Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas 9780520969063

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Beyond the Pink Tide

american studies now: critical histories of the present Edited by Lisa Duggan and Curtis Marez Much of the most exciting contemporary work in American Studies refuses the distinction between politics and culture, focusing on historical cultures of power and protest, on the one hand, or the political meanings and consequences of cultural practices, on the other. American Studies Now offers concise, accessible, authoritative, e-first books on significant political debates, personalities, and popular cultural phenomena quickly, while such teachable moments are at the forefront of public consciousness. 1. We Demand: The University and Student Protests, by Roderick A. Ferguson 2. The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit, by Scott Kurashige 3. Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, by Jack Halberstam 4. Boycott! The Academy and Justice for Palestine, by Sunaina Maira 5. Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism, by Shelley Streeby 6. Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century, by Barbara Ransby 7. Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas, by Macarena Gómez-Barris

Beyond the Pink Tide Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas Macarena Gómez-Barris

university of california press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress .edu.

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2018 by Macarena Gómez-Barris Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gómez-Barris, Macarena, 1970– author. Title: Beyond the pink tide : art and political undercurrents in the Americas / Macarena Gómez-Barris. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references. | Identifiers: lccn 2018015079 (print) | lccn 2018018323 (ebook) | isbn 9780520969063 (epub and ePDF) | isbn 9780520296664 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520296671 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Arts—Political aspects—Latin America—20th century. | Social movements—Latin America—20th century. | Latin America—Politics and government—20th century. Classification: lcc nx650.p6 (ebook) | lcc nx650.p6 g66 2018 (print) | ddc 700.98—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018015079 Manufactured in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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For Jack

contents

Overview ix Preface xi Introduction 1 Beyond the Pink Tide 1. Sounds Radical 22 Ana Tijoux, Student Protests, and Palestinian Solidarity 2. How Cuir Is Queer Recognition? 46 A Manifesto from the Sexual Underground 3. Art in the Shadow of Border Capitalism 68 Migration, Militarism, and Trans-Feminist Critique 4. An Archive of Starlight 88 Remapping Patagonia through Indigenous Memories Conclusion 107 Rogue Waves

Acknowledgments 115 Notes 119 Glossary 139 Selected Bibliography 143

ov ervi ew

introduction How do artistic and political undercurrents refuse the nation-state, offering other modes of being and doing politics in the Americas? Moving beyond the Pink Tide, or statecentered change, I discuss how Transnational Americas Studies foregrounds the importance of art and activism to imagine the world otherwise. Pink Tide

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Art and Social Movements • Transnational Americas Studies • Critical Hope • Debt

chapter 1. sounds radical What imaginations of solidarity exceed the container of the nation-state? This chapter focuses on the interventions of Ana Tijoux whose music based in the African diaspora and South-South exchanges has become the backdrop for social movements in the Americas, including student anti-debt mobilizations and Indigenous land struggles. Ana Tijoux • Mapuche Land Struggles • Decolonization • Palestinian Occupation and Resistance • Diaspora • Student Movements

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chapter 2. how cuir is queer recognition? What spaces and voices challenge the heteronormative violence of nation-state politics? This chapter considers the difference “cuir ” makes to theorizing LGBTI recognition politics, beginning with Pedro Lemebel’s classic manifesto, “Hablo por mi diferencia.” LGBTI Politics • Queer Theory • Cuir • Pedro Lemebel • Sex Alternatives • Trans Representations • A Fantastic Woman

chapter 3. art in the shadow of border capitalism What perspectives challenge the normalization of border violence? This chapter looks at how artwork, performance, and critical theory reveal the extreme conditions of living and dying in the shadows of the US-Mexico border. Art

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US-Mexico Border • Militarization • Experiential Performance • Post-Commodity • Sayak Valencia • Teresa Margolles • Regina José Galindo

chapter 4. an archive of starlight This chapter decenters colonial maps and archives to reveal the genocidal colonial violence against Selk’nam, Yeguen, and Ona peoples and territories in Tierra del Fuego. A focus on archipelagos and Indigeneity reorient our view toward land, sea, sky, and starlight. Patagonia

• Tierra del Fuego • Archipelagos • Patricio Guzmán • Selk’nam and Ona Peoples • British Colonialism • Disappearance

conclusion I offer a metaphor for the sudden sea change and potential of art and political undercurrents from the Americas and the Global South. Art and social movements find routes out of the heteronormative and racialized logics of the nation-state. Global South

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Antonio Gramsci

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Future

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Southern Theory

pr eface

One origin moment for this book came from my time living in Quito during 2015. There I saw how a progressive Latin American government, or what has been dubbed “the Pink Tide,” turned against the leaders of the social movements that had first brought them to power. Manuela Picq, an anthropologist and journalist and currently a professor at Amherst, was persecuted for her activism alongside her long-term partner, Carlos Pérez Guartambel, Indigenous activist and president of the Kichwa Confederation of Ecuador (Ecuarunari). Even before Manuela was jailed for her supposed antistate activities in solidarity with Indigenous land and water defenders, it became clear that the strong-arm tactics of the state were meant to quell increasing discontent with the politics of resource extraction. As she herself noted, “Surprisingly, the Left is also prone to criminalizing social protest.”1 In contrast to these strong-arm tactics, I witnessed how on the ground, eco-feminist, transgender, anarchist, artist, youth, and Indigenous activists worked collaboratively to denounce xi

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state violence. A series of actions called out President Rafael Correa’s cover-up of the real story, which was the Ecuadoran state’s alliance with extractive corporations. In the face of Manuela’s shocking beating by police and her subsequent arrest and imprisonment, I found my hope in the Pink Tide, or the turn to progressive governments in Latin America over the past twenty years, quickly dissipating. Like many, I wrongly assumed that progressive governments coming to power on radical-sounding platforms would cement social and economic change. Put into power by coalitional movements, Pink Tide states had mobilized the language and symbols of decolonization to garner support. But in the space of a few short years, new progressive states sometimes deployed the same authoritarian methods as their predecessors, and they continued policies that perpetuated social and economic inequalities and reinforced the class, color, sex and gender order. At the same time, I observed that local communities, artists, Indigenous organizers, and eco-feminists and queer / trans activists embodied alternatives to colonial and modern authoritarianisms in the Americas. Whether through youth radio programs, vibrant exchanges on the street, meetings in people’s houses, coalition marches, or experimental performances in small theaters, artistic and political undercurrents provided alternatives to the increasing violence of the neoliberal and extractive economy. By strengthening these undercurrents, activists in Ecuador deepened the prospects for social transformation. Within the undercurrents of the Pink Tide, submerged perspectives live in the undercurrents of the dominant politics of the nation-state.2 It was through these worlds that I deepened my understanding of the importance of political affect in rela-

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tion to the potential for lasting social transformation, a point that feminist and queer scholars have long illustrated. I experienced firsthand the creative and active process of social change that felt like forward momentum. Rather than naive, such work was cognizant of the depth of structural injustice and did not instill hope in top-down political machines. Even when repressed by the government, social life reemerged to show how its undercurrents offer alternatives to the dominant global order. First in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and then globally, the slogan of the World Social Forum, “Another world is possible,” has since 2001 inspired social movements, advocacy groups, activists, and artists to counter the devastating effects of globalization. These movements have often been led by queer, trans, Indigenous, and Black activists with direct experience of liberal democracy and its repression. Though I do not focus on the Forum per se, Beyond the Pink Tide does address the modes of thinking, being, listening, and shaping that emerge from below, showing how other worlds are indeed possible and interlinked in vital ways. These artistic and political imaginaries work from translocal spaces, or what Sonia Alvarez and Claudia de Lima Costa and their coeditors refer to as translocalidades.3 “Translocalities” is defined by a hemispheric politics based on feminist knowledge production that emerges in spaces of Black and Brown solidarity and in the transits of the South, North, and Caribbean middle spaces of the Américas, or the cross-current flows of political activity. The concept of translocalities comes directly from dissident spaces of solidarity, where social interaction and embodied knowledge transfers are immensely valued. This book registers exhaustion with the politics of accommodation and the limits of liberalism. This is not to say that new progressive states cannot make dramatic social change, such as

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that promised by Mexican president-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). It is to say, however, that global extractive corporate and right-wing interests will do everything in their power to obstruct genuine social and economic transformation. By considering the undercurrents, and the watery dissolution of nation-state boundaries and principles in acts of solidarity, I ask, can we flow away from the authoritarian politics of the nation-state and past the sea swells of the capitalist economy? Working at the intersections of social action and creative praxis allows us to think, feel, desire, and enact politics together, beyond the Pink Tide. •

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All English translations from Spanish are mine unless otherwise noted.

Introduction Beyond the Pink Tide art and political undercurrents in the americas

Un oceanografo me enseño que la actividad de pensar se parece al oceano. Las leyes del pensamiento son las mismas del agua que siempre esta dispuesto a amoldarse a todo.* Patricio Guzmán, The Pearl Button (2014)

This book cautions against our overinvestment in any one model of political change and shows the limitations of liberal democracy. It offers what the Brazilian theorist and educator Paulo Freire called “critical hope” by reaching beyond the crashing ebbs and flows of national elections and political defeat to instead perceive how art and social movements fundamentally remake the world. It asks us to perceive the profound desires and critical expressions of social justice in the Americas; it also pushes us to move beyond the limitations of area studies to learn * “An oceanographer taught me that the activity of thinking is like the ocean. The laws of thought are the same as water that is capable of accommodating everything.”

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from the rich and living archive of social movements, political experiences, and expressive arts in the hemisphere and beyond. Reflecting on recent documentaries, music, performances, and exhibitions, I show how these modes of doing politics experiment to give primacy to emergent worlds. Taking cues from artists, musicians, and activists helps us organize new forms otherwise according to innovative and embodied models of change, rather than defaulting to well-oiled political machines. By using the metaphor “beyond the Pink Tide,” I refer to getting past the recent disappointing experience with progressive states in Latin America. Rather than slide into a state of political despair, we might recognize and bolster the already existing practices and the continual nonlinear movement toward sustainable and equitable futures, practices that represent an ocean of radical potential.1 As I show throughout the Americas, artists and activists often reinvent politics by reaching deeper into historical and structural inequalities and by imagining  beyond the traditional affairs of the state. Creating nonnormative worlds of political being, these efforts queer (cuir) the nation. As José Quiroga proposes for the Americas, “All politics is, or should be, queer politics, just as all forms of artistic expression should aim to queer the public sphere. Somewhere between the dilution of homosexualities and its specificities lies the future of inclusive forms of social action.”2 Following Quiroga’s lead, a focus on embodied forms of relating through artistic visions can lead us out of the confining, normative, and often stifling politics of the nation-state. We might call this the future of queerness to refer to the future of non-normative modes of social and political life.3 For scholars and students as well as activists and artists, this means moving to a model of politics that does not

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accommodate capitalism and the oppositions embedded in liberal democracy. Rebecca Schneider importantly asks, “How can scholarship learn from the body and overcome the habits of rendering relations as mutually exclusive opposites?”4 Pursuing the generative forces of politics that exist beyond the Pink Tide is one way.

as democracy recedes: a brief history In a wave that Geraldine Lievesley and Steve Ludlam describe as an experiment in radical political democracy, over the past twenty years Latin American citizens voted for social democratic governments, or what the US media dubbed “the Pink Tide.”5 These governments ranged from authoritarian populism, as modeled by Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, to the horizontal assembly processes in Bolivia that resulted in the election of Evo Morales, the nation’s first Indigenous president. Uruguayan president José Mujica perhaps pursued the most radical political agenda. Widely touted as the world’s humblest president for his modest demeanor and small living quarters, Mujica promoted gay rights and legalized marijuana and firstterm abortion, in addition to offering a range of economic alternatives to neoliberalism.6 As political commentators celebrated these changes, rising debt, new authoritarianisms, widening criminalization, environmental degradation and crisis, and the expansion of extractive and military capitalism threatened Latin American experiments with radical democracy.7 For instance, by referring to centuries of colonial theft, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador made Earth Rights central to their electoral campaigns. Once in power, both rewrote their nations’ constitutions to grant

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rights to majority Indigenous populations.8 In contradictory fashion, they granted mega-contracts to Chinese, Canadian, and European state enterprises in hydroelectricity, mining, minerals, and petroleum while actively deflating social movements. Both presidents contended that the closing off of resource extraction would only perpetuate economic dependency and foreign debt.9 Following a similar pattern of developmental thinking, rather than redress Mapuche land claims, Chilean president Michelle Bachelet expanded corporate and military control over the BíoBío region and increased prison terms for Indigenous activists. For Native peoples in the Americas, the difference between Left and Right governments diminished when decolonizing rhetoric turned into anti-Indigenous state practice. The difference that Left and Right governments made to gender rights during the Pink Tide was also sometimes difficult to discern. Revealing the masculinist orientation of Pink Tide politics, Maria Galindo and Mujeres Creando rewrote the new Bolivian Constitution to include the perspectives of Indigenous women, lesbians, sex workers, single mothers, and trans women.10 Through a series of radio shows and actions, they pointed out how new governments in the hemisphere excluded their female populations and also tended to perpetuate heterosexual norms and normative moral codes. In Argentina, gender rights activists noted that regressive reproductive politics were a hallmark of Christina Kirchner’s administration.11 As Kirchner denounced foreign control of the economy and helped legalized gay marriage, she supported the strict abortion ban under a failing health system that did not guarantee universal contraception.12 Further, even as Kirchner and Bachelet touted health care reforms and broadened pro-

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grams for public transportation, they continued a fast-paced neoliberal agenda that skewed income toward the global rich. In both cases, obstruction and corruption scandals depleted the gains of progressive social policy, particularly as a willing news media spread these stories. Of the Pink Tide governments, Brazilian Left states most directly addressed the long-standing concern with anti-Black racism and land concentration in the Americas, even as legislative efforts were partial and incomplete. The 2010 Racial Equality Law offered land titles to quilombo (runaway slave) communities, in addition to confronting institutional racism, though such efforts fell short of fuller measures for racial redress. By 2012, one hundred public universities and one thousand private universities had passed affirmative action laws as new discourses of racial difference circulated in the nation.13 Brazilian progressive administrations also initiated a tax structure to benefit hundreds of thousands of workers, dispossessed peasants, and Indigenous peoples, leading to an intense political backlash led by agribusiness and corporate elites. Overall, the Brazilian white privileged minority reacted with fierce retribution to the broad demand for more economic and racial justice. Though the media’s commonplace explanation for the turn to the Right in Brazil was that the Left did not deliver on its promises, a more complex set of provocations led to the “witch-hunting” processes in Brazil and ultimately to the impeachment of President Dilma Rouseff. Paul Amar explains how the newly empowered right wing launched a series of accusations against the Left using the term bandidolatria to make Pink Tide movements seem inherently corrupt and anti-Christian.14 Referring to Dilma’s removal, Noam Chomsky commented, “We have the one leading politician who hasn’t stolen to enrich herself, who’s being

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impeached by a gang of thieves, who have done so. That does count as a kind of soft coup.”15 As the experience of Pink Tide states illustrates, even prior to the xenophobic right-wing turn in the United Kingdom and Europe and the explicit racist rhetoric in the United States, progressive political agendas in Latin America were directly challenged by the rise of the global Right. Indeed, the military coup against Honduran president Mel Zelaya in 2009, the parliamentary coup against Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo in 2012, the recent electoral victory of Macri in Argentina, and the return of Sebastián Piñera in Chile all evidence the conservative counterwave that forced the Pink Tide to recede. In Brazil, as in Honduras, Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, the phenomenon of fake news, obstructionism, and political infighting diminished the possibility for deeper progressive gains. Candidates who promised a profound challenge to globalization soon privatized, defunded, and accelerated the neoliberalization of their national economies.16 In general, the Pink Tide could not solidify lasting political transformation within neoliberal societies that had opened the door to new forms of state violence and vulnerability. The conservative commentator Jorge Castañeda wondered if this failure represented the death of the Left in the Americas.17 Yet to name the failure, or so-called death of the Pink Tide distracts from the profound structural inequality in the hemisphere. It also ignores the persistent attacks by conservative forces on redistributive policies rather than a hoarding economy that benefits those who already have access to power and resources. Finally, despite the recent global turn to the contrary, we might consider if liberal democracy is up to the task of social, racial, multispecies, and economic justice. A better way to think about the Pink Tide is to note the fundamental

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Eurocentrism and failures of liberal democracy with respect to real justice. As new trends point to yet another wave of momentum by the political Left,18 my main point in this book is to have us move beyond the ebbs and flows of conservative and progressive governments. The artists, thinkers, and activists I study pursue otros mundos, or other and submerged worlds of collaboration. These worlds imagine politics beyond the narrow confines of the nation. Three short examples explain what I mean by moving beyond the Pink Tide.

island perspectives The work of a Puerto Rican artist collective called Occupy Museum, featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, illustrates why we must orient our view toward minor, island, archipelagic, and submerged perspectives. Ten Puerto Rican artists, Gamaliel Rodriguez, Melqulades Rosario, Nibla Pastrana Santiago, Sofia Maldonado, Celestino Ortiz Jose Soto, Gabriella Torrer-Ferrer, Adrian Roman, Yasmin Hernandez, Norma Vila, and Chemi Rosado and Bea Santiago (who participated independently) created Debt Fair, an exhibition that grew from the Occupy Wall Street movement and powerfully addressed the island’s subordinated position to the US mainland. Using symbols of the less visible yet structurally present aspects of the global economy, the artists placed a small Puerto Rican flag against a powerful anti-debt manifesto that rejected the PROMESA legislation and its heavy austerity measures. By 2015, and prior to the events of Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico had a massive national debt that paralyzed the island’s economy by more than $70 billion. PROMESA created the Fiscal

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Control Board and charged it to reduce Puerto Rico's debt by enacting fiscal austerity measures.19 The exhibition specifically names the First Bank of Puerto Rico as routinely underwriting Wall Street’s biggest banks.20 Through videos and wall text, the exhibition details how Wall Street dividends exacerbated the neocolonial condition, forcing tens of thousands of young people and professionals to migrate to the US mainland, even before the recent devastation. Debt Fair artists asked the viewer to consider the embedded role of Global North art institutions in Puerto Rico’s financial institutions, making visible how MFA programs in the United States saddled artists with insurmountable student debt. As Debt Fair illustrates, growth models in the Caribbean are deeply rooted in the structures of colonialism and imperialism in the hemisphere.21 With rising interest rates and shortened debt repayment plans, Latin Americans found themselves drowning in US financial dependence, austerity regulations that were imposed by multinational lending agencies.22 As early as 1982, the Mexican government announced that it was not able to repay its ballooning loan with skyrocketing interest rates, leading to panic among international lenders and direct intervention by the International Monetary Fund and the Central Bank. Debt Fair, like this book, argues for moving beyond debt dependency on the global market and for naming economic, political, and social chains that have constrained the Americas since the fifteenth century. Given the workings of disaster capitalism on the island after Hurricane Maria, Debt Fair’s political message is even more necessary.23 An archipelagic viewpoint can decenter the continental thinking that organizes the US nationstate and the power relations that (il)legally constitute islands as colonies. To move with the flow of trans-solidarities is another way to unmoor the taken for granted normativity of the nation.

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trans-solidarities In 2015, the Colombian artist Carlos Motta countered binary gender norms by inviting over two hundred trans women that included a diverse group of mestizxs, Indigenous peoples, sex workers, and performers, to an independent art space in Guatemala City. For this presentation, Motta collaborated with REDMMUTRANS, a trans-multiracial organization that worked collaboratively against the acute experiences of social, racial, and economic discrimination. In a multiracial society where anti-Indigenous racism and trans phobia is pervasive, REDMMUTRANS offered a venue for countering gender and sex norms to challenge the strict binary gender codes in Guatemala that date to the Spanish colonial era. The objective of the work was to raise the visibility of trans people within the violent public sphere that privileges binary gender assignations. As an internationally recognized artist, Motta intervened in art worlds that had historically excluded trans bodies. Carlos Motta described his role in the project this way: “I’m not so concerned with labeling this action as art but instead with developing an ethical artistic practice that reconsiders the act of representation.”24 Motta insists here on not separating artistic autonomy from the history of representation. Indeed, as a cisgendered artist he expressed weariness with the use of trans and Native bodies as ethnographic spectacle and in my subsequent interview with him was careful to narrate his own positionality vis-à-vis this project. Instead, Motta resignified the gallery to make evident the contemporary state of emergency for gendernonconforming people. And he reconsidered the political stakes of contemporary art in Guatemala, set within the afterlives of civil war and its political violence that includes feminicide,25

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genocidal violence, and vastly unequal economic conditions. Finally, by refusing the surveillance eye, as there is safety in numbers in the gallery space, the performance challenged the very real threats that trans women face on a daily basis in Guatemala. How might we think about the role of trans activisms in relation to the project of social change? During and after the Pink Tide, a newfound visibility for queer and trans peoples swept the hemisphere and moved LGBTI identities from the periphery of politics into the spotlight of public debate and legal recognition. Yet, as I elaborate in chapter 2, “How Cuir Is Queer Recognition? A Manifesto from the Sexual Underground,” in relation to trans and queer identified movements, the future of queerness lies in attending to and reinvigorating earlier alternative sex and art worlds.

freeing bodies Libertad para las 17, or Freedom for the 17, provides my third brief example of undercurrent political activities. Libertad para las 17 is an important trans-feminist movement that rejects a capitalist economic system that feeds itself by criminalizing Black, Indigenous, mestiza and female bodies. Drawing from abolition movements throughout the Americas, anti-prison activists in Central America show us a mode of hemispheric politics that challenges both the prison industrial complex and the political conservatives who aim to control their gendered bodies. In 2014, the Salvadoran group was founded during an international meeting in Nicaragua organized to free a group of female prisoners imprisoned by ultraconservative laws. These laws include an absolute ban on abortion that penalizes those

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attempting to end their own pregnancies, even in the face of life-threatening medical conditions. Alongside the Citizen Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion, Libertad para los 17 thinks and organizes with other feminist groups in Central America against the carceral logic that moralizes and legislates against Brown and Black female bodies. Through marches, legislative battles, artistic expression like poetry slams, and direct action, Freedom for the 17 has made important inroads that challenge how women’s bodies are claimed by the state, redirecting the meaning of libertad toward embodied autonomy. These three instances of creative praxis—Occupy Museum, the collaboration between Carlos Motta and REDMMUTRANS, and Libertad para las 17—demonstrate how to deepen our critique by expanding the horizons of possibility, starting within artistic and political imaginaries.

transnational americas studies In this book I call for a Transnational Americas Studies that learns from the intersections and crosscurrents of interdisciplinary formations and pushes beyond the Cold War architecture of area studies. As Walter Mignolo asks in The Idea of Latin America, is it possible to uncouple “the name of the subcontinent from the cartographic image we all have of it?”26 Transnational Americas Studies responds to this question by reorganizing the normative flow and geographies, bodies, and identities of politics. For instance, Trans-Pacific Studies considers the broader oceanic space of Pacific geographies where histories of conquest and exchange occur within dynamic flows of goods, peoples, and commodities.27 And Caribbean and Andean Studies has

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long theorized the intersecting histories of racisms, colonialism, and decolonization.28 New work in Central American Studies develops transnational American studies through grounded examinations of US Empire, migration, aesthetics, and political disobedience.29 As Lisa Lowe rigorously models in relation to undoing coloniality, reading across archives rethinks the liberal nation-state.30 Bringing together these critical crosscurrent approaches is central to the Transnational Americas Studies I highlight throughout this book. Latin American and Caribbean cultural knowledge formations also directly inform my mode of study in Beyond the Pink Tide. During the 1980s and 1990s, cultural studies scholars explored the making of social worlds even in the face of state violence.31 And they challenged strict Marxist orthodoxies that defined art as epiphenomenal, or of a secondary order to the capitalist economy, instead pointing to creative praxis as its own site of theory production. Latin American cultural studies troubled the nation-state and lifted modes of marginal critique and world making to the center of making politics anew. Mindful of these contributions, the critic Mabel Moraña writes: The fact is that, despite the value of the contributions that have been made in this field from the perspective of cultural studies, one of the problems that should remain at the center of our work is the reconstruction of a political articulation capable of coping with (and coordinating) distinct agendas, subjects and programs that exist in Latin America and consequently in the international field of Latin Americanism. Perhaps one should analyze not only the causes of the progressive exhaustion of cultural studies, but above all the alternatives to it in order to launch, from what remains of its foundation, a joint effort for the reconstruction of political platforms in order to approach society and culture.32

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Here Moraña recognizes the particular exhaustion with institutionalizing cultural studies in the hemisphere. And to this I would add that studies of Latin America, and area studies more broadly, have unevenly attended to Blackness, Indigeneity, disability, and gender nonconformity, dimensions of social life and oppression that have been omitted by focusing too narrowly on poststructural theories and disciplinary norms.33 Elsewhere I discuss how a decolonial and queer methodology, such as work by Emma Perez, intimately frames global race, gender, sex, and political economic formations to move beyond these limitations. In my own research, I have found that there are crucial lessons to be learned about how to analyze cultural and political intersections, in part by building on diverse radical art and intellectual inheritances. The artists and social movements I study in this book include spaces and formations across the Americas as divergent as music in the Palestinian diaspora (chapter 1), submerged sex and art worlds (chapter 2), art and performance in the shadow of the US-Mexico border (chapter 3), and cultural memory in Indigenous Patagonia (chapter 4). When new alternatives seem impossible, we might reorient our study toward the creative praxis and submerged perspectives that are found beneath or at the edge of the dominant political tide. Two questions guide my discussion. First, how exactly can we move from the Cold War inheritances of Area Studies, whether it be American, Latin American, or otherwise, to open a generative space that foments rather than colonizes our political imaginations? I am constantly surprised by the capacity of academic institutions to reorganize and sort our knowledges into disciplinary and geographic regions of containment. Second, what theories and methods actually take social justice seriously? To consider these questions, Indigenous studies, Black

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studies, critical ethnic studies, queer and trans of color critique, transfeminisms, and decolonial methods need to be at the forefront of any thoughtful examination of social justice today, as does a focus on Palestinian justice, as Angela Davis recently suggested.34 Indeed, Transnational Americas Studies asks us to remain vigilant about radical equality, such as undoing the concentration and occupation of land, property, and natural resources that has long plagued the Americas. We must also abolish the prison industrial complex, an acute form of military and extractive capitalism that disproportionately criminalizes Black and Brown peoples. During neoliberalism, it continually expands its security apparatus to capture more populations in its cages, as Freedom for the 17 shows.35 Transnational Americas Studies, informed by new American Studies, pays attention to states of emergence36 and the social formations of justice-oriented political imaginaries. In equal measure it has the capacity to address how gender and sex norms bolster patriarchal states and societies. For instance, the recent Christian Far Right protests against Judith Butler in Brazil, which violently burned their effigy, shows how gender nonconformity continues to threaten binary and heteronormative ideologies.37 By considering the histories, contemporary struggles, and world-making practices of social movements and art production, we can find creative and new / old ways to dismantle and queer, as Quiroga puts it, the nation.

untamed geographies Though Latin America and the Caribbean are often ignored within the purview of “American” politics, the continent and islands haunt the US imaginary as geographies of valuable

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resources whose peoples are often represented as untamable and ungovernable. The seventeenth-century Black slave revolts and revolutionary energies of the anticolonial Caribbean culminated in the 1798 Haitian Revolution, with constant reverberations through the present day. Histories of primitive accumulation, transatlantic slavery, property, land, and national independence as historical debt motivated powerful insurgent movements throughout the twentieth century, including the pivotal 1910 Mexican Revolution and the 1959 Cuban Revolution.38 In fact, we might read the history of the Americas through the dynamics of debt, racial, and extractive capitalism in the context of counterinsurgency. The Doctrine of National Security is a good example. It justified the US intervention in Iraq even as it was first practiced in Guatemala, Chile, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador, from the 1950s on. And, as Greg Grandin argues, it was in Central America “where the Republican Party first combined the three elements that give today’s imperialism its moral force: punitive idealism, free market absolutism, and right-wing Christian mobilization.”39 From Puerto Rico to Mexico to Central America to South America, US militarism and economic dependency followed in the footsteps of Spanish colonialism to construct the western hemisphere as terra nullius and ungovernable regions so that racial capitalism and US Empire could take hold. During the 1970s and 1980s, authoritarian governments used Christian colonial rhetoric and the methods of torture and disappearance to install market-driven economics throughout the Americas.40 Whether in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay, or Paraguay, nations were ruled by powerful dictators as new and militant social movements challenged modernization schemes.

