Interview: Amalia Mesa-Bains

This interview was originally published in ART PAPERS March/April 1995, Vol 19, issue 2.

Amalia Mesa-Bains is an artist as well as a critic. As an artist, her work is primarily an interpretation of traditional Chicano altars; as a writer, she has worked to define a Chicano and Latino aesthetic in the U.S. and Latin America. She has pioneered the documentation and interpretation of long-neglected Chicano traditions in Mexican American art, both through her cultural activism and her own altar installations. She is currently involved in multicultural educational research at Far-West Laboratories.

Ann Barclay Morgan: How did you begin writing art criticism?

Amalia Mesa-Bains: It grew out of the community’s need to be understood. I began as an artist to affirm the things that were important, and then, as groups of artists we started our own institutions so we would have a place to show. But those institutions were really so outside of the system, that the knowledge that we were creating and the ideas that we were generating weren’t impacting our own children. So then I began writing about art and creating a curriculum, and eventually criticism came out of that. So criticism for me was a self examination/investigation—and I mean that in the collec­tive way. Without the critical logos of being able to explain what this work meant—since it stood out­ side, experientially, society’s collective knowledge— it wouldn’t have validity. It would never rest in any broader context of people’s shared experience. That was why I got into criticism. It wasn’t because I sat down and thought it was such a great idea. It was one of those, inevitabilities—you have to do certain things because you just have to get them done.

Morgan: But you’ve branched out and written about other art, not just Chicano art?

Mesa-Bains: I’m very interested in the area of memory. The idea of visual language versus spoken language is so fascinating to me, the way in which the mind takes in images and information and constructs them, much as we make our dreams and ideas. And since we don’t know very much about that, I think we often fail in the way that we communicate things to young people. We underestimate their capacity—anybody’s ca­pacity—to condense really disparate bits of information and make a sort of imaginary sense out of them. Other than that, I would say I’ve stayed mostly in the genre of writing about first Chicano art, then women within the Chicano community, then later artists who are working in the area of con­temporary spirituality which took me into the work of other Latin Americans.

Morgan: Do you have any problems in writing about Chicano art for publications that are not Chicano-run?

Mesa-Bains: I have no access whatsoever. I’m now working with New Press to put out a collection of essays that I’ve been doing in small distribution over the past ten years, because essentially…I’m just going to say this straight out: whiteness has an assumed reality that is so potent—as though it is reality, that it goes unquestioned. It’s not thought of as racial opinion—it is the cultural opinion. So when anyone comes in from another point of view—regardless of whether you represent 50-60% of the population, or an entire hemi­sphere, or thirty centuries of history—your opinion, or your cri­tique, or your presence doesn’t matter, because whiteness goes un­ questioned in this universal and essentialist sort of way. Your point of view is always seen as narrow. I’ve had people say that to me, “Don’t you think it’s kind of a narrow area that you’re interested in?” And I want to say, “Well, I don’t think it’s any more narrow than writing about minimalism, or writing about pop art.” That’s because of the whole issue of whiteness never being questioned in its as­sumption of totality. So that anything else bears the responsibility of describing itself as a particle, because the totality never questions its own being. That’s what you do when you write, you often get pi­geon-holed or marginalized in that way. So I haven’t had as much access, but I can’t say that I’ve pressed it either. My first responsibil­ity was to help artists within my own community gain language in terms of critical discourses for their work. It was an exploration of the understanding of my own work and my place in the community of artists. So I began writing from that point of view and then, when I took an interest in other points of view, I really didn’t make an attempt to penetrate the mainstream press. I wasn’t really interested, because writing was simply something I had to do to get these other things done. I’m more interested now. I like the idea of being able to have dialogue with other people who are forming these kinds of critical narratives. But in going through the process of graduate schools and PhD’s and learning to have your place in the “discourse,” you really get “whitified.” You have to use the language, because the language is a code. I used to say that quality was a euphemism for the familiar, well I think critical is a euphemism for the familiar, because it’s really about who you know and who you can reference. So you throw out certain words and then immediately you’re in the pot. If you don’t want to use those words or if you try using other words like sincerity, or passion, or spirituality, then you’re once again in the narrow discourse. Sometimes you start out at the beginning captivated by some of those ideas. Craig Owens was very important to me. I always thought Craig Owens was really Latino and he just never told anybody. I kept saying, “That allegory stuff, I just know he has to be…” There’ve been other people whose writings have helped give me a way to look at the things that I saw people in my community gen­erating in terms of cultural pro­duction. But at a certain point your tongue gets twisted from talking to other people’s talk, and finally you go home and no one in your house understands you. So then you start to ask yourself, “Why am I talk­ing like that?” And then you begin to give back to yourself the power of your own speech. I call this the age of interpretation; we passed through the age of ac­cess and it’s not finished, it’s still an issue for us to be able to exhibit and arrange the representation of ourselves. But in the age of interpretation, the powerful devices are critical writings, things as pedestrian as museum signage, catalogues, being able to curate—those are the ways by which you actually voice the position of your work. In a lot of the communities that I work in, the term “first voice” has replaced “minority” or “people of color” or all the euphemisms that you try to make up for being outside of the dia­logue. “First voice” has become a term used for people to talk about self-description. We joke that the age of ventriloquism is over, that we don’t really need anybody else to talk for us. I think that people like bell hooks, or Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gdmez-Pefta have been really critical in establishing that kind of first voice, and 1 often feel that the African American community leads the way in establishing whatever is required for the next stage of your struggle. So I have looked to people like bell, and Michelle Wallace, and others because I have felt that they’ve really taken it straight on. The whole idea of self-recovery in bell’s writing is so pertinent to our lives in the Southwest.

