Transgenero Performance: Gender and Transformation in Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders

Mujeres en Ritual: An Invitation to Transgress
There are many ways to perceive Tijuana: as the first corner of México, or the last, or as the doorway to Latinoamerica, or to los Estados Unidos.1 I grew up in the hills above the city, overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the San Diego skyline, watching the border patrol cars and helicopters chasing migrants who were trying to cross to the USA, every day. The border was literally in my back yard, in my face—a horrible stretch of rusting metal, leftover from the first US Gulf War and recycled in México as a fence to stop the perceived infiltration of Latinos into the United States. As a child, this non-metaphorical, very concrete border fence reminded me every day that I was considered inferior, poor, dirty, criminal, that I was not wanted, that I could not cross. As an artist, as I grew, that fence invited me to transgress.

The border between Tijuana, B.C. (México) and San Diego, California (US) is the most frequently crossed border in the world, with an estimated 300,000 legal crossings per day. As described by anthropologist and folklorist Maribel Alvarez, the border includes:

Millions of workers essential to the economic machines of North American agriculture, tourism, and industry: farm workers, low-tech labor, dishwashers, gardeners, maids . . . but [it's] also a military machine of low-intensity conflict: Homeland Security helicopters, Border Patrol agents, infrared cameras, detention centers, books of regulations . . . Violence and death are dimensions of everyday life in the border.2

In addition to non-sanctioned border crossings, these deaths include feminicide,3 the trafficking of women in the sex trade and labor, as well as deaths related to untenable working conditions and toxic illnesses caused by pollution from maquiladoras.4 Tijuana's maquiladora industries and sexual tourism industries are among the largest in the world—both predominantly controlled by men, but fueled by the exploitation of (predominantly) women workers. All of this systematically diminishes the image of Mexican women in the global imagination, and thereby normalizes and renders violence against us permissible in a region where every woman is potentially seen as a “puta.” The stigmatization of my identity, as a woman and Tijuanense, also invited me to transgress.

In November 1999, I founded a company with a group of women artists from the community, as a response and resistance to the systematic oppression of women at the México-US border—a way oftransforming the perception of women, as well as our perceptions of ourselves, from object to subject. Our first production was titled Mujeres en Ritual (Women in Ritual), which became our name. After nearly three years as a participant in Jerzy Grotowski's WorkCenter in Pontadera, Italy, I had returned to México with a deep desire to investigate and create theatre from the roots of my own culture.5 With grounding in traditional dances and rituals of México, Mujeres en Ritual Danza-Teatro developed a rigorous training process, drawing from three techniques that complement each other and sustain the concept of precise movement: Suzuki Technique, Butoh, and the theatre tradition of Jerzy Grotowski (specifically “Objective Drama” and “Art as a Vehicle” phases). The intention of embodied practice is to eradicate the vestiges of oppression in the bodies of women. The physical training process liberates blocks in the body and voice to allow greater levels of expressivity—which often means breaking silences, and confronting or expressing our traumas. It helps us deconstruct conventional stereotypes of femininity, to perform strength and agency. Mujeres en Ritual de-objectifies women of the border region by demystifying our desires—by breaking myths that, as women of color, we choose oppressive systems, or “like it like that,” or want to be in positions in which we are dominated. Through our creations, we disrupt stereotypes and false perceptions to expose the systematic exploitation of women.

In our creative process, we explore the sources of creativity, ritual structures, the “internal pulse” and the creation of actions (as described by Thomas Richards).6 We work from the impulse of the performer that comes before the manifestation of an expression or movement. Impulses have no gender, and are not confined by realism. This is significant because to break the paradigms of traditional Western theatre, and the Euro-American concept of realism (which has dominated theatre since the mid-1800s, and typically re-inscribes a 'reality' created and controlled by men) is to break the social constructions of gender and representation, and to begin a process of decolonizing our creativity. Thus, interdisciplinarity is profoundly important in the work of Mujeres en Ritual. We often devise our own texts, re-interpret plays, or use no text at all; we employ poetry and prose, narrative and abstraction, evolving our aesthetic through a seamless exploration of diverse forms. We do not subscribe to divisions or categories of form, discipline, or genre, which create artificial “borders” between human modes of expression.