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Nonviolent as well as armed movements also struggled against Latin America’s neocolonial relation to the United States and the social suffering caused by the economic and political stranglehold of the Washington Consensus. John Beverley asks an important question to those of us who study the hemisphere: “What is the emergent form of a new Latinamericanism, capable of confronting US hegemony and expressing an alternative future for the peoples of the Americas?”41 Beverley points to the perilous condition of Latin America, historically situated in the shadow of the United States, which has now also become the expanded site for Canadian, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and Australian extraction and militarized capitalism. As Amy Kaplan famously stated in her American Studies Association presidential address in the wake of the US attack in Iraq, we must speak with increased urgency against US occupation around the world, especially “in its authoritarian incursions against civil liberties, the rights of immigrants and the provision for basic human rights.”42 With the recent deportation orders of Haitian, Salvadoran, and, potentially, Nicaraguan temporary migrants and the intensification of the global paradigm of war this speaking up and writing against is ever more urgent. Kaplan’s move to consider imperialism is central to radical political critique and Transnational Americas Studies. Given the history of the Cold War, militarism, and occupation in Latin America and the Global South, Transnational Americas Studies forcefully raises the specter of US Empire and the new / old expansion of global imperialisms. Internationalism also advances the movement of political undercurrents. For instance, in Angela Davis’s recent interview on the Black radical tradition, she addresses the role of internationalism in antiracist and anticolonial struggle. In relation to

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her activism on Palestine that emerges out of imaginaries of Black freedom, Davis reflects: In 1973, when I attended the World Festival of Youth and Students in Berlin (in the German Democratic Republic), I had the opportunity to meet Yasir Arafat, who always acknowledged the kinship of the Palestinian struggle and the Black freedom struggle in the United States, and who, like Che, Fidel, Patrice Lumumba, and Amilcar Cabral, was a revered figure within the movement for Black liberation. This was a time when communist internationalism—in Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, and the Caribbean—was a powerful force.43

These global histories of solidarity that work in tandem with Black freedom movements demonstrate how to move beyond a focus on elite political change in the hemisphere. Historical and recent calls for decolonization by raising the Indigenous question must also be at the center of our analysis. With the frameworks of Transnational Americas and Global South Studies we might consider how the history of internationalism has always been intertwined with Black radical political critique and the quest for Indigenous sovereignty as well as creating and initiating alternatives to capitalism. To move in the fluid spaces of these other worlds is essential to a renewed vision for a Transnational Americas Studies, or a decolonial American Studies.

indebted: deepening democracy? In their now-classic book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985), Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe consider the work of social movements as that of deepening the principles of liberal democracy. In fact, their definition of the political Left is “the radicalization of democracy . . .

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[that] can include any struggle against a relation of subordination.”44 Rather than focus on revolution, Laclau and Mouffe describe the importance of deepening the ideas and values already present within but unfulfilled by liberal democracy.45 They propose a praxis-oriented understanding of society and politics that strengthens heterogeneous forms of democratic struggle. Though deepening or radicalizing democracy is certainly a worthy objective, we might note that liberal democracy has structural limitations, because its exclusionary idea of freedom is based on histories of debt, enslavement, theft, omission, dispossession, and obfuscation. In Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons (2014) debt is reframed to consider transatlantic slavery and settler colonialism and histories of refusing the very terms of freedom engendered by liberal democracy. Thinking at a moment of increasing precarity for racialized populations and the dismantling of tenure at the university, Moten and Harney reverse the meaning of debt to reveal the fundamental way it organizes social life in a negative and positive sense: “They say we have too much debt. We need better credit, more credit, less spending. They offer us credit repair, credit counseling, microcredit, personal financial planning. They promise to match credit and debt again, debt and credit. But our debts stay bad. We keep buying another song, another round.”46 When coupled with J. Kēhaulani Kauanui’s historical attention to “the commons,” 47 Moten and Harney’s rich work, and its recent translation into Spanish, gives us a model for rethinking the ravages of debt and indebtedness that have been at the center of social and artistic praxis in the Americas. How can we use these insights to think about recent challenges to the Global North’s predatory schemes and growing

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consumer national debt? As easy access to credit became routinely available during the 1980s and 1990s, a wider swath of the population experienced the debt economy that made rising interest rates part of the squeeze on daily life. Rather than break with these oppressive patterns during democratic transitions throughout the hemisphere, liberal governments consolidated new market economies that only dramatized social inequalities.48 In the financial squeeze that followed, new waves of discontent openly contested privatization and deregulation. Indeed, over the past thirty years, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Bolivia to challenge the neoliberal order and its failures. In El Salvador, the FMLN (Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional), once a guerrilla organization, became an official party and won national elections with a mandate to contend with the ravages of civil war and the violent imprint of empire in the nation. In 1992, the Zapatista uprisings broke with an elite political consensus that had worked to repeal Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution, which protected the ejido system of Indigenous collective land rights that had existed since the Mexican Revolution. The Cochabamba water wars became another focal point of social mobilization and Indigenous resurgence.49 During the early 2000s, the Bolivian water wars, a mass antiglobalization protest, denounced the rising price of the precious resource. Through a broad coalition called the Coordinadora por Defensa de Agua y Vida (Coordinator for Water and Life Defense), Aymara Indigenous protesters rebelled against the foreign joint investments of Aguas del Tunari and Bechtel by demanding fair access to water rights.

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Within the Bolivian public sphere, protests, horizontal assembly meetings, and artful expression became the global epicenter for antiglobalization alternatives. For instance, amid growing gentrification in La Paz, the graffiti art of Mujeres Creando inscribed visible feminist critique on the urban streetscape.50 A range of regional and urban popular movements, like those on display in the streets of Cochabamba and Chiapas, sought economic justice and local equity against the visible ravages of neoliberal globality. Throughout the hemisphere, Indigenous movements, Afro-descendant peoples, Zapatistas, feministas, ambientalistas (ecologists), eco feministas (ecofeminists), anarquistas (anarchists), movimientos cuir and trans (queer and trans movements), and pobladores (urban poor) all mounted important challenges to autocratic and patriarchal states by building consensus and nonhierarchical decision making. And visual arts and creative projects importantly mediated social movements that worked to break the Washington Consensus and root out authoritarian patriarchy. Such movements deepened democracy throughout Latin America and must not be forgotten with the easy phrase that blames the so-called failure of the Pink Tide.

contributions Paying attention to social activisms that are shaped by visual arts, film, performance, and music allows us to see a rising tide of world making. Together the chapters that follow challenge the assumptions of nation-state politics. As I show in the next chapter, musical exchanges build upon diasporic and SouthSouth connections to reject the colonial politics of recognition and occupation. Such creative formats instead search for modes of solidarity, connection, and affinity that form sound bridges

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across the Palestinian diaspora and in relation to global Indigenous struggles. Though such locations can always be commodified and appropriated for statecraft, the movements, sonic experiments, artworks, and visual archives I study also point to how to alternatively make and do politics, beyond the electoral sphere and the narrowly defined scope of liberal democracy. By studying artistic and political undercurrents in the Americas, I challenge the means by which to live and do politics and also reach beyond area studies. Given our troubled times in which politics seems overdetermined, corrupt, and saturated by the demands of capitalism, this book presents other models and languages for how to organize the political. Moreover, this book is meant for students as a way to perceive the transformational impact of art practice when tied to social change. For many activists, thinkers, and artists, going against conventional art categories is the only way to undo coloniality toward shaping another model of the political. The chapters in Beyond the Pink Tide together express a sea of political potential.

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Sounds Radical Ana Tijoux, Student Protests, and Palestinian Solidarity

beyond shock In 2011, the Chilean mestiza singer and rapper Ana Tijoux became the sound of the student movement that reverberated throughout South America and beyond. Her song “Shock” gave a sound track to the massive student marches and collective street performances in which hundreds of thousands of students demanded a free education from then President Michelle Bachelet’s government. With rising tuition costs, students protested the ransom on their future: in class-stratified Chile, debt had made it untenable to access higher education and the elusive dream of upward mobility. Tijoux wrote the lyrics to the song after reading Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In it, the author describes how “shock doctor” economists remade the world in their own image, disciplining the global economy through austerity policies that were implemented by military dictatorships. Chile was one key epicenter of the shock doctrine.

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On September 11, 1973, Augusto Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende’s Socialist government in a bloody coup supported by then US President Richard Nixon and the CIA. As I have written elsewhere,1 the Pinochet regime (1973–89) used torture, disappearance, and exile against tens of thousands of those it deemed subversive to enable the Chicago Boys’ application of US economist Milton Friedman’s neoliberal experiment. As a precursor to counterinsurgency and the neoliberal turn that would take place throughout South America, Central America, Asia, and Africa, Chile became the testing ground for economic shock therapy. Using the rhetoric of a “doctrine of security,” military dictatorships turned against their own citizens, restructuring the global economy in part upon the broken and disappeared bodies of social activists. Ana Tijoux’s song “Shock” references this history, noting how global marketization was literally built on the murder and pain of Socialists and Indigenous activists. The lyrics tell the story of a nation traumatized by a brutal authoritarian regime who left debt, deepening social resentments, and resource theft in its wake: The poison of your colorless discourses Don’t you see that we aren’t alone? Millions from pole to pole We will march with the tone With the conviction Of no more stealing Your state of control Your rotten throne of gold Your rich man’s politics And your treasury, no! The time has come, the time has come We will not permit anymore anymore of your

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Doctrine of shock No countries, only corporations Who have more, more actions Bellies fat, powerful Decisions made by so few. Pinochet’s Constitution Rule of law, fascist book Fascists disguised as a greedy elite.2

The lines “Your rotten thrones of gold, your rich man’s politics,” and “Bellies fat, powerful decisions made by so few” are a powerful reference to the increasing concentration of wealth that expanded social and economic inequality over the past forty years, notable in university tuition hikes at public institutions. Students were moved by Tijoux’s refrain, “No permiteremos más, más tu doctrina del shock,” or “We will not permit any more of your doctrine of shock,” reflecting student demand for a society not organized by insatiable greed and the social control mechanism of police and military violence. In a nation where economic and political power remained in the hands of dominant elites, Tijoux’s song “Shock” resonated with working-class and working poor youth, who increasingly saw their futures ransomed by an economic model that catered to corporations, wealthy ministers, and foreign bankers. Fed up with state-led marketization and empty promises, students demanded alternatives to the consumer-oriented society that had impoverished education and public health systems while weakening the texture of social relations. Against the hypocrisy of the education system that hid the history of authoritarian violence, they demanded a fuller account of neoliberalism than the whitewashed triumphant narratives of the Chicago Boys and their technocratic masculinity that had been ubiquitous in their textbooks.

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For a generation searching for new modes of living and imagining their own futures, Tijoux’s song became an anthem of political accountability and social transformation. As I discuss in the chapter, despite the economic system that had produced social crisis, through music, solidarity, social movements, and performances, young people instead forged deep connections to histories of diaspora, to each other and across the Global South, working to create a different, less market-oriented imaginary of a future society.

sounds like justice On the album of the same title, the rap song “1977” refers to the year Tijoux was born. It makes several references to the utopic potential of the Socialist Allende period by repeating, “mil novicientos setenta, che,” or 1970, the year Salvador Allende was voted into power for a short-lived Socialist experiment that ignited the global imagination. By 1973, the conservative Right had pushed back against Allende’s nationalist platform, rolling back an economic agenda that had nationalized copper and the telecommunications industry while also expropriating the land of agrarian workers. The political violence that accompanied economic restructuring and that engulfed the nation was aimed at Allende supporters and in addition to mass murder and imprisonment led to the expulsion of one million Chileans, who were scattered between England, France, Spain, Australia, Canada, the United States, Venezuela, Cuba, and other nations around the world. Born in exile in France, Tijoux returned with her family to Chile as an adolescent, forming part of the retornados, a multigenerational group that comprised about 260,000 people in a nation of 16 million. As Loreta Rebolledo’s research emphasizes,

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returning to an unknown nation during the 1980s and 1990s was confusing for the daughters and sons of exiles.3 For this generation, return had meant an extraordinary effort to access a nation that was wholly unfamiliar and had only been experienced and mediated through the traumas of their parents. In addition to a general feeling of estrangement, this generation found themselves in a militarized nation that had been wrought by the aftermath of the 1981 economic crisis. In the aftermath of the 1990 democratic transition, thousands of exiles returned to a vastly transformed country whose democracy and natural resources had been destroyed by shock capitalism. For Tijoux, this meant going to a nation that was foreign to her, mediated through the political perspectives of her mother’s generation. In fact, Ana Tijoux’s mother, María Emilia Tijoux, was a formidable influence. A sociologist whose work on race and immigration is well known in Latin America and whose scholarship focuses on South-South migrations, María Emilia Tijoux has written extensively on social exclusion and the impact of poverty on street children in postindustrial geographies such as Santiago. Though Ana Tijoux defined her own perspectives on social, racial, and economic justice in her music and public interviews, marked by her own trajectory as an immigrant/exile, it is clear that her political economic analysis was also informed by her mother’s attunement to social injustice. Ana Tijoux’s musicality was also influenced by her experience in exile, where rap created an important vehicle for expressing social discontent within a changing racially diverse environment. Rap’s early development in Black New York City, and the deep imprint of Caribbean culture on the music, especially from Jamaica and Puerto Rico, also offered a way to make connections across transnational spaces and migrant experi-

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ences. US popular music circulated in Europe and the Global South, expressing urban discontent as its central theme in the aftermath of 1970s global economic restructuring. Embedded in a genre of socially conscious rap, Tijoux’s music bears the trace of the Afro-diaspora as influenced by her formative experiences first in France and then in Chile. In Tijoux’s hybridized music, one can hear the influences of jazz and Andean sounds, even as it comes from the African disapora, as the music that traveled with her from France to Chile and then found an enlivened and nascent community in Santiago. For Tijoux, transculturated music meant connecting to what she has called “creative chaos,” a musical mix of genres that breaks the boundaries of fixed identities, nations, and geographies.4 A new influx of migrants from Cuba and Peru sought opportunities from “Chile’s economic miracle” and was part of the creative mix of Afro-diasporic populations engaging and expanding the experimentation with music in the nation. Though the Afrodescended population in Santiago was small, with a more sizable historical presence in northern Chile, it found forceful expression in the emergence of rap in the urban peripheries. An important venue for addressing systemic inequality such as racism, sexism, and classism, rap also often made consumerism and the cheapening of economic and social and political life central to its themes, resonating powerfully with Chilean youth’s experience in the mushrooming peripheral communities of Santiago. Tijoux’s music was enlivened by the vibrancy of an urban music scene that was surprising for its heterogeneity and strength. Groups such as Tiro de Gracia, Panteras Negras, Rezonancia, De Kiruza, La Pozze Latina, and La Frecuencia and Mamma Soul, which featured Moyenei Valdés as lyricist, contributed to a rap and beat box scene that spread and gave voice to the

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experiences of living in precarious neighborhoods. As a counterpoint to the culture of fear of the dictatorship and the isolation of the early transition to democracy period, breakdance and b-boys could now be found on many street corners. Music and dance provided the backdrop for public gatherings, and working-class and mixed-race young people and immigrant communities used rap’s ability to sound their discontent and frustration with what they saw as a corrupt social and political order. Let me elaborate how I see the points of convergence within these very distinct histories. Tijoux’s music connected to a history of global resistance that had a very specific origin point in US Black and Caribbean diasporic communities of struggle. Scholars have described how rap, which began in the Bronx, New York, and Kingston, Jamaica, defined the period after the civil rights movement for US urban centers and Black and Afro-diasporic youth in the aftermath of deindustrialization.5 In the post-neoliberal Global South, Black diasporic sounds allowed for an articulation of the despair over globalization that brought a dearth of working-class jobs. Though Chile was far from the United States geographically, it had been subject to the same kinds of development discourses that US communities of color endured. For instance, New York government officials were quick to represent peripheral city spaces as Third World wastelands. In particular, the Bronx as one key center of rap and hip-hop was also constructed as a Global South space. As Jeff Chang states: Here was the unreconstructed South—the South Bronx, a spectacular set of ruins, a mythical wasteland, an infectious disease, and, as Robert Jensen observed, “a condition of poverty and social collapse, more than a geographical place.” Through the 1960s, the Bronx’s prefix was merely descriptive of the borough’s southernmost neighborhoods, like Mott Haven and Longwood. But now most of New York

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City north of 110th Street was reimagined as a new kind of ‘South,’ a global south just a subway-ride away. Even Mother Teresa, patron saint of the world’s poor, made an unannounced pilgrimage.6

Even though Chang’s quote references how politicians represented the Bronx as a “Third World” space, urban areas such as this shared central features as a meeting place for new arrivals, cultural creativity, and rap sound that became part of a global musical wave. What cities from throughout the Global South shared, including the Bronx, were processes of deindustrialization, white flight, and the dramatic effects of suburbanization. During the 1980s and 1990s, the expansion of Santiago followed a similar pattern of social and economic division. The Chilean government focused on financing public works that benefited the wealthy, such as the Río Mapocho highway that connected the downtown to the upper-class neighborhoods, which increased physical and infrastructural separation that translated into fewer opportunities for working-class people. Observing this race/class divide during early morning work hours dramatizes the geophysical divide of the city: white financial workers from the upper barrio travel down to the downtown center, a few hours after working-class Indigenous and mestiza/o service workers, such as nannies and gardeners, take public transportation up to the upper barrios to care for wealthy people’s homes and children at the edges of the Andean cordillera. Ana Tijoux witnessed the racism and classism that was also prevalent in France, and it proved to have a lasting impact on her music and collaborations. She grew up listening to rap, where what she calls “verbal flow” circulated widely among the youth in the African- and Arab-descended mix of immigrant communities that bordered Paris. The powerful blend that global rap absorbed, and its ability to be a vehicle of sound, offered Tijoux a

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way to speak truth to power, resonating with her exilic experiences, her experience of return, and the social consciousness that was the inheritance from her mother. The exposure to exilic culture and its intellectual and political commitments also provided Ana Tijoux with creative material. In 1997, with other members she formed the group Makiza, whose name came from the French word maquisard, or resistance to the Nazi Occupation, and whose lyrics were antiauthoritarian and antimilitary. Finally, though I have addressed the multiple influences on Tijoux’s oeuvre and musicality, in interviews Tijoux also speaks about the profound impact that the singer and poet Victor Jara had on her music, thinking, and musical praxis. Of the diverse musical scene in Santiago she says, “There can be metal musicians, jazz folkloric, rapperos, it doesn’t matter. Victor Jara is the one who unites them all. He had a special capacity to reach across lines and go directly to the heart.”7 If Victor Jara’s songs are often associated with protest movements of the 1970s, or what is often called the New Song Movement, then Tijoux would influence and respond to the next generation through her word flow. In her return to Chile from exile, and as innovator at the edge of a transformative tide, Ana Tijoux’s music became the sound of and a touchstone for new forms of social dissent.

la bala: moving students Since at least the 1960s, music and performance were critical platforms that enlivened the messages of social movements throughout the Américas, producing new imaginaries of ways to live and dance. For Global South millenials, flash mobs, global hip-hop, and group choreographies offered critical modes through which to express the desire for social transformation. From Spain to

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Turkey to the United States and, of course, in Chile, students marched against the zombie capitalism that attempted to convert them into the living dead. For instance, in 2011, hundreds of university students choreographed a street performance to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, dramatizing how consumer debt and rising tuitions had turned them into zombies of the market system. Wearing graveyard costumes and doing monster choreography en masse in front of the large, public University of Chile, they made the deadening effect of the debt economy visible on the national stage. This focus on body politics throughout the Americas allows us to reveal the gaps between dominant ideologies and on-theground desires and modes of resisting that are essential to new political imaginaries. Music and performances pulsated as new models for expressing social and economic solidarity and discontent, critiquing the deadening logics of consumerism and the importation of “the American way of life.” If Michael Jackson’s Thriller video choreographed the student movement, then Ana Tijoux’s song “La Bala” gave it its anthem. The song was inspired by transversal social movements, referring not to a single issue protest but a multidirectional and crossdirectional broader call for social change. “This new generation of students has been a bucket of cold water, a giant slap in the face for all of us. It’s a huge lesson about the ability to unite, and fight over something as basic as the right to study,” Tijoux said. As her own rise to global recognition demonstrated, “The marches have been a high point for the gathering of otherwise invisible artists.”8 “La bala,” or the bullet, refers to the death by gun of a courageous activist who faces down a policeman. The last two stanzas of this bluesy song are as follows: Aquel cuerpo sin vida era su hijo maría estupefacta Cayo al piso su rostro deformado se convirtió en un grito

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Quedo solo un zumbido que significa (asesino) La hora del deses marcaba por un beso Del adiós de la madre perdida en desconsuelo Hizo llover al cielo lagrimas del desierto Y hasta la muerte se quedo callada por respeto Angelitos de papel se han perdido por babel Quien devolverá esta piel La madre le suplica al coronel La muerte es un carrusel Fue un edén en su va y ven Un juicio final cruel El ángel le suplica al coronel

That lifeless body was his son, Maria dumbfounded Fell to the floor her face deformed transformed into a scream Only a buzzing left that meant (Murderer!) The hour of death marked by a kiss from the mother’s farewell lost in grief made the sky rain tears of the desert And even Death was silent out of respect Little paper angels have lost themselves through Babel Who will give back this flesh The mother begs to the coronel Death in its carrousel Eden in its comings and goings A cruel final sentence The angel begs the coronel.