My interest now is more in cultural criticism than art criticism. I think that is the most important area right now, because here in the West, especially in California, we’re in the wave of the most extreme xenophobia that we’ve ever, ever had. Even though the general public may not read cultural criticism, it does have an impact in giving language and voice to those who will represent people.

Morgan: You don’t feel it’s important for you as a representative of your community and a voice for your community to reach out to newspapers, and to write for newspapers?

Mesa-Bains: I want to but it takes time. I want to write, and prob­ably eventually will on the SOS (“Save Our State”) initiative. I really like talking about geopolitics, talking about the unspoken issues about our rights in a land that really is our own. The idea of “go back home if you don’t like it”—well, guess what, there’s nowhere to go. We were here before everyone else was here—along with American Indians, and many of us have native families. So I have this compelling need to write, but the time that it takes to write— well, writing is a discipline totally different from making art or speaking. Speaking is very easy for me, but my writing has a self-con­sciousness that I wish I could get rid of, because I think the best writing doesn’t have that self-consciousness. I like for it to have humor and energy. I was teasing somebody recently about the idea that beauty is making a comeback. I wasn’t making light of it, but in fact I’m a fashion junkie, and I watch the movement of clothing. Because I’ve always believed that this dynamic of women and their bodily representations—even though they may be forced into it, nonetheless, they make choices, they buy or don’t buy. Those are indicators of the ways in which other cultural forms will seek to represent themselves. So, when women got sick of the grunge and the deconstructed look, and decided that they really wanted a pair of pretty shoes…I thought that might mean something, and so I was teasing about the notion that the glamour troops are on the move again. There’s a very serious question within that about why we as women are trying to reinscribe a very narrow notion of sexu­ality and beauty. Why can’t we get up one day and wear combat boots and overalls, and then feel that it would be all right to go out another time in gauzy dresses? This forced choice, this totality, is to me another one of those things that we constantly struggle with. And it’s a very important time in this examination of early feminism and what it means now.

