identities and our unique experiences in a society
that insists on putting all of us in a mold.

I define my cultural identity as Mexican American. My parents came from
Mexico; I was born and grew up in
Chicago. I speak English as a first language and Spanish as a second language.
My cultural experiences have been many.
From the moment my mother died I
was a ward of the state. Between the
ages of two and seven I lived in an
orphanage. Between the ages of seven and
ten I lived with a Jewish family, an Italian
family, and a Puerto Rican family. My confrontation with my identity started with my
foster families, and my association with my
Mexican heritage began at age ten with my
stepmother, who spoke no English.
Throughout my childhood I experienced cultural ambiguity. Being uprooted was traumatic each time it happened.
The images I use in my artwork represent my constant need to
Innocent Bystander No. 2, 1992
photo-etching, aquatint, 29" x 45".

connect to my true beginnings, both spiritual and physical. My
work becomes therapeutic because it allows me to confront my
past and question my identity.
My need to connect with the Mexican community in Chicago
is an obvious one. I have made a conscious effort to learn about
my people and work within the community. Through my teaching art to Latino children I learn about their struggles, their
dreams, and their need to identify. I see they have the same
questions I had and still have. Through my work with the permanent collection of the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum I
am able not only to view but also to discuss works by other Mexican and Mexican American artists. All this is my inspiration, and
it feeds my curiosity and my need to express myself visually.

HERESIES

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Montserrat Alsina
Fragments: Combination 2, 1992
linocut, 8" x 11".

It was not until I arrived at
the School of the Art Institute of

truly needy, and the more well-to-do, that have influenced my work

Chicago, after having been born
in Venezuela and living in London, England, that I became
aware of the meaning of the term /atino and started to assimilate what it meant to be a latina here in the U.S.A. I saw the

a great deal.

My historical background, imy mestizo mother, my
father who escaped from the Spanish Civil War, and their family history are the basis of my search for independence from
the existing social consciousness, for spiritual awareness, and

hear comments like, “You'll get that job because you are a

for my Self. I believe this has allowed me to create art.

,

latina and a woman,” which infuriated me because I see
myself as more than that. I want to be looked at for what I
can offer, not for my ethnic background and gender.
Latino culture, such as it exists in the U.S.A., does not
influence my work. I am in search of showing the process of
my inner explorations as a woman, as a human being. My
self-imposed exile here has exposed me to a whole range of
groups, such as the feminists, the Native Americans, the

Being involved with the latino community and with
women’s groups of all colors has facilitated a dialogue, a
knowledge of other people’s history. We get to compare
common experiences, which makes us more conscious of
who we are. Working with latino children at the Marwen
Foundation has helped make me more aware of the Oppression of the so-called minorities. I feel that these minority
people are my family away from home.

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1I was born in Buenos Aires of parents who combined the
European with the South American Indian. Both of them were
singers; my father was also a carpenter. I

a spiritual, social, and political consciousness at a very early age, as well as an understanding of
community life as an important force for social change. From my
parents I learned the power of conviction in action, the language
of dreams and myths, and the importance of ritual and symbol.
I do not see or make a separation between art and life. I
became involved in art in the early 1970s as a way to protect my
freedom of thought from the political and social repression going on
in Argentina at that time. My artwork is a personal exploration into
the realm of the self, motivated by existential questions such as
how we become transformed and the effect of chaos and
destruction on the emotional and mental life of an individual.
My way of thinking is increasingly intuitive and nonlinear, and
it is strengthening my belief in
transcending differences in order
to attain significant change. Therefore, I am not interested in questions related to Latino culture and
its differences. The social split of
people on the basis of race or any
other characteristic, I believe, is a
game in a competitive system in
which differences are used as

weapons against one another
instead of as complementary pieces
of the big picture: the world. I
believe that the real separations
among all of us are those of class and
gender: rich/poor man/woman.
Latin American lives are colored by constant economic, social,
and political struggle and oppression; so are the lives of Blacks,
Caucasians, Asians, and Native American Indians.
I connect myself with any community interested in EMpow-

The Illumination of the Moon on the Water, 1993
acrylic, 36" x 36".
Photo: Bob Levy.

ering itself through art. Wherever there is a real need to be
addressed is where I like to work. I see and feel myself changed
by the mark that each community leaves on me, and of course
my own artwork then changes as well.
At present the world needs a sense of wholeness, of the essential unity of all people, creatures, and growing things of the Earth.
We need to restore the idea of the Great Ground before the linear “power over” mindset destroys life altogether. To me, this is
what is important and imperative to look into and work for.