With its resonant beat and infectious chorus line, the melancholic music honors a previous generation of social activists. It also addresses the constant facing down of the military and police state by young activists in marginal and criminalized workingclass communities. In its pointed political critique, the song has

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been described by some as an homage to Manuel Gutierrez Reinoso, a fourteen-year-old student who was killed during a mass protest on August 24, 2011, yet the album of the same title came out earlier that year. Regardless, the circulation of the story shows how the song resonates with specific recent cases and a longer history of young activists’ deaths at the hands of police states. In Chile, and throughout the Américas, “La bala” became an important anthem against police violence and the state’s targeted killing of young people actively working toward a better society. Though the 2011 global student movement and uprisings have been widely discussed, considerably less has been written about how university students followed the lead of their younger counterparts. Indeed, in Chile and beyond it was often elementary and high school students who, fed up with the state’s underinvestment in public education, began a series of public protests. In an increasingly precarious economy that offered debt in exchange for overworked and stressed-out lives of consumption, students articulated how national governments functioned as corporations, widening economic inequality by accumulating wealth for a few. Protesting the defunding of their classrooms, middle school students demanded that the state shed the legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship and the failures of education during neoliberalism. The penguino movement, or what is sometimes called the “march of the penguins,” referencing the students’ uniforms, comprised hundreds of thousands of elementary and middle school students and created a political pressure point that eventually led to broader student reform. In their uniforms, students created a visual landscape that overtook the nation through the expression of the relentless march of the penguins. On May 30, 2006, an estimated 790,000 students participated in national strikes demanding free bus passes, waivers of the

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university admission test fee, and abolishment of the Organic Constitutional Act of Teaching (LOCE). The latter, a leftover from the Pinochet’s regime and the constitutional legal framework that paved the way to the privatization of education, became the signature demand of the pinguinos. As a hallmark of neoliberalism, the LOCE made it possible for private entrepreneurs to open schools and receive government funding, with little oversight regarding educational standards. During April and May 2006, students and teachers campaigned to reform LOCE through massive strikes and protest, which eventually led to the General Education Law, which set the parameters for how government education standards and monitoring of those standards would be met. As Natalia Núñez, a student organizer of the pinguino effort said, “Es a nivel de presión como se logran las cosas. Esa es la única forma de que te escuchen,” which can be translated as “Raising the level of pressure is how things get done. It’s the only way that they will listen to you.”9 As the movement grew into a university strike with forceful female leaders like Camila Vallejo, Bárbara Brito (an out lesbian), and Scarlett Mac-Ginty Fontecilla, it became increasingly clear to observers around the world that change was afoot. This was not the passive generation that the right wing had hoped for, that would be consumed by market logics, social climbing, and concerned only about themselves, with little sense of the collective struggles of the past. Those who lived with the consequences of neoliberalism and debt capitalism after the dictator’s rule (1973–89) did not, in fact, turn into zombies like the politicians and television pundits they mimicked. Instead students sounded an urgent call for a new way to organize society not based on the logics of economic debt but on turning to each other for social solidarity.

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The student movement used collective solidarity to overcome the brutal forms of violence they faced. For instance, during a recent international conference in Argentina, Bárbara Brito, a Chilean Trotskyist and member of the Partido de Trabajadores Revolucionarios (PTR; Worker’s Revolutionary Party) discussed how the student movement contended with the repressive political apparatus “that came from the authoritarian period.” She described how after arresting female student strikers, the police would “take them to prison to rape them,” and they would “throw tear gas at them,” also using violence against the students in the streets.10 In the packed auditorium, Brito suggested that it was only through a broad-based solidarity movement against financial capitalism that the structures of debt and police brutality could be overcome; and it was only through solidarity at many scales of political intimacy that social change could be fully realized. Indeed, many analysts around the world agree that the massive student organizing in Chile over the past decade ultimately catapulted the student agenda to the foreground of the national political scene. In 2015, in the most significant reform of thirty years, President Bachelet signed transformative educational reform into law, legislation that gradually removed tuition fees, banned profits, and eliminated selective admissions practices in schools where stated subsidies had previously been in place. After countless marches and efforts to negotiate, student organizing successfully pushed to dismantle class-based segregation and market-based education, even as the return of a right-wing government now threatens to undo these gains.11 As Bárbara Brito discusses and as Ana Tijoux’s lyrics recognize, the transformation of the educational system came at a price for students who relived the violence as afterlives of Pinochet’s legacy. In We Demand, Roderick A. Ferguson documents

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how the university in the United States underwent a massive attack on progressive gains of the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the areas of Ethnic Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and Cultural Studies.12 Taking this analysis to the Américas, the university was in fact one of the first institutions to be completely restructured by neoliberalism. In the aftermath of authoritarianism, the sounds of Ana Tijoux continue to inspire elementary, middle school, and university students, who continue their relentless marches against the debt university.

wallmapu and palestine: connecting occupation and diaspora So far in this chapter I have considered the importance of Ana Tijoux’s music as embedded in the genre of global rap and as marking out political critique that is relevant to the rise of student activisms. In her album Ven, Tijoux expands her political content with songs such as “anti-patriarcha,” or anti-patriarchy, a feminist manifesto that meditates on the limitations of masculinist-oriented politics in our current period. However, the profound impact of not only Tijoux’s political insight but also her musical talent can be heard in the song “Somos sur,” a vibrant song comprised of an infectious blend of Andean and Arab sounds. “Somos sur” is a special collaboration with Shadia Mansour, an emcee of Palestinian origin, whose talent as a female rapper increasingly circulates throughout the Arab world. “Somos sur” translates as “We Are the South” and provides insight into the multiple Indigenous, African, and transmigrant histories of the Américas. This is what the great Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once referred to as its “Indo-IberoAfro-Américas” inheritances.

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Though the song is an overt political critique of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, it also refers to the history of uprising and Intifada in the region. The specific transits of Palestinian migration to Chile are the background context for “Somos sur,” as Arab Chileans form a vital political and economic presence in South America. In fact, Palestinians in Chile represent the most sizable community anywhere outside of Palestine. With over 300,000 people of Palestinian descent currently living in the nation, the political voice of diasporic Arab memory forms part of a significant Global South history of migration. Three waves of Palestinian immigration mark the histories of the two nations and settlement, especially in Chile’s Central Valley. These are, first, a wave of businesspeople and farmers at the end of the nineteenth century that produced a visible elite; second, the arrival of migrants during and after World War II; and third, a large wave of refugees that came after their expulsion during the 1948 occupation of Palestine by the establishment of the Israeli nation-state. These historical connections between Palestine and Chile forge social, economic, and cultural links that produce a vibrant Latin American Arab diaspora. Unlike their minoritized status in some parts of the world, in Chile Palestinians make up a vital economic and political force, with representation in Congress, as well as strong visibility in the entrepreneurial sector. Palestinians were especially dominant in the cotton and silk industry from the nineteenth century through the late 1970s. This history emerges in Peter Winn’s well-known Weavers of the Revolution (1986), a classic book on Latin American political history about the takeover of the textile factory by workers under Allende’s government. Of Palestinian descent, the Yarur owners were among the dozens of families that made their name and fortune in the weaving indus-

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try. Weavers of the Revolution shows how Palestinians were not just a marginal group in Chile, but a powerful class of entrepreneurs that later made inroads in politics while often retaining their attunement to social justice concerns and their homeland. More recently, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) movement, now a global movement on behalf of Palestinian rights, has seen important gains in Chile precisely because of the powerful position of the Palestinian community. Though BDS efforts to oppose the state of Israel for its illegal occupation has garnered important international support, it has often been condemned at the level of world governments. Yet in Chile it has had a decisively different trajectory, in part because there is knowledge of and connection to Palestinian social justice histories. In fact, Chile is one of the only governments around the world to have supported Palestinian claims to their homeland as well as divestment from Israel as a matter of principle.13 The Palestinian community’s presence, and the acquisition of power by Palestinians in the parliamentary system, has meant that formal resolutions have been debated and passed to denounce Israeli occupation. Ana Tijoux’s collaboration with the Palestinian rapper Shadia Mansour is not superfluous, then, but a potent form of cultural politics that interweaves the sounds of the Palestinian diaspora with transmigrant and political inheritances across the Global South. Rap, as a mode of articulation that expresses political histories of dissent, provides the powerful venue for articulating these histories, especially in the video and song, “Somos sur.”14 “Somos sur” also sounds out a global Indigenous project that names political and social struggles for territory as central to the decolonization of Native territories. In particular, linkages to the protests against corporate, military, and legal encroachment on Mapuche lands in the far south of Chile’s BíoBío region

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becomes lyrically and sonically connected to Palestinian Indigenous struggles and rights. Making the connection across historical and contemporary forms of colonialism in relation to occupation of Indigenous lands, bodies, and resources the song registers the powerful fire of those silenced: Tu nos dices que debemos sentarnos Pero las ideas solo pueden levantarnos Caminar, recorrer, no rendirse ni retroceder Ver, aprender como esponja absorbe Nadie sobra, todos faltan, todos suman Todos para todos, todo para nosotros Soñamos en grande que se caiga el imperio Lo gritamos alto, no queda mas remedio Esto no es utopía, es alegre rebeldía Del baile de los que sobran, de la danza tuya y mía Levantarnos para decir “ya basta” Ni África, ni América Latina se subasta Con barro, con casco, con lápiz, zapatear el fiasco Provocar un social terremoto en este charco [Coro] Todos los callados (todos) Todos los omitidos (todos) Todos los invisibles (todos) Todos, to, to, todos Todos, to, to, todos Nigeria, Bolivia, Chile, Angola, Puerto Rico y Tunisia, Argelia Venezuela, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Costa Rica, Camerún, Congo, Cuba, Somalía, México, República Dominicana, Tanzania, fuera yanquis de América latina Franceses, ingleses y holandeses, yo te quiero libre Palestina [Coro] Todos los callados (todos)

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Todos los omitidos (todos) Todos los invisibles (todos) Todos, to, to, todos Todos, to, to, todos Saqueo, pisoteo, colonización, Matias Catrileo, Wallmapu Mil veces venceremos, del cielo al suelo, y del suelo al cielo Vamos, sa, sa, sa, sa, sa, sa, sa, saltando Caballito Blanco, vuelve pa’ tu pueblo, no te tenemos miedo Tenemos vida y fuego, fuego nuestras manos, fuego nuestros ojos Tenemos tanta vida, y hasta fuerza color rojo La niña María no quiere tu castigo, se va a liberar con el suelo Palestino Somos Africanos, Latinoamericanos, somos este sur y juntamos nuestras manos [Coro] Todos los callados (todos) Todos los omitidos (todos) Todos los invisibles (todos) Todos, to, to, todos Todos, to, to, todos

You tell us we should sit down But ideas can only rise us Walk, march, don’t surrender or retreat See, learn like a sponge absorbs No one is surplus, all fall short, all add up All for all, all for us We dream big that the empire may fall We shout out loud, there is no other remedy left This is not utopia, this is a joyful dancing rebellion Of those who are overrun, this dance is yours and mine Let’s rise to say “enough is enough”

Sounds Radical

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Neither Africa or Latin America are for auction With mud, with a helmet, with a pencil, drum the fiasco To provoke a social earthquake in this puddle [Chorus] All the silenced (all) All the neglected (all) All the invisible (all) All, All All, All Nigeria, Bolivia, Chile, Angola, Puerto Rico and Tunisia Algeria, Venezuela, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mozambique Costa Rica, Cameroon, Congo, Cuba, Somalia, Mexico Dominican Republic, Tanzania Get out Yankees from Latin America French, English and Dutch I want you Free Palestine [Arabic Verse Rapped by Shadia Mansour] Give me, give me, give me the mic and sing Singing is the mother of world languages It holds our existence and it holds our root to greater Syria, Africa and Latin America I’m with A.N.I.T.A Tijoux I stand with those who suffer not with those who sold out I’m with cultural resistance From the beginning, hasta la victoria siempre I’m with those who are against, those who collaborated with those who are not on our side Long ago, I calculated eh, so I decided to invest in Banksy after Ban Ki-cracked As the saying goes “the situation needs to be cradled but in reality the situation has to stop” For every free political prisoner, an Israeli colony gets bigger For each greeting, thousand houses Rumble They use the press to be manufactured

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But when my punishment is condemned, reality shows [Chorus] All the silenced (all) All the neglected (all) All the invisible (all) All, All All, All [Chorus twice] Looting, trampling, colonization, Matias Catrileo, Wallmapu A thousand times we will overcome, from the sky to the ground, and from the ground to the sky Let’s go, jumping White Horse go back to your city, we are not afraid We have life and fire, fire in our hands, fire in our eyes We have so much life, and strength up to the colour red The child (divine) Mary doesn’t want your punishment, she is going to free the Palestinian soil We are Africans, Latin Americans, we are the south and we join our hands together [Chorus] All the silenced (all) All the neglected (all) All the invisible (all) All, All All, All

I quote these lyrics in full in both Spanish and English (and gesture to the Arabic) because they represent a powerful call for Global South solidarity that makes connections across multiple spaces through the political histories of Third World alliances and beyond. Given that we currently live in a post-Oslo world where the ability to imagine a free Palestine has narrowed, the lyrics show how that imaginary continues to be held by those living

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within the territories, but also by those carrying these burdens in the diaspora. Shadia Mansour’s melodic undercurrents in the song invoke the links between violent dispossessions, new migrations, and the political memories of Palestinian territory. The powerful presence of Arab sound within the hybrid musicality of “Somos sur” becomes the acoustic reverberations of interwoven histories of occupation and Indigenous dispossession. Further, the line, “looting, trampling, colonization, Matias Catrileo, Wallmapu,” is a very specific colonial linking of occupation across geopolitical spaces and within Indigenous territories. Specifically, the line calls out the internal colonial condition of Chile, where nation-state governance continues to “legally” occupy the land of Indigenous Mapuche, Pehuenche, and Huilliche peoples. Wallmapu signifies the territories prior to Spanish colonialism that stretches across the Andes and between Chile and Argentina and names the space that refuses liberal nationalism. Further, the naming of Matias Catrileo, a young Mapuche student who was killed in 2008 during a reoccupation, or a taking back of Indigenous land against corporate encroachment in BíoBío, becomes central to the memory work in the song.15 The militarization of Mapuche territories to facilitate extractive capitalism and the imprisonment and killing of Mapuche activists have become common practices of the racial state.16 By drawing on the life-and-death dialectic within the condition of coloniality in Palestine and in the southern territories of the BíoBío, Ana Tijoux and Shadia Mansour’s lyrics call for the liberation of those who have been silenced within the geopolitical advancement of settler occupation. In enlivening histories of exchange between Indigenous peoples within colonized spaces, “Somos sur” suggests something powerful about the ability to connect across regions toward a political

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and enlivened imagination of the future. It is also a call to find new modes to enliven the 1955 Bandung Conference, which promoted Third World solidarity primarily between Asian and African nations but also throughout the “developing” world, including the Americas. Rather than invoke the South as a top-down framework or as a social science framework that emphasizes war, poverty, and violence as reductive categories of underdevelopment, Ana Tijoux and Shadia Mansour put into motion other possibilities for the Global South. Like the massive mobilizations by students to enact a different relation to debt and indebtedness, Tijoux and Mansour show how alternatives to capitalism matter, where Andean histories and cultural memory find other routes for organizing global politics, outside of the binary choice between capitalism and communism or between individualism and no future. The visual impact of the video draws from Andean cultural production, especially the communal dances that span the Highlands and are often performed in ritual contexts that celebrate Pacha Mama, or the Earth Being. In the video the visuals are broken up by psychedelic moments, where flashing light, masks, and dizzying spinning produce a sense of a parallel universe, one that cannot be reduced by the neoliberal market or the logics of commodification. The quick edits and pulsating flashes mimic the experience of psychedelic states, wherein multiple sensations emerge in the consciousness as a kind of physical embodiment of the surround. Though in the United States the “war on drugs” has tainted and confused our understanding of sacred plants, in the Andes, Indigenous Aymara- and Quechua-speaking populations have an understanding of the natural world that includes a relation to plant life, or a cosmovision where altered states are part of a wider perception of the universal principles and a connection to all living things. In the

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video, Tijoux politicizes this consciousness and connection through lyrics that denounce racism and global oppression. The line, “white horse, go back to where you came from, we are not afraid,” speaks precisely to the anti-imperialist and anti-settler colonial critique embedded in the song. •

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In this chapter, I have written about how Ana Tijoux’s music represents a sonic political disruption and break with the noise of the neoliberal consensus. Student social movements fed up with the debt economy expressed their opposition through music, coalition building, and collective enactments of street performance. And Tijoux’s music and collaborations sounded the frustrations of a generation that had inherited the ruinous effects of neoliberalism, including debt, environmental disaster, gender inequities, racism, and the occupation of Indigenous territories. By learning and remaking the sounds of global hip-hop that emerged from the Afro-diasporic contexts of New York City and the Caribbean and then creating a platform to voice the discontent in the Global South, Tijoux’s songs have become an important venue for political and social change. In “Somos sur,” the connections across global spaces of occupation are made through the vibrant pulsations of Black diasporic sound. Global rap might be thought of in this context as creating the very platform of expressive solidarity that allows the articulation between Indigenous land rights and Palestinian return. It is through the deep and resonant histories and sounds of Black cultural production that Andean and Arab music intertwine to call for the rise of the Global South. These radical sounds allow us to reposition the politics of occupation to hear and feel beyond the liberal static and noise of the nation.

t wo

How Cuir Is Queer Recognition? A Manifesto from the Sexual Underground

In 1986, prior to the Pink Tide and toward the end of the Pinochet dictatorship and amid deep economic crisis, the fiction writer, radio personality, performer, and gay and trans poet Pedro Lemebel delivered a manifesto titled “Hablo por mi diferencia,” “I Speak for My Difference.” The manifesto’s opening lines are: No soy Pasolini pidiendo explicaciones No soy Ginsberg expulsado de Cuba No soy un marica disfrazado de poeta No necesito disfraz Aquí está mi cara Hablo por mi diferencia Defiendo lo que soy Y no soy tan raro Me apesta la injusticia Y sospecho de esta cueca democrática Pero no me hable del proletariado Porque ser pobre y maricón es peor.

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How Cuir Is Queer Recognition? / 47 I’m not Pasolini asking for explanations I’m not Ginsberg expelled from Cuba I’m not a fag disguised as poet I don’t need a disguise Here is my face I speak for my difference I defend what I am And I’m not so strange Injustice stinks And I am suspicious of this democratic dance But don’t speak to me of the proletariat Because to be poor and queer is worse.1

These lines address overlapping forms of oppression as experienced by Lemebel during a period of acute violence and economic disarray. When Lemebel reveals, “I don’t need a disguise / here is my face,” they defend their authentic expression of selfhood despite the fact of transphobia and class hostility. And when they declare “I’m not so strange” and “injustice stinks,” they reference interlocking forms of oppression that cannot be isolated by either sex or economic exclusion but must be understood in a much deeper historical context of sex and gender regulation. Throughout the manifesto, and particularly in this stanza, “lo raro,” or strangeness, offers an important category of difference as an expressive site for queer and trans social life beyond normative structures of the nation. Writing prior to the 1990s and as a critique of neoliberal mainstreaming, Lemebel anticipated the inability of neoliberalism to reckon with radical difference. Lemebel rehearses how the military state’s targeting of sexual dissidents is intentional and specific: queer and trans bodies directly challenge authoritarian states of normalcy.2 In the final line, Lemebel registers the limits of the rhetorics of

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democracy that dance a smooth choreography. As Lemebel insists throughout their literary and performance oeuvre, radical queerness and anticapitalist critique cannot be easily incorporated into the national order. Lemebel’s “I Speak for My Difference” represents an ur-text of cuir theory and praxis from the Américas and a key site of disidentification.3 By using the term cuir here, I point to the specific Spanish term for “queer” that renders the specificities of the continent by locating non-normative bodies in space and time. Written and performed during the early phase of neoliberalism, Lemebel’s work powerfully critiques those who leave gender / sex identities and experience out of Left political analysis, as well as those intent on commodifying queer suffering. Positioning the manifesto as a key genre for political expression and action, Lemebel simultaneously speaks against the violence of dictatorship, the homophobia of the Left, and the consumer absorption of gender / sex difference that have become acute in our present. The manifesto asks us to consider other approaches rather than LGBTI recognition politics and visibility such as those that turn away from the politics of the nation-state toward the sotanó, or basement, or as I term it, the sexual underground. Before the Pink Tide, what can Lemebel’s manifesto and body of work tell us about queerness and its future from a southern perspective? How does Lemebel’s call for difference resonate three decades later to reposition our view from the wave of LGBTI rights visibility to the sotanó (the basement) or sexual underground? In other words, how might we perceive sex dissidence beyond the formal sphere of legal politics?4 In this chapter, I take my cue from Lemebel’s manifesto, noting how sex politics and queer / trans perspectives and experiences challenge the politics of normalcy. By reading Lemebel’s

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work with the performance group Yeguas del Apocalipsis (Mares of the Apocalypse) and by situating particular movements and texts that speak from the site of difference, I bring forward an important archive of cuir sociality, spaces, and critiques. Looking back to this past work gives us clues for how to think about the future of queerness beyond the politics of recognition.

from the sexual underground Lemebel’s manifesto charts geographies and desires for social transformation outside the authorizing structures of the state, gender norms, or bourgeois morality.5 Rather than seek recognition from existing power structures and the legal sphere, the sexual underground destabilizes the one-track channel of power embedded in authoritarianism. As Lemebel wonders in this stanza: ¿El futuro será en blanco y negro? ¿El tiempo en noche y día laboral sin ambigüedades? ¿No habrá un maricón en alguna esquina desequilibrando el futuro de su hombre nuevo? ¿Van a dejarnos bordar de pájaros las banderas de la patria libre? El fusil se lo dejo a usted Que tiene la sangre fría Y no es miedo El miedo se me fue pasando De atajar cuchillos En los sótanos sexuales donde anduve.

Will the future be black and white? Day and night, without ambiguity?

50 / How Cuir Is Queer Recognition? Won’t there be a fag on some street corner, destabilizing the future of your new man? Will you let us embroider birds onto the flag of the free land? I will leave the rifle for you The coldblooded one And it’s not that I’m afraid The fear wore away Used to blocking knives In the sexual undergrounds that I used to move in.

Living through the fascism of heteronormative nationalism, the future looked quite bleak, binarized and monochromatic. As a metaphor for queer and trans connections that go beyond the framework of legislative visibility, el sotanó, the basement, or what I am intentionally translating as “the sexual underground,” refers to submerged spaces of queer and trans social life and cultural production not easily absorbed by the nation-state. Lemebel cuirs the normative logic of the national family and its symbols with the question, “Will you let us embroider birds onto the flag of the free land?”6 The embroidered act becomes a way to signify sexual and political difference within a heteronormative structure where a diversity of genders and sexual object choices is simply not tolerated.7 In these lines, Lemebel also gestures to how the nationstate co-opts the language of territorial freedom by disappearing the fact that it continues to occupy Indigenous territories. Lemebel suggests that non-normative sex and genders enact embodied creativity to destabilize “the future of your new man.” This is a powerful critique both of leftist concepts of revolutionary masculinity and right-wing ideas that place the autocrat in the primary role as father of the nation. Lemebel references the rifle, a symbol of militarism and patriarchy that presumes hegemonic masculinity and at the same time squelches gender and sex difference. The rifle also represents the weapons of state

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violence and the debris of dissident bodies tortured and killed by the dictatorship. By turning to embroidery as the symbol for alternative creative acts in the face of the rifle’s barrel, Lemebel offers us a language for the embodied and radical politics of queer creativity and refusal. In an interview with Miguel Paz in December 2001,8 Pedro Lemebel was asked, “¿Todavía eres maricón o ahora eres gay? Te lo pregunto por una definición que hiciste anteriormente” / “Are you a fag or are you now gay? I ask you because of a definition you previously made.” Lemebel’s response was swift and condemning: A ver, creo que yo lo dije en algún momento y creo que el término ‘maricón’ en tu boca heterosexual es ofensivo, en primer lugar. Te lo digo esto porque es un código afectivo entre los homosexuales tratarse así, porque uno revierte la agresión que tiene esta palabra. Ahora, sobre la misma pregunta yo creo que soy un devenir minoritario, sexuado evidentemente pero una sexualidad ‘derivante’ que pasa por la homosexualidad, pero no es un lugar estanco.

Let’s see, in the first place, I think I said it at one point and I think that the term “maricón” [fag] in your heterosexual mouth is offensive. I say this because it is an affectionate term and a way of relating between homosexuals, because one reverses the aggression contained in that word. Now, in relation to the same question I think I am a deviating minority, evidently sexed but with a deviating sexuality that passes through homosexuality but does not represent a fi xed state.