There are lots of questions that are going to be put forward in the next couple of years that would be pertinent. I feel like it’s a time when women of color can step in to give their historical view of what feminism was like. Because they were not necessarily feminists (in terms of being associated with the white movement), but they had their own struggles within their own communities and their own viewpoints on what were and continue to be the salient issues for women of color, which are not the same issues. Sometimes they overlap, but they’re not the same. So I’m hoping that I can write in some sense about those issues as well, because I feel that the whole discourse on feminism has also created a kind of assumed whiteness. When you use the word feminist, you really mean white, but you don’t say that, then periodically a woman of color will be brought in marginally to give a side viewpoint. But even people like Gloria Steinem, even Betty Friedan, when they speak historically, they really only name each other, I mean, they really only see the world within the terms of those leadership fig­ures. To me, one of the examples of that—and this has nothing to do with criticism—is the women’s vote, and particularly in Califor­nia when we were electing Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer. People raised money and it was this exciting moment where all over the country women were going to go to Congress in numbers for the first time, and within a year, Boxer and Feinstein took really conservative, reactionary stances on militarizing the border, using very xenophobic language, having their picture taken at the border with the border patrol with goggles. Playing to people’s fantasies of the criminalization of immigrant people, bringing up stuff about the prison system and sending them back to Mexico. But we know (after the “nanny problem”) that women who live at their level have help, and their help is largely undocumented Latino women who are not in their consciousness of the women’s vote and of women’s issues. And so, once again, you get women who claim to represent all women, but who lack the consciousness of the underclass of women of color who struggle to make their lives more comfortable.

To me those are the kinds of issues that go in and out of criticism, because I don’t think criticism should be separate from the acute social conditions of our time. What are we criticizing then? Who’s the audience for all this art discourse? Is it a bunch of other artists or people who know art and like art, or do we really care about changing the perception of people, you know, the “little p” people? Not the people in black and not the beautiful people, but the little people. And it sounds kind of hokey, like “Mr. Jones goes to Washington,” but the truth is, if we really believe that the work we do can open up people’s minds in a way that allows them to be more humane to each other or to be more complex in the choices they make, then we should want to reach numbers of people in a language and in visual ways that pertain to the conditions, however acute they may be, that they’re living in. I’m as concerned about the politics of the border as I am about allegory, I think they’re sort of like related to each other. No one else would think that, but I think that.

Morgan: Do you feel that writing in English versus writing in Spanish affects your ideas?

Mesa-Bains: Well, its funny because I’m a dominant English speaker, but I was raised as a receptive Spanish speaker. By that I mean that people spoke Spanish in my household, especially my grandmother who lived with us part of the time. But then I was like the little emissary that was going to go to school and learn English; they didn’t want me to speak Spanish in the house, so I wouldn’t have an accent and have a problem. As the result of that I don’t write well in Spanish. I write Spanish in English—my structure is completely Spanish, but the language I’m using is English, so I have had to learn to reverse all my sentences. So I write them the way I normally would think them out and then I turn them backwards to make sense in English, syntactically. Then I take a sentence with all these clauses, which is very common in Spanish, and then I’ll break it into two to three sentences, so that English-speaking people will understand me. I never was aware of it as much as when I started having my works translated into Spanish for Latin America. The translators would send notes back saying that this was the easiest English they’d ever translated because it made perfect sense in Span­ish. So I don’t write in Spanish because I don’t write well enough, and it hampers you to a certain degree. I just did a televised thing for Latin America, and I had to keep going to a translator for things that I can’t really say well in Spanish. Growing up in this country, especially in the generation I grew up in, you basically were prohibited from speaking Spanish. And now it’s very different, but we’re still very xenophobic. We have English-only in California. It’s unbelievable that even Chinese people and Spanish people voted for it. They thought it meant that we’d get more English classes or something. That’s not what it meant.

Morgan: Apart from the structure of the language, do you feel that there is a certain aesthetic or something in the fabric in the Spanish language that would speak about Chicano art more “appropriately” than English does?