Further, the company pushes the boundaries of sexuality and gender representation by performing a spectrum of identities, including male, female and transgendered characters. When women perform male characters (an act historically considered “deviant”), several things happen: catharsis, parody, political commentary, and discovery of the freedom of transgressing assigned gender roles or taboo gender expressions. Our practice, then, becomes an embodied testament to the performativity of gender, as described by Judith Butler:

The various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis . . . Gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed.7

Theatre critic Sergio Rommel8 describes the work of Mujeres en Ritual as fitting “in the frame of hybrid and trans-genre traditions,” such that the company's “transgression of borders in multiple ways” constitutes a form of transgenero performance—meaning both transgender and trans-genre. In an attempt to provide a deeper understanding of transgenero performance, and its aesthetic and political significance, this chapter explores in detail the creation and production of one of our representative works, Fronteras Desviadas, or Deviant Borders, with special attention to how transgeneridad is manifested in those processes. Because Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders involved collaboration with US-based, Arab American writer and performer Andrea Assaf, this exploration also reveals the complexities of such border-crossing collaborations between queer women of color from two very different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds.9

Devising Fronteras Desviadas: The Creative Process

Figure 1., Andrea Assaf and Dora Arreola perform in Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders, Tijuana, Mexico, 2005. Photo by Mercedes Romero.

 In 2004, Mujeres en Ritual sought to explore these issues from multiple points of view, to arrive at a more complex perception of the experiences of women on both sides of the national and cultural borders that join/divide México and the United States. Our goal was to create new work that deconstructs dominant images of the women of Tijuana, to stage representations that were not condescending, illustrative, simplistic, stereotypical, or didactic. We began with research and site visits to uncover the history and conditions of the region (most of which were very familiar to me, but previously unknown to Assaf). When we first conceived of the project, we began with the theme of “women's bodies at the border,” not knowing where it might lead us. We knew we wanted to investigate the maquiladoras, and the Ciudad Industrial where most of the factories are located. Our first step was to participate in an Environmental Justice Tour10 of communities affected by the pollution from the maquiladoras, and to investigate the inhumane conditions for women workers. As we journeyed deeper into our research, however, the connections to, and immensity of, the sexual tourism industry began to overwhelm our thoughts.

Amidst an ocean of information in Border Studies, news and media archives in Tijuana and San Diego, and in the internet, we found a particularly valuable resource in Tijuana La Horrible: Entre la historia y el mito, by Mexican writer Humberto Félix Berumen. He exposes the founding of Tijuana by Americans in 1916 as an adult entertainment center for US tourists, and the creation of its border as a state apparatus to regulate the flow of US citizens in to México in the era of Prohibition. He describes in detail how the association of Tijuana with sex, drugs, “deviance” and illegality (the “Leyenda Negra” as it's called in México) was not only constructed in the US imagination, but also promoted by American casino owners to attract their own people as consumers. Félix Berumen further explains how this legend persists:

People have a stigmatized image of Tijuana, as it can be perceived through radio, literature, film, written press, television, songs and many other discourses (oral, visual and written). That image is a social creation and a collective image formed by the syncretic amalgamation of platitudes, legends, stereotypes, prejudices, sociograms and clichés . . . Tijuana is a city-symbol, the emblem, by definition, of perversion and vice. A myth that has been revealed with a great capacity to renew itself continually.11