HERESIES

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As two New York-based Latina artists frustrated
and angered by the isolation, exclusion from exhibitions, misconceptions, and stereotyping facing Latina
artists, we joined efforts in 1989 and put out a national
call for slides and writing for an exhibition to be sponsored by the Women’s Caucus for Art, which was
holding its 1990 annual conference in New York City.
More than one hundred Latina artists responded. The
exhibition we had planned developed into two exhibitions plus a bilingual poetry reading. Later that year
we mounted a third exhibition. The response from our
audiences was exhilarating, and we began to get attention from other artists as well as art administrators.
To date Vistas Latinas has presented eight exhibitions in the New York area, in both alternative spaces
and museums. We have chosen to work in a self-determined way rather than to become co-opted and
appropriated by a faddish mainstream.
Latinos are a hybrid people whose backgrounds
are rich with a mixture of many cultures. Yet the
stereotyping we encountered assumed that Latinos
were a homogeneous group and that our work fit into
categories predesignated for the art of a handful of
already accepted Latino artists, mostly male and
mostly dead.

We knew it would be imperative in 1992 to add
our Latina voices to the quincentenary observances.
Although many of us have cultural connections with
Europe, we also have a strong identification with the
indigenous people of the Americas because our roots
are here as well. Thus has been engendered an inclusive Latino culture, one that allows for diversity.
Four venues were offered to Vistas Latinas for a
series of exhibitions we called Adios, Columbus. We
successfully curated and mounted three of the shows.
The fourth, an installation designed for the Windows
Above the Circle site at New York Institute of Technology’s Manhattan campus, was in effect censored.
The imagery of the two artists, Ana Ferrer and Kukuli
Velarde, was so strong in its viewpoint, so committed

VISTAS

to the reporting of the historical fact of genocide, that
before the installation had been completed, the dean
at the Institute ordered that the work be dismantled.

HERESIES , 104

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Vistas Latinas is now in litigation to ensure that the
work be seen as intended and that NYIT, which had
entered into a contract with the artists, be made to
honor its obligation to exhibit the work uncensored.
Our original purpose having been to bring visibility to Latina artists, Vistas Latinas has become a project involving not only artists but also art historians
and curators. The response from Latina art professionals has been extremely supportive, yet we have
encountered a reluctance on the part of a few artists
to be included in all-women or all-Latina shows. Given
all that has occurred in the last two decades, do these
artists really believe that not identifying as Other will
improve their chances for recognition or that identifying as Other will stigmatize them? They may believe
the myth that an artist will be judged solely by the
“quality” of her work and that she doesn’t need the
support of a community of Latinas and artists, but
politics, networking, and socializing — as in other professions — have much to do with who benefits in the
art world.

There are also the few who will use an organization and its opportunities when it is fashionable and
convenient to be associated with it — in this case, as a
Latina artist. They use the group to advance themselves but seldom nurture the group in return. Our
philosophy is that, in the long run, group identity and
shared experiences are more empowering than the
gains of the individual. In the larger society, classism,
sexism, and individualism are means of promoting and
ensuring the success of a select few women, who are
supported financially and socially by a patriarchal system. But for the majority of Latina artists, who neither have nor want access to such support, grassroots
organizing is a more realistic approach to empowerment. Most participants in Vistas Latinas exhibitions
are working-class, many were raised poor, and about
half are lesbians. We find ourselves unable to partake
of the success that is more likely to be enjoyed by heterosexual women of the privileged classes, so the support we give one another does contribute to the
courage we need to go on with our work.
Regina Araujo Corritore & Miriam Hernández

HERESIES s 105

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An Invitation to the “Other America’”*
Maria Mar

Who discovered America? The Arahuacos,
Tainos, Caribes, Mayas, Incas, Hopis, Sioux,
Mohawk, Creeks, Cherokees, Iroquois, and all the
other Native Americans got here first. “What
Columbus really discovered was... an old world,
long populated by numerous and diverse peoples
with cultures as distinct, vibrant, and worthy as any
to be found in Europe ... Only recently, in fact,
have we come to realize that what Columbus did in
1492 was to link two old worlds, creating one
new world,” suggest Carolyn Margolis and Herman
Viola in Seeds of Change, published in 1991 by
the Smithsonian.
The tragedy of warfare is that in the meeting
of two worlds, the one that has spent more time
training for destruction usually wins and proceeds
to wipe out, devalue, and steal from the creative
work of the defeated. So it was in the First Inva-

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Idaljiza Liz Untitled, 1989, sepia-toned photograph. sion of the Americas, also known as the Discovery

or the Conquest. The Europeans did not under-

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stand the value of the cultures they had found.

D Many did not see the Indians as people (dehuman-

L izing the Other is a prerequisite for prejudice, and

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rejudice is a tool for exploitation). Convinced of

t the inferiority of the “savages” culture and of the
8

T barbarity of their religion, the Europeans found
justifications for the massacre of the natives, the

. lundering of their resources, and the devastation

D of their environment.