Mesa-Bains: It’s about the values that are held. Language is just a manifestation of that belief system system. One of the easiest ways to understand it is through salutations. When Americans meet one another, they say, “Hi, nice to meet you,” “How’re you doing,” or whatever. It’s relatively casual. When people meet each other as they introduce each other in Spanish, there are several ways that it’s done. One is the more traditional one: “es un placer”—”it’s a great pleasure,” or “a sus ordenes,” which means “I am at your command,” which immediately makes you very vulnerable. The most fascinating one is like the French, “enchants” “encantada” which means that you’re enchanted by this person or enchanted to be in their presence. To put yourself under someone’s command or under their spell are both expressions of a way of seeing and being in the world that is truly not North American. It isn’t that you’re culturally determined simply by the place where you were born. It’s that to be born in a place, to speak a language in a place, to have a history there, to have spiritual practices, to have everyday life, to have people speak to you in endearments when you were a child, to have all of that is to form cognitive and visualizing processes that make your way a little bit different from people who grow up in another place with another language. That’s not to say that we are not complex people; we’re bicultural, most of us. We all learn to live in different worlds; but the familiarity and the comfort of a worldview that has a certain origin stays with you, and regardless of how many adaptations you make, that sensibility is based on nutrient sources, and it creates preferences, ways of expressing yourself visually, so writing about those expressions has to include that same system. That’s not to say only Latinos can write about Latin America. I think sometimes we write best about it, because we see it in a complex wisdom that we share. It’s a shared reality, but it’s not even as fixed as that. It’s just simply that there is a particular set of views that do make it easier to understand that work. The Brazilian artist Regina Vader uses the term “the aesthetics of precariousness” when she talks about her own work, and about the complexity of Brazilian life with its African antecedents and its ways of being. I remember once watching a television program in Brazil; they were in a major urban center, and they were just talking to “the man on the street”—stockbrokers and whatever—you can imagine a range of professional people. Every single one of them believed in what we would call supernatural powers. Office buildings had shrines. People didn’t make the distinctions that we make in the Western and North American world about those ideas of the universe, the sort of cosmology. So I understood better when Vader uses “the aesthetics of precariousness’’ to describe the sort of poetic and philosophical view that directs a lot of her work. When you’re writing about the work, you really have to have a sense of what that is. I’ve sat through theater programs and read reviews the next day by writers who had no familiarity at all with Latin American life or cultural conditions—that didn’t know what a quinceaHera was, didn’t know who the Virgen de Guadalupe was, didn’t know who the Magon brothers were.. .Didn’t know anything as far as we would be concerned. But they wrote a review of the piece that was disconnected, sort of like gibberish, because they have no reference points, so the irony, and the paradox, and the allegory completely pass them because they didn’t have the reference point to understand where the play was speaking from. If you don’t know about the quinceaneras, and fifteen godmothers and the girls and the colors, then you don’t get the jokes, and you don’t get the movements. It’s not like you are supposed to have this cultural encyclopedia, but I believe that we’ve suffered a great deal in our communities from being critically appraised by people who abso­lutely would never dream of going into another discipline without any background, yet they write about our communities without any understanding.

Morgan: Are there any critics you know who are not Chicano, who you feel write with understanding and whose viewpoint you like?

Mesa-Bains: No, I don’t, I really don’t. First of all, very, very few people ever write about us. Basically New York and Washington D.C. are the two seats of power that determine much of the nation’s thinking institutionally, ideologically, and certainly culturally. We don’t exist in any numbers in those areas, so Chicanos—who are Mexican Americans, the biggest group within the larger Latino population—really operate off of the West Coast and very little criticism really comes out of there. There are some people in Mexico who are beginning to write for the first time about Chicanos, which I think is really interesting. Polyester—I don’t know if it’s still being published—is a journal that’s been taking more account of Chicanos. By and large, we don’t get much press in New York. I think that one of the reasons that I’ve gotten even some of the attention I have is because I’ve exhibited on the East Coast, unlike almost any other Chicano.

Morgan: I think that’s true for artists of any background. If you don’t exhibit in New York, it’s very hard to make a career.

Mesa-Bains: And I used to think it was a cliche, but it’s absolutely true. I had a solo show at Intar in ’87, which happened to be picked by Art in America as one of the ten best alternative shows, which then spun off into “The Decade Show” in ’90, which then spun off into the Whitney show in ’93. Those were critical junctures for me as an artist even though I’d been exhibiting since the ’70s. I was considered the new kid on the block, but I’ve been here a long time. Here is not there.

Morgan: How do you feel as an art critic writing about Latino art or art from Brazil?

