Performing the Other


Velasco, Juan. “Performing Multiple Identities: Guillermo Gómez-Peña and His “Dangerous Border Crossings”. Latino/a Popular Culture edited by Michelle Habell-Pallan and Mary Romero. New York, London: New York University Press, 2002.

Velasco looks at Gómez-Peña body of work which comprises performance and writing, and points at several issues raised by it:
- commodification of indigenous identities
- connections between the production of the 'authentic Other' and the new world order
- performative nature of identity
- colonial discourse as relying on a binary between colonizers and colonized identities
- strategies by which colonized subjects can subvert this binary

Anzaldúa has previously constructed the notion of the 'border' as a site for articulation of a 'new mestiza consciousness', a type of subjectivity that refuses to be on one side or the other. Gómez-Peña however, seems to be more skeptical about any 'positive model of cultural hybridity' since it can be assigned any meaning, commodified and consumed in the context of contemporary American politics. Instead, he seems to suggest identity as a permanent interrogation and a "Latina/o performativity that alternates between sincerity and subversion, irony and compliance" (217), while advocating for a more complex and situational mestizo subject.

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