But rarely is there an acknowledgement of US responsibility in creating the political and economic conditions that make this image, and the markets it relies upon, flourish; rarely is there any accountability for the exploitation and violence that accompanies these markets. The Zona Norte, the commercial sex zone of Tijuana, continues from its American origins as the most active “red zone” in México—a country in which sex work is officially illegal, except for “zones of tolerance” where tourism is valued above even the “morality” laws (under which individuals exhibiting “homosexual behavior” can still be arrested, in states such as Baja California). Poverty, lack of opportunity and trafficking force thousands of women, children and transgendered people into sex work. As José Esteban Muñoz described in Disidentifications:

Late capitalism represents the dwindling of possibilities for the racialized working class. Under such hegemony, women of color compete over low-wage positions within the shrinking service economy. Individuals who reject this constrained field of possibility often choose to survive by entering alternative economies involving sex work or the drug trade . . . [This] move into the illicit coliseum represents a dystopic vision of what the continuation of late capitalism will mean for Latinas and other people of color.12

In 2004, there were more than 8,000 registered sex workers in the Zona Norte alone (an area of about four square city blocks), and likely hundreds more who were not registered. Today, the bars and prostíbulos of the Zona Norte are owned by Mexican, American and multi-national owners, as are the maquiladoras. Empirical research was equally important to our process, which included site visits to the Zona Norte13 to observe the dynamics of gender exploitation, particularly with US tourists filling the bars and alleys. This history, along with its contemporary reality and the ways in which it implicates the United States, had to inform our work.

Our creative explorations began with a series of community-based workshops with women on both sides of the border, a process that ultimately generated text for the performance. Andrea Assaf brought a writing process to the workshops rooted in methodologies from the US community-based arts movement; I brought improvisations, movement composition, and physical vocabulary techniques that Mujeres en Ritual had developed through the years. The workshops alternated writing or storytelling exercises (depending on the literacy level of the participants), with movement and dialogue. This interweaving of approaches led us to design a means of shared facilitation and methodologies for community collaboration.

We replicated this process in three very different locations. A group of women artists in Tijuana, including Mujeres en Ritual company members and independent artists, met in studios and cafes to explore our three central prompts: Soy mujer cuando . . . /When do I experience myself as “woman”? What is deviance? and What is on “the other side”?14 Next, we worked with a community in crisis, named after activist leader Maclovio Rojas:

Maclovio Rojas is a community of maquiladora workers halfway between Tijuana & Tecate, México. As part of the NAFTA process, the Mexican constitution was modified and poor families began to be forced from their ejido lands. A few defiant communities, including Maclovio Rojas, resisted. Maclovio happens to now sit on prime industrial real estate, sandwiched between maquiladoras who very much want their land. The Mexican state has [made] many attempts to evict them.15

There, we held a Story Circle16 in La Casa de la Mujer (the women's center) focused on the question, “Soy Mujer Cuando?” The third group was in San Ysidro, California, just across the US border. At a community development agency, Casa Familiar, we worked with a “Parenting Class” for convicted parents whose children had been taken away by the state (all Mexican or Latina mothers, except for one Mexican father who was there with his wife). With this group, we explored the notion of “deviance,” particularly from cultural and state norms in the context of the criminalization of recent immigrants.

The results were texts and phrases of movement charged with meaning, intensity and complexity that reflected the life experiences and visions of women in these communities. At the end of each workshop, we invited participants to contribute their writing, stories or movement phrases, if they wished, to the creative process of developing a script and movement score for the performance. Every single participant chose to donate his or her work to the project. Through a process of multiple translations,17 from Spanish to English and back again, Assaf then edited the texts into collective poems, rich with abstraction, symbolism and metaphor, layered with double meanings and the women’s surprising encounters with atrocity. These voices were often contradictory, and yet we felt it was important to keep the multiplicity. The following is an excerpt of the “Soy Mujer Cuando” series that illustrates this aesthetic of overlapping realities, which privileges the bilingual listener/reader:

Soy mujer cuando me lanzo como colibrí,
y entiendo cuan corta la distancia a la muerte.          
                                                                                    I am a woman when I spin infinity
Soy mujer cuando giro al infinito
y me desvío . . .                                                          and deviate . . .
 
