Leticia Alvarado, Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Productions

Abstract

Reviewed by: Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Productions by Leticia Alvarado Yvette Chairez (bio) Leticia Alvarado, Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Productions. Duke University Press, 2018. Pp. 232. Alvarado opens her text with a look at the Dream 9, a group of young immigration activists in Mexico who marched in graduation caps and gowns to the US border and demanded to be let in. Their performance seems to announce to the public that they are educated, hard-working, law-abiding individuals capable of assimilating into US American culture. Conversely, as Alvarado explains, it is the “deployment of abjection as an irreverent aesthetic strategy … instead of the [usual] pride, bravery, and redemption on display by the Dream 9 … [that] unite the artists, performers, and cultural producers profiled in Abject Performances” (4). Chapter 1 offers an alternate interpretation of the work of Cuban exile artist Ana Mendieta. Alvarado, pulling from comments Mendieta made in interviews and other media, shows how her subject was forced to reckon with a sudden proximity to Blackness, and all the structural racism that came with it, after arriving in the United States at the impressionable age of thirteen. Alvarado particularly notices Mendieta’s early self-portraits in which the artist styles herself in ways that can be inferred as appropriating Black culture and mimicking Black features. These portraits, Alvarado explains, reference an abjection consigned to Mendieta by the [End Page 265] underlying anti-Blackness in both Cuban and US societies, a consignation she was attempting to understand, document, and dispose of through her art. I find this chapter incredibly important right now for its suggestion that aesthetics of abjection can be useful investigative tools for calling out the anti-Blackness steeped in our cultural productions, both old and new. In chapter 2 Alvarado gives readers Asco, a group of artists “considered the progenitors of a politicized Chicano avant-garde” (61) who, “[b]y harnessing asco [Spanish for disgust], indeed willing its transmission, desiring a visceral audience response, reveal an aesthetic collectivity that dwells in and amplifies a sense of displacement, discomfort, and disease, cohering around and validating feelings of disenchantment through embodied public responses to social situations” (60). Without going further, I must point out what I found to be an irresponsible analysis of Asco’s public performance Caca-Roaches Have No Friends. The text states that this particular performance was “mislabeled” as “a play for the whole family” (69; my emphasis). The piece consists of two Asco members in drag undressing each other. Then a water balloon is involved, placed at one performer’s crotch while the other strokes, bites, and twists it, “popping the balloon in a violent simulated fellatio and manual stimulation” (69) until it sprays all over the audience made up largely of Latino families. Alvarado does not evaluate this performance as one that took place in front of children and, thus, does not discuss how that may have altered Asco’s intended message, or the ethicality of their use of abjection as an aesthetic strategy. The almost predacious nature of Asco’s Caca-Roaches absolutely must be attended to, but it is not in this text. Alvarado attends instead to the spectacle’s mislabeled queerness, a “queerness” that, when coerced on an audience of children, can be interpreted as pushing the still-not-extinct narrative that LGBTQ individuals and their lifestyles pose a danger to this country’s youth. Following the Asco chapter is a more palatable examination of the aesthetic strategy of abjection via the juxtaposition of America Ferrera’s Ugly Betty character with Nao Bustamante’s performance art piece America, the Beautiful. For both performances Alvarado focuses on the beauty standards being displayed and critiqued: “both performers elaborate a gendered and racialized subjectivity, legible by reference to traditional standards or normative beauty” (91). The heavy-handedness with which Ugly Betty lays abjection after abjection upon Betty in order to uglify her is meant to be endearing to the audience, Alvarado observes. Bustamante, a counter to Ferrera’s Betty, parodies Western beauty standards by putting on a blond wig and taping up her body with clear shipping tape to try to achieve the female figure so revered...