D This seems all too familiar to any Latino in the

s

v U.S. We have been the victims of the Second Invae sion of the Americas. It is the belief in our inferi-

s ority — this time under the name of underdevel-

e? opment — that justifies military invasion, political
2 interference, and the scavenging of our natural and
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human resources. When, drained and persecuted,
siders who have come to take away the work and
benefits of the “American” workers — as if we
were not American too. (Everyone seems to forget

D we then move to this country, we are seen as out-

e about South and Central America, about the
. = Caribbean, and, even in North America, about

Alicia Porcel de Peralta Beware of Dogs, 1992, ink on paper, 11" x 14". Canada as well.)

HERESIES 106

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Just as the Europeans ignored the achievements of the Indians and could not even imagine
that the Indians could offer them anything of aesthetic or cultural value, we Latinos are faced with a
mainstream that ignores Our contributions, steals
our innovations, and blocks our progress — all in
the name of Old World values. This country seems
to forget that it once called itself the New World. It
is like a young girl who, upon waking each morning, steals a look at herself in her aged stepmother’s mirror. After a while, she sees in the mirror
not her own image, but rather she sees the image
of the old woman.

have found their way into our blood as their legacy
was passed on to us. In my altar of the goddesses I
have a Catholic statue of Caridad del Cobre, whose
Yoruba name is Ochun. I have an African Yemaya,
and I also have Oya, a woman warrior, one of the
Yoruba orishas — which are called Santos by the
Latinos, for African slaves in the Caribbean were
forbidden to carry out their religious practices and
learned to fuse the images of their Orishas with
those of the Catholic saints. But Oya is also Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and war. My
aunt Fanny, who knows nothing about these cul-

We are the New America, the descendants of
the two old worlds colliding — yet it was more
than two. In our veins run Africa, Europe, and

tures, gave it to me. She loved the way the woman
stood tall and dignified, “con to’ los hierros” (“with
all she has”). This syncretism is not atypical of the

HERESIES

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: the laye s of invisibility put upon us through
racial, cultural, and national oppression. Vistas
Latinas offers Latin American women artists an
PP

for Adios, Columbus.

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Апа Реғғег Ѕађег Ѕех ѕегіеѕ: Веаг, 1993.

Апа Реғғег Ѕађег Ѕех ѕегіеѕ: Егопі, 1993.

Апа Ееггег

НЕВЕЅІЕ$ 109

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Етта АІмаге Рійеіго

Гогепа Сагсіа-Јојо!Іа

Оеаһ Мопѓоуа

Магісга Аггаѕёіа

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Killing one’s children is generally considered a
depraved violation of parental love and responsibility. Like
incest, murdering one’s offspring is universally abhorred as a

end to have emerged from the era of the Spanish
Conquest of Tenochtítlán (now Mexico City) in 1521. Many
historians and folklorists consider the indigenous woman La

concept even if the taboo has been violated with astonishing

Malinche, who was given by her chief to the Spanish con-

frequency throughout history (René Girard, Violence and the

queror Hernán Cortés, as the historical source for La Llorona.

Sacred, p. 77). Indeed, it is that violation which, at least in part,
gave rise to the taboo. In what are still the rare cases in recent
decades of mothers killing their children, insanity is automatically assumed and usually proven to explain the horror.
How paradoxical, then, that one of the most vigorous folk
legends among Mexicans and Mexican Americans — people
whose cultures place high premium on mi madre, la familia y el
hogar (mother, family, and home) — is the story of La Llorona,
the Weeping Woman who kills (or, in some versions, abandons) her children and forever after wanders the world in
punishing anguish for her sins.
The mythic Weeping Woman of Mexican-Chicana/o! cul-

Growing up in New Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s, four
hundred years after the Conquest, I heard stories of La
Llorona that are still told today, persisting even in the era of
“boy toy” Madonnas, Murphy Browns, and a few Gloria
Molinas, although the tale’s power to scare may have become
weakened by the commonplace fact of mass murders and child
abuse. What explains the paradox and persistence of this tale
even in the late twentieth century? Does the bone-chilling
impact of her story on impressionable young minds make it
indelible? Surely what I was told about her when I was a child
is unforgettable.
I recall my mother struggling to raise eight children

ture, La Llorona is, along with the Virgin of Guadalupe,

almost singlehandedly (my father nearly always worked out of

arguably the most persistent and well-known mestizo folk leg-

town) and using La Llorona as a very effective disciplinary

HERESIES III

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instrument. She would warn us, usually in Spanish, to “settle
down and behave, or Lia Lloronawill come and get you. Listen,
I think I hear her outside . . .” Her voice would drift off softly,
eerily, and we would immediately cease our rambunctious
behavior, look toward the windows and doors, and strain to
hear what I clearly remember as the awful bruja’s plaintive
moaning. Is it imagination or memory (or both) that recalls
the childhood terror? “She’s missing her babies and crying
again, and she needs someone just like you to take with her. And
remember, she’s not going to put up with what I do, uh-uh,
she’ll drown you too, just like that [snap!] — like she drowned
her own babies.” Invariably effective, the ominous threat of
the unseen Llorona lurking dangerously outside quieted our
fussing, because we didn’t want the brujamala to hear us and
realize that, just behind a flimsy door, sat desirable children for
the taking. Later on, it occurred to me that she wouldn’t have
been interested in brats like us anyway, but in my preschool
innocence I could think of us only as very easy prey, for surely,
in her annoyance with our behavior, Mamá wouldn’t even have
bothered to save us.
Other versions of the always evolving legend were at hand
as we grew up and struggled for independence and self-identiMexican Woman, Elisa, 1924