Lemebel articulates a deviant sexuality as a form of the social, where maricón becomes a term of relational intimacy that circulates within “desviando” affective communities. Pushing back on heteronormative discursive enactments of privilege, Lemebel

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suggests how from your heterosexual mouth you cannot ask such things so easily. The point of Lemebel’s statement is another refusal, one that rejects the assimilation, absorption, and usage of queer and trans identities by mainstream media. By refusing to answer the question initially and by then calling the interviewer out for their insensitivity, Lemebel points to a broader politics of social critique that disavows the renormalization of the use of maricón. Not in your mouth, Lemebel insists. By focusing on the sexual underground that Lemebel points us to, we can trace the complex textures of sexual identities, practices, experiences, and political formations not bound by the above ground and out-of-the-closet narrative of LGBTI visibility and recognition, especially in relation to dominant electoral politics. For instance, the terms maricón, lesbiana, presa, camionera, puta, tortillera, and loca all become a thick vernacular language in Spanish that describe non-normative sexual identities within regional spaces of the sexual underground. These are practices and identities not contained by recognition politics or new legislation aimed at integrating queer and trans peoples into the fold of the nation-state.

embodied cuir and trans publics A literary writer, poet, and performance artist, Lemebel was born in 1952 into a working-class family on the outskirts of Santiago. While working as a visual studies high school teacher in Santiago, at age twenty-six, Lemebel was fired, presumably for wearing women’s clothing. Such early experiences shaped Lemebel’s anti-institutional stance and political identity; defiance defined the tone of his radio shows, chronicles, essays, political commentary, and performance oeuvre in the decades

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that followed. As part of the escena avanzada (avant-garde scene), a group of photographers, performers, poets, writers, and sex positive activists that produced art against the dictatorship, Lemebel moved within hidden circuits of a cuir and trans underground. These spaces both challenged and posed alternatives to the colonial and modern gender, race, class, and sexual order.9 As a member of the Communist Party from the 1960s until his death in 2015, Lemebel addressed the heteronormativity of the military regime and the homo and trans phobia that circulated within Left political formations and more broadly within Chilean society. Self-identified as a “loca” (queen) with profound commitments to feminist, Indigenous, and anticapitalist struggles, Lemebel lamented the fact that Marxism often reduced social identities to the experience of material and classbased oppression. By speaking for the positive force of cuir difference and for sex / gender alternatives, Lembel argued for an antinormative approach to social justice during a period of brute authoritarian violence and its enforced gender conformity. During the 1980s and 1990s, Lemebel worked closely with their partner and collaborator, Francisco Casas, in las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, a widely lauded interdisciplinary performance and video production duo that charted new paths for queer / trans expression. Born in the mix of antidictatorship politics and cultural movements that resisted institutionalization, las Yeguas created strong links to the escena avanzada.10 As part of their practice, they incorporated an aesthetic sensibility that drew from a rich language of sex dissidence that emerged from the social intimacies and methods of the sexual underground. For those watching, the collaborative work of las Yeguas marked a “surprising turn” for Lemebel’s career, especially given his literary talents and upward global trajectory.11 But the formation of the

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performance duo was anything but surprising, especially considering the international happenings that had made their way to Santiago.12 As Diana Taylor explains, performance can offer a mode for a vital act of transfer where social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity are communicated through embodied practice.13 Indeed, las Yeguas used the street as a powerful place for the transit of social knowledge and identity within a broader antiauthoritarian artistic movement directed at social change and economic redistribution. The specific use of embodied performance and visual interventions as mediated sites produced an explosive critique of normative embodiment in the public sphere. For instance, the monumental performance “Yegua de dos pisos,” or “Mare of Two Levels,” took place on October 8, 1988, at the Art Faculty of the University of Chile, right after the popular plebiscite vote against Pinochet. Riding on a horse into the main patio of the Catholic University in Santiago, the two performers were stark naked, with their hair flowing behind them and led by the escena avanzada poet Carmen Berrenguer.14 As Francisco Aravena Solar explains, the intent was to create a shock that would “leave the students catatonic” and sín aliento, literally, “without breath.”15 With the conquistador Pedro de Valdivia as one potential referent, the bareback performance mocked the colonial symbols of the nation, disrupting the paradigm of civility by instead perverting the heteronormative order through queer / trans embodiment, particularly through the figure of the loca. These decolonial gestures revealed the artificial constructions of the colonial social order that organized distinctions between human and animal, civilized and uncivilized, and peace and war. Like many of their performances, “Yegua de dos pisos” confronted the authoritarian gaze and punctured the surveillance

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apparatus of the public sphere. By riding bareback on a horse, they brought the perspectives of the sexual underground into the censored space of the university. They also lifted up the mixed class / gender / race contact space of the sexual underground, which included sex workers, artists, poets, photographers, and writers committed to a critique of sex and gender norms and actively accompanying las Yeguas to document and collaborate in the performance. Such collaborations offered an alternative to heteronormative public spaces that were increasingly monitored and censored. In short, the performance “Yegua de dos pisos” made the sexual underground visible within the highly surveilled public square. Though much of las Yeguas’s body of work has been categorized as merely a rejection of formalist art or as the art of social protest, I read their performative actions as queer / trans performance that expresses the plurality, desires, and social formations of the sexual underground.16 Showing how cuir and trans bodies differently inhabited public space, las Yeguas challenged the spatial boundaries of bourgeois morality. For instance, in August 1989 Lemebel and Casas interrupted the Teatro Cariola in the middle of a cultural event where then President Aylwin’s government aimed to showcase the future of the democratic transition. Dressed in long coats, high heels, and corsets, las Yeguas interrupted the speech of nationally renowned actress, Ana González, by wearing a sign that read “Homosexuales por el cambio,” or “Homosexuals for change.”17 By bringing embodied politics to the national stage, such performances activated the defiant and in-your-face approach of the sexual underground on a national stage. The sexual underground represents a southern and distinctly Latin American space for political change that is organized by the

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logics of cuir sociality and trans embodiment. Beneath normative models for social political change, Lemebel and las Yeguas remind us how to fashion worlds of pleasure, joy, disruption, and refusal organized by the social desire for transformation. Though this period predates the Pink Tide by a couple of decades, my point is to show how beyond, beneath, below, and before the dominant political sphere there are modes of queer and trans social life that cannot be subsumed by normative politics.

the cuir difference Pedro Lemebel’s manifesto, sometimes read in high heels and with the Communist sickle painted on the side of their face, expresses alternative sexualities through cuir and trans performance strategies. Rather than rehearse the closet as a coming into visibility,18 Lemebel’s manifesto considers the importance of the speaking subject in contrast to the Marxist idea that condemned homosexuality as a bourgeois voice, on the one hand, or the more recent LGBTI mainstream social movements that presume they disrupt the neoliberal consensus, on the other. As Jack Halberstam writes in his book Trans*, nonheteronormative gender and sex identities cannot be captured within the dualistic frames of visibility / invisibility, binary / nonbinary, or through the language of staying in or coming out of the closet.19 How does the manifesto for difference potentially chart alternative pathways for cuir politics? By starting with a hemispheric perspective, we decenter the universalizing metaphors for LGBTI liberation and shift to approaches that emerge from geographies outside of the US political frame. Specifically, to look to the circulation of queer / cuir theory in Latin America, we might reposition some

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of these debates to account for sexual difference in their specific geopolitical context. For instance, in the introductory chapter to Re-sentir lo cuir, editors Diego Falconi, Santiago Castellanos, and María Amelia Viteri acknowledge the importance of not merely importing the term “queer” to Latin America. Instead, they describe how the non-normative is always situated in relation to social violence and forms of difference that include and exceed gender / sex identities within specific regions. In forthcoming work, Kale Fajardo makes a similar argument about the term “kweer” in Filipinx contexts. Shifting to the language of “lo cuir” allows a conversation about the flows of social experience and intellectual and cultural production that do not always pass through Anglophone theory or experience. Dynamic cultural, social, and geopolitical differences become part of a critical discourse where the concept “queer” is located within deeper histories of colonial exchange. The importance of situated geographies obviously comes into play here in the distinct local, cultural, regional and national, and linguistic formations that constitute Latin America, from Mexico all the way to Patagonia. At the same time, Falconi, Castellanos, and Viteri acknowledge how a single model of queer theory cannot encapsulate the whole of the Americas. In other words, what the authors in Re-sentir lo cuir analyze and encourage is the ability to note the interchange and fluidity of concepts that emerge from local and regional histories of Latin America. We can desviar, or move away from, straight and linear histories. Or we can make new sense of our terms and affective and political attachments to “lo cuir” through the process of “resentiendo.” In this way, the translation of resentir is not the resentment of external imposition, but rather a “re-sensing” of the experience of cuir embodiment and experience. Cuir, then,

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becomes a powerful mode of embodied political activity that is not merely the result of US imperialism, but names relational viewpoints from throughout the Southern Hemisphere.

cuir-ing rights: views from the south Over the past decade, one nation after another has adopted a series of new laws aimed at doing away with centuries of discriminatory practices against sex and gender minorities. By 2009, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Mexico had legally granted same-sex marriage rights, with common law marriages later legalized in Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, and Peru. These struggles for recognition look different in Latin America than they do in the United States, especially given their anchoring within the histories of state violence and their afterlives and the specific forms of trans and alternative sexual practices that represent a longer arc beyond the colonial period. In 2012, Argentina passed one of the most progressive pieces of legislation in the world: The Gender Identity Law removed psychiatric diagnoses, medical interventions, and judicial permission as a prerequisite to changing one’s legal gender. It also guaranteed access to those desiring hormone therapy and sexreassignment surgeries. Such changes on the legislative front culminated from forty years of intense political activisms in the face of homo and trans phobia, where rates of violence against queer and trans-bodies are some of the highest level in the world.20 Through broad-based social movements, LGBTI candidates took public office, such as Carina Vance, an out lesbian who was appointed to the Ministry of Health in Ecuador. As a Foreign Policy article recently suggested, these changes represent a coming-out for alternative sexual practices and identities.21

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In the US context, Lemebel’s manifesto for difference might be understood alongside a range of queer, trans, and theoretical positions that include Lisa Duggan, Dean Spade, and Chandan Reddy’s work, all of whom consider the neoliberal and racialized politics that function to normalize queer and gay identities through the state.22 To make the comparison, in the United States we have witnessed how movements for same-sex rights is often anticoalitional and even work in opposition to other rights struggles. This is especially true in terms of the single issue of gay marriage and its mainstream silence on anti-Black racism, class inequality, housing rights, and sex-positive rights. In other words, marriage inclusion legislation in the United States is often billed as part of a human rights campaigns even as it defers calls for radical equality and accountability.23 How might we understand how gay marriage in Latin America has often been tied to broader social movements? As Jordi Díez discusses in The Politics of Gay Marriage in Latin America, same-sex marriage rights efforts accessed frames that resonated far beyond cuir and gay communities.24 In fact, the path to legislative victory for gay marriage in Argentina was often anchored in specific political genealogies connected to historical memory, disappearance, and the struggle over LGBTI rights in ways that challenged the sovereign authority of the state over citizen lives. Antiauthoritarian at their core, the marriage debates in Argentina brought to the foreground the importance of extending ideas about the family so that it could not be used to justify the militarized logics of the nation-state. During 2010, a series of debates about same-sex marriage took place in Congress that raised the specter of the Dirty War in Argentina. Between 1974 and 1983 the military regime in Argentina was responsible for the deaths of thirty thousand

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politically Left activists and the torture and exile of tens of thousands. This period of state terror created enormous political divisions within families and communities, dehumanizing young people for their political beliefs and for their anticapitalist political organizing that imagined a better society. Throughout the Américas, Left sympathizers and revolutionaries were dehumanized, labeled “subversives” for activating movements that provided alternatives to capitalism, colonialism, and normative gender / sex roles.25 In moving testimony that I followed at the time, several relatives of the disappeared and of the formerly imprisoned and tortured spoke about not wanting their LGBTI sons and daughters to be subject to the similar process of dehumanization that those deemed subversives had undergone. By suturing political dissidence to sexual dissidence, these open comments condemned authoritarian discourses of dehumanization. In these specific testimonials, the legal sphere was positioned not only as the national arbiter of rights, but the site for cultural memory, where broader struggles about political dissidence, state violence, and the military could be staged. By focusing on the memory of the “the disappeared,” LGBTI communities were able to access legal recognition from the state, carrying the memory of embodied activism during state terror with them. In this way, the marriage debates in Argentina were not imported from US LGBTI movements but instead connected to intimate histories and experience with state violence throughout the Americas. Further, though the public and academic discussion of the disappeared has often operated within a heteronormative framework, where the patriarchal family and the place of the lost father is primary, through the example of the marriage act in Argentina we can see how the category might also reference those shunned

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by society for their sexual nonconformity. During the marriage debates, relatives of LGBTI people articulated the importance of historical memory. They described how the refrain “Never Again” could also be applied to cuir kinship: “Never Again” should our queer loved ones be banished. By cuir-ing disappearance, they referenced the violent histories of the nation and connected those histories to the social disappearance of LGBTI populations. Like Lemebel’s oeuvre and performance archive, this multidirectional understanding of solidarity that places political and sex dissidence at its center produces new possibilities for what cuir legal visibility and recognition can look and feel like. Omar Encarnación’s work expands on these ideas by charting the recent gains for gay and trans populations in Argentina, showing how Argentina follows its own rather than a global trajectory. Argentina’s gay marriage law, which was passed in 2010, was the first of its kind in Latin America. In terms of progressive LGBTI legislation, and alongside South Africa, this put Argentina at the forefront of the Global South. The Transgender Law, which authorized gender / sex transition without undergoing surgery or the legal demand to receive authorization from a doctor or a judge, quickly followed. In other words, Argentina’s path to same-sex marriage legislation did not merely follow the US lead. Instead, LGBTI recognition responded to the postauthoritarian desire that allowed room for different sexualities and minority viewpoints and practices. There are similar histories to tell here about Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Chile, where LGBTI recognition rights have been connected to longer struggles against militarization and police brutality. Yet in the new authoritarianisms throughout the hemisphere, violence against trans people has also increased and is often invisibilized. According to a recent report from Transgender

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Europe (TGEU), 74 percent of all murders of trans people globally take place in Central and South America.26 For instance, in the recent waves of political violence in Honduras, trans communities have been the direct targets of military violence. Suyapa Portillo Villeda elaborates how after the coup in 2009, CATTRACHAS, a Tegucigalpa-based human rights organization that works on behalf of the lesbian, gay bisexual, transgender, transvestite, intersex (LGBTTI) community, organized against the murders. Led by trans activists, CATTRACHAS draws attention to the deep pathologies of power and structural violence aimed at sex / gender nonconforming populations.27 In the face of brute and structural violence, gender / sex dissidence accompanied by a critique of militarism and state violence offers a transnational model for alternative political solidarities. These views from the South surface alternative genealogies regarding the meaning of LGBTI rights and activisms, revealing the ongoing importance of the manifesto for difference.

fantastical living The recent film, Una mujer fantastica / A Fantastic Woman (2017), directed by Sebastián Lelio, rewrites the histories of state, familial, and nation-state violence by situating the experience of trans exclusion. The protagonist of the film, Marina, played by trans actress Daniela Vega, is a cabaret singer who lives in Santiago and is romantically involved with Orlando (Francisco Reyes). Orlando’s death sets off a set of dramatic encounters that begins with Marina’s exclusion from the hospital when Francisco dies of an aneurysm. The death of Orlando propels a series of exclusions, especially as Marina is treated by Orlando’s upper-class family as subhuman rather than as his legitimate partner. Marginalized

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from the funeral, evicted from the apartment they shared, and deprived of the couple’s dog, Marina is multiply denied the right to mourn her beloved. This denial of the right to mourn repeats the histories of female relatives of the disappeared who by being in relation to political dissidents were themselves cast as abject. Relatives of the disappeared were also denied the right to mourn a body, an extremely dissociative and painful experience of loss.28 Marina’s own embodiment as a young and transgender woman is constituted outside the boundaries of legitimacy and therefore denied the ability to grieve the body of her lover. In a recent interview, Lelio emphasizes this form of intimate exclusion when discussing the question of rights to personhood. In particular, Lelio unearths legitimacy: [La pelicula trae] el tema de cuáles son los límites de nuestra empatía, de lo que estamos dispuesto a permitir; el considerar que hay personas más legitimas que otras y amores legítimos e ilegítimos; y que existen personas que creen que pueden declaran esa legitimidad. ¿Con qué autoridad se roban ese derecho?29

The film addresses the limits to empathy, and what we permit; it considers that there are some people who are more legitimate than others and legitimate and illegitimate loves; and that certain people can declare legitimacy. With what authority is that right stolen?

From the director’s perspective, the right to legitimate intimacy is one main undercurrent of the film. Whether in the investigation by the police about Orlando’s death, or in scenes with her partner’s cruel brother, including moving into Marina’s apartment and hanging her yellow dress in the living room as an act of shaming, or in the misunderstandings about Marina’s intentions by her own sister and brother-in-law, or in having to

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constantly explain herself to Orlando’s estranged wife, the film turns on a series of indignities and shaming practices that deny the right to legitimate intimacy and the formal role of partner. In a visually stunning scene that renders the inescapability of transphobia, Marina walks face forward into wind that increasingly becomes a torrential force that threatens to blow her away. In the sequence that immediately follows, Marina reclaims the right to mourn. Uninvited to Orlando’s funeral, she is quickly thrown out of the church ceremony by patriarchal family members who do not want to expose Orlando’s intimate relationship with a trans-female partner. In the subsequent harrowing scene, Marina is disappeared from the street by an SUV with tinted windows, driven by members of Orlando’s family. The SUV repeats the motif of the DINA, the secret police that throughout the 1970s snatched those believed to be political dissidents from the public sphere, taking them to torture and concentration camps throughout the country. After she is abducted, Marina tries to kick her way to freedom, though she is forcibly subdued in the backseat by two men who bind her hands, legs, and mouth with thick gray duct tape. In this violent scene, we literally see the torture practices of the secret police impose themselves on the transfemale body. By transposing these violent histories onto the histories of violence against trans people in the Americas, the film literally rewrites and extends the meaning of disappearance. Even though these moments reveal the harsh realities for trans lives, A Fantastic Woman’s critical hope lies in its use of fantastical elements in the making of alternative worlds. Reminiscent of Lemebel’s world in which depictions of violence are punctured by pleasure, the film offers precious moments of joy and pleasure that encapsulate what I refer to as the sexual underground. For instance, after the torture scene, Marina finds

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her way to a cuir / trans bar where the immersive view of submerged sex and gender worlds is foregrounded. In a campy choreographed scene where Marina glitters with silvery angelic wings, she finds the pulsating music and sonic reverberations of kinesthetic escape. As the camera closes in on a cropped view of Marina’s face, the dreamscape blue and green hues of the film signal to the viewer that we have been brought into another kind of world, one where pleasure, domination, sex alternatives, and fantasy mix to help purify the scene of tortured violence. I do not want to suggest that such ecstatic moments can wholly erase traumatic experiences. Violence against trans and trans of color bodies in the United States and the Caribbean continues to be experienced within the regulatory spaces of the state and its institutions, such as the school, the heteronormative family, the medical establishment, and the street. If we reframe our view on the sexual underground such as A Fantastic Woman does, we see violence at work but also find spaces of potential release and the intimacies of different and heterogeneous socialities at play. The sexual underground, as queer and trans scholars have written, becomes an intimate space for contact, a site for recognizing each other, and a place for non-normative intimacies that extend beyond the desire for legislative recognition. Even as the racial and gender state and patriarchal systems violently press down directly on the regulation of trans lives in the Americas, intimate communities of sexual dissidence find routes of temporary escape.

returning to difference In this chapter, I have focused on Pedro Lemebel’s manifesto, “I Speak for My Difference,” to illustrate how cuir / trans performance and film that emerge from the sexual underground can

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extend and disrupt a normative view of nation-state politics. Lemebel’s poetics and performances provide a rich archive of refusal from within the heart of the early global turn to neoliberalism. Written and performed during the bleak decimation of the public sphere, and ahead of the global clamor for LGBTI recognition, Lemebel’s oeuvre seems almost prophetic in its articulation of the refusal to smooth over sexual difference. Lemebel and the performance work of las Yeguas as well as A Fantastic Woman, made some thirty years later, contend with gender/sex regulation as tied to military violence in the Americas. Reaching beyond the politics of gender and sex regulation, they bring the sexual underground to the foreground, redefining how we might consider the questions of legitimacy, the politics of respectability, and ideas of legitimate recognition. As I discuss throughout the chapter, cuir politics in Latin America must be understood within the histories of authoritarianism, and though I have focused here on a specific case in South America, there are infinite stories of repression and refusals to be told from the Caribbean, Central America, and throughout Brazil about how cuir / trans bodies block heteropatriarchal and heteronormative control of the nation. In contrast to marriage politics, which are formulated in the United States often based on the issue of equality, in Latin America cuir struggles for recognition can be articulated against the histories of state disappearance. In other words, LGBTI demands on the state refuse to participate in historical violence against dissident bodies and subjectivities. And, unlike the United States, where gay marriage politics often work in isolation from economic and racial justice, in Latin America they are often connected to a range of other social movements for justice. Cuir and trans recognition cannot be separated from struggles

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against class oppression, racial inequality, bourgeois morality, state violence, antiracism, and the occupation of Indigenous territories. Whether in nightclubs, performances, art venues, bars, film, art, or intellectual and literary production, or on the path toward visibility and recognition, queer and trans life in the Américas complicate any singular, smooth, globalized, or US/European formulation of LGBTI rights. The gender and sex formations expressed in these venues exceed the containing logics of liberal state and citizenship rights.30 Cuir and trans life in the Américas finds its source of critique and pleasure within new avenues of political access, as well as in the submerged space of the sexual underground. These expressions of different modes of doing gender and sex, and ultimately new modes of being, rethink the meaning of politics.

three

Art in the Shadow of Border Capitalism Migration, Militarism, and Trans-Feminist Critique In the prior two chapters I showed how sonic and embodied worlds in the Americas create the undercurrents for political change. Such expressions refuse the colonial and heteronormative violence of nation-states, exposing state power in order to move beyond it. I now turn to the archetypal space of colonial and militarized violence in the hemisphere, the US-Mexico border. As the Laguna writer Leslie Marmon Silko recounts in Almanac of the Dead, the border region is where the historical violence of the hemisphere gets worked out. As a two-thousand-mile geography that is the model for global security regimes, the border physically and symbolically connects the United States to Latin America, a particularly acute site where the material inequalities between Global North and Global South are experienced on a daily basis. The border war, of course, extends far beyond the mere physical geography of the US-Mexico border deep into the Southwest, Central America, Haiti, and South America. Artists and performers laboring in the shadow of the militarized border directly challenge US state policies and narratives 68

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that have proven to be so deadly for transmigrants, maquila (factory) workers, and those expulsed by imperial and social wars.1 These works perform a complex sense in which the body is used to make and experience art in the not always seen spaces of violence. For instance, building on a decade of research, the Indigenous art collective Post-Commodity brings forward themes of complicity, settler colonialism, and border violence to create a multisensory exhibition that asks the viewer to reckon with the abjection and violence of migratory routes. Recently shown at the General Art Space in Brooklyn, the exhibition Coyotaje controversially imagines the life-threatening experience of border crossing. By immersing visitors in a sound and visual landscape that evokes the militarized border, Coyotaje raises a standpoint of critical engagement in relation to the disposability of transmigrants as constructed by the global economy. Indeed, the intersections between art and politics throughout this chapter allow for a deepened experiential analysis of how the US state’s machinery continually targets migrants while extracting value and surplus from them.2 Despite the progressive rhetoric of his social policy, President Barack Obama’s massive border buildup and deportations laid the conditions for the current transmigrant expulsions in an economy that depends upon immigrant labor and military capitalism.3 And, though President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” may never be realized, his administration’s move to accelerate deportations and end provisional residency for millions while slashing the acceptance of new refugees has intensified the border crisis. The powerful undercurrents of experiential art and performance make these violent political and economic continuities vivid, by showing what it means to live and die in the shadow of the border. They also reveal how we must push beyond the boundaries

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of the nation-state by means of transnational analyses that make connections between racial, extractive, and military capitalism. Within the geographies of economic restructuring that criminalize migrants, spaces of brutality, disappearance, and murder run through San Salvador, Tegucigalpa, Guatemala City, Mexico City, Sinaloa, Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana, and throughout the Southwest. As the visual art and performance focused on border militarism acutely expresses, there are dire consequences for transmigrants and undocumented populations living in the race, class, gender fractures of global borders.

experiencing coyotaje Using the same technologies that the US Border Patrol deploys to track human movement, Post-Commodity installed sound decoys and aerial and predator drones in the gallery space. The Coyotaje exhibition also looped audio tracks and projected green laser beams to mimic the embodied experience of transmigrants whispering and hiding within zones of overexposure and surveillance. As one of the Post-Commodity artists recently discussed, “It’s no coincidence that the border area we worked in was adjacent to Fort Huachuca, the telecom headquarters for the US Army. They’re really pushing the envelope with surveillance technologies. You can see the larger military industrial complex and its attendant micro-economies in action.”4 Through an art practice that inverts border technologies and demands engagement as a critical witness, Post-Commodity raises the spectacle of militarized violence along the US-Mexico border and our own complicity within it. Coyotaje, which literally means “trickery,” is both the exhibition’s title and a polysemic metaphor for the mythic figure of the

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chupacabra, part dog and part monster, that appears along the borderlands. The exhibition’s pamphlet details, “Chupacabras reference a long folklore history in Mexico, where the reptilian, alien, and canine figure is attached to Indigenous oral traditions of Latin American origin.” And as William A. Calvo-Quirós explains, the image of the chupacabra spread during the 1990s as a subversive and complex metaphor among rural producers who feared being swallowed by the predatory neoliberalism of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).5 Building on these references, the US Border Patrol appropriates the chupacabra by setting up decoy figures for transmigrants along the border. Rather than a resistant figure of globalization, the chupacabra has been turned into the repository for surveillance devices capable of tracking and digitally mapping the migrant body. As Post-Commodity recounts, the exhibition was made through a “conversation with US Border Patrol agents about the use of decoys in their tactical operations.” “Decoys,” the information sheet tells the viewer, “can manifest as audio or physical objects and are used to trick smugglers and migrants in the border region.” But, the exhibition seems to ask, are decoys the same as tricksters? The installation’s chupacabra blow-up figure symbolizes both a decoy and a screen projection of the US nation’s anti-immigrant fears. Are you the one exposed by the biometrics of the Border Patrol? Or does the digital projection of your face on the stomach of the chupacabra ask you to consider your complicity with the political economy of border violence? In utter darkness, the visitor enters into a tunnel-like gallery space enclosed by black-painted walls surrounded by the immersive exhibition Coyotaje. For a few minutes the experience is completely disorienting: Where to focus your eyes? Are you in the right space? Whose voices and murmurs, perhaps in

