There is an historical trace of Latin American art criticism interrogating how imperial technology marks the ideologies of ‘progress’ and ‘vanguard’ in relation to art production. Marta Traba, when writing about the arts of the United States in the 1950’s and '60´s, argues that the artistic production of this country derived directly from the imperatives of the consumer society and was always related to the optimism of the ‘New Deal’ and the disillusions emerging in the post second world war period. The Argentinean historian affirms that artists employing technologies in the United States are loyal servants capable of constructing control mechanisms leading toward total militarism . With this historical reference, Latin American art historians and critics, when not understanding the intersection of class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality in the liberation process, could imagine U.S. Latina/o media artists as ‘servants of the imperial state’. If we add to this historical condition how the question of sexuality is addressed in Latin American and Latina/o social and civil right nationalistic movements, we can understand how U.S. Latina/o Queer Media Artists are doubly marginalized by these phallocentric oriented discourses and how their media practices have become a decolonizing manifestation traveling into multiple directions to assert our subjectivities.

 


Still from Negra Linda, Maria Cora          

 

We cannot deny the historical importance of Traba’s study and her militant posture. Her writing, produced in an era when Latin American art history was in the domain of men, and fighting to disassociate from European and North American art scenes, advises us of the importance of understanding the imperial relation with media technologies as we hear her words echoes of Walter Benjamin criticizing the mechanical reproduction of art. Rather that antagonized with Latin American art criticism, I would like to disrupt that line of discourse articulating how Latino queer media artists intervene critically, no only Traba´s argument, but also the imperial mechanism of technology, the neo-colonial apparatus, as well as the nationalistic male lefty rhetoric still employed in many Latin American and U.S. Latina/o communities.
          

I sketch at the end of this essay an organic historical database of audiovisual, sound, media and digital representations produced by Latin@s at the intersection of ethnicity, gender, sexuality and technology emerging in the U.S. Latina/o Diaspora since the late 1980´s until today.  I employ the term ‘queer’ for political reasons, not because I believe in defining one's sexuality as fixed categories. Therefore, I invite future generations to articulate new definitions for the diversity of our sexual practices alive in <<The Americas>>. Being queer proposes an identification originating within social subjectivity and the unconscious and its presence within the decolonization process allows me to present a subjective historical context where the artists here can be studied as information warriors demystifying not only the empire, but also technologies and social anthropological discourses about Latin@s. I have included works by artists such as Coco Fusco and Ela Troyano whom have never identified with ‘being queer’, but have employed queer theory in the articulation of their audiovisual discourses. Furthermore, I would like to point out how the present works of Latin@ queer makers such as Karim Aïnouz, Frances Negron-Muntaner, Alex Flores and myself have decentered from queer theory to integrate multivocal discourses around social cultural, colonialism, and land occupation issues, among others.
           

Historical evidence proves that our sexualities are not necessarily anchored in the encounter with Europe. Other references show how the colonization process marked a heterosexual normativity in the construction of Latina/o culture, permeating our liberation process.  Osa Hidalgo de la Riva, in her work Primitive and Proud (1992) opens a lead to understanding how native American cultures of The Americas relate to sexual diversity when she links the Olmecas with her lesbian Chicana experience. Jacquie Alexander, in her book Pedagogies of Crossing, points out how the Spanish conquistador Balboa, when arriving to the Caribbean, killed more than forty male cross dressers to deploy the need for establishing the heteropatriarchy ideology that emerged in Europe prior to the colonization of <<The Americas>> with the intricate marriage between the Judeo Christian religions, the state and the ruling class .
           

The colonization of our sexualities has been a systematic process that is still working within the subtle mechanisms installed in our Latinos communities, religion being one of the most effective forms of colonial subjugation. The already historical evidence of the brutal rape of our indigenous female population along with the killing of the native transgenders which Alexander references are located within a chronological colonial axis where we can observed the desexualization of African and Native deities in order to impose the heteropatriarchy normative in <<The Americas>>. As I pointed out in a previous essay: “Shango, the deity of the thunder in Yoruba mythology, a male deity well known for his sexual appetite, was converted in Cuba to Santa Barbara –a female Christian virgin. Oshun, the Yoruba deity of love and female sexuality and Atabey, the Taino deity mother of the water, fertility and protector of female and male sexuality, were converted in a syncretic colonial maneuver in La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre” . In her seminal analysis of transnational Chicana/o/Latina/o experience, Gloria Anzaldua exposed how Coatlicue and Tonanztzin, the serpent woman, symbol of fertility and growth for the Nahuas, were desexualized as they were converted into the myth of La Virgen de Guadalupe .
           

One could assume that with the coming of age of the sexual revolution and the fight against AIDS that prompted the queer movement in the 80’s and 90’s, the works of Latin@s queer media artists could find a better treatment within the so called “queer community”. When responding to Richard Fung´s presentation dealing with the representation of Asian men in porn at the conference How Do I look?, the first major critical space that looked at queer media representations, the late queer Latin@ media maker Ray Navarro stated: “… I’ve found a consistent theme running throughout gay white male porn of Latino men represented as either campesino or criminal. That is, it is focuses less on the body type–masculine, slight, or what ever–than on signifiers of class. It appears to be class fantasy collapsed with race fantasy, and in a way it parallels the actual power relation between Latino stars and the producers and distributors, most whom are white.”