Mesa-Bains: I work real hard at it, I read a lot of materials—but being an artist I understand the process. The creative process itself is a series of synaptic breakthroughs. In my dissertation work I’ve done a lot of study on creativity—dissociative thinking, permeation of boundaries, complexity of mode, all the mental and cognitive characteristics that make up the process that you call art. I know what that is like. I’ve lived through it for years and years, so when artists are talking to me, I always know what they’re talking about. Sometimes, I think my insights come from the fact that we have some shared or overlapping cultural materials, but often I think that on a very individual level I can write for them in a “first voice,” because I know what it feels like to make art. So when they talk to me about their fathers or what it was like to grow up in Brazil, or even the powerful influence of spirituality, having been raised in an alternative system, both Catholicism and home altars, knowing what curanderos really do and how powerful they are—it’s very easy for me to understand, because I know exactly what they’re talking about. I think sometimes having cultural affinities is an important part of criticism. Not too many artists write about other artists, so often people who are coming in to write about art really have never been through the actual process—that decision making process where you start to make it and you go, “That’s not working,” and you switch to something else. Those fragmentary incidents or encounters that you cannot predict change the direction of the work. You take an airplane and from boredom you start reading the airline magazine, and there’s some sort of odd biography there, of Edith Wharton for example, and you notice that she made gardens in France. So you clip it out, and then you notice that you’re talking about something else when you’re talking about a garden—it’s a metaphor, a site in your mind. All the coincidences that happen in the creative mind often don’t get accounted for because criticism tries to make too big a picture. I feel that an important part of art criticism is the intimacy of creating, the intimacy and familiarity of that sort of interior journey that artists make. Artists who are very politically aware, socially anchored, acute in their sense of what is going on are different than politicians, different than sociologists, different than others who serve because they take that acute vision and go inside. Then this interior process reflects back out something greater, more amplified than anything that you would read in the newspaper or see on television about that same situation, because it has passed through the funnel of a rich interior life. Criticism for me is really trying to reflect and amplify that interior perspective on larger and more acute social realities. My dissertation, a study of other Chicana artists, was an attempt in my own development to anchor myself in a place so I wouldn’t feel so alone, so I would think, “I can’t be this different, I just can’t,” and of course 1 wasn’t. I found ten other women of my generation who could have been repealing each other word for word’ “Oh, there’s a man inside my head.” “My grandmother was the most important person in my life.” “I knew I wanted to be an artist since I was a baby.” “I remember the first time I held a pencil.” All of them amplified these worlds of experience that were very akin to my own. Even when I was writing then, it was a self-referential kind of writing, which I think is true for most people, you’re really investigating your own experience, and you’re finding in other people those references that give you a sense of connection.

Morgan: How do you feel about such exhibitions as “Magiciens de la terre”?

Mesa-Bains: I’m so embarrassed, I have a completely different opinion from all the critics. Everybody was just going on and on about the margin in the center, and the exploitation of folk artists, and the diffusion of boundaries between high and low, and I kept saying, “What about the work?” That work was the most powerful I’d ever seen in my life. In my own thinking about what I could do, what I wanted to do, that was the turn in the road. I remember standing there thinking, “You just have to think bigger,” because of the scale of the works, and their audacity. I understood what they were saying about the center and the margin, I’m the first person to complain about exploiting artists, this unique person that you bring from the middle of the bush who doesn’t even know where they are because they’ve never been in a city before. 1 got all that, but I still think they missed the point. The point was that those artists from the bush knew the world in a way that for all our education and for all our systems of technology’, we don’t. They were in the fourth dimension. You stood in front of that sluff and the hairs rose on the back of your neck. If you were a dog you would have howled. I went and sat down and cried in the corner several times, because the work was so monumental in a profound sense of something larger and yet at the same time more focused than we ever gel to see. I’ve seen shows for years in all kinds of places in the U.S. and I can’t think of a single show that ever, ever touched me the way that show did. The Chinese artist, Yongping Huang, who did big burial pieces out of newspaper, and (he washing machines where he pulped them were over io one side. They splattered on the wall, and as the burial pieces cracked, the outside of the paper yellowed but the inside stayed wet and porous. They were reflections of burial sites with at (he same time the language of the newspapers. and the processes of decay and erosion (hat arc so much about regeneration. And that was just one piece. I realized the articles were about the politics of (the exhibition, the politics of display and representation. They were not criticisms of the works themselves. That was just the way that people handled it at that lime, and they had legitimate concerns. But every once in a while a big political mis­take like that makes ihe world recognize how false the boundaries and distinc­tions are between the so-called modern and the so called primitive. That’s what they should have written about. But the Kwandebele houses from South Africa, or the voodoo work with all the people with big penises by Georges Liautaud. Or John Fundi from Africa—I went back so many times lo those mahogany figures with huge tongues that wrapped around and went in the anuses, and the bodies were revolting and at the same time something from your own archaic past. He was so much more powerful in my mind, because the work was about the deepest sense of our own sexual potency, and it wasn’t lied up in outraging or censoring. It was just there. I hardly anyone even wrote about those pieces. I thought the African pieces were at another level of material immediacy. I met Cheri Samba, who was in that show, at about the same time.