ty. Of course, as adolescents we no longer believed Mamá’s
“superstitious crap,” as we became aware of what I now call,

platinum print, 8 7/8" x 6 3/4".
The Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Edward Weston.

con cariño, my mother’s strategic, if Machiavellian, methods of
kid control and self-preservation. Yet those grown-up versions
of La Llorona stay with me today as vividly as the others. One
tawdry form tells of a teenage girl who, disobeying her parents, sneaks away to a dance, is seduced by a handsome
stranger, and becomes pregnant. Aghast at her condition, she
conceals it until the child is born; then in fright and shame she
drowns her baby, runs away, and is doomed to the eternal,
tearful Llorona search. Another variation has as its antihero a
young, pretty, and very lonely mother whose husband is stationed in Korea. Succumbing to temptation, she leaves her
children untended to indulge in a night on the town. When
she returns, the children have disappeared. Ashamed to face
her family and husband, she spends the rest of her life crying
and searching for her kidnapped and/or murdered babies.
As an adult I have often exchanged Llorona tales with
other Chicanas/os in usually good-humored, though hardly
mock, amazement at our parents’ retrograde child-rearing tactics. One familiar rendering, whose sexist subtext is particularly blatant, involves a poor mestiza (half-Indian, half-Spanish

woman) who falls in love with an aristocratic criollo (Mexicanborn Spaniard) who, going against social convention, also falls
in love with her. Although social mores prevent their marrying,
he keeps her and their children in a house away from his people until the time comes when he must adhere to tradition and
marry an acceptable criolla. Understandably broken-hearted,
angry, and overcome with passion, the mestiza drowns their
children in a well and then commits suicide. When her soul
appears in heaven in search of her children, now angels, she is
expelled and condemned to earth to roam, childless and crying in eternal torture for her unpardonable sins. The tale ends
there, as of course it must to serve its function as populist propaganda intended to reinforce the patriarchy. Presumably the
highborn macho lives happily ever after with his proper family,
but even if he doesn’t, the key point is that he is the one who
lives — not she or the children — without permanent social
stigma for his conduct.
No longer frightening to me or anyone I know, young or
old, La Llorona nonetheless still evokes my intense passion,

HERESIES 112

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hence this article and accompanying poem. She makes me

Yes, I think it’s past time for her to cut her hair, put on

laugh when I’m not crying, makes me screamingly angry when

her Nikes and tie-dyed T-shirt, and get a life — at least, that’s

I’m not mute in sorrow at the remarkable efficacy of brute

how I would re-image her. So transformed, she would learn a

social power to define the terms of its perpetuation. The phal-

new walk to replace the head-down, bent-over crouch she’s

lic propaganda of this folklore’s face value are as obvious —

been doing for 400 years, and in the breezy, in-charge manner

and, in some versions, as banal — as tabloid headlines. On its

of artist Yolanda M. López’s twenty-first century Chicanas, she

face it teaches that girls get punished for conduct for which

would lead the radicals in organizing the quincentennial

men are rewarded; that pleasure, especially sexual gratification,

protests marking La Conquista de Mejico in 2021.

is sinful, that female independence and personal agency create

The first thing to stress in recuperating La Llorona for the

monsters capable of destroying even their offspring; that chil-

next century is that she and La Malinche received an especially

dren are handy pawns in the revenge chess of female jealousy;

bum his/torical rap. As Adelaida R. Del Castillo’s 1974 article

and other lessons of scapegoat morality.

(in Encuentro Femenil) and my own 1975 study on La Malinche

Like Greek mythology’s Medea, who also bears the stain

(in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 1980) have established,

of evil for maternal infanticide resulting from her love for a

there is no valid historical basis for malinchismo, the harsh

man who leaves her, La Llorona and her historical prototype,

Mexican concept of betrayal that emerged in the nineteenth

La Malinche, have served as convenient crucibles for their cul-

century and that bears her name. Women didn’t have the

tures’ coming to terms with conquest, sexual desire, incest,

political or military power to win or lose Mesoamerica to the

and the double-sided nature of love/hate. Seen as a scapegoat

Spaniards. Thus the image of La Malinche as traitor and

and a crucible, the Llorona legend begs for reconsideration

whore, which gave rise to the Llorona folk legend and which

and possible recuperation from what, in another context, his-

was memorialized by, among others, muralist José Clemente

torian Emma Perez calls inside e/ sitio y la lengua (the space and

Orozco and Nobel poet Octavio Paz in Labyrinth of Solitude

language) of the female subject, rather than from a

(1950), lacks legitimacy except as a reflection of masculinist

dominant/dominating male perspective. But can even such an

versions of power.

enlightened viewpoint save the Weeping Woman? Does she
even deserve a new image?