 


           

Still from No Me Olvides, Raúl Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet

 

During the '90’s, the debates about multiculturalism demonstrated that systems of funding, distribution, programming and cultural recognition had systematically excluded Native American, Latina/os, women, African American, Asian Americans, gays and lesbians, the working class and the disabled communities. At the same time this discussion was taking place, I traveled across the United States, Canada and Europe showing my work and speaking on panels at major gay and lesbian film and video festivals. In most of these events I perceived how institutional multiculturalism perpetuated media racism within the queer media community. Still today, when looking at present catalogs of queer media festivals, I witness the works of Latin@ queer media artists grouped and employed at the festival to create a series of connections which are intrinsically related to racism. I experienced seeing my work, as well as the works of Marlon Riggs, Richard Fung and Mona Smith among others, presented in such a way as to distort the intention and cultural specificity of their pieces. The categorization of these works under the minority heading emphasized the racism these festivals were attacking. However, none of the works of which I speak deals specifically with the issue of racism in the gay community. Deep research into the way programming was executed in 1990 at New York’s New Festival, or The 10th Chicago Lesbian and Gay Film and Video Festival, which organized a screening around the theme Minority: Racism in the Gay Community/Homophobia in Minority Communities, or the Color Me Here panel at the 10th Annual Los Angeles International Gay and Lesbian Festival could provide the historical facts. At this last festival, queer media artists of color such as Cheryl Dunye, Dawn Sugg, Ming-Yuen Ma, Shari Frilot, Alfonso Moret, Thomas Allen Harris and myself not only experienced one of the most racist attitude enacted at any of these festivals, but we also learned that the festival had used our names to obtain funds from the city of Los Angeles and instead of placing us at hotels the way the festival did with the white gay media makers, we were asked to find a place to stay with friends. The reaction of the queer media artists of color was superb. After a brief meting, we decided to denounce the festival’s maneuvers at the panel and, in a performative gesture, I brought my hat to the festival director when speaking about the socio-economic conditions of queer media artists of color.
           

The language developed by the art grant agencies around multiculturalism gave the opportunity for these festivals to appropriate funding allocated for queer media artists of color. In their grant application, these festivals presented themselves as diverse and multicultural and after obtaining the money, the festivals programmed the works of queer media artists of color under the above mentioned titles, failing to understand the economic realities in communities of color and reinforcing the colonial racist mentality so ingrained in the white queer community. In a recent publication, Cathy J. Cohen starts her essay discussing stories of alleged racism at the New York based Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) pointing to the continuing practice of racism many of us still experience in the queer community.
           

The racism and sexism inherent in the gay community have forced us to reclaim our place within Latina/o communities. The history of the gay movement has rendered invisible the participation of Latina/os and African Americans, not mentioning that the ones confronting the police at Stonewall were the Latina/os and African American Queers. Lesbians are always relegated to a footnote.
           

Latina/o curators and scholars have directed their efforts to include our works in major media exhibitions and conferences. Queer Latin@ media works, as well as critical analysis of these works has been included in Latino Media Arts: Theory and Culture, organized by Chon Noriega, Lilian Jimenez and Ana M. Lopez at Film and Video Gallery, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York , New York in 1992; Latino Collaborative, an important media organization in New York City presented in 1993 Otras Cosas del Querer curated by Euridice Arratia; Screening Latinidad, a conference presentation at the Art Museum, Duke University, North Caroline, in February of 1994; the 10th Chicago Latino Film Festival in Chicago, Illinois showcased Representation, a curatorial project of Queer Latino video that I organized in 1994; Frances Negron-Muntaner curated in 1993 The Politics of Hyphenation: Latino Gay and Lesbian Independent Media for the Philadelphia based Neighborhood Film Video Project; David Olivares organized Encounter, a film and video program that included more than twenty five works from U.S. Latin@s, Latin American and Spanish media artists for the 18th San Francisco, Gay and Lesbian Festival; Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (QWOCMAP) organized in 2007 Espejo: A Closer Look - Queer Latina Shorts and major international festivals and media circuits such as 39th Robert Flaherty Seminar, 1992’s L.A. Freewaves, San Antonio CineFestival, the 11th Rio de Janerio Cine Festival and Toronto’s Cruzando Fronteras/Crossing Borders have showcased the works of Latin@ queer media artists.

 


           

 

Most of the works produced by Latin@ queer media artists dismantle pre-established notion of desire and search for a historical location where desire intersects with our ethnicities, communities and subjectivities. As Latino media artists, sexuality is not our only concern. Our works delineate our subjective location intercepting with a large cultural and socio- political context where issues such as violence, migration, bilingualism, exile, feminism, marginalization, family relations, gender politics, sexuality, desire, history and knowledge define the variable geometry of our media work. Any attempt to read our works with a narrow reference to ‘race’ or ‘sexuality’ perpetuates the very cords of the colonial system we have decentered.
           

The projects and media artists included in the database provide an expanded territory where further studies might emerge. The works presented here integrate the rational/emotional, the reflective/entertaining, the analytic/recreational, the local/global, the individual/ collective, and the informational/poetic in their narrative structures. These integrations strengthen the organizational capacity, the reflexive/expression, and the struggle for survival and pleasure, placing them in function of a socio-cultural transformation, agency the mechanism for liberating the unconscious.  One of the main concerns of Latin@ media artists is to activate the audience response, the informational process and its participation in the constructions of the media discourses, for we continue a history of media practice associated with Third Cinema and the New Latin American Cinema.


Traba, Marta. Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas, 1950-1970. Buenos Aires and Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Second Edition, 2005.

Alexander, Jacquie M. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005.

Ferrera-Balanquet, Raul. "Multiplying Radical Difference: Reading Latino Lesbian and Gay Audiovisual Discourse." Art PapersVol. 17, No. 5, Atlanta, Georgia.

Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderland/La Frontera, The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters-Aunt Lute, 1987.

"Discussion after Richard Fung’s Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn." How Do I Look?: Queer Film and Video. Ed. Bad Object-Choice. Seattle: Bay Press, 1991.

Cohen, Cathy J. "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" Black Queer Studies, Ed. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Anderson. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005.

 

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