i love these bits from Guillermo Gómez-Peña's introduction to his 1996 book, The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century... (we read a few excerpts from this work for today's hybrid ids class)
I am a Mexican artist/writer in the process of Chicanization, which means I am slowly heading North. My journey not only goes from South to North, but from Spanish to Spanglish, and then to English; from ritual art to high-technology; from literature to performance art; and from a static sense of identity to a repertoire of multiple identities. Once I get "there," wherever it is, I am forever condemned to return, and then to obsessively reenact my journey. In a sense, I am a border Sisyphus.
...
What does it mean to be alive and to make art in an apocalyptic era framed/reframed by changing borders, ferocious racial violence, irrational fears of otherness and hybridity, spiritual emptiness, AIDS and other massively destructive diseases, ecological devastation, and of, course, lots of virtual space? ...In a sense, this book is a disnarrative ode to hybrid America -- a new country in a new continent, yet to be named.
...
Since I don't believe in the existence of linguas francas, my choice not to translate (or to purposely mistranslate) the sections in Spanglish, Gringoñol, bad French, and indigenous languages is part of an aesthetic and a political strategy. I hope that this is apparent to the reader who, at times, will feel partially "excluded" from the work; but after all, partial exclusion is a quintessential contemporary experience, ¿que no?
**
and swiped off the hybrid ids course website: Check out Guillermo Gómez-Peña's website, http://www.pochanostra.com/,which invites all you hybrid border crossers out there to come in and interact with these living exhibits, which are (in his words): "one quarter stereotype, one quarter audience projection, one quarter aesthetic artiface, and one quarter unpredictable personal/social monster"!
p.s. listening to: the 'fever ray' album
open atmosphere
take me anywhere
take me there
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