But why try to save the baby-killer of legend? Aren’t there
better uses of time and political resources than to try to recu-

dren. Variants differ as to the nature

reside; originally Aztlán was the name

Woman of Mexican legend, is consid-

of her offenses, but they usually

of the mythological northern home-

ered by many historians and folk-

include adultery, infanticide, or child

land of Mesoamerican ancestors,
analogous to the Garden of Eden, a

the Weeping

lorists as the mythic form of the his-

neglect, and sometimes homicidal

torical woman La Malinche (also

revenge, excessive hedonism, and

myth borrowed in the 1960s by Chi-

known as Doña Marina, Malinalli, and

self-indulgence as well. Often told as a

cana/Chicano activists eager to

Malintzin), who was given by her chief

bruja (witch) or ghost tale to coerce

recover indigenous roots). La Llorona

to assist Hernán Cortés in what

obedience from misbehaving children

and her historical prototype, La Mal-

resulted in his conquest of Mexico in

(e.g, she will steal them to replace

inche, have been interpreted as

1519—21. The hundreds of variants of

the babies she drowned) and overly

emblematic of the vanquished condi-

the Llorona tale share a kernel plot:

independent adolescent girls (e.g., her

tion and reputed fatalism of Mexico

as punishment for her misconduct a

agony will be theirs if they do not

and its people.

young, usually beautiful woman is

repress their sexual longings), the tale

condemned to wander (often by

has been recorded for centuries, and

rivers and other bodies of water) for-

it is reported throughout Mexico and

ever crying, unloved, and homeless, in

AmericAztlán (that is, in the United

grief-stricken search for her lost chil-

States wherever Mexican Americans

Adapted from Cordelia Candelaria’s
entry “La Llorona” for The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United
States.

HERESIES

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perate such a hopeless, worthless case? One very
important reason is that the same brush that
painted the Weeping Woman portrait in history
continues to apply its demeaning brushstrokes
of single-minded misogyny to contemporary
society. It’s past time that brush got a thorough cleaning and a fresh set of primary
paints to color women authentically en
route to the twenty-first century.
In addition, the tale’s tenacity within and
among el pueblo cannot be ignored. A major
' reason for its persistence is that La Llorona’s
” act of infanticide and/or child abandonment
has multiple interpretations that have been
overlooked or forgotten. For instance, the
legend can be interpreted fruitfully as a
“tender mercy,” a concept from biblical
folklore suggesting that within a corrupt
system of authoritarian power, even an act
of compassion can be brutal because it, too,
partakes of the dominant context of Ccorruption. The tale can thus be read as political
euthanasia, a woman’s conscious. attempt to
save her cherished children from their par-

ents’ awful fate. Like Toni Morrison’s
Beloved, in which infanticide is presented as a
slave mother’s desperate act of protection to
save her daughter from slavery, La Llorona
persists in folklore because its meanings are
multiple, not one-dimensional, and they have
the capacity to expose the very injustices that a
superficial reading of the tale seems to prefer. In
this vein, folklore scholar José Limón argues that
“La Llorona [is] a symbol that speaks to the course
of Greater Mexican [and Chicana/o] history and
does so for women in particular, but through the
idiom of women [it] also symbolizes the utopian
longing [for equality and justice] of the Greater Mexican
s folk masses” (Between Borders:

SY Essays on Mexicana/Chicana
History, 1990, p. 413).

Yolanda M. López Guadalupe series: Tableau Vivant, 1978. Photo: Mogul.

HERESIES 114

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Whether or not the iconography of folklore’s Weeping
Woman can be rehabilitated by radical poets, artists, and intellectuals and re/visioned as a resisting woman (like Antigone,
Sor Juana, Anne Hutchinson, Morrison’s Sethe, and even
Hillary Rodham-C,.), today the La Llorona tale can be interpreted
as a woman’s brave choice to will her own destiny by electing a
tragic fate rather than allow herself and her children to live
under the inescapable tyranny of masculinist privilege and
authoritarian despotism. Usually when men perform such
deeds they’re called heroes, especially if — as kings, presidents, and generals — they kill thousands of other people’s
children on battlefields. It is finally time to let go of a single,
narrow understanding of the tale and to see La Llorona instead
as an always evolving emblem of gender, sexuality, and power
— and, too, as another female victim of history’s tender mercies.

