Spectacular Citizenships: Staging Latina Resistance through Urban Performances of Pain

Abstract

Spectacular CitizenshipsStaging Latina Resistance through Urban Performances of Pain Emily Klein (bio) Not just a legal category, a stamp, or a government-issued document, citizenship in the age of twenty-first-century globalization is increasingly being thought of and studied as an embodied act, a dynamic set of behaviors, and a category of live (and lived) performance. Because of its role in transnational life, the modern city serves as the most obvious staging ground for performed citizenships. Distinct from traditional definitions of legal and political citizenship that entail obeying laws and helping to craft them, these new brands of embodied and engaged citizenship promote the broader values of critical reflection and, when necessary, active and spectacular expressions of dissent. Variously termed cultural citizenship, moral citizenship, and a citizenship of engagement, emergent streams of visibly resistant civic participation have been theorized by a small subset of scholars across a broad range of disciplines.1 Critics of the modern city have suggested that these new models of engaged citizenship are constituted primarily by the volatile and efficacious social interactions that have come to define city life. From protests, strikes, and picket lines to public performances and street art, popular urban modes of political and self-expression have helped to solidify a Western conception of cities as places where collective action comes to a head and incites social change. Gyan Prakash argues that "modern urban life … has produced new subjects, solidarities and meanings. The cityscape—its streets and sidewalks, its public space, the ebb and flow of its crowd, its infrastructure of transportation—has served as the setting for dynamic encounters and experiences."2 For feminist scholars one point of entry within this new area of research is to articulate how revolutionary urban models of female participatory citizenship reframe and expand the practices and rituals that have traditionally been associated with women in the public sphere. This essay takes up two examples of this phenomenon: the now canonical Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires and the less widely known [End Page 102] Chicago-based Teatro Luna. The Madres are a group of mothers whose children were the victims of state-sponsored violence during the Dirty War. Their weekly protest events have become increasingly performative in the decades since they began their public marches around the Plaza de Mayo. Teatro Luna, a pan-Latina performance collective, stages innovative theatrical workshops and productions that aim to represent and advocate for the rights of Latina and Hispana women. These all-female urban collectives have each used established Latino/a performance traditions like the escrache and the carpa, as well as cultural archetypes like the mater dolorosa, to invert and politicize stereotypical Latina modes of citizenship for the purpose of reframing loss and trauma to incite social change. I argue that by using urban spaces as their staging ground for politically resistant performances of pain, Teatro Luna and the Madres creatively adapt traditional Latino/a performance practices to attract and mobilize new audiences. Key to these spectacularly performative inversions is the addition of the disruptive, raucous spirit that Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez identifies as relajo.3 Even when performing stories of pain, the Madres and Teatro Luna both employ the resistant, mocking mood of relajo, which was first defined by Mexican philosopher Jorge Portilla as a "negation of required conduct" that "constitutes a subjective positioning of dissent vis-à-vis the dominant values of the social whole."4 This mode of boisterous and sometimes ironic critique allows Teatro Luna and activist groups affiliated with the Madres to question and subvert the status quo while still relaying their own traumatic stories as evidence of the need for structural change. While these two groups use entirely different performative modalities to reach their audiences—the street protest and the improvised short sketch—they both see relajo as a flexible but culturally specific way to attract engaged spectators and build community spirit. Operating from positions outside of the political mainstream, both of these groups use their cultural knowledge of various oral and embodied performance practices with roots in Central and South America to speak to a transnational Latino/a audience. Publicly sharing their personal stories of suffering within a...