Soy mujer cuando cruzo las piernas.                    I am a woman when I cross my legs.
Soy mujer cuando atravieso el miedo.                 I am a woman when I confront desire.



I am a woman when I cannot speak,

Soy mujer cuando siento mis sueños                   and my reflection brings me to myself
Soy mujer cuando siento mis sueños                   once and once again.

I am a woman when I am hit.
I am a woman when I attend a man.
I am a woman of breasts and vagina
fucking and washing, cooking and cleaning

cogiendo y lavando, cocinando y limpiando

fucking and washing, cooking and cleaning

Soy mujer . . .                                                           when I pass through fear
Soy mujer. . .                                                            when I feel my dreams
Soy mujer . . .                                                           when I vibrate with joy
                                                                                   for nothing more than being alive18

In tandem with the community-based process, I began studio explorations to develop a movement vocabulary for the piece. My challenge was to uncover the appropriate aesthetic forms, as if they were sleeping, or waiting for a means of expression to emerge. As the director, I chose to focus on popular rituals that women are expected to pass through, from birth to death—such as quinceañeras, weddings and funerals—which gave us a structure for the journey of the play.

Ritual is a complicated source. Rituals can be oppressive or transformative. They can be male-centered, and function in society to reinforce patriarchy; or they can invert social roles, gender norms, and so-called “morality.” On the other hand, ritual is also a form of performance that is pre-colonial, often circular, and highly symbolic. It can create an open, holistic, participatory space, or even a radical separatist space. With Mujeres en Ritual, we identify and deconstruct rituals that perpetuate the oppression of women, and explore inversions, such as casting women in traditionally male roles.19 This creative interrogation, subversion, and embracing of ritual—this process of deconstruction and (re)invention—is central to our aesthetic.

I decided to create these ritual representations as independent vignettes, without trying to tell a story, utilizing celebrations well-known in Mexican culture but transposing them to the socially deviant contexts of exploitation, prostitution and feminicide. The most certain choice was to select vignettes that could link the three themes of the writing—what it means to be a woman, deviance, and what is on “the other side”—with the history of Tijuana. The workshops gave me many images and metaphors to draw from: transformation (transition, passing); rites of passage, journeys; doors, borders, thresholds; trespassing, transgression; and death. Although there was no explicit narrative, I took as a base concept the journey of a woman who travels from South to North, with the intent of crossing to the United States; but when she must find work in Tijuana, she is drawn into this liminal zone of the border, the Zona Norte. The actions and choreographies, developed with the company, sustained the metaphors of transgression and transformation throughout the play. The poems were then layered in to the movement composition, as live and recorded text.

Parallel to the journey of the women, Andrea Assaf wrote the character of “El Chamuco” from found text on the internet, as an examination of the male gaze, and popular US perceptions of Tijuana women. As Octavio Paz describes in El laberinto de la soledad, “Americans have not looked for a México in México; they have looked for their obsessions, enthusiasms, phobias, hopes, interests—and these are what they have found.”20 Based on research into actual English language websites promoting sexual tourism to Tijuana, Assaf created the fictional site “sex-mex-chilitas.com” and its virtual-turned-flesh tour guide, Hank Screwell III, a.k.a. “El Chamuco” (which is Mexican slang for the devil). This character is not a pimp himself, but claims to be a self-made millionaire who capitalizes on the commercial sex industry via the web, and markets his services to English-speaking tourists. In globalization's commercial arena of intersecting webs, both geographic (such as human trafficking rings) and virtual, identities are continually reinvented in order to escape accountability, while male desire and illegal consumption are normalized. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty points out in Feminism Without Borders:

In each of these webs, racialized ideologies of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality play a role in constructing the legitimate consumer, worker, and manager. Meanwhile, the psychic and social disenfranchisement and impoverishment of women continues. Women's bodies and labor are used to consolidate global dreams, desires, and ideologies of success and the good life in unprecedented ways.21

The objective of juxtaposing El Chamuco with the women's voices was to establish a discourse of the double realities of the border, and to implicate US responsibility in the conditions and exploitation of women in this region.