Í For gender inclusiveness, the term “Chicanas/ Chicanos” is used
here interchangeably with “Mexican Americans” even though it
usually suggests a more politically progressive social consciousness
than the latter. For brevity, “Chicana/o” and the plural form
“Chicanas/os” are used.

Coatlicue / Las Colorado
La Llorona, 1990.
Photo: Jean Claude Vasseux.

La luz es todo: light is crucial.

The reticence of her slow movements

Its tawny hues the weight of dusk

Remembers the tons of sleepless time

Sifted by random shreds of a retreating sun.

Pressed upon her weary flesh from shore

The soft curves of el río’s current

To shore. Bony hands press feeling, slowly,

Fills the early evening like thick brushstrokes
Of a watercolor drying darkest blue.
The splash of ripples

Into each toe one by one.

Fingertips damp back stray wisps of hair,
Loose threads of gray on a tight weave of black

As she bends to rinse tired feet

Blending into the night.

Paint her flesh an instant shine

Slow motion inscribes, too, a final image.

Bright as tears. Or hope.
Each haunted glance
persistent footsteps ‘round every shore
de Tehuantepec a Chapala
de Campeche a Culiacán
del río al río, del calor al frío

lavando llorando andando

She sinks into river’s reflection
Returns her babies outstretched hands to her,
Shivering cold and wet:
la hambre eterna.
from Arroyos to the Heart (Santa Monica, CA: Santa Monica College Press—Lalo Press, 1993).

HERESIES 115

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Notes on Contributors*

Juana Alicia is a San Francisco muralist, illustrator & printmaker currently working with 6
other artists on mural for the SF Bay Area
Women's Building & teaching at New College
of Calif. in the Art & Social Change Program.
Montserrat Alsina: Born in Venezuela 1962.
Lived in London, England. Got my MFA in performance at the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago. | teach art at a private school full-time.

Vanessa Fernandez: | am 18 years old,

Gallery, former president of National

still live with my mother (Esperanza Lara).

Association of Artists’ Organizations. Native of

*Ileana Fuentes is assistant director of the

Cuba, came to U.S. 1968. Recipient of an NEA

Latino Center at Rutgers University in NJ.

grant, two Creative Artist Program Services,

Ana Ferrer: As a Cuban bom artist my work

The grandparents of Yolanda M. López

a venue for all the different voices within me.

came to the U.S. from Mexico in 1918. YL is

Coco Fusco is a New York based writer,
curator and media artist.

Elia Arce is a conceptual and performance

A Ph.D. candidate in performance studies at

artist working in film and installation. Toured

NYU, performance/visual artist Guadalupe
García-Vásquez is currently exploring AfroMexican cultural traditions in the Atlantic and

Department (LAPD). She was raised in Costa

Pacific coastal regions of Mexico.

Rica and has lived in the U.S. for |1 years.

Martha E. Gimenez: | was bom in

*Santa Barraza co-founded Mujeres Artistas

Argentina where | studied law & sociology.

del Suroeste, a nonprofit Chicana/Latina visual

Ph.D. in sociology UCLA 1973. Now associate

art organization. She presently teaches at the

professor in Dept. of Soc. at Univ. of

School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1994

Colorado at Boulder. Has written numerous

Chicago's Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum

articles & book chapters on Marxist theory,

will present a retrospective of her work.

feminist theory & race/ethnic relations.

currently visiting lecturer in painting at Calif.
College of Arts and Crafts, and teaches drawing in Art:Practice Dept. at UC Berkeley.
Consuelo Luz produces & hosts the daily
nationally syndicated spanish radio program
“Buscando la Belleza." Other work includes
recordings of her poetry and songs, tin sculpture, adult and children's musical theater and a
novel-in-progress in Santa Fe.
Maria Mar is a writer-actress-director. She
was bom in Puerto Rico and resides in New
York City since 1978. She has written & performed numerous plays & poems on women,
gender issues and domestic violence.
Hanoi Medrano: I'm 16, I'm a student at

Miriam Basilio, bom in Puerto Rico, is pursuing a Ph.D. in art history at the Institute of

borondongo, borondongo le dio a bernave,

Fine Arts, NYU. She is a curatorial assistant at El

bernave le pegó a puchilanga le hechó burun-

Museo del Barrio.

danga y le hincha los pies.