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Spanish, echo in the empty space? Around a slight bend, a large chupacabra figure appears, a representation of the monsters that lurk in the hidden spaces of US-Mexico border territories. On its belly is your own distorted digital image refracted through a surveillance camera that you notice is hung high in the corner of the gallery. As a green beam of light streams through the room, you search for anchoring points and realize that the camera and laser beam mimic the technologies used by the border industrial complex to survey migrant crossings. Your senses of sight and hearing are assaulted by an exhibition that confuses you in order to reveal itself slowly. A multichannel sound loop continues to reverberate in your ears, imitating the sonic decoys used by border agents. As your eyes begin to adjust to the low light, a large lit image of a Doberman pinscher, bones, and a carcass along a chain-link fence appears in the short distance. These are horse bones the information sheet tells you (it can be read by the dim light of your cell phone). It seems as if the wild dogs circling the carcass have just finished off the last bit of meat. As you approach the image with the ghostly loop of voices echoing in your ears, reminiscent of the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo’s classic novel, Pedro Páramo, you realize that you are no longer in the land of the living. You have entered a death space, where border surveillance, scant water supplies, and dangerous desert landscape lead to the disappearance of migrant bodies.6

gore capitalism Hemispheric trans-feminist critique can show us how gendered and sexed bodies differently experience the political economy of drug and social wars throughout Mexico and Central America. In the shadow of the border, Brown women and children

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have disproportionately suffered the consequences of military capitalism’s intensification.7 As Mexicans, Haitians, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans, in addition to those at the receiving end of the so-called Muslim ban, have all too directly experienced, brute state power exerts itself by defining the boundaries of legality, citizenship, and access to inclusion.8 In this brutal border context, the work of the Tijuana-based trans-feminist scholar Sayak Valencia’s work expands on Achille Membe’s concept of necropolitics, which refers to the sovereign power of the state to dictate who may live and who may die. For Membe, state power is organized to “exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.”9 Along the US-Mexico border transmigrants, maquila workers, and those caught within the transits and crossfire of drug wars very much live in the shadow of the state’s necropolitical and sovereign power. The life and death transits of migrant populations along the border intensifies state power through the rationale of US military presence that totalizes domination over human life as a form of social control. Extending Membe’s theory, Sayek Valencia’s work on capitalismo gore describes the gendered and violent experience of frontier capitalism. Gore or slasher capitalism, depending on how you translate it, addresses state and extralegal power where particular bodies such as migrants, sex workers, and maquila workers are disposed of by a capitalist machine that extracts value by exploiting their labor. The term names how capitalism produces violence as surplus in its most extreme form, including kidnapping, the human organ exchange, torture, and assassination, within and outside the new drug economies.10 In particular, transmigrants, poor women, sex workers, children, and maquila workers populate the “free trade” zone

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between the United States and Mexico as the human and gendered debris of the global economy with rising rates of feminicide (murder of women) and transmigrant deaths across the border. Valencia carefully attends to how security rhetoric and state practices organize hierarchies of death through a machine of violent masculinity. As racial capitalism builds ever more borders and walls, it fortifies masculine state impunity; it also intensifies social and economic divisions in the border region. Valencia’s work makes new claims about old problems based on her awareness of the long history of trans-feminist debate and on her scholarly analysis of the border frontier. In addition to building on Membe’s concept of the necropolitical, she engages the Chicana theorist and poet Gloria Anzaldúa’s poignant and classic book, Borderlands / La Frontera, describing how the binary gender formation within the border region comes from the overlapping processes of Spanish colonialism, Mexican nation-state building, and US imperialism.11 Whereas the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo annexing the northern third of Mexico’s territory could be described as a single historical event, Anzaldúa instead refers to the lasting legacies of US expansionism that persist as an “open wound.” This herida abierta haunts Chicanx and mestizx peoples as the “wounds of genocidal colonization and marginalization that have never formed scabs because they’ve continued to bleed for centuries.”12 For Anzaldúa, the borderlands are a multivalent geography where visible and invisible race / class and gender / sex divisions of power continue to unfold and become violently manifest through the long effects of Spanish, French, and present-day US territorial occupation.13 Like Anzáldua, Sayak Valencia analyzes the militarized border as the historical outcome of frontier colonialism. Throughout Mexico and the Southwest, Mexican colonial officials thieved

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lands from Indigenous peoples through genocide, intermixing, and a land tenure system that radically skewed access to material resources away from the majority population. During the nineteenth century the Spanish settled lands through states of impunity that relied on violent masculine figures to do the dirty work of expansionism. Gore Capitalism specifically considers the history of caudillismo, or the rule by powerful male brokers over large concentrations of land during the Spanish colonial land grab that took place during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. A highly unequal land tenure system, caudillismo was codified through the Mexican viceroyalty, the proxy for Spanish rule. As masculine rural bosses increased their control over growing local agrarian economies, they enslaved, slaughtered, and further indebted Indigenous laborers. In Valencia’s estimation, this fixed gender, class, and color order, caudillismo, propagating the rhetoric of lawlessness formed the baseline for early globalization with effects that persist today. Situating the history of frontier colonialism as a land of impunity where sovereign power was put into the hands of colonial officials and rural bosses allows Sayak Valencia to address the death economies that hover in the shadow of the border, processes that have intensified during the past two decades. In the aftermath of the 1994 signing of NAFTA, an agreement that loosened economic regulations between the United States, Mexico, and Canada and further inserted Mexico into the global economy, the accompanying social wars against peripheral populations motored new forms of violence. As social discontent increased throughout the 1990s and 2000s, as measured by the student and large-scale popular protests such as the Zapatistaled Indigenous movement (Ejército Zapatista para la Liberación Nacional, EZLN), the state’s clamping down on “extralegal”

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populations became increasingly aggressive within new political discourses of social control. In the dense and violent context of Mexican contemporary politics, the greatest site of impunity has been the drug war, in which extralegal power seemed ubiquitous, especially in the north.14 For instance, during his presidency from 2006 to 2012, Felipe Calderón acted as a sovereign power by managing the massive deployment of federal troops. In a much critiqued move, Calderón expanded the police and military apparatus of the state, an already powerful force in Mexico, to purportedly bring drug cartels into line. In this culture of militarized violence, more than sixty thousand people have been killed in the most recent drug wars and the practice of feminicide has exponentially increased.15 In a region like northern Mexico that is littered with bodies from drug and social wars, gore capitalism both names and critiques the broad construction of Mexican criminality in the border region. Specifically, Valencia shows how earlier economic and cultural formations, such as colonial capitalism and frontier expansionism powered and expanded illicit economies and increased the violent sovereignty of the US and Mexican state. Valencia importantly contends that at the heart of the drug economies and the shadow state is a gendered system; through hyper criminal masculine representations and the dehumanization of the female, violent masculinity hardens the social and economic differences produced by neoliberal globalization. Valencia’s work is situated within the shadow spaces of border histories and economies to address the afterlives of colonial violence. Though Valencia does not extend this analysis to the transits between Central America and Mexico, and in the spaces in southern Mexico, one could use the historical frames of Span-

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ish colonialism, US imperialism, and neoliberal globalization embedded within her work to discuss the recent rise in drug wars that have spread to, for instance, Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where women and children are often caught in the crossfire of violent masculinity. One could also point to the geographic spaces of imprisonment and containment in relation to the US deportation machine that requires migrant labor, yet ensures that it is dehumanized by denying it full access to rights and citizenship. By locating the economic pressures of border capitalism upon particular bodies, we can empirically name how migrants, female subjects, workers, and young people all become the social and political debris that powers new forms of economic globality.16

body count We might link Valencia’s notion of gore or slasher capitalism to the artistic practices of the Mexico City–based conceptual artist Teresa Margolles whose body of work explores the death economies that lie deep in the shadow of border capitalism. Margolles’s performance art reckons with the embodied violence of our cultural institutions and the social waste of illicit economies. For instance, in the exhibition Plancha (2010), the artist sources and purifies water from the general morgue in Mexico City, liquid that has been previously used to cleanse corpses during their autopsy. As water slowly drips down from the ceiling onto hotplates below, each drop audibly sizzles and thus reminds the viewer of the present absence of the dead. The minimalist work recycles water from the morgue, drawing upon liquid that has been in contact with murder victims of the drug trade and social wars in Mexico. Such controversial work that

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draws attention to our complicity, literally drips from the bodies of gore violence and brings them into the spaces of the gallery. Margolles’s body of work on morgues builds on earlier similar explorations, such as the 2004 exhibition Muerte sin fin (Death without End), which takes the water from the Servicio Médico Forense (Medical Forensic Service) and runs it through a fog machine, vaporizing and then converting it into bubbles that are then formed within the the space of the gallery. Muerte sin fin is about the physical transformation between life and death, but it also references the absent presence of bodies that have vanished from the public sphere into the space of the morgue by way of state violence. In another exhibition, Aire, Margolles also uses Mexico City morgue water to humidify the room so that gallery patrons cannot leave without being confronted with the presence of social wars and their traces. By transcending aesthetic boundaries that move the forensics of the morgue to their display in the gallery, Margolles forces a confrontation with those who live on the periphery of the global economy and who cannot escape the grip of what Valencia terms gore capitalism. Margolles’s artwork and praxis has long transited within urban murderous spaces of globalization. As part of the collective SEMEFO, Margolles labored to salvage body parts, making art that explicitly addressed dehumanization by working with the remains of decomposing bodies. For instance, in Grubos sobre la piel / Globs on the Skin (2001), Margolles collaborated with a Moroccan drug dealer named Mohammed whom she met in Barcelona’s Plaza Real. As Margolles states of the piece, “He was fully aware of the origin of the material that I would use. . . I spread toxin on his naked torso, remains of the human beings that had been murdered, forgotten, recycled. I smeared remains of my misery on his misery, our human misery.”17 In smearing

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fat from corpses on the body of a drug trafficker in public, Margolles asked for consent from the living “social problem” to literally bear the existential weight of the socially dead.18 In the act of bodily transference, and in the consent that takes place between artist and performer, living bodies make visible the abject structural conditions that undergird these deaths. Drug wars have formally plagued the Américas since at least 1984 when the United States announced a new crackdown on global drug trafficking.19 Plan Colombia, initiated in 1999 by then-President Bill Clinton and Colombian president Andrés Patrana, dictated policies of crop eradication on the coca plantations of Bolivian and Peruvian rural peoples. To return to the discussion of the Pink Tide, this version of the drug war effectively intensified strong anti-US sentiment and bolstered the election of the first Indigenous president, Evo Morales, who was the leader of the cocalero organization and whose election had a dramatic effect throughout the Américas. In Mexico, the Mérida Initiative followed on the heels of Plan Colombia, and was described in 2008 as “a package of U.S. counter-drug and anticrime assistance for Mexico and Central America.”20 On the ground, these policies were experienced as the expansion of a state apparatus sanctioned by a hemispheric interstate system that carried out violence against anyone it deemed criminal. Margolles’s artwork becomes an important reminder of the massive body count in the shadow of imperial drug and social wars in Mexico and beyond. Using body parts as her artistic mediums, Margolles transits in the gore materiality of life and death. As Amy Sara Carroll points out, the ethical and political dimensions of Margolles’s work makes present the bodies of invisible subjects within global capitalism. Carroll importantly considers the apparent contradictions of how Margolles trafficks

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in the same body parts that capitalism refuses to legitimate.21 Since permission to use corporal materials to make this kind of artwork is not required by the Mexican state, Margolles has taken particular liberties, transubstantiating the materiality of the body for her own artistic interventions. As Carroll thoughtfully attends to, such ethical concerns force open difficult questions about who is ultimately responsible for these bodies. She asks, what does it ultimately mean to turn forensic science into an art for public consumption? These questions prod me to consider how Margolles’s work embodies gore capitalism and becomes a source of critical intervention in the present forms of gendered and racialized coloniality. Again, the work demands us to consider our complicity in relation to living and dying within the long shadow of border capitalism. In ¿De qué otra cosas podríamos hablar? (What Other Things Could We Talk About?), a piece made for the 2009 Venice Biennial, we are confronted with the pervasiveness of violence throughout the Mexican social and political landscape. Margolles collects the materials of blood, glass, and scenes from Sinaloa murders to draw attention to the high cost of President Felipe Calderón’s internal wars. That is, the ephemeral material of state violence becomes part of a residual collection of gore capitalism. Such art and its remnants become an ever-proliferating wasteland of bloodied objects, burning smells, and undervalued abjection, an archive that counts and evidences corporeal remains. Indeed, some might find Margolles’s work too gory in its material production, or too extreme in its uncovering of entangled power. At the same time, what such performative art makes explicit is that certain bodies are preselected to die in a hierarchical society that devalues certain lives over others.22 And art derives a particular kind of value in the wasted use and

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transits of body parts. In my reading, the process of dehumanization takes place not in the making of death art but in the violence of capitalism. Margolles’s work, like Post-Commodity’s experiential border installation, allows us to intimately witness and reckon with the body count. The corpse becomes the quintessential symbol of gore capitalism, based on one’s complacency with unequal social and political access. The forensic art practice of Teresa Margolles’s Muerte sin fin finds recourse in the examination and display of bodily remains as a way to speak to the recent waves of violence in Mexico. By focusing on those forgotten by capitalist success stories, Margolles reveals the deep shadow of the border and the global economy. Whether the bodies of sex workers, migrant women, drug addicts, street children, or victims of the drug wars, Margolles makes present how the politics of death in the metropolis are enacted through dead subjects, the bodies of refuse that dwell amongst the living.

documenting stateless peoples In July 2015, I took fifteen graduate students and artists to Tijuana, Mexico, to study the militarization of the border, its social exclusion, and the history of creative interventions from the perspective of artists, activists, scholars, and other cultural producers. Having not been in Tijuana since my undergraduate thesis research there some twenty years earlier, I was shocked to note the changes even though I had followed regional politics and the massive increase in border security and technologies. In place of the old metal fence and bridge that used to physically separate the two nations now stood a highly fortified prison border with ten-foot-high walls and large cameras on each post

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recording every move. Though drug-sniffing dogs had been ubiquitous throughout the 1990s, the new infrared, passport security system, steel walls, and airline-like border inspections far surpassed any of the security conditions I previously encountered. This was not the border of the previous decades but a war zone of penetrating surveillance.23 The art students and I studied how the 1980s and 1990s represented an earlier iteration of border violence, in which artists, performers, and musicians denounced US border militarization through ironic and performative political strategies. For instance, we screened the 1994 music video of the punk band Tijuana No’s song “La Esquina del Mundo” / “The Corner of the World.” The band raged against the border fence that extended into the Pacific, the analogue version of today’s hightech border. And, we looked at blueprints of a portable cultural center that the deejay and architect Toro made so that it could be set up on either side of the border. Toro also designed jeans with a pocket where a green card could be easily stored, a symbol of the more porous ways that many living in Tijuana transited back and forth across the border during the 1990s. We noted that even as late as 2005, the Venezuelan artist Javier Teller came up with the idea of the “human cannonball,” an art performance that literally shot David Smith from Tijuana across the border fence to the US side in San Ysidro. The idea of the performance was to provide a metaphor for dissolving borders, where the sky represented freedom of movement above the border fence. In today’s highly fortified border where billions of dollars have been invested in surveillance technologies that hover above the border, along it, and even below, it is difficult to imagine that the human cannonball was possible a little more than a decade ago.

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In addition to thick iron, border surveillance, endless cameras, and the prisonlike environment of walking from the United States into Tijuana, the most notable change was how the Tijuana River had become the place for stateless peoples. After a full day of lectures, studio visits, and walking the city’s streets and art venues, our group crossed back over the river very late at night. On the way, the smell of ash rose into the night sky and burned our eyes with the thick smoke coming from below. As we crossed a long bridge, my students and I witnessed how hundreds of people were gathered together in the shadows of the border, keeping warm around bits of trash in fires that burned bright orange for miles. Once an uninhabited cement space where a river wound its way through central Tijuana, today the river has become the site where deportees originally from Central America make their home. Expelled by the United States and not granted passage through Mexico by the Mexican government, hundreds of stateless peoples live in deplorable conditions in between national borders, in between nations, in between governments, and in permanent transit. Stateless peoples live in the new fortified border and in the shadow of the expulsive state. Deportations and expulsions that produce undocumentation offer another way to understand the dynamics of life and death in the shadow of the border. If Sayak Valencia analyzes violent masculinity from the structures of the narco-machine and the history of frontier expansionism, then Tanya Golash-Boza’s book Deportation begins from the assumption that precarious labor and its routinized exploitation is part and parcel of the global economy. Golash-Boza’s category “non-citizen” names how workers from South of the border are excluded from the legible subjectivities. Instead, non-citizens and the undocumented become a

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shadow workforce that lives and is expelled at the will of the racial state. She writes: We must look at mass deportation as part of the neoliberal cycle of global capitalism because mass deportation is only the latest permutation of this cycle that began in the 1980s. Understanding this requires stepping back and taking a critical look at the social and economic processes that produced global migration from the South to the North, the current state of the neoliberal economy, the rise of the coercive arm of the state, and the uneven integration of developing countries into the global economy.24

Golash-Boza specifically considers how the number of Haitian and other Caribbean deportees is significantly higher in the current period, as necessary to expulsive capitalism. In a segmented labor market where some are included and others remain outside of recognition by the state, waves of racialized labor are controlled to create flexible disposability. In this case, those who linger in Tijuana, now including many Haitian transmigrants, become part of a state machine that sorts labor to expel it. The “indocumentados,” as they are called in Tijuana, who live along the river are in a permanent condition of expulsion.25

outrunning the military machine Throughout this chapter, I have focused on art and performance that contends with the border experience, where transmigrant, female, and “disposable” figures and communities become the extractive material for the expansion of frontier capitalism. In this context, it is important to also bring forward how the 1980s and 1990s US-backed civil wars in Central America set the terrain for the politics of death that devour those whose lives are

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determined within the long shadow of empire. In particular, the body of work by the Guatemalan performance artist Regina José Galindo speaks back to this condition by revealing the transfrontier and borderless connections of the military state.26 In a recent haunting three-minute video, El Objetivo, screened at the 2017 Documenta in Kassel, Germany, Galindo’s small brown body is framed on the video screen before the audience. Dressed in black, with her long hair framing her face and body, her primary activity is the effort to outrun a large tank that seems to be chasing her down. The close-up of Galindo’s fearful face while barely outrunning the outsized machine behind her symbolizes the disproportional vulnerabilities in the wake of US Empire, but her Brown body also becomes a metonym, an extractive zone for racial and military capitalism. As a Guatemalan performance artist whose body of work has explored borders, violent masculinity, civil war, the military, and the embodied experience of being “the objective,” Galindo barely outrunning the military machine becomes a potent symbol of abject survivability for Brown female subjects under the gun of extractive capitalism. Serving as a reminder of 1930s and 1940s Nazi Germany and the rise of the United States as a superpower shortly after, El Objetivo is filmed in the forest surrounding Kassels, a city whose factories manufactured the majority of the machinery for German fascism. By bringing in Kassel’s World War II history, Galindo references the global history of gore capitalism that extends how we understand neoliberal social and drug wars in the Américas. In the performances accompanying the video, G-36 rifles are placed in the four corners of the room, all aiming at Galindo who stands in the center as the target. These same rifles were used in the civil war in El Salvador, Guatemala, and

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Nicaragua during the 1980s and 1990s, when US military support for right-wing dictatorships and regimes delivered death through counterinsurgency. Rather than merely use her own body as a symbol of bare life, Galindo draws out the global connections that make racial and gendered bodies the objective of state and military violence, whether through feminicide, state terror, or the ongoing dispossessions of body and territory in extractive zones. I bring Galindo’s work into the fold of other artists in this chapter to suggest the geopolitics of empire, state violence, governmental impunity, and militarization as comparative instances lodged within deeper histories of modern and colonial power. Artists like Galindo decode and subvert the logics of extractive and military capitalism in the long shadow of border economies, frontier expansionism, imperial wars, and the death politics of global migration. By staying close to “the objective” in these contexts, such artwork rearranges these logics, making visible and audible the Brown female figure made abject. •

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At the beginning of this chapter, I considered the recent Coyotaje exhibition that called into question the logics of surveillance by localizing the violence on the border to a specific region, addressing our complicity in the migrant / labor migration cycle. Post-Commodity’s recent exhibition raises the issues of surveillance, militarization, and intensification of border violence as it plays out within various scenes for transmigrants between the United States and Mexico and in the movement from Central America to the United States and back. Through the production of a sonic and immersive environment, the art collective troubles normative understandings of politics and

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power to illuminate the hidden terrains of the US racial state. In this case, migrant experiences hover in the shadows of the border beyond the decoys of anti-immigrant rhetoric. Through new sound and visual technologies, the work of Post-Commodity imagines the border region as a global space of complicity, occupation, and militarization. Teresa Margolles invokes the corpse of the Other as the material effect of drug and social wars. In her short video the Guatemalan filmmaker and performance artist Regina José Galindo relies on her own body as the instrument through which to communicate the violent history of imperialism, resource extraction, migration, and death. In these bleak artistic landscapes in the shadow of the border, critical hope lies in representational and material untangling and remixing of the normalizing practices and discourses of dehumanization.

f ou r

An Archive of Starlight Remapping Patagonia through Indigenous Memories

In the film The Pearl Button (2014), directed by Patricio Guzmán, an artist unfolds a handmade paper map of Chile. The map reveals the improbability of the nation’s contours, too long to fit within the confines of one filmic take. As the camera swoops down the map representing the nation’s 2,400-mile length, we are presented with the preposterous view of a skinny nation flanked on one side by the Andes mountain chain and on the other by the Pacific Ocean, or what is referred to by the historian Gabriel Salazar as an island. When the camera final settles on the southern tip of Chile, it is impossible to imagine that the fractured Patagonian region coheres within any normative idea of a nation-state. By following a long take that sweeps across a map of the archipelago, we become aware of continental breakage all along the southernmost edge of South America, islands that scatter into a body of water. Patagonia, an area of more than 400,000 square miles, spans modern Chile and Argentina. More ocean than landmass, the nation’s limits blur into the sea, geographically troubling the neat containment of a nation-state’s 88

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political geography and how we think about the hemisphere’s boundaries. Mishuana Goeman’s remarkable book, Mark My Words (2011), traces settler colonialism by mapping the geographies of Indigenous mobility and containment through US Native American women’s literature. She analyzes how settler colonialism persists as enduring structures of racial and gendered violence within present-day neoliberal globalization.1 Goeman’s spatialized view of mobility and containment forces us to consider the colonial state’s ongoing ability to control Indigenous peoples and to mark the boundaries of Indigenous movement within the nation-state.2 And Jody Byrd’s important book Transits of Empire describes the trajectory of movement in relation to the making of US Empire. For Byrd, Indianness is a transit that is located in the relational sites of Empire that she reads through Indigeneity as radical alterity and remembrance.3 Following this focus on mobility and transits, in this chapter I ask, how do hemispheric Indigenous practices of spatiality and embodied perspectives, in this case from a sea-oriented and fragmentary territory, change our understanding of the modern nation? How can new visual representations unsettle the violent bonds between settlers and nation-states first forged during the colonial occupation of Indigenous territories? And, how does the archipelago challenge our view of normative geographies? Hemispheric Indigenous Studies reveals how colonial violence on Native bodies and territories sets the conditions for political nationalism and the expansion of extractive capitalism through the settlement of the nation-state.4 By focusing on the Patagonian archipelago and the colonization of its original inhabitants, we are forced to rethink the meaning of nations, boundaries, and orientation to land mass, to instead consider the

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primacy of the oceanic as a colonial space of mobility and restriction. In this chapter, I continue to expand how we trouble the conventional boundaries of national politics to reach beyond the Pink Tide and into the undercurrents, this time literally into the Southern Pacific Ocean and within the archipelago territories of Patagonian Indigeneity. By thinking alongside the documentary The Pearl Button and peering into the troubling archive of British colonial discovery narratives, I uncover how Indigenous territories that extend to the night sky and the Pacific seas force us to reckon with the ongoing violent processes of nineteenth-century nation making.

mare nullius In a series of scenes in The Pearl Button that focus on interspersing shots of the galaxies with ocean waves, Guzmán narrates, “As I watched the stars, I began to learn about the importance of water.” In the next breath, he says, “Life was brought to earth by the comets that shaped the seas.” With this opening Guzmán connects the stars to the Earth’s oceans, a theme he draws on throughout the film to describe the Patagonian region and the cultural practices of its original inhabitants, namely, the Kawésqar, Selk’nam, Aónikenk, Hausch, Yánama, who the colonizers knew as the “Fuegian” peoples who traveled by sea through the archipelago. In the next scene we move to a satellite overview shot of western Patagonia, the region that forms the longest water boundary of Chile and where the Andes sinks into the ocean only to reemerge as thousands of islands. As Guzmán puts it, this is “a timeless place, an archipelago of rain.” This poetic and

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universal view of geography is followed by a meditation on water as the vehicle between our bodies and planetary bodies. It is only in the next scene that we realize this view connects sky and earth, stars and water, as understood by the Selk’nam, or as Guzmán puts it, “life in relation to the cosmos.” In the nostalgic tone and music that reminiscently haunts his other documentary films, Guzmán states, “They lived submerged in the water and they ate what the water supplied.” It is only much later that we bear witness to the full violence of the genocidal occupation by Australian and then British military forces, sheepherders, and vigilantes against Patagonian peoples. Patagonia is often visualized as a territory without inhabitants. In the ideology of terra nullius, the colonial gaze empties territories of Indigenous peoples to facilitate colonialism’s acquisition. Prior to the nineteenth century, the “Fuegan” peoples oriented themselves to the ocean and the sky, as reflected in language and in relational understandings to embodiment, water, and the cosmos above. Yet these practices were truncated by the nineteenth-century era of exploration and expansionism, including the expedition of the HMS Beagle (1831–36), captained by Robert Fitzroy with Charles Darwin onboard. We might call the perspective that imagined the sea as limitless and the region as timeless and an exceptional site for discovery as mare nullius. Indeed, Patagonian history represents a contact and extractive zone where explorers, scientific expeditions, police, the military, and sheep settled the Southern territories upon the bodies and archipelago of the Selk’nam and other Fuegan Indigenous peoples.5 Unsuccessfully colonized by the Spanish during the sixteenth century and again in the eighteenth, Patagonia and its Indigenous communities were then subjected to the brutal

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military and police power of Swedish and, later, British colonizers. The historian Matero Martinic B. discusses how, beginning in 1898, British colonizers formed the Society for Exploitation of Tierra del Fuego whose aim was to kill, capture, or relocate Indigenous peoples in order to resettle the space by dedicating large estancias (ranches) to sheepherding.6 Violent occupation was rationalized under the doctrine of social Darwinism, producing a racialized order that justified colonial and imperial subjugation of Tierra del Fuego and its inhabitants.7 Martinic argues that the Chilean state’s complicity in genocidal violence is not only its “original sins” but also its ongoing narration of a nationalist historiography that avoids confronting nineteenthcentury state violence. Indeed, this complicity has functioned to virtually disappear the histories of occupation, religious conversion, and colonial violence within the nation’s memory. In the End of a World: The Selk’nam of Tierra del Fuego (2008), Anne Chapman situates the specificity of genocidal cultural memory in the context of Patagonia.8 Though conventionally anthropological in its orientation, Chapman’s critique of power and brutality in the region, like Patrick Wolfe’s discussion on elimination as a structure rather than an event,9 reaches beneath the amnesic politics of the nation-state to consider the genocidal character of sheep colonization in the region. In particular, Chapman shows how settler militarism left a trail of genocidal events that occupy and reoccupy Indigenous territories in ways that disappear their societies from Patagonia. Such scant literature on Selk’nam, Yánama, Hausch, Aónikenk, and Kawésqar peoples cannot evade how structural genocide is foundational to Chilean and Argentine nation-state formation, especially in relation to the arrival of extractive capitalism in Tierra del Fuego.