 

Figure 2., Raquel Almazan performs “El Chamuco” while the two women dancers are played by Maria Vale and Dora Arreola. New WORLD Theatre’s Summer Play Lab., Amherst College, 2005. Photo by Ed Cohen.

El Chamuco was the final element to be integrated into the sequence of scenes, creating a narrative bridge, and at the same time, a rupture—a continual interruption of the women's journey. He conducts the audience, his “clients,” on a trip through the Zona Norte, creating, apparently, a double spectacle: two different “shows” simultaneously, with two different relationships to time and space—one the passage of a life cycle, the other a passage from night to day. Dialogue does not exist in the conventional sense; there is no one defined relationship between the women characters, but many relationships that are constantly changing (as in dance). In the beginning of the play, their encounters are not by choice, only coincidences that propel them forward. One initiates, or prepares the way for the other to advance, or they pass each other. Chamuco’s actions, in moments, coincide with actions in the women’s structure, without a direct relationship to the characters. In other moments, an encounter occurs, which startles them. Alternating between these two “worlds” brought us to an aesthetic of syncretism and juxtaposition, a collision of diverse cultural elements and political realities.

In the mise-en-scene, we utilized various icons of Mexican and American cultures: a disco ball, the National Hymn of México, America the Beautiful sung by Elvis Presley, Disney’s It’s a Small World, a Mexican Quinceañera waltz, the traditional Wedding March, and signs used in Catholic ceremonies. With Chamuco, US icons emerge, through characterization and costume choices: a rock star, a corporate executive, a televangelist, a mafioso. An immobile, unchanging set of pink-sequined curtains (as one might find in a strip club or drag bar) transports us to various spaces. Objects in the performance are used in multiple ways to create different contexts—a kind of over-use or recycling that suggests a maximum economy in sharp contrast to the excess of production in maquiladora zones that renders human bodies disposable, just as the sex industry renders women’s bodies, and body parts, disposable.

This idea is explicitly manifested in the scene we called, alternately, the “Quinceañera/ Maquiladora Waltz” or the “Pink Piñata/Paso Cruzado.” As the women performers emerge from a table dance grotesque, they place the enormous plastic body parts (buttocks and “bras with prosthetic painted breasts”22) that they were wearing in yellow plastic bags. These bags, which most Mexicans from Baja California will immediately recognize as coming from the local grocery superstore chain, Calimax, are emblazoned with the logo, “Has la cuenta, y date cuenta!”23 The music of a traditional Quinceañera celebration begins, as an announcer's voice introduces the young woman of the day:

ANNOUNCER: Ahora, recibamos con un fuerte aplauso, a la quinceañera! Ella, que hoy a llegado a la edad de las promesas e ilusiones. Ha dejado de ser niña, para ser mujer. Ella celebra sus quince primaveras. presentandose ante la sociedad . . . y ante las maquiladoras!24

What begins as a seemingly normal introduction to a “coming out” party for the belle of the ball suddenly becomes her unsuspecting introduction into the world of maquiladoras. The movements of the dancers become increasingly mechanical, and at the same time deathly, as the announcer proudly proclaims the long list of multinational companies that actually have factories in Tijuana. As the list continues, seemingly endlessly, to the tune of the waltz, a poem by Assaf is overlaid to further complicate, and illuminate, the meaning of the scene:

 
When the little dyed–
blonde girl
piñata in the pink dress
bursts open,
what falls from the
cavity?
 
a thousand nude plastic babies
5000 used condoms
100 tamarind candies covered in chili
champagne and confetti
cigarette butts
wet thumping organs
chilis rellenos
border patrol
military rifles
vaginal fluids
30,000 widgets
some used car parts
a blue baby blanket
contaminated water
bright yellow lines
the moon and the ocean
and herself as a child
in that same pink dress . . .25
 

As these multiple texts overlap and collide, one dancer lifts the other and continues the steps of the waltz, while the suspended dancer, legs spread-eagle, looks off in the distance with the blank stare of someone already dying inside. The announcer concludes triumphantly, “que la esperan con los brazos abiertos!”26In this universe of juxtaposition, unseen “gentlemen” are the owners and promoters of “businesses,” and invisible accomplices in a world of death and impunity, sustained by both countries. The bodies of young women are thrust into these global markets, even before they've had an opportunity to assert their own adult consciousness.