Dina Bursztyn is a sculptor, writer, printmak-

and two Cintas Fellowships.

has sometimes been a personal diary, providing

with Bread and Puppet Theater and codirected
and performed with the Los Angeles Poverty

Artistic Director of INTAR Latin American

attend High School of Fashion Industries, and

*Dolores Guerrero-cruz: Bom in Rocky

Fashion Industries High School and at Cooper
Union in the Saturday Program.
*Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-bom artist, activist
and feminist, lived and worked in New York
and Rome. She died in 1985.

er, among other things. She was born in

Ford, Colorado; has lived in Los Angeles for 25

Mendoza, Argentina, and lives in NYC.

years. Involved with Self-Help Graphics and

Raquelín Mendieta: Cuban bom artist,

Art, an East L.A. community arts center dedi-

residing in New York State, arrived in the USA

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons is a
Cuban artist presently living in Boston. Her
work adäresses issues related to history, race,

cated to Latino art.
Marina Gutiérrez, borm 1954, lives and

gender, family. She is the recipient of the 1993-

works in New York. In addition to making art

94 Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe.

and working on public art projects, she teaches

Author of over 60 published titles including
Chicano Poetry: A Critical Introduction (1986) and
Seeking the Perfect Game: Baseball in American
Literature, Cordelia Candelaria is a tenured
full professor in the English Dept. at Arizona
State University.
Josely Carvalho: Brazilian-bom poet, visual
artist, and activist currently living in New York.
Consuelo Castañeda: Nació en la Habana
1958. Estudió en el Instituto Superior de Arte

Italy, acted in several Hollywood movies, lived
and photographed in Mexico with Edward

Claudia Hernández: Art historian specializing in Latin American art & issues.
Ester Hernández: | was bon and raised on
the westem slope of the Sierra Nevadas. For 20

ing the dignity, strength, experiences and dreams
of Chicanas through printmaking and pastels.
Michelle Hernandez: | am from Trinidad
and would like to use art in my future career.

many years. She presently holds a Rockefeller

Miriam Hernández: Bom in Puerto Rico,

Foundation grant.

began training as an artist in NYC in 1961. Co-

of Coatlicue/Las Colorado Theatre
Company, educate & entertain through person-

Weston, worked and traveled extensively for
the Communist party, was in Spain in 1939
during the civil war, and died in Mexico.
Lillian Mulero has exhibited her work at
Feature, Artists Space, Intar, and Grey Art
Galleries in NYC as well as in Boston, Chicago
and San Francisco.

Fanny Sanín was bom in Bogotá, Colombia,
and has lived in Mexico, London, and, since
1971, New York. Her work has been the subject of 31 international one-woman exhibitions.
Elaine Soto, Ph.D.: Puerto Rican artist-psychologist born and raised in New York.
Currently an artist in residence at Taller
Boricua/Puerto Rican Workshop and has private practice, both in NYC.
Merián Soto is a New York-based Puerto
Rican dancer and choreographer, committed
to supporting Latino new dance and performance work. She has collaborated and toured
extensively with visual artist Pepón Osorio.
Carla Stellweg lived and worked in Mexico for
over 25 years. Founded and edited first contemporary Latin American art magazine, Artes
Visuales,. 1987-88 was curator at Museum of
Contemporary Hispanic Art in NYC. 1989
started Carla Stellweg Latin American and
Contemporary Art Gallery in NYC.
Avwilda Sterling is a painter-performer-

since 1974. MFA Pratt Institute. Has received
various NEA choreographer's fellowships. Cofounder of Pisoton, a dance-theater group
based in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
May Stevens, a founding member of & frequent contributor to Heresies, is interested in
collaboration and crossing borders.
Gladys Triana: Bom 1937 in Camaguey,
Cuba. B.A., M.Ed., L.I. University. Cintas
Fellowship, 1993. Selected museum exhibitions
in Santo Domingo, 1991; Chile, Caracas &
Mexico, 1990.
*Carmelita Tropicana is a performance
artist living on New York's Lower East Side.
Kathy Vargas grew up in San Antonio,
Texas, where she presently works as Director
of the Visual Arts Program at Guadalupe
Cultural Arts Center. She has exhibited in U.S.,
Latin America, and Europe.

Lisa Navarro: |8-year-old Colombian-bom
art student.

ogist and poet who has lived in the U.S. for

Hortensia & Elvira Colorado (Chichimec)

Fellow and internationally known artist.
*Tina Modotti (1896-1942) was bom in

(ISA), en La Habana. Actualmente trabaja
como artista en Miami.

years | have been committed to visually depict-

actors/storytellers/writers, founding members

Bom 1943, Amalia Mesa-Bains is an installa-

tradition in contemporary art. She is a MacArthur

1977-1982. Luego trabaja como profesora en

*Mary Garcia Castro: Brazilian-bom sociol-

studied art at the University of lowa.

Saturday Program for teenagers.

el mismo Instituto hasta 1987. Actualmente
trabaja como artista en Miami.

Pan Project." Lived in lowa for 14 years and

tion artist who has pioneered the Chicano altar

1966. Graduada del Instituto Superior de Arte

Haymee Salas: | would like to say to everyone to understand the importance of origin.

dancer-choreographer performing her work

in 1961 with sister, Ana, as part of the "Peter

art and is director of the Cooper Union

Quisqueya Henriquez: Nació en la Habana,

University of New York Law School.
Susana Ruiz: Solo con tu mirada me dices
todo lo que quisiera saber.