Morgan: Well, do you feel that when we gel through the process of becoming whole, that we can achieve some kind of unity of human­ kind?

Mesa-Bains:I work all the lime at the potentiality, not so much of unity, but more like a humane complexity. I don’t think anything in our lifetime is going to change the profound race, class, gender divisions that we have. Because we arc a nation based on the profit motive. The potentiality that in our lifetime people are going to understand one another is very limited. Often when I work with teachers, I talk to them about being a transitional generation of people that will invest in a world of possibility in these children, that they will never have the joy to actually see. They have to imagine a future they will not have the benefit of, which you can do if you know that you’re in this transitional age, which we are: the end of the Cold War, the falling of borders, the wholesale movement of people, the questioning of nation-state, ethnic cleansing, the son of post-colo­nial decay that we experience—it has to generate something new. Because we won’t experience that in our lifetime, people who are inventing new language, new structures of understanding, have to have a really deep faith that the work and effort they put in now will mean something. There can be something very ennobling about that—that you’re contributing to something that at some point will allow people a more humane complexity. I fall back on Erik Erikson, because I’m an old developmentalist. He wrote a really wonderful book, Life History and the Historical Moment in which he talks about the notion that every individual has a life history that has stages of development in its high and its low points. And every group to which individuals have membership has a historical trajectory as well. At some moments, particularly in times of crisis and world change—-Erikson will give you the Nazi movement as a negative example—young people can be called into service in ways that question those systems. A positive example can be the youth in Tiananmen Square In those moments in which the life history of certain individuals and the historical moment of their group intersect at a juncture of powerful development, usually late adolescence and early adulthood, but sometimes even at a later age. there is an aperture that occurs Those individuals who, by what he says is a combination of unruliness, giftedness, and competency, can rise to take hold of that moment and create for the entire group, a new identity and a new complexity. If we’re willing, we can create those possibilities for them, change institutionally in some ways, particularly in education and the arts and culture. I guess I do believe that there are possibilities, but I don’t believe in reconciling, by emotional processes, vicious differences, especially in class. But I am one of those people who believes that art serves, and if art serves, then I think artists can be people who can make change.

Morgan: You mentioned spirituality I low do you deal with that as a critic and as an artist?

Mesa-Bains: I actually think that spirituality is the underpinning of it all. it’s just that we don’t have very good words for it. You know the acceleration of science was really in the name of gods and God, of a belief in a spiritual world view or a religious order. That’s not to say that the corruption of patronage certainly didn’t have exploitive elements in it, but, nonetheless, people could illuminate a view of something greater, and 1 think in a way that hasn’t changed even though artists now are, since the advent of science, operating from different kinds of concepts of who they make art for. I think deep inside artists always have a rather passionate view that, for lack of a better word, is spiritual. People carve or make things or give life to inanimate material. I think that in general artists are driven by a great spirit in themselves that they try to convey through their material in hopes that somehow other people will have a reaction, even if it’s a provocative one. even if it’s one that deconstructs all the pleasant harmonies of that world because they want to take it apart.