 

Figure 3., Dora Arreola lifts Maria Vale in the “Quinceañera/Maquiladora Waltz” at New WORLD Theatre’s Summer Play Lab., Amherst College, 2005. Photo by Ed Cohen

The journey of the play thus becomes a journey to voice and agency, in which only an encounter of queer possibility, of deviance from the norm, lights the way out of patriarchal oppression. In the final image of the performance, the women connect in a moment of intimacy, at last arriving at a true encuentro, a possibility of transgression, and begin to transform their pain into hope, together.27

The Complications of Cross-border Collaboration
What is on the other side?

is the contradiction of this side
a subaltern river.
un río subterraneo.
Just the old with a new dress –
the masquerade of contemporaneity.
El pájaro está en otro lado,
pero las plumas caen aquí
where little of me
donde un poco de mí
. . . remains.
. . . permanece.28
 

As Rosa Linda Fregoso suggests in “Gender, Multiculturalism and the Missionary Position in the Borderlands,”29 the political position of México in relation to the US is one of submission to a “masculinist colonial fantasy that authorizes and privileges the white man's access to brown female bodies.” México itself is feminized as the “bottom” that must submit to the US position of domination. How, then, is it possible for artists from the United States and México to collaborate equitably? Does this power relationship change if the two subjects in question are both woman-identified? Mohanty states that “Sisterhood”—or, to queer this metaphor a bit, perhaps partnership—“cannot be assumed on the basis of gender; it must be forged in concrete historical and political practice and analysis . . . Feminist discourses, critical and liberatory in intent, are not thereby exempt from inscription in their internal power relations.”30

One might argue, as Marxist Jazz scholar and poet Fred Moten has, that equitable cross-racial collaboration is impossible given the brutal inequities of our shared global histories. Yet creating—which is to say, inventing and constructing—equitable processes, and means of working together in mutual support, is in fact central to the project of feminist activism by women of color. As artists, we are constantly inventing new structures. Our approach was to confront the inherent power relationships in the creative process, and invert them in relation to patterns of historical disempowerment. For example, the director is generally the most powerful collaborator in the artistic process, having the final decision in the ultimate representation of images on stage. For this collaboration, therefore, it was significant that I—a Mexicana from the border region—was the director of the performance. Assaf's texts, informed by a community-based process, were approached as raw material in the construction of a world on stage.

As professional artists conducting workshops in marginalized communities, we also had to be conscious of power dynamics, and to be very clear about our practices and intentions. As Butler advises in “The Question of Social Transformation:”

Feminists as well must ask whether the 'representation' of the poor, the indigenous and the radically disenfranchised . . . is a patronizing and colonizing effort, or whether it seeks to somehow avow the conditions of translation that make it possible, avow the power and privilege of the intellectual, avow the links in history and culture that make an encounter between poverty, for instance, and . . . writing possible.31

I believed it was important for us not to engage in “missionary art” or anthropological study, but rather to create a means of genuine collaboration with other women of color. “Missionary art” enters with the idea of wanting to “save” communities, a fundamentally paternalistic approach; while “anthropological” art positions the artist as a falsely objective observer or “expert,” and usually creates a situation of appropriation. As facilitators, instead, we were full participants in the creative process, opening spaces by sharing our own experiences and stories of violence. We were collaborating with other women in order to journey back into our own histories and reveal the complexity of multiple oppressions together. For example, I was born in a marginalized community, and grew up in poverty. My family migrated to the border region when I was very young, and lived for many years in a precarious position. When I was only thirteen years old, I tried to get a job in a maquiladora, because it was the only way I knew to get money, but I was not able to sustain the work. I then worked in a restaurant in the Zona Norte, as a waitress and dishwasher, until I was fifteen. Assaf came from a history of domestic violence, and was exploring her voice as an Arab American artist in the post-9/11 climate, in which mobility and border crossing had dramatically changed. We were not there to speak for others, but to work together to tell a collective story.