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rethinking testimonial: interviewing survivors To describe the human slaughter that took place during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Chapman relies on interviews with Indigenous survivors. Federico, a Selk’nam (Ona) survivor, tells the story of “Ondian hunters,” local settlers and Indigenous people who were paid by the occupying forces to kill as many Native peoples as possible. From 1893 through the 1920s, these hunters fulfilled the doctrine of terra nullius, often by shooting Indigenous people in the back as they ran away or adopting the practice of execution, later used by modern state militias. Chapman writes, “In the first decades of the twentieth century, Native peoples from Tierra del Fuego had to opt: did they run the risk of being killed by the gold discoverers and the ranch agents or would they seek refuge in the religious missions?”10 Fuegen peoples could not escape the brutality of the British forces or the rapid expansion of the extractive wool and mining industries, on the one hand, and missionaries and the military, on the other. This genocidal history, long buried and obfuscated, has been brought to the screen by Guzmán’s important documentation. In The Pearl Button, Guzmán shows how Indigenous peoples from Tierra del Fuego literally had no options in the face of the brutality of the occupying forces. However, I would argue that even within the frame of “no options,” giving primacy to embodied cultural memory is a powerful method for considering the space of endurance. Let me explain. In J. Kēhaulani Kauanui’s reading of settler colonialism she reminds us that Patrick Wolfe’s original discussion refers to it as an enduring structure rather than a single event or period of colonization. Kauanui builds on

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this idea to position endurance as a twofold process: “[First,] Indigenous peoples exist, resist, and persist; and second[,] . . . settler colonialism is a structure that endures indigeneity, as it holds out against it.”11 In other words, in relation to the colonization of Indigeneity, Kauanui notes the strategies of resistance, refusal, and survival that exist within the terrain of colonial brutality. We might consider how the testimonial, a genre usually reserved for survivors of recent human rights atrocities, represents an important archive of Indigenous endurance even as it is steeped in the colonial history of constituting Native peoples in the Américas as barbaric and uncivilized. In Guzmán’s expert hands, interviews with Indigenous survivors break with liberal human rights narratives of the recent past to reveal the longer arc of endurance and survival in relation to occupation. The director also shows how British and Chilean coloniality is embedded in the bodies, languages, stories, and memories of the few last survivors and the descendants of Selk’nam, Kawésqar, and Yámana peoples. Guzmán’s documentary practice makes visible the deep entanglements of colonization not only as past-oriented violence, but as an ongoing colonial wound. In line with his prior filmography, Guzmán interviews survivors of genocidal violence to undergird the fullness of the catastrophe. As of 2010, there were twenty direct descendants of the original Patagonian peoples, yet many more are mestiza/o with direct lines to Tierra del Fuego Indigenous ancestry. And at least a quarter of the film is dedicated to the accounts of a handful of Selk’nam, Kawésqar, and Yánama survivors. For instance, Martin G. Calderón is interviewed by Guzmán in the interior of his artisanal wood home and alongside his handmade wood and fiber canoe. This is a portion of the scene’s script.

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martin g. calderón: El Mar es uno de esos lugares, como yo me crecí cerca del mar, me gusta mucho. Me gustaria poder volver a navigar en la manera como lo haciamos, pero en este momento estamos completamente restringido. Y no podemos casi ocupar el mar. [The sea is one of those places, well, because I grew up close to the sea, that I enjoy very much. I would love to be able to return to navigation in the way we used to, but in this moment we are completely restricted. And, we cannot use the ocean.] patricio guzmán: ¿Por que? [Why?] calderón: Por que la navada exige demasiadas cosas para poder usar el mar. Yo tengo una embaracación que yo hice yo mismo. Cuando hay una embarcación tan chica se astustan. Por que no estan acustumbrado a ver una embarcación que puede navigar asi. Y por eso es como ellos creen que protegen, pero creo que no. [Because the navy restricts us from using the sea. I have a boat that I made myself. When there is a boat that is so small they get scared. They are not used to seeing a boat that can navigate that well. And that’s how they think they protect us, but I think they do not.]

In this exchange with the filmmaker, Calderón speaks about his journeys across Cape Horn with his father and the prohibitions to seafaring he continues to experience on a daily basis. Calderón maintains a strong line of critique that does not just name the past restrictions to his cultural practices, but refers to current laws and regulations by the liberal state as an ongoing interruption to Indigenous life through settler militarism. The Chilean Navy has occupied the sea to such a degree that there is no room for the descendants of Patagonian Indigenous peoples to navigate through the archipelago. In Calderón’s narrative, we see and hear how the ongoing delimitation of his mobility by the Chilean state and his inability to be “in the sea” reproduces the histories of genocidal violence. This reoccurring form of restriction crim-

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inalizes the embodied mappings of the archipelago, sky, and sea at the heart of Patagonian Native modes of living. As Vincent Díaz’s work shows in relation to seafaring technologies, Indigenous Pacific epistemologies often decenter the landmass to focus on movement and mobility with an orientation to the sea.12 These testimonies describe a fragmented history with respect to British occupation but also attest to the complex textures of Patagonian Indigenous cultural memory, including canoe building techniques, artisanal fishing practices, and retrieving words from the disappearing Selk’nam and Yánama languages. We find out from Gabriela Paterito, a member of the Indigenous Kawésqar, that she does not feel Chilean and that there is in fact no word for “military” in her Native language. Through these submerged perspectives, the viewer is able to consider the spaces where Native imaginaries continue to reside, despite these intense histories, and the restricting control of the Pacific and Patagonia. By remaking the testimonial, Guzmán forces us to witness the extreme and enduring anti-Indigenous state violence experienced by Fuegan peoples. To work against the colonial viewpoint and plausibly represent both the region and Indigenous life differently is the urgent task of Guzmán’s filmmaking. For instance, as we visually track through long and close shots of the Pacific Ocean, Guzmán narrates how the Indigenous populations of Tierra del Fuego have understood themselves as fundamentally relational beings, where the stars are not distant but intimate to the orientation of Southern territories. Like the Sama-Bajau people of Southeast Asia who are oriented in relation to the islands of the Sulu Archipelago, and in connection to other Pacific Islander Native peoples, the Indigenous peoples of the Patagonian archipelago inhabit worlds that live in close proximity to the tides of the

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ocean and the orientation of the night sky.13 Guzmán returns several times throughout the film to the importance of stars Patagonian Indigenous seafaring and its practices in ways that resonate with Pacific Indigenous studies. Shifts in place, scale, and temporality also are key cinematic strategies that let us see beyond the extractive view. Guzmán opens The Pearl Button with long takes of the Atacama Desert, displaying the massive telescopes that map the cosmos at an unprecedented scale. Rather than romanticize this extraterrestrial viewpoint, Guzmán moves to a shot of the Milky Way galaxy, filmed through the powerful telescopes of the European Southern Observatory that both centers human exploration and decenters the human, invoking the time-space continuum with scenes of the cosmos. In an interview that follows with the poet Raul Zurita, Guzmán explores the scientific desire to capture something new about human and cosmological being. Guzmán and Zurita return to the idea that the quest for knowledge of the universe is bound up with “what was already known” by the people of Patagonia by observing starlight. Such moments of profound Southern and archipleagic knowledge are not conclusive or systematic but offer open reflections on time-space, cosmic meaning, and ‘human’ embodiment, all continually available to reinterpretation and reevaluation. In addressing Indigenous approaches to land and sea, Guzmán’s narration on the sound track also references the ubiquity of water on other planets and on planet Earth to set the stage for a series of scenes that document the long coastline and the rivers of the southern territories of Chile. By moving between long takes and close-ups of water, Guzmán shows a shift in scale that reveals complex and grounded interconnections. As the musician and anthropologist Claudio Mercado says of the water in the film:

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Native peoples of the Américas consider that the water is alive and that everything has a spirit and that water is a fountain of music. Everything that is makes a sound and the universe is comprised of it. The Earth is three-fourths water and the one forth material. Everything is water, the air is water. So the astrophysicists say that everything is water is not a strange idea. Water is everything.

Such passages and filmic moments offer a decolonial viewpoint, an invitation to a planetary perspective of resources as living entities. And the attention to water becomes the centerpiece of the film’s diegesis, moving us away from a land-based visuality to one that imagines the Pacific Ocean as the source of life, as livelihood, as the center of Indigenous culture, as memory, but also as a source of colonial death. Though there can be a universalizing and mystical quality to some of these pronouncements, there are also important lessons to be learned from the specificity of the view within the film about how to see beyond the limits of the liberal nation-state. By showing the viewer how Fuegan survivors continue to be intimately connected to water and the ongoing violence of coloniality, Guzmán lifts the significance of Patagonian Indigenous practices of cultural memory. These “less qualified knowledges” emerge as important for how we might think about the archipelago, Southern epistemes, and embodied memory as ways to decolonize the universalizing language and practices of the Anthropocene.

representational witness In a stunning plunge into the colonial photographic archive, Guzmán puts British documentary photographs of Patagonian Indigenous peoples on full display. The camera focuses tightly in on dozens of images of whitened earth painted on Selk’nam bod-

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ies, which seem to mimic and reflect the starlight above. In scenes that move between blue ice, a moving sea, a darkened night, and colonial images of Indigenous death, Guzmán consistently returns to the embeddedness of Tierra del Fuego Indigenous cultural matrices as a fundamental lack of division between sea and sky, human and nature, Earth and cosmos. Yet in Guzmán’s narration of the images before us that perhaps easily fall under what Audra Simpson has referred to as ethnographic entrapment,14 the filmmaker serves as a guide and critic for the viewer. On the audio track he says, “What are we bearing witness to? What are we really seeing?” By inserting the filmmaker’s presence in an overdetermined archive of violent erasure, Guzmán asks us to consider the limits and constraints of colonial representation. And, as a political act of mediation, Guzmán teaches us how to make meaning of an archive imbued with strangeness. Indeed, the photographs bear witness more to colonial affect and Western aesthetic technologies than the traces of Selk’nam and Yánama cultural life. Ultimately, we are asked to consider the question that scholar of colonialism Ann Stoler has forcefully articulated: What forms of representation visualize the impossibility of the colonial archive to deliver historical truth?15 Guzmán’s focus on the Native inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego foregrounds British settler violence that resulted in the nearextermination of Selk’nam (Ona), Hausch, Kawésqar and Yámana peoples. In a long sequence that draws from historical footage of the arrival of the British in Patagonia in 1883, Guzmán says, “They arrived. The colonists, the gold diggers, the military, the police, the sheepherders, the Catholic missionaries. After living centuries with the water and the stars, the Indigenous suffered an eclipse of their world.” Indeed, the massacres that took place in the late nineteenth century in the period of Republican consolidation extended

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the boundaries of the nation-state over the death of Indigenous bodies. This violence was justified through the discourses of racialized humanity inherited from the European Enlightenment and transferred to the colonial space of Patagonia. In the next sequence the documentary focuses on visual footage of Chilean and British officials rounding up groups of Indigenous peoples; on the sound track Guzmán says, “The Chilean government supported the British and declared that Native Peoples were corrupt, sheep thieves, and barbaric. Many found refuge in Isla Dawson where the central mission was stationed. They took their language, their beliefs, and their customs.” While narrating the role of religion in Patagonia’s colonization, Guzmán presents images of Indigenous women weaving in the mission while nuns oversee their labor. In front of the nuns, there is a row of Indigenous girls wearing brown Protestant costumes. The scene takes on increasingly terrifying proportions as the colonial disciplinary society comes fully into view, structured by colonial religious hierarchies that actively worked to erase the cultural traditions of Indigenous women and girls. And the director is confronted with a practical problem. Given that the colonial archive cannot bear witness to such brutality, what strategies of representation fill the void of Chilean historiography? Through witnessing the photographs of British militia “man hunts” against the Native Selk’nam peoples and the Protestant and Catholic disciplining that was Indigenous religious conversion, the viewer is forced to consider the colonial basis of what Nelson Maldonado-Torres calls “the master morality” that constitutes modernity’s paradigm of war.16 In fact, British documentation of Indigenous genocide is thoroughly inscribed in photographs that bear witness to social Darwinian ideologies of Indigenous death.

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By showing the archive of death, Guzmán is able to position the history of Patagonia within broader global processes of colonial exploration, occupation, and elimination. At the same time, Guzmán considers the complexity of Patagonian epistemes and Indigenous life that reside in the margins of the archive. Listening to the sound of water and visualizing the iceberg surroundings while layering the audio with a narrative about Patagonia’s colonial history, the viewer is inserted in a poetic geography that perhaps objectifies the landscape and devastating colonial histories. However, the voice-over emphasizes questions about modern politics and its obfuscation of Indigenous genocide.

gendered conversions Though there is little commentary about the gendered character of Patagonia’s occupation in the film, the system of “civilizing” Native women and girls by incorporating them into the life of the mission was a common practice of colonists across the Americas.17 While Guzmán mostly attends to the details of this history with a careful hand, in this filmic sequence he unknowingly invokes Catholic rather than Catholic and Protestant missionaries, which leads him to slip between Spanish and English forms of colonization in the region. Despite this slip, Guzmán weaves a historical account of state terror as a palimpsest of memory, where the spatial overlap between zones of occupation becomes part of the colonial and neocolonial logic of containment that is difficult for the Selk’nam to escape. The title of the film, El botón de nacar / The Pearl Button, is taken from the story of Jemmy Button, a “Fuege” Indigenous subject who was taken from Tierra del Fuego in the 1830s by Robert Fitzroy, captain of the HMS Beagle. When he was twelve years old,

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Jemmy Button, with three other Indigenous captives, was sold for the price of a pearl button. He was returned three years later, after a civilizing trip to England, and charged with the British expansionist mission of bringing light to Tierra del Fuego. In the numerous colonial stories about him, Jemmy Button has been alternately represented as a race traitor, a trickster figure, and a celebrated and exceptionalized Indigenous figure. As a submerged perspective, the story of Jemmy Button is impossible to uncover, buried within layers of colonial mediation. Yet Guzmán’s documentary approach is not overly invested in matters of historical truth. Instead, he contemplates the voyage to Europe and Jemmy Button’s return to Tierra del Fuego as an ambassador of the British colonial project as one replete with colonial hauntings that invoke the legacies of slavery, as well as the settler colonial project. The undercurrent view here is both literal and figurative in that Guzmán chases the pearl button as material evidence of the trade of Jemmy Button to the British military forces, foreshadowing the finding of a pearl button at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean a century later that belonged to an Allende supporter. By focusing the narrative on two pearl buttons, one symbolizing the colonial genocidal violence against Tierra del Fuego’s original inhabitants and one symbolizing dissident subjects during US imperialism in Chile, Guzmán is able to show us how submerged histories reveal a longer colonial-modern arc of knowledge and power in the Americas. In an important and characteristic sequence with survivors of Pinochet’s repression in Chile, Guzmán narrates the history of Dawson Island as the site of “subversive” capture in the 1970s, as well as the earlier imprisonment of Tierra del Fuego Indigenous subjects during British colonization. Dawson Island functions in the nation’s historical memory not only as a symbol of the failure of moder-

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nity,18 but also as a site of trans-temporal military occupation for those it deemed subhuman. It is impossible, then, to watch The Pearl Button without recalling another documentary of state violence, that of Miguel Littin’s short film, ISLA 10. The film is based on Sergio Bitar’s autobiographical account of his five-month imprisonment at Dawson Island. In addition, it chronicles the stories of dozens of men and women who were held at Dawson Island as political prisoners by Pinochet. The prison was meant to isolate political prisoners from their social networks and produce a sense of total deprivation in their condition of criminality against the state. As Guzmán points out by suturing the genocidal history of Patagonian Indigenous peoples to the repurposing of Isla Dawson by the Pinochet regime, these Southern landscapes are filled with mnemonic echoes of colonial and modern violence. The haunting views of the Pacific recall both the history of disappeared peoples of Indigenous Tierra del Fuego and the modern history of disappearance in the Americas during authoritarian regimes. Rather than participate in a touristic representation, Guzmán shows the island as a site of military and colonial entrapment that establishes a clear racial and gendered order. Yet in continuing with a viewpoint that leaves room for potentiality, Guzmán lingers on the vitality of oceanic space, as a connector of fragmented landmass, and fragmented histories, as a repository of historical memory that repositions the spaces and temporalities of state violence.

decolonial mappings While many of Guzmán’s earlier documentaries addressed witnesses, victims, and legislative rights from a liberal and modern

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definition of state terror,19 in The Pearl Button Guzmán radically rethinks human rights by considering historical memory from an Indigenous perspective, especially in relation to the British occupation of Tierra del Fuego in the nineteenth century. In other words, he shifts the frame of reference from an overemphasis on modernity’s construction of state violence, or what Julia Suárez-Krabbe refers to as the liberal rendition of the “human” in Western rights discourse.20 Breaking with the conventions of his previous film, which seemed to center the experience of Chilean state violence as exceptional, in The Pearl Button Guzmán focuses on the racialized construction of the Other. More specifically, The Pearl Button reevaluates how an exclusive focus on the violent legacies of the Cold War obscures the deeper genocidal histories of colonial occupation. Shifting to a focus on colonial violence, then, makes available overlapping histories of state terror that make Indigenous genocide visible. Guzmán attends to what might be termed the geographies of disappearance. He also artfully uses the technique of scale to film the 2,400-mile ocean border that organizes the geography of Chile, a territory he describes as both an island and an archipelago. While colonial accounts of the formation of Chile’s territory emerge from a modern discourse of 1898 military victories against Peru and Bolivia in the North, or colonialization of Mapuche, Huilliche, and Pehuenche peoples in the South, Guzmán takes a decolonial view. From a non-Eurocentric standpoint, he considers the long mountain chain of the Andes on the eastern side and the open ocean that trails down to the southwestern island chain on the Pacific down to Patagonia the “unnatural” geographic boundaries that resulted from colonial and then modern domination and subjugation.

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How does a view on Patagonian Indigenous cultural memory reshape our understanding of the nation? How does an understanding of Indigenous territories and southern worlds make visible our complicity with settler colonialism and the national politics of genocidal erasure? Can we reach beyond the memory of the colonial archive to think about a different relation to land, water, the state, and ultimately to each other, through Indigenous seafaring perspectives? Engaging Patricio Guzmán’s approach to the history and cultural memory of the Indigenous peoples of archipelagic spaces allows us to begin to address these questions, and to reckon with how the expansion of the colonial project through extractive and racial capitalism forced the near extinction of Indigenous peoples. In Beyond the Pink Tide so far, I have yet to fully consider the importance of decolonial knowledge and methods as key to how we understand the Americas in the context of the United States, where English is the dominant language of academic and cultural circulation, where hemispheric geographies and histories are split off from our study, and where imperialism and coloniality are often separated.21 Disciplinary discourses and practices continue to perceive Southern regions as marginal and peripheral, undervaluing the heterogeneity of Indigenous life embedded in regions and the endurance of representational and material violence. Disturbing academic disciplines is part of a hemispheric and archipelagic Indigenous Studies that broadly considers regions of comparative study and that also sees beyond the extractive view. By facing expansion histories such as the British colonial experience in Patagonia and Chile, we can think about our present and future as deeply responsible to a decolonial account of settler histories. Indeed, the project of social justice as outlined

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by new artistic models like Guzmán’s The Pearl Button must include formats for Indigenous memory that disentangle the past and past-present through embodied archives. Through hearing the testimonials by Indigenous Patagonian survivors who integrate the importance of the ocean, language, and experience, and by seeing enduring relational connections to stars, sky, and the archipelago, we move to a fuller understanding of the complexity of state and colonial violence. The Patagonian archipelago regional viewpoint places islands as central to new mappings of knowledge such as hemispheric and Pacific Studies. Guzmán thoughtfully meditates on the difficulty of visually mapping the sheer length of the modern nation, as if by analogy, to contemplate the fabrication of all nations. By commissioning his artist friend to make a giant paper map of the nation that is unfolded and filmed to reveal Chile’s surprising length, Guzmán denaturalizes the nation-state as the product of geographic features. Instead, he reveals the military and conquest histories that underlie the creation of the Chilean Republic as an artifice made in the triangulation of elite wars of independence from Spanish franchise colonialism, in alliance with British military imperialism, and through its nineteenth-century policies that favored European immigrant settlement. This reorientation of how we understand the constructedness of Southern geographies becomes a necessary exercise for reimagining how we see territory, national boundaries, and our own epistemic limitations.