Morgan: What about spirituality in Chicano art in particular?

Mesa-Bains: It’s a very important pan ol it. It goes without saying that large numbers of Chicanos have Catholicism as a dominating religion, with the whole Baroque sensibility that the Church brought into the everyday lives of people it dominated. But then there was another system, a kind o! spirituality that is not lied to the formal religion of the Catholic Church. Much of its practices took place in the home. People of my generation would still have been raised by people who kept home altars, particularly in the Southwestern region. Jennifer Gonzalez, a wonderful young woman in the I listory of Consciousness program at UC-Santa Cruz, has been writing on the idea of auto-topographies, which arc the ways in which people scif-describe through arrangements of objects. She has written about artists who do altar and shrine work. We’ve been talking a lot about how those arrangements ol space have to do with narrating events, flic difference between an altar and an ofrenda is that a home altar is the permanent, ongoing record of the family’s life. So if someone dies in the war their little medals are put there; when babies are born, their booties are put there; when people get married, their corsages are put there. And then mixed into that will be icons that have relevance for the family, sometimes San Martin, sometimes the Virgen de Guadalupe, or the Virgen de San Juan de Los laigos. There are certain key ones that come from regions of Mexico that, even after years of urbanization, people still keep. Photographs, and of­ ten the family’s important papers like insurance papers, will be kept in a drawer underneath, so basically, what is being described or circumscribed is a protected, sacred space that acts as a record of (he history of the family, so it’s a space that has a great voice to it. The ofrenda is a temporal offering that is only done on the Day of the Dead and only for (he remembrance ol the soul departed. It will sometimes have references to their life and its voice…a hat. their glasses, usually something close to the body, traditional things like cigarettes or tequila for the man, hot chocolate for the woman, and then pictures and mementos. Those are only for the moment. So this idea of the momentary is a really important part of why Chicano artists gel invested in the ephemeral, why Carmen Lomas Garza or myself or Celia Munoz or others have done ephemeral work impermanence is a very long tradition in Mexican popular cul­ture. I think that those elements, while no longer tied in any way to a formal religion, are reflections of, not spiritual­ity, but of a worldview that does not subscribe to a North Ameri­can concept. In North America the mind and the body are separated, we go to internists and we go to psychiatrists, but in a curundero’s world view or a healing person’s worldview, coming out of that spiritual tradition, they really are inseparable. Even though we’ve learned to go to the right doctors, we don’t really believe those things are so distinct, so often when people are speaking about those things, they speak about them in different ways. So the residues, even now, after all the urban­ization, are still quite manifest. One of the things that I think govern our spirituality is our sense of place. I’ve been writing a great deal about that, and this last year or two, that’s been the most important topic. It came to me from other people, so it’s not something that I’ve thought up. I really came because so many artists were doing work about land. I think that, as the fall of the borders occurs, and these world displacements, and major migrations and the militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border. and the xenophobia… all these things increase and constellate around us. We are reminded even more of how much we arc in a place that is our place, but can t be acknowledged as being our place. Those deep feelings and memories, and family stories and photographs—that’s a kind of spirit that comes from having been a continuous inhabitant, when your family goes back eleven generations, you don’t think of yourself as a newcomer, you really don’t Land is a very important theme at this point for Chicanos, though it’s very different lor other Lilin Americans Latin Americans are concerned with displacement, the concept of an exile, especially the Cuban cultural constellation where people arc in suspended animation— defining themselves as Cubans for 30 and 40 years, never having set foot on the place. What does that mean? To stare across the water on an island you’ll never go to.Those are the kind of cultural questions that I think are very important for us as a nation to understand, because I think we are facing the residues of all these displacements. but without the capacity, in terms of shared knowledge in our institutional life, to really know what those things mean. We have forgotten the exodus from Europe. We don’t remember any­ more w-hat those things mean for people. The issues of displace­ment.exile. internal colonialism are producing more complex identities and cultural expressions.

Anne Barclay Morgan is a writer and documentary video maker living in Florida.