Regina Vater, Brazilian artist who lives in U.S.
for more than |3 years, was a Guggenheim

Frances Negrón-Muntaner: Philadelphia
based Puerto Rican filmmaker and writer.

Fellow in 1980. Has shown in U.S., Europe &
Latin America. Her transmedia work is inspired

founder and co-curator of Vistas Latinas, an

Celeste Olalquiaga is a writer living in NYC.

by Brazilian roots & deals with images & con-

organization of Latina artists; and steering com-

She is currently at work on a book about kitsch.

cepts from both African & Amazon traditions.

mittee member of Coast to Coast National

*Gloria Claudia Ortíz was bom in Cali,

Viveca Vázquez is a Puertorican indepen-

Women Artists of Color.

Colombia. BFA, Marymount College,

dent experimental dance person. Active in

al story weaving family histories, political, social,

Maria Hinojosa: Award winning TV & radio

Tarrytown, NY. Worked as professional free-

cultural & sexual issues affecting Native women.

journalist. Originally from Mexico City, she

lance artist and illustrator in NYC for many

and performance in her native San Juan since

reports for National Public Radio and is the

years. Now lives in rural Pennsylvania.

the 1980s. Works as a mother, teacher,

Catalina Parra: Bom in Santiago, Chile. Lives

dancer, choreographer, producer and lecturer.

Regina Araujo Corritore: | am a scultore
who works in steel, an artist activist who co-

host of a local TV show about Latinos in NYC.

founded Vistas Latinas and is on the steering

Beatriz Ledesma: MAAT from the School

in New York since 1980.

committee of Coast to Coast.

of the Art Institute of Chicago. Argentine-

Alejandria Perez: I'm twenty years old, go

American living in Chicago since 1982, teaches

to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, am taking Art Ed.

Marilyn Cortés: Bom in Chicago 1963. of
Mexican parents. Received MFA from School of
the Art Institute at Chicago 1991. 1teach art to

art, practices art therapy, and gives lectures &
workshops on the healing power of art.

Alicia Porcel de Peralta: Born in Cordoba,

developing a community of alternative dance

Marta Moreno Vega: Executive Director,
Caribbean Cultural Center, NYC., and Ph.D.
candidate in African American studies, Temple
University.

Argentina in 1959; moved to New York in

Kukuli Velarde: Peruvian artist living in New

1990. Studied at Universidad Nacional de

York for the last 7 years.

Cordoba, degree in Art Education. Also

Cecilia Vicuña: Chilean poet & artist living in

Latino children for the Marwen Foundation and

Susana Torruella Leval: Art historian and

also work for Mexican Fine Art Center Museum

curator of contemporary art. Currently chief

as assistant permanent collection manager.

curator at El Museo del Barrio, NYC, &

worked in film, projection shows & installations.

New York. Most recent book: Unravelling Words

Liliana Porter: Bom in Buenos Aires,

& the Weaving of Water, Graywolf Press, 1992.

Ada Pilar Cruz: Sculptor working in New
York. She works as an artist-in-the-schools and
at community colleges and is a member of
Vistás Latinas.
Pura Cruz: Bom in Santurce, Puerto Rico —
came to New York as a toddler — raised and
educated in the U.S.A.
Cristina Emmanuel is a painter & mixedmedia artist who has recently lived in San
Francisco, Calif. and San Juan, Puerto Rico. She
has exhibited her work extensively in the
United States, the Caribbean & Europe.

Manhattan's representative on board of
Metropolitan Museum of Art. From 1985-87
was chief curator of Museum of Contemporary
Hispanic Art in SoHo. Came to NY from
Puerto Rico in 1970.
Ana Linnemann is a Brazilian sculptor and

Argentina — Resides in New York since 1964

Mirtes de Magalhaes Zwierzynski, born

— Painter, printmaker — Associate Professor,

in São Paulo, now living in Chicago, has created

Queens College — Represented in NY by

collaborative murals & sculptures throughout

Steinbaum-Krauss Gallery.
Sophie Rivera is a recipient of a 1989 New

Illinois. Has been art editor of Actualite de la
Formation Permanente; executive director of

designer who now lives in New York.

York Foundation for the Arts Individual Artist's

Visual and Pedagogical Programming Services

*The photographer Idaljiza Liz, bom in the

Fellowship in Photograhy. She has taught pho-

in São Paulo; and member of UNESCO pro-

Dominican Republic, recently left New York

tography in the South Bronx and Bedford Hills.

grams in Latin America & Africa.

City because of lack of work and moved to

Celina Romany is a poet, painter, journalist,

Paris, where she quickly found success.

and feminist theorist & activist in movement for

* All notes written by contributors except

Inverna Lockpez: Painter and sculptor,

Latino/a rights. Also Professor of Law at City

those preceded by an asterisk.

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Омї а апу шоло, ешволкацінд диавон -

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| ші ш
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