Conclusion Rogue Waves thinking with the global south

In this book I have used the Pink Tide as a foil to attend to the inadequate promise of progressive states, to imagine more just, equitable, and sustainable futures. I have shown the deeper structural and historical forms of violence that cannot be swept away with superficial policy changes, or by not tackling the rooted problems of a racial, sex, gender, and colonial order that reinforce the heteronormativity of the nation-state. I have played in the undercurrents of artistic and political creativity to note the important role of experience and affect as sources of decolonial feminist and cuir critique and imagination that remake our worlds. In the artist Cecilia Vicuña’s short experimental film, Kon Kon (2012), she plays with the Pacific Ocean and its undercurrents, running in the foam of the sea and beckoning the soft waves to chase her. Alongside sublime images of ecological destruction, Vicuña narrates how she remembers spending hours by the sea as a child while building small structures from the delicate materials she finds on the beach, such as pebbles, driftwood, and 107

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the feathers of seagulls. Such past and present play allows Vicuña to contemplate another way to interact with and imagine the human relationship to the sea, where experimentation with the ebbs and flow of the sea currents enliven her encounters with the Pacific. In her prouncement, “I felt the sea sense Me,” Vicuña positions the ocean as a powerful life-force with its own ability to sense the Other.1 How can we take this experiential insight to guide us as a model of affiliation and the political that is ungovernable? The film is an important homage to the Concón region in northern Chile, whose delicate sea and marsh ecologies were inhabited in the fifteenth century by the Aconcagua Indigenous people until it was used by Pedro de Valdivia’s ships as a port from which to stage the Spanish conquest. Made in 2012, in the period following Michelle Bachelet’s first presidency, Vicuña’s Kon Kon seemed to have little hope for the Pink Tide (progressive) governments that had by then swept Latin America. Rather than engage the promise of the Pink Tide, Vicuña critiqued the politics of extractive overfishing and the emptying out of the Pacific Ocean by US, Canadian, and Japanese transoceanic shipping vessels. By excavating the buried histories of the Aconcagua peoples and lifting the near-disappearance of artisanal fishing beneath the oil refinery, Vicuña offers a mode of politics that dug deep into the undercurrents of coloniality and neoliberalism. And, in contrast to seeing the sea as a national economic resource for take off, Vicuña dialogues with the Pacific, a living being that has the capacity to regenerate, desire, language, and flex in front of human play and anthropogenic destruction. Throughout this book, I have considered how activist projects, artful expressions, and cultural production such as that of Vicuña’s film, further social transformation by increasing our

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awareness of the limits of reductive thinking and the boundaries of politics as delimited by the nation-state. My point is that we have to look beyond electoral politics to strengthen already existing networks of possibility in a flow of creative energies that make political life otherwise. Thinkers, makers, and doers offer us plenty of models for eschewing with liberal democracy and for enacting social transformation without reproducing the logics and inequities of settler capitalism, patriarchy, homogeneity, gender and sex normativity, ecological destruction, and politics as usual. In an unpredictable pattern, the rogue wave has the capacity to break with the status quo of liberal consensus making. I have outlined how thinking against and beyond the nationstate becomes a powerful set of tools for imagining another way to think about political inheritances. The nation-state offers us the inheritance of settler colonialism, enslavement, the nuclear family, the paradigm of war, neoliberal governmentality, and extractive and racial capitalism. Instead, I have focused on the sexual underground, visual decolonial art practices, radical sounds, films, and embodied performances that reveal the sites of power, cultural forms of political critique and life imagine other ways we might relate to our social and ecological worlds. In this interdisciplinary study, Transnational Americas Studies allows us to think beyond the rubric of the United States and the nation-state toward hemispheric, Pacific, oceanic, and archipelagic potential. Transnational Americas Studies gives us important modes for thinking beyond the nation-state and for integrating a nuanced understanding of global and US power in the context of coloniality and imperialism. This does not mean that new political parties are not necessary or that we should turn away from deepened analysis and critical engagements that have the capacity to remake the state. It does mean that by

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reaching beyond the Pink Tide, a metaphor that for me signifies top-down political change, we have the opportunity to differently craft political futures in the Americas. What would it mean to reach beyond single nation-state analysis toward understanding the dynamics of the hemisphere, where Trans-Pacific Studies, Black Studies, Critical Indigenous Studies, Cuir and Trans Studies, South/South, and diasporic approaches all become powerful locations from which to study and live? I have explored currents of art and politics that flow below the surface of dominant political trends. These emergent expressions complicate the practice of political transformation as following any singular path. Beyond the Pink Tide comes from my investigation into how artistic and cultural spaces document the tide of cultural, embodied, feminist, cuir, decolonial, and sonic expressions that challenge how we fundamentally understand political transformation in an era of deteriorating and unfulfilled democracy. For instance, the recent documentary films of Patricio Guzmán expand the boundaries of how we see national politics by focusing on Indigenous territories, starlight, archipelagos, and deserts, revealing worlds that are situated within geological and colonial time rather than structured by the temporality of neoliberalism.2 And the artwork of the Native collective PostCommodity, working on the militarized US-Mexico border, considers how to see land and territory beyond the rhetoric and practice of xenophobia, the building of walls, or deportation. In refreshing and critically necessary ways, artist and filmmakers, alongside social movements in the Americas, often work to replace the confining paradigm of the nation-state. Present struggles over and representations of queer / trans rights, border walls, militarization, Palestinian freedom, Indig-

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enous land rights, and the erasures of colonial history, all themes in the chapters of this book, are embedded in global political economic structures and a social order with deep roots in colonialism.3 However, the colonial condition is far from over and has only accelerated over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Stratified by geography, race, class, nation, gender, and sex, the violent condition of late capitalism, what Regina Regillo refers to as “the ravaging machine,” is ever more apparent throughout the hemisphere.4 In the closing pages, I would like to challenge us even further to see where thinking beyond the nation-state might also take us. Given the current multiple political crises, the rise of the global Right, the environmental degradation, new authoritarianisms, and massive waves of expulsions, knowing the history of local and global struggle is important, but what kinds of challenge could effectively make a difference in the current global crisis? Written on the eve of his imprisonment by the fascist regime, Antonio Gramsci’s “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” described how politically Left intellectuals often figured “southerners” as a passive and ignorant mass, equating rural peoples with underdevelopment. Published in 1926, Gramsci’s book references how those proposing radical change in Italian society used language that hierarchized knowledge and minimized local southern formations, thereby diminishing the value of regional cultural forms. Much of the analysis that Gramsci developed would become fully realized in The Prison Notebooks, a text that was written after his arrest and during his extended imprisonment.5 Gramsci focuses on class cleavages in relation to class alliances, agrarian blocs, intellectuals, and potential paths for revolutionary struggle.

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We might rethink and expand the Southern question for our own political and social moment, reimagining how we understand the Global South in terms of its relation to the Global North and in terms of the meaning of politics. In mainstream uses of these terms, the assumption is that the Global North refers to overdevelopment, liberal democracies, advanced capitalism, and working consumer societies while the Global South represents underdevelopment, authoritarianism, and the space of contamination south of US and European borders. Yet the Global South is the site of experimentation and where making do with very little creates openings to new ways of thinking, acting, and being. During the Special Period in Cuba, for instance, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 when Cold War dependency diminished, social creativity was at an all-time high. The arts flourished, and subsistence gardens overtook the city, just as they have in postindustrial Detroit. Bikes became the primary mode of transportation. Social ecologies as networked potential offered a primary mode of living. Though “creative capital” is quick to seize upon experimental activities to further new forms of global capitalism, we might suggest how these fluid practices pose alternatives to carbon dependent and ossified political structures. In the undercurrents of the Global South and communities of color in the Global North experiment and produce ways of living that cannot be reduced to the accumulation of wealth or the cycle of impoverishment and debt. In the face of grotesque capital accumulation for the few, environmental decline, neocolonialism, and the expansion of military and police states and in the wake of liberal democracy’s failures, artists, thinkers, and activists put forward new possibilities for how to organize society and contest increasingly

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pressurized and violent conditions. Guiding these imaginaries is a politics of social justice where the domains of art, music, and performance blur the boundaries between formal institutional change and embodied cultural expression. These artistic and activist strategies propose a means of living politics that eschews conventional categories of political art and contests the death logics of neoliberalism. By flowing in the undercurrents, we can move to rethink politics and the worlds within the world we think we know.

ack now ledg m ents

Writing Beyond the Pink Tide emerged from my long-standing doubt that state-led change could produce the kind of world we want to make and live, be, and do in. I have had the great fortune of being surrounded by groups of thinkers, activists, and artists that are already involved in the project of normative refusal and creative world making. Conversations with Paul Amar, first at a panel at UC Santa Barbara, then in Rio de Janeiro, and later at the Pratt Institute, allowed me to think anew about the undercurrents of politics and art. I thank Lisa Duggan in particular for encouraging me to write these ideas in the form of a contribution to the American Studies Now series. I also thank coeditors Curtis Marez and Niels Hooper for their feedback at key moments in the process. Freelance copyeditor Sheila Berg and UC Press project editor Kate Hoffman offered thoughtful editorial support for this project. Herman Gray, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Guillermo Delgado-P., John Brown Childs, Dana Takagi, and Candace West continue to model for me how to think, live, and be outside of normative boundaries. Akiko Naono, Sarita Gaytan, Pat Zavella, Manuel Pastor, and the Department of Latino and Latin American Studies at UC Santa Cruz were key to how I think about Hemispheric Studies and Global South

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Studies. It is through Laura Pulido, Ruthie Gilmore, John Carlos Rowe, Fred Moten, Laura Harris, Cynthia Young, Janelle Wong, Jane Iwamura, Roberto Lint Sagarena, Ricardo Ramirez, George Sanchez, Judith Jackson Fossett, Shana Redmond, Maria Elena Martinez, Sarah Gualtieri, Viet Nguyen, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Mike Messner, Tim Biblarz, Jujuana Preston, Kitty Lai, and Sonia Rodriguez, and proximities to the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity that I had the space to think about my work in relation to the capacious field of Critical American Studies. I also thank Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne, Floridalma Boj-Lopez, Crystal Baik, Evren Savci, Rebekah Garrison, Rebekah Park, and Athia Choudhury for critical exchange. Neetu Khanna has been an anchor within the ebb and flow of academic life. I thank Mishuana Goeman and Jodi Byrd and Critical Indigenous Studies writ large for their example. Avery Gordon, Rod Ferguson, Lisa Lowe, Saidiya Hartman, Marianne Hirsch, Neferti Tadiar, Nestor Maldonado-Torres, Marianne Hirsch, Leo Spitzer, Gil Hoschberg, Chandan Reddy, Gayatri Gopinath, Cathy Davidson, Ken Wissoker, David Eng, Josie Saldaña-Portillo, David Kazanjian, Teemu Ruskola, Kathleen Wilson, Nick Mirzoeff, Karen Tongson, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Hentyle Yapp, Licia FiolMatta, Lena Burgos LaFuente, Marcia Ochoa, Joseph Pierce, Adela Licona, Jamie Lee, Kaitlin Murphy, Mel Cheng, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Julietta Singh, Ana Paulina Lee, Mary Louise Pratt, Jens Andermann, Gabriel Giorgi, Jaskiran Dhillon, Claudia Sofía Garriga-López, Gina Ulysse, and Diana Taylor show me what is possible. The Social Text collective and Emisférica push me to be better. A special gracias to Marcial Godoy-Anativia who helps me work out puzzles. Carolina Caycedo, Cecilia Vicuña, Emma Perez, and Francisco Huichaqueo inspire me. Working closely with Cisco Bradley, Ann Holder, Sameetah Agha, Uzma Rizvi, Caitlin Cahill, Zhivka Valiavicharshka, Josiah Brownell, Lisabeth During, Gregg Horowitz, Liz Knauer, Erum Naqvi, Josh Karant, Johanna Oksala, Jennifer Telesca, Kumru Toktamis, Ric Brown, Ivan Zatz-Díaz, Carl Zimring, Darini Nicholas, Nick Gamso, Jennifer Miller, Karin Shankar, Rosa Cho and Sophia Straker has taught me so much. I especially thank Licia Fiol-Matta and Amy Sara Carroll for their excellent feedback on the manuscript. I also thank Luka Lucic and

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May Joseph for their intellectual acumen, for their friendship, and for embarking with me on the Global South Center. Joshe Ordoñez’s talents are impressive. Ira Livingston, Iona Cheong, Andy Barnes, Arlene Kaiser, Ellery Washington, Agnes Macsy, Minh-Ha T. Pham, Jon Beller, and the fabulous Jayna Brown make Brooklyn and the Pratt Institute a site of potential and a lot of fun. I miss Arnold Bauer on a daily basis for his early intellectual nurturing and thank Rebecca Bauer for her continued friendship. I thank Vicente Gómez-Barris, Virginia Ramirez, and Roberto Leni for encouraging me. Vivianne Dufour, sister chick Lorena Gómez-Barris, Ethan, and Eric Rocher are always in my heart. Renato and Ixchel allow me to remember the future. Cuir love and appreciation to mí querido Jack Halberstam. Forever. And to all the radical, art, and visionary students whom I have had the privilege of working with, thank you for being and doing otherwise! Special thanks to Canciones Nacionales for permission to reprint lyrics from several songs: “La Bala” and “Shock,” written by Ana Tijoux and Andres Celis, and published by Canciones Nacionales. “Somos Sur,” written by Ana Tijoux and Shadia Mansour, and published by Canciones Nacionales.

notes

preface 1. See Manuela Picq, “The Failures of Latin America’s Left,” Al Jazeera, November 26, 2017, www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014 /11/failures-latin-america-left-20141168289406883.html. 2. For an extended discussion of submerged perspectives, see my recent book, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 3. Sonia E. Alvarez, Claudia de Lima Costa, Veronic Feliu, Rebecca Hester, Norma Klahn, and Millie Thayer, Translocalities / Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in Latin/a Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

introduction 1. There is important scholarship in new art history that similarly considers the role of art in world making. For two excellent books, see Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

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120 / Notes to Pages 2–4 2. See José Quiroga, ed., Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latinoamerica (New York: New York University Press, 2000). 3. I am extending Fenton Johnson’s recent manifesto, “The Future of Queer,” to consider a hemispheric and broader context of social justice. See Johnson in Harper’s Magazine, January 28, 2018, https://harpers .org/archive/2018/01/the-future-of-queer/. 4. See the compelling dialogue, “Inside / Beside Dance Studies: A Conversation,” 5, a dialogue with Michelle Clayton, Mark Franko, Nadine George-Graves, André Lepecki, Susan Manning, Janice Ross, and Rebecca Schneider. The conversation appears online in the Dance Reasearch Journal, edited by Noémie Soloman, December 2013, 5–28. 5. On the Pink Tide, see Larry Rohter’s widely cited article, “With New Chief, Uruguay Veers Left, in a Latin Pattern,” New York Times, March 1, 2005, www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/world/americas/with -new-chief-uruguay-veers-left-in-a-latin-pattern.html?_r=0. 6. For a good introductory article in English to Mujica’s background and presidency, see “José Mujica: Is This the World’s Most Radical President?,” Guardian, September 18, 2014, www.theguardian.com/world/2014 /sep/18/-sp-is-this-worlds-most-radical-president-uruguay-jose-mujica. 7. See David McNally, Another World Is Possible: Globalization and Anti-Capitalism (Manitoba: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2002); and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Random House, 2005). 8. See Marisol de la Cadena’s Earth Beings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), for a detailed explanation of the Pachamama. Also see chapter 2 of my book, The Extractive Zone. 9. See my The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017) for full discussion of these processes. 10. http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/emisferica-111-decolonial-gesture/galindo. 11. See Debora Loprelle, “Gender Policies in Argentina after Neoliberalism: Opportunities and Obstacles for Women’s Rights,” Latin American Perspectives 42, no. 1 (2015): 64–73. 12. Argentina’s terrible record on maternal morality was denounced in a damning Human Rights Watch report, “Illusions of Care: Lack of

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Accountability for Reproductive Rights in Argentina,” August 10, 2010, www.hrw.org/report/2010/08/10/illusions-care/lack-accountability -reproductive-rights-argentina. 13. See Paul Amar, “Military Capitalism,” NACLA Report on the Americas, March 29, 2018. 14. For a clear hemispheric discussion of racial difference and its ideologies, see Alexandre Emboaba Da Costa, “Confounding AntiRacism: Mixture, Racial Democracy, and Post-Racial Politics in Brazil,” Critical Sociology 42 (2016): 4–5. 15. See Noam Chomsky, “Dilma Rousseff ‘Impeached by Gang of Thieves,’ ” Guardian, May 16, 2016; see also Democracy Now Program, www.democracynow.org/2016/5/17/noam_chomsky_brazils_president _dilma_rousseff. 16. Neoliberalism, a phase of late capitalism, can be briefly defined as the privatization and deregulation of the government, a process that in the Americas, as elsewhere in the Global South, was installed through dictatorship and/or militarisms and imperial intervention. We can date the beginning of debt crisis and disaster capitalism to the overthrow of Socialist president Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. Chile became the nation where experiments in austerity were supported by brute authoritarianism. 17. Jorge C. Castañeda, “The Death of the Latin American Left,” New York Times, Op-Ed, March 22, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/03/23 /opinion/the-death-of-the-latin-american-left.html?_r=0. 18. Katur Arkonada, “2018, the Year of Left Possibilities in Latin America,” www.telesurtv.net/bloggers/2018-el-ano-de-las-izquierdas -posibles-en-America-Latina-20180122–0002.html. 19. PROMESA is the abbreviation for the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act, the US Congress’s bipartisan legislation giving the control board the power to cut pensions, labor contracts, and social services in order to restructure the $73 billion loan. PROMESA legislation is strongly critiqued by Puerto Rican activists and scholars as another effort by US capitalism to privatize social security, health care, and education on the island. 20. See Adriana Garriga-López, “Here’s What Has to Happen for Puerto Rico to Recover after Maria,” September 25, 2017, http://fortune

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.com/2017/09/25/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-relief-debt-crisis/. On crisis and debt, see the helpful overview and teaching tool, “Puerto Rico in Crisis Timeline,” https://contropr.hunter.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/PDF_ Publications/Puerto-Rico-Crisis-Timeline-2017.pdf. 21. On coloniality, see Aníbal Quijano’s classic work, “The Coloniality of Power,” Nepantla: Views from the South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–80. 22. During this period, the level of debt in Latin America skyrocketed from $159 billion in 1978 to $327 billion in 1982. See Jocelyn Sims and Jessie Romero’s “Latin American Debt Crisis of the 1980s,” www .federalreservehistory.org/essays/latin_american_debt_crisis. 23. See Adriana Garriga-López’s insightful discussion of disaster capitalism in Puerto Rico, “The Other Puerto Rico,” in “Beyond the Extractive View” dossier by Macarena Gómez-Barris, Social Text: Periscope, June 15, 2018. 24. See the extensive interview, “Queer Lives are Conditioned by Violence,” by Cat Tyc with the curator and artist Carlos Motta in BOMB: Artists in Conversation, May 6, 2016, http://bombmagazine.org /article/946053/carlos-motta. 25. “Feminicide” refers to the systematic killing of women, including trans women, with impunity, as I discuss in chapter 3. These cases have been prevalent in Mexico and Central America since the 1990s, are ongoing in Indigenous North America, and were on the rise in South America in 2017. 26. Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (New York: Blackwell, 2005). 27. See Janet Joskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen, eds., Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014). 28. See the work of Sylvia Wynter, Sylvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Aníbal Quijano, and Lewis Gordon as a starting point into these fields. 29. See Arely Zimmerman, “A Dream Detained: Undocumented Latino Youth and the Dream Movement,” NACLA (November– December 2011): 14–18; and Kency Cornejo, “Visual Disobedience: The Geopolitics of Experimental Art in Central America, 1990–Present” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2014). Also see Suyapa Portillo, “Honduras: Refounding the Nation, Building a New Kind of Social Move-

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ment,” in Latin American Social Movements, ed. Richard Stahler-Sholk, Harry E. Vanden, and Marc Becker (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 121–45. 30. See Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 31. Obviously there are many versions of cultural studies, especially the Birmingham school’s and Stuart Hall’s, to cite here. Ranciere’s book Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury, 2010) is informative on how art expands power. 32. This quote can be found on p. 34 in Mabel Moraña, “Latin American Cultural Studies: When, Where, Why?,” Debating Hispanic Studies 1 (2006): 31–36. 33. For a discussion of new turns in this field, see Juan Poblete, ed., New Approaches to Latin American Studies (New York: Routledge, 2015) 34. MLA Presidential Panel with Angela Davis, Anthony Romero, Cathy Davidson, Juan Lopez Intzin, and Judith Butler, January 5, 2018. 35. See the American Studies Association’s call for proposals in 2018, with Rod Ferguson as president, “States of Emergence” theme, www.theasa.net/annual-meeting/years-meeting/years-theme. 36. See Angelina Snodgrass Godoy, “Converging on the Poles: Contemporary Punishment and Democracy in Hemispheric Perspective,” Law and Social Inquiry 3, no. 2 ( July 2006): 515–48. 37. It is hard to know whether such protests targeted Butler for their gender non-normativity or for their work on behalf of Palestinian justice, but the point is that the organized Right often collapses these issues. See Scott Jaschik, “Judith Butler on Being Attacked in Brazil,” November 13, 2017, www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/11/13 /judith-butler-discusses-being-burned-effigy-and-protested-brazil. 38. Greg Grandin, The Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Owl Books, 2006), 6. 39. See Cecilia Menjívar’s edited volume, When States Kill: Latin America, the U.S. and Technologies of Terror (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). 40. See John Beverley’s “Latin America after 9/11: Geopolitics and the Pink Tide,” January 6, 2012, www.berfrois.com/2012/01/john-beverley -latin-americas-pink-tide/. Emphasis in original.

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Notes to Pages 16–18

41. For further discussion on the violence of neoliberalism, see my book Where Memory Dwells: State Violence and Culture in Chile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 42. See “Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today,” Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, October 17, 2003, American Quarterly 56, no. 1 (March 2004): 1–18, https://muse.jhu .edu/article/53459. 43. See “Angela Davis on Black Lives Matter, Palestine, and the Future of Radicalism,” MR On-line, September 4, 2017 (originally published in Literary Hub by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, September 1, 1917), https://mronline.org/2017/09/04/angela-davis-on-black -lives-matter-palestine-and-the-future-of-radicalism/. 44. See Dave Castle’s interview with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, “Hearts, Minds and Radical Democracy,” June 1, 1998, Red Pepper, www.redpepper.org.uk/hearts-minds-and-radical-democracy/. 45. In addition to Mouffe and Laclau’s work, Johanna Oksala’s Foucault, Politics, and Violence (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011) is useful for rethinking politics in the Americas beyond a normative view. Oksala writes: While the distinction between “politics” and “the political” has become commonplace, efforts to define what constitutes “the political” in its ontological dimension have repeatedly run into difficulties. Whether we think of Carl Schmitt’s definition of the political as always referring to the friend/ enemy distinction, or of Hannah Arendt’s contested distinction between the social and the political, the problem with defining the political as a distinct and autonomous ontological domain is that it places certain questions, issues, and experiences outside of politics. To put the problem in more provocative terms, purely ontological investigation turns out to be a political act itself, establishing the boundaries of the realm of proper politics. (15)

46. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2014), 61. 47. On complicating the idea of “the commons” that dates back to the seventeenth-century English context, see J. Kēhaulani Kauanui’s contribution in Nothing Common about the Commons (book in process). Kauanui presented ideas from this manuscript at Brown University, October 9, 2013, in a talk entitled, “Nothing Common about ‘The

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Commons’: Settler Colonialism and the Indigenous Politics of Land Dispossession.” 48. For an important text in Spanish by key intellectuals and economic activists on this recent history, see Luis Rojas Villagra, ed., Neoliberalismo en América Latina: Crisis, tendencias y alternativas (Asunción: Grupos de Trabajo CLACSO, 2015), http://biblioteca.clacso.edu.ar /clacso/gt/20151203044203/Neoliberalismo.pdf. 49. On the concept of Indigenous resurgence in Canada, see Leanne Simpson’s “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 3, no. 3 (2014): 1–25. Also see Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). In the Americas, many date Indigenous resurgence to the Maya-Quiche Rigoberta Menchu’s 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. 50. For a longer discussion, see chapter 5, “Decolonial Gestures: Indigenous Anarco-Feminist Critique,” in my book The Extractive Zone.

chapter one. sounds radical 1. See my book Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 2. Veneno tus monólogos tus discursos incoloros no ves que NO estamos solos !!millones de polo a polo¡¡ Al son de un solo coro marcharemos con el tono con la convicción que !!BASTA DE ROBO¡¡ Tu estado de control tu trono podrido de oro tu política y tu riqueza y tu tesoro no. La hora sonó, la hora sonó NO permitiremos más, más tu doctrina del shock NO países solo corporaciones quien tiene más, más acciones trozos gordos, poderosos decisiones por muy poco.

126 / Notes to Pages 26–34 Constitución pinochetista derecho opus dei, libro fascista. Golpista disfrazado de un indulto elitista cae la gota, cae la bolsa, la toma se toma la maquina rota. la calle no calle, la calle se raya la calle no calla, de bate que esta. Ya todo lo quitan, todo lo venden todo se lucra la vida, la muerte todo es negocio. Como tu todos, semilla, pascuala, métodos y coros. Veneno tus monólogos tus discursos incoloros no ves que NO estamos solos !!millones de polo a polo¡¡ Al son de un solo coro, marcharemos con el tono con la convicción que !!BASTA DE ROBO¡¡

3. See Loreto Rebolledo’s article, “Volver del exilio,” Revista Rocinante, 1–6, February 4, 2004, www.archivochile.com/Mov_sociales/ exilio_cl/MSexiloc10023.pdf. 4. https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-Lkry-SF01 &hsimp=yhs-SF01&hspart=Lkry&p=Tijoux+y+hip+hop#id=6&vid =cb64051026262f9774f7caed07eec95d&action=view, October 15, 2015. 5. See Marc D. Perry’s article, “Global Black Self-Fashionings: Hip Hop as Diasporic Space,” Global Studies in Culture and Power, December 26, 2007, 635–64. 6. See Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation (New York: Picador, 2005), 25. 7. See Ana Tijoux interview, Scholars and Publics Forum, with Professor David Garcia, Duke University, www.youtube.com/watch?v =fcHSkPC1UN4, published January 8, 2016. 8. Quoted in Luis Andres Henao, “Ana Tijoux’s Hip-Hop Goes Back to Chilean Roots, Pittsburgh Courier, April 8, 2014. https://newpittsburghcourieronline.com/2014/04/08/ana-tijouxs-hip-hop-goes -back-to-chilean-roots/. 9. Instituto de Investigación y Debate sobre la Gobernanza, “El movimento estudiantil en Chile, o la marcha de ‘los pinguinos,’ ”

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October 27, 2007, www.institut-gouvernance.org/es/analyse/fiche -analyse-348.html. 10. See Bárbara Brito’s speech on YouTube, “PTR de Chile en el Acto Internacionalista organizado por el PTS en el Frente de Izquierda,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCjAe4-5uQ0, published August 25, 2013. 11. Emily Achtenberg, “Chilean Students Struggle to Deepen Educational Reform,” Rebel Currents, NACLA, March 3, 2015. 12. See Roderick A. Ferguson, We Demand: The University and Student Protests (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). 13. On Boycott and Divestment, see https://bdsmovement.net/acad emic-boycott for the letter by several hundred academics protesting Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories. In relation to the institutional effort to divest from Palestine, see Omar Barghouti, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011). On the topic of Chile’s state, see my article, “Mapuche Hunger Acts: Epistemology of the Decolonial,” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the LusoHispanic World 1, no. 3 (2012). 14. Ana Tijoux featuring Shadia Mansour, “Somos sur,” https:// video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-Lkry-SF01&hsim p=yhs-SF01&hspart=Lkry&p=Somos+sur#id=1&vid=5254dc858a58f 3bf7a3c24baf29a1623&action=click. 15. See The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 16. For a brief recent overview in English of a very complex militarized situation, see the documentary Defiance of the Mapuche, January 11, 2018, www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2018/01/defia nce-mapuche-180110043941553.html.

chapter two. how cuir is queer recognition? 1. http://cordite.org.au/poetry/notheme4/manifesto-i-speak-for-mydifference/. 2. The performance work of a new group of activists and artists called CUDS: Sexual Dissidence builds on Pedro Lemebel’s work

128 / Notes to Pages 48–51 within a postmemory framework; see especially, Felipe Rivas San Martín and Jorge Díaz Fuentes, “No Body without Fiction: Towards a Representation of Sexual Dissidence in Chile,” Universidad de Chile, Colectivo Universitario de Disidencia Sexual, https://hemi.nyu.edu /hemi/en/e-misferica-102/cuds. 3. See José Muñoz’s original work on disidentification that analyzes racial and sexual minority cultures outside of the mainstream: Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). For thinking about the circulation of queer / cuir sexualities in relation to Latinx formations, see Juana María Rordríguez, “Pornographic Encounters and Interpretative Interventions: Vanessa del Rio: Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior,” in Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Lingering in Latinidad: Theory, Aesthetics and Performance in Latina/o Studies 25, no. 3 (2015). Also see Deborah R. Vargas, “Ruminations on Lo Sucio as a Latino Queer Analytic,” American Quarterly 66, no. 3 (September 2014): 715–26. For an excellent ethnographic study of trans embodiment and trans femininities, see Marcia Ochoa’s Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 4. In the context of the United States and in relation to Black queer and trans communities, see Riley Snorton’s critique of the closet as a metaphor by giving a genealogy of the Down Low: Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 5. For a range of examples of queer dissidence in Chile, see Carl Fischer, Queering the Chilean Way: Cultures of Exceptionalism and Sexual Dissidence, 1965–2015 (New York: Palgrave, 2016). 6. For an excellent treatment of the complicated queering of and complicity with the nation-state, see Licia Fiol-Matta, A Queer Mother for a Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 7. See Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 8. See “Entrevista Pedro Lemebel,” December 7, 2001, http:// miguelpaz.blogspot.com/2001/12/entrevista-pedro-lemebel.html.

Notes to Pages 53–54 / 129 9. See Francine Masiello, The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Diana Palaversich, “The Wounded Body of Proletarian Homosexuality in Pedro Lemebel’s Loco afán,” Latin American Perspectives 29, no. 2 (2002): 99–118; and Fernando Blanco and Juan Poblete, eds., Desdén al infortunio: Sujeto, comunicación y público en la narrativa de Pedro Lemebel (Santiago, Chile: Cuarto Propio, 2010). 10. For Alejandro Jodorowsky the point of performance was more than to take the theater out of the theater. See Arden Decker, “Los Grupos amd the Art of Intervention in 1960s and 1970s Mexico” (PhD diss., CUNY, 2015), https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent .cgi?referer = www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1915&context =gc_etds. 11. www.memoriachilena.cl/602/w3-article-3651.html. Performance happenings were organized by Enrique Lihn and Alejandro Jodorowsky and influenced the creative explosion in Santiago. 12. These happenings were later replicated and expanded in their repatriation to Mexico City and reworked to be performed in Paris. 13. See Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Américas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 14. The longer-term impact of las Yeguas imagery was to produce a critical juncture in the paradigm of power set forth by Pinochet as the bright and shiny future of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, as Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys would have it, was not about a better future, a brighter economy, and the rising tide but instead marked the end of the Socialist utopia or the moment after Allende’s death, when the revolution was no longer possible and art like that of las Yeguas was the only possibility. Colectivo Acción de Arte (CADA) was an important instance of dissident performance, whose important unfurling of the “No Más” banner—no more violence, no more imprisonment, no more Pinochet— became a cry of public cultural opportunities in a space that had become synonymous with surveillance tactics. In the novel Lumperica, for instance, Diamela Eltit’s protagonist experiments with running through the tank-filled streets of Santiago in the early hours of the morning, before curfew had been lifted, describing how she shape-shifts to avoid detection.

130 / Notes to Pages 54–58 15. See Francisco Avena Solar, “Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis: Hitos, crítica y escándalo,” October 2012, https://arteycritica.org/ensayos /las-yeguas-del-apocalipsis-hitos-critica-y-escandalo. 16. For a recent take on queer performance and embodied abjection, see Leticia Alvarado, Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). For an extended discussion of submerged perspectives, see my book The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 17. See the website www.yeguasdelapocalipsis.cl/1990-de-que-serie-presidente/ for a more detailed discussion of this performance. 18. See Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Also see Snorton, Nobody Is Supposed to Know. 19. See Jack Halberstam’s book Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). In the United States, the question of legal rights for LGBTI populations often returns to the June 28, 1968, Stonewall uprising as the founding moment of the gay liberation struggle. But as queer of color theory and critique has pointed out, Black, Asian, Latinx, and Native communities of color were long engaged in their own struggles around housing rights, everyday racisms, the health system, police brutality and surveillance, criminalization, and white settler norms and occupation of Indigenous territories. 20. Despite legislative gains, violence against trans people continues at alarming rates. Though we might question the use value of proportional statistics, 78 percent of all trans homicides in the world occur in Latin America, which is a shocking figure. According to the Observatorio de Personas Trans Asesinadas there were more than 2,000 homicides in 2016, an increase of about 400 from the previous year. The majority of these deaths were among sex workers. 21. The Western and universalizing metaphor of the closet does not account for much of the Latin American experience. See Javier Corrales, “Gays in Latin America: Is the Closet Half Empty?,” February 18, 2009, http://foreignpolicy.com/2009/02/18/gays-in-latin-america-is-the -closet-half-empty/.

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22. See Lisa Duggan’s classic book, The Twilight Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy (2003), which coins the term “homonormativity”; and see The Nation article, “What’s Next for the LGBT Movement,” June 27, 2013, www.thenation.com/article /whats-next-lgbt-movement/. Also see Dean Spade, “Under the Cover of Gay Rights,” NYU Review of Law and Social Change 37, no. 79 (2013): 79–100; and Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 23. There is a broad US literature on LGBTI marriage debates. For an overview, see Urvashi Vaid, Lisa Duggan, Tamara Metz, and Amber Hollibaugh, “What’s Next for the LGBT Movement?,” The Nation, June 27, 2013, www.thenation.com/article/whats-next-lgbt-movement/. 24. See Jordi Díez, The Politics of Gay Marriage in Latin America: Argentina, Chile, and Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), for a thoughtful discussion of the path to same sex marriage rights in the region in a study that comparatively considers policy. 25. Though the term guerra sucia, or Dirty War, was first used in the Argentine context, it was later expanded to describe the many dirty wars against student and guerrilla movements in the region, including that of Mexico, El Salvador, Uruguay, Chile, and Honduras. See Claudia E. G. Rangel Lozano, México en los setenta: ¿Guerra sucia o terrorismo del Estado? (Guerrero: Editorial Ithaca, 2012); Mark Danner and Rocío Gómez, Masacre: La guerra sucia en El Salvador (Barcelona: Malpaso, 2016); Jorgelina Coratta, Narrativas de la guerra sucia en la Argentina: Piglia, Saeer, Vale (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Corregidor, 1999). For a key book on the memory of the dictatorship in Argentina, see Susana Kaiser, Postmemories of Terror: A New Generation Copes with the Legacy of the Dirty War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 26. See Kate Lyons, “The Trans Experience in Colombia: ‘This is where we work—and this is where we are killed,’” Guardian, October 8, 2017, www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/oct/08/trans -women-in-colombia. 27. See Suyapa Portillo Villeda’s illuminating article, “Outing Honduras: A Human Rights Catastrophe in the Making,” https://nacla.org /article/outing-honduras-human-rights-catastrophe-making.

132 / Notes to Pages 63–69 28. The issue of mourning without there being a body to mourn is a complex historical and theoretical phenomenon that traverses many specific geographies, even as disappearance is often associated with the Southern Cone dictatorships, especially those in Argentina and Chile, and more recently with the drug and social wars of Mexico and the US-Mexico border. Macarena Gómez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 29. See Antonella Estévez B., “Entrevista a Sebastián Lelio, director de Una mujer fantástica,” April 4, 2017, http://cinechile.cl/entrevista-182. 30. See Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

chapter three. art in the shadow of border capitalism 1. There is an enormous range of scholarship, art, and performance work that constitutes the field of Border Studies. To name just a few of these, see the work of Felicity Amaya Schaeffer on virtual borders, especially “States of Love, Sex and Intimacy across Virtual Borders,” in Intersections of Difference in Contemporary Media, published online, August 15, 2016; Josh Kun and Flamma Montezemolo, eds., Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Amy Sara Carroll, REMEX: Towards an Art History of the NAFTA Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017). Also see the work of Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, http://digitalarts .lmc.gatch.edu/unesco/internet/artists/int_a_edtheater.html. 2. To elaborate these questions and to understand Obama’s inheritances, specifically with regard to the 1996 changes in border policy, see Muzaffar Chishti, Sarah Pierce, and Jessica Bolter, “The Obama Record on Deportations, Deporter-in-Chief or Not,” January 26, 2017, www.migrationpolicy.org/article/obama-record-deportations-deporterchief-or-not. 3. See Tanya Golash-Boza, Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism (New York: New York University Press, 2015).

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4. See “Postcommodity,” Interview by Rob Goyanes, BOMB, April 13, 2017, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/postcommodity/. 5. See William Calvo-Quiros, “Monsters of Late Capitalism along the US-Mexico Border: Legends, Epistemologies, and the Politics of Imagination” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2014), www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/lib/ark:/48907/f31n7z8g. 6. For an extended analysis of migration and politics along the USMexico border, see Alicia Schmidt Camacho’s Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2008) 7. For an astute analysis of “the mother of anchor-children” as a discourse in the United States, see Gretel H. Vera-Rosas, “Regarding ‘the Mother of Anchor-Children’: Towards an Ethical Practice of the Flesh,” Decolonial Gesture 11, no. 1 (2014), http://hemisphericinstitute .org/hemi/en/emisferica-111-decolonial-gesture/verarosas. 8. Maria Scheeti and Nick Miroff, “See How Trump Is Building a Border Wall That No One Can See,” Washington Post, November 21, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/local/immigration/how-trump-is-buildinga-border-wall-no-one-can-see/2017/11/21/83d3b746-cba0–11e7-b0cf-7689 a9f2d84e_story.html?utm_term=.3d3a66337a10. 9. See Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11-40. Mbembe particularly addresses how the state enacts its sovereignty through the “generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations.” 10. See Sayak Valencia Triana’s Capitalismo gore y necropolítica en México contemporáneo (Mexico City: Melusina, 2014). 11. See Gloria Anzaldúa’s classic book on the experiential forms of living social identities along and within the border, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987). 12. Ibid., 10. 13. For a discussion of racial geographies, see Maria Josephina Saldaña-Portillo, Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 14. For a historical and cultural analysis of drug wars, see Curtis Marez, Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

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/ Notes to Pages 76–84

15. There is by now an extensive bibliography on feminicide. See Lourdes Portillo’s film Señorita Extravaida for early but compelling takes on the problem of impunity. Also see Rosa Linda Fregoso, MeXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Rosa Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejerano, Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 16. For work in English on how new social and drug wars in Mexico have affected young people, see Rosanna Rejillo, “The NarcoMachine and the Work of Violence: Notes toward Its Decodification,” http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-82/reguillo. 17. Cited in Amy Sara Caroll, “Muerte sin fin: Teresa Margolles’s Gendered States of Exception,” TDR: The Drama Review 54, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 112. 18. Though I have not used the term “socially dead” here, the work of the sociologist Orlando Patterson and his concept “social death” and the broader critical inquiry by Black Studies on this concept in relation to transatlantic slavery hover in the background of these experiences especially when connected to the specific history of Haitian migration and expulsions. 19. Curtiz Marez, Drug Wars. 20. Cited on p. 51 in Julia Banwell’s essay, “Agency and Otherness in Teresa Margolles’ Aesthetic of Death,” Saggi, Ensayos, Essays 10, no. 4 (2010): 45–54. 21. See Carroll’s essay, “Muerte sin fin.” 22. On this question and in relation to Blackness and global racisms, see Denise Ferreira da Silva, Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Also see João H. Costa Vargas, Never Meant to Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). 23. See Todd Miller, “Is the US-Mexico Border Turning into a War Zone?,” Mother Jones, July 11, 2013, www.motherjones.com/politics /2013/07/border-drones-illegal-immigration/. 24. See Tanya Golash-Bozada’s excellent Deported, which focuses on the cycles of deportation pressure on Caribbean migrants. The quote can be found on p. 6.

Notes to Pages 85–91 / 135 25. “Indocumentados en el Bordo de Tijuana,” www.youtube.com /watch?v=h_eJxC_0TYI, Azteca Television clip. 26. For an extensive analysis of Central American art in the shadow of empire, colonial violence, militarization, and drug economies, see Kency Cornejo’s forthcoming book, Visual Disobedience: The Geopolitics of Experimental Art in Central America, 1990–Present (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

chapter four. an archive of starlight 1. Mishuana Goeman, Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 2. On racial geographies in relation to Indigenous territories and transnationalism, see Josephina Saldaña-Portillo’s excellent analysis, Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 3. See Jodi Byrd’s rich theorization of colonial mappings in relation to US Empire: The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 4. I refer to Hemispheric Indigenous Studies as the comparative study that distinguishes different forms of settler and franchise colonial histories and legacies in the Americas. The British colonial and Chilean state expansion in Patagonia is one of competing and overlapping settler colonialisms beginning in the nineteenth century. On the question of political nationalism within Canada that extends this hemispheric framework, see Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Mask: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 5. These spaces of brutal colonial violence not only represent asymmetrical contact (see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation [New York: Routledge, 1992]) but also are made into extractive zones based on the material extraction of Indigenous labor, territory, and resource theft to produce monocultural settlement (Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017]).

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6. Luis Alberto Borrero describes an abrupt change in perception due to the privatization of lands, where the wires that enclosed sheepherding territories interrupted ancestral trails: Los Selk’nam (Onas): Evolución cultural en Tierra del Fuego, Colección Aborígenes de la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 2007), 64. 7. See Stephen K. Sanderson, Social Evolutionism: A Critical History (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990). 8. See Anne Chapman, End of a World, the Selk’nam of Tierra del Fuego (New York: Taller Experimental Cuerpos Pintados, 2002). 9. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409. 10. See Chapman, End of a World, Introduction. 11. J. Kēhualani Kauanui, “ ‘A Structure, Not an Event’: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity,” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 5, no. 1 (2016), http://csalateral.org/issue/5–1/forum -alt-humanities-settler-colonialism-enduring-indigeneity-kauanui/. 12. See Vicente M. Diaz’s “Voyaging for Anti-Colonial Recovery: Austronesian Seafaring, Archipelagic Rethinking, and the Re-Mapping of Indigeneity,” Pacific Asia Inquiry 2, no. 1 (Fall 2011). 13. Dominque Legoupil, “El sistema socio-económico de los nómades del mar de Skyring (archipiélago de Patagonia),” Anales del Instituto de la Patagonia 28 (2000): 81–199. 14. See Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, eds., Introduction to Theorizing Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 15. See Ann Stoler’s classic book on colonial methodologies, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 16. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 17. For a thoughtful analysis of how spiritual economies overlap with colonialism in the Americas, see Kathryn Burns, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 18. For a discussion of disappearance as historical memory that considers Dawson Island, see Elizabeth Jelin, Los trabajos de la memoria (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2002).

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19. See my book Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), for a discussion of the trilogy The Battle of Chile (1979), Obstinate Memory (1998), and The Pinochet Case (2001). Guzmán’s films on human rights also include Salvador Allende (2004). 20. See Julia Suárez-Krabbe, “Race, Social Struggles, and ‘Human’ Rights Contributions from the Global South,” Journal of Critical Globalization Studies, no. 6 (2013): 78–102. 21. See Rolando Vázquez’s “Translation as Erasure: Thoughts on Modernity’s Epistemic Violence,” Journal of Historical Sociology 24, no. 1 (March 2011): 27–44.

conclusion 1. For a longer discussion of Vicuña’s film, see “I Felt the Sea Sense Me: Ecologies and Dystopias in Cecilia Vicuña’s Kon Kon,” in About to Happen: Cecilia Vicuña, ed. Andrea Anderson and Julia Bryan-Wilson (New York: Siglio Press, 2017). 2. For an excellent book that addresses neoliberal time, see Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004). 3. See Aníbal Quijano’s classic treatment, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from the South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–80. Also see Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (2003): 240–70. 4. Like any geopolitical region, the Americas represents a diverse map of North, South, East, and West migrations; racial formations; identities; and cultural and political exchange and dissent. One common thread in the hemisphere, however, is the experience of European colonialism and its violent afterlives as the dominant force in the path to liberal democracy. The undercurrents of authoritarianism and patriarchal legacies and the persistence of colonialism since the sixteenth century have long stymied the ability to make lasting social transformation, especially given the legal and economic frameworks set up by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberalisms.

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5. See Antonio Gramsci, The Southern Question, with new translation by Pasquale Verdicchio (Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2005); see also Antonio Gramsci, with Quintin Hoare and Geoff rey NowellSmith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971).

glossa ry

alternative epistemes Systems of understanding otherwise or knowing that exceed disciplinary boundaries. antinormative Defiance and refusals in relation to standard heterosexual and socially accepted norms. archipelagic memories The term used here to invoke the submerged perspectives and cultural memory of Patagonian Indigenous peoples who are often presumed to be entirely disappeared by genocidal British, Australian, and Chilean occupation campaigns during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. chicago boys A group of Chilean economists trained by Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger at the University of Chicago who during the 1970s and 1980s implemented the first “shock therapy” economic and social policies of neoliberalism. coloniality The persistent system, processes, and effects of colonial power and colonialism as originally theorized by Aníbal Quijano with the phrase “the coloniality of power.” cuir The term used by theorists and social movements in the Americas for queer identities, theories, and practices of alternative sexualities. decolonial theory A heterogeneous body of scholarship organized around the premise that colonialism and its complex afterlives have

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not ended but persist in the ongoing violence of racial, gender, sex, class differentiations made by the modern nation-state. extractive capitalism Names how capitalism depends on the accumulation of natural and nonrenewable resources and labor often thieved from Indigenous territories. horizontal assemblies Gatherings and dialogues that level power differentials. In the context of Bolivian experience, a collaborative political process of mutual respect, conversation, and understanding based on Aymara Indigenous cultural formats. inter- and transdisciplinary studies Theories and research that move beyond the nineteenth-century colonial formations of academic discipline to instead link and theorize seemingly disparate objects and relational sites of study. intersectionality The term first coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1989) and then elaborated by Black Feminisms to describe overlapping forms of systemic and inextricably linked injustice based on class, race, sexual orientation, disability, and gender. normative flows The dominant currents within hetero and patriarchal nation-states that assume a natural power order of spaces, bodies, and political systems. politics of recognition The mainstreaming of rights by minority populations within the legal sphere of a nation-state. In this book, I use the term mostly to refer to LGBTI hemispheric and specific social movements that during the past decade demanded marriage equality. queer the public sphere Refusing the heteronormative organization of social life wherein individuals come together to discuss and enact politics. A term used by José Quiroga in Tropics of Desire (2000) and that I use as a general frame for Transnational Americas Studies throughout the book but especially in chapter 2. racial capitalism The term used by Cedric Robinson in Black Marxism to refer to Western Civilization and a world system dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide, in which the growth of capitalism exaggerates racial difference during the expansion of an accumulative global market model.

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the racial state A concept first coined by Omi and Winant in Racial Formations (1986) and then elaborated by David Theo Goldberg in The Racial State (2002) to describe the coarticulation of race and the modern nation-state. This also coincides with what Enrique Dussel calls the first modernity. I use the term as shorthand for the inherent racial dimensions and racisms of the modern nation-state. relationality The ability to produce forms of intimate, social, and political engagement that extend beyond the cult of the individual. settler occupation Forced takeover and settlement of Indigenous territories by means of militias, corporations, and colonial state entities that enact genocidal violence. These processes have historically been supported by anti-Indigenous laws that expand the boundaries of the nation-state. socialities Forms of relational, collaborative, and creative engagement that extend beyond the norms and relations of the biological family. state legitimacy The process by which nation-states confer recognition on a population, which in the legal realm usually means by the granting of rights. transversal Mediations of different levels of power to achieve common objectives. A term used in social movements and coalition building in the Americas as a strategy for building political power. The concept first circulated widely with the rise of el Frente Transversal Nacional y Popular (the National and Popular Transversal Front) founded in Argentina after the 2001 economic crisis. us imperialism An inherently violent process; the US government’s interference beyond its juridical and geographical boundaries. US indirect and direct control of other economies, political systems, and national outcomes. washington consensus Ten International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank policy prescriptions for economic development that were imposed on “developing” nations to structurally adjust their societies to a Washington-based international financial order.

selected bibliogr a phy

For the extended bibliography, see notes to individual chapters. Alvarez, Sonia E., Claudia de Lima Costa, Veronic Feliu, Rebecca Hester, Norma Klahn, and Millie Thayer. Translocalities / Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in Latin/a Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Bauer, Arnold. Chilean Rural Society: From the Spanish Conquest to 1930. Cambridge Latin American Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Bhambra, Gurminder K. Connected Sociologies. Theory for a Global Age. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. . Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Borrero, Luis Alberto. Los Selk’nam (Onas): Evolución cultural en Tierra del Fuego. Colección Aborígenes de la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Galerna, 2007. Burns, Kathryn. Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Buroway, Michael. “The Critical Turn to Public Sociology.” In Enriching the Sociological Imagination: How Radical Sociology Changed the Discipline, ed. Rhonda F. Levine, 313–26. New York: Routledge, 2016. 143

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Byrd, Jodi. Transit of Empire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Castro-Gómez, Santiago, and Ramón Grosfoguel, eds. El giro decolonial: Reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalism global. Bogotá: Siglo de Hombre Editores, 2007. De Castro, Eduardo Vivieros. “Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere.” Creative Commons, 2012. De Sousa Santos, Boaventura. “Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges.” Eurozine, June 29, 2007. www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-06-29-santos-en.html. . Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2014. Du Bois, W. E. B. Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1903. Dusell, Enrique. The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philsophy of Liberation. New York: Prometheus Books, 2000. Escobar, Arturo. La invención del tercer mundo: Construcción y desconstrucción del tercer mundo. Caracas: Fundación Editorial El Perro y La Rana, 2007. Ferguson, Roderick. The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Gómez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. . Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Gómez-Barris, Macarena, and Licia Fiol-Matta. “Introduction.” Las Américas Quarterly, Special Issue (November 2014). Gómez-Barris, Macarena, and Herman Gray, eds. Towards a Sociology of a Trace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Gray, Herman. “Subject(ed) to Recognition.” American Quarterly 65, no. 4 (December 2013): 771–98. Grosfoguel, Ramón. “La descolonización del conocimiento: Diálogo crítico entre la visión descolonial de Frantz Fanon y la sociología

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descolonial de Boaventura de Sousa Santos.” El Correo, 2012. www .elcorreo.eu.org/La-descolonizacion-del-conocimiento-Dialogo-critico-entreFrantz-Fanon-y-Boaventura-de-Sousa-Santos?lang=fr. . “The Dilemmas of Ethnic Studies in the United States: Between Liberal Multiculturalism, Identity Politics, Discipinary Colonization, and Decolonial Epistemologies.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 10, no. 1 (2012): 81–90. Gubrium, Jaber F., and James A. Holstein. “Narrative Practice and the Transformation of Interview Subjectivity.” Chapter 2, Social and Cultural Sciences Faculty Research and Publications, Marquette University, February, 1, 2012. Lipsitz, George. “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies.” American Quarterly 47, no. 3 (September 1995): 369–87. Marcelo Maia, João. “History of Sociology and the Quest for Intellectual Autonomy in the Global South: The Cases of Alberto Guerreiro Ramos and Syed Hussein Alatas.” History of Sociology 62, no. 7 (November 2014): 1097–1115. Marez, Curtis. Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Mignolo, Walter D. Local Histories / Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harney. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2014. Perez, Emma. The Decolonial Imaginary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Pingali, Prabhu L. “Green Revolution: Impacts, Limits, and the Path Ahead.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) 109, no. 31 (2012): 12302–8. Rivera Cusicanqui, Sylvia. “The Historical Horizons of Internal Colonialism.” Andean Oral History Project, 2007. http://web .net/~bthomson/bobs_files/Cusicanqui_Historical_Memory.pdf.