Mohanty discusses the ways in which scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Norma Alarcon, Honor Ford-Smith, and Doris Sommer have challenged liberal humanist notions of subjectivity:

In different ways, their analyses foreground questions of memory, experience, knowledge, history, consciousness, and agency in the creation of narratives of the (collective) self. They suggest a conceptualization of agency that is multiple and often contradictory but always anchored in the history of specific struggles. It is a notion of agency that works not through the logic of identification, but through the logic of opposition.32

This notion of the logic of opposition emerged as an implicit organizing principle in the aesthetic of our work, and in the collaboration process for creating Fronteras Desviadas. This meant we had to confront the complex power dynamics in our own relationships—our own internalized racism, Euro/US-centrism, classism, and fears about sexual violence. We had to be willing to implicate each other and ourselves in the expression of what we found. While the writers Mohanty mentions may emphasize the multiple subject (and an ethic of multiplicity is certainly present in our aesthetic), our experience of the environments we were investigating, and of ourselves as women in those environments, was perhaps more aligned with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's conception of the fractured subject. The journey of creating the play was, for us, a journey of acknowledging, re-membering, and perhaps healing those fractures, within ourselves and within the group. Working from a post-colonial and feminist perspective, the creative process strengthens our capacity for connection, for building relationships across the perceived borders of class, race, national, and sexual identity. “We should not think,” as Butler cautions, “that this transit is smooth, since it takes place via a rupture in representation itself . . . what emerges from this translation, however, is a political vision that maintains . . . the possibilities of long-term global survival.”33

Audiences & Impact: Deviant Becomings
After premiering with a tour to four cities in Baja California, the first English-dominant version of Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders was presented in Amherst, Massachusetts by New WORLD Theater (Summer Play Lab 2005). Comparative literature scholar Kanchuka Dharmasiri wrote a review that highlighted the question of cultural translation. Noting that the concept of “the other side” is relative to where one stands, she wrote:

Some of [the women's] culturally specific gestures remained incomprehensible to audience members who were not familiar with Mexican rituals . . . [H]ow can a director make the audience comprehend culturally specific signs in live theatre? How does a play based on a particular socio-cultural milieu translate to a different context? . . . Or, does this space (which is not immediately decipherable) become a necessity in a process that is intent on creating awareness of a different cultural and socio-political condition?34

While the bilingual script interchanged lines of Spanish and English in the women’s text, the Chamuco was predominantly in one language, depending on the country in which we were performing. Presenting the show to audiences in diverse places—some geographically far from the political, socio-economic and cultural situations in which the work was created—required a process of cultural translation as well as linguistic. In México, actress Maria Vale interpreted El Chamuco as a Mexican American from California, thereby implicating men of color in their participation in the exploitation of Mexican women. In the United States, however, as performed by a Latina actress, Raquel Almazan, the character became a Texan, with the particular inflections, tones and expressions of men from that state—which had a different political resonance, given that the performance was touring during the presidency of George W. Bush. Different publics may have recognized different symbols and icons, as well as the rituals and cultural elements particular to each country. Even though Dharmasiri raised these questions of legibility, she did acknowledge that the post-show discussions, even in Amherst, stimulated community dialogue on sex trafficking, locally as well as globally:

Arreola and Assaf perceive the performance as a form of activism, to create awareness among the spectators about the situation in Tijuana . . . While problematizing the dichotomy (here/there, self/other), the play likewise questions the political power structures that continue to oppress and exploit certain groups of people . . . The play made spectators question and think. It opened up a space to discuss issues related to contemporary political power and how they affect the lives of women on a global level.35

The use of abstraction and symbolism, as well as a kind of farce that pushes hyper-realism to absurdism, creates a political theater that is not narrative or didactic, and gives audiences the work of interpretation. The audience is called to make sense out of juxtaposed realities in which power is constructed, gained, and deconstructed in vastly different ways. Further, in Fronteras Desviadas, the audience is cast in multiple ways—in one reality as male, and in another reality as female—and left to reconcile the constant, unpredictable shifting between those polarized identifications. With Chamuco, the audience is cast as a group of male “johns” or clients, implicating all present as silent participants in a system of misogyny and exploitation. In the movement structure, the woman-identified characters cast the audience as women (as in the women-only workshops in which the texts were created). Meaning is realized in the audience’s perception of, not only what they have seen, but also who they are.

In North Carolina, where we performed excerpts of Deviant Borders at the Alternate ROOTS Annual Meeting for artists and activists, the piece sparked a heated debate about agency in sex work. A queer audience member from San Francisco argued for a more “sex positive” vision. Another audience member countered, “This performance is not about sex, it's about exploitation.” In this way, we were able to facilitate a deeper dialogue about the various contexts of sex work, and the extent to which agency exists with regard to class and location, as well as to differentiate between voluntary sex work and human trafficking.

In a very different context, in Managua, Nicaragua, a review in La Prensa celebrated both the unusual aesthetic strategies and the audience impact of the play, particularly regarding the power of embodied knowledge and expression:

The International Festival of Theater [presented by Teatro Justo Rufino Garay] brought us a unique play this time. Fronteras Desviadas . . . left the public impacted. A rare mix of dreamscapes and allegories teaches us more than any research essay on prostitution in Tijuana, México . . . There are objects with phallic dimensions, reminiscent of copulation, receptacles as an allegory for the vagina, and very surprising solutions for visualizing the world of the brothels . . . The play is a denunciation of the complicity of the authorities that ignore what happens behind the curtains in the red zone of Tijuana, where prostitution reigns and tourists are received with open arms in every sex bar, where [men] haggle the price of the feminine body.36

While critics affirmed the clarity of the play's intention, it is important to raise the question of activism, and where its true impact lies. Certainly work of this nature raises awareness of political issues. In this way, performances can support the work of local organizers in engaging concerned constituents and mobilizing for action. On an individual level, perhaps, the deepest impact is found among the women who actually participated in the creative process, including those who identify as artists, and those who participated as community members. This is the arena in which we bear witness to actual transformation, on a deeply personal level. The women of Casa de la Mujer in Maclovio Rojas, for example, attended the performance at the Autonomous University of Baja California in Tecate (January 2005). By working with organizers from their community, we were able to arrange transportation and tickets for them to attend. Many of them had likely never been to a university, and had never seen their stories spoken or represented on stage. After the performance, they gathered with us to reflect on their experience. This simple act created some small measure of access, by beginning a relationship between an academic institution and a community in crisis only a few miles from their campus. This project also began a multi-year relationship between Maclovia Rojas and Mujeres en Ritual. Perhaps more importantly, it left the participants with the experience, perhaps for the first time, that their stories were of value, were worth listening to, and had a place in the public sphere.

In the classic womanist text This Bridge Called My Back, Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga described embodied theory in this way:

A theory in the flesh means one where the physical realities of our lives—our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings—all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity. Here we attempt to bridge the contradictions in our experience . . . We do this bridging by naming ourselves and by telling our stories in our own words . . . This is how our theory develops.37

By speaking a story that has never been told before, by embodying an experience for which words are not sufficient, by seeing oneself represented on stage for the first time, or allowing oneself as a performer to break the taboos of gender representation on stage for the first time—these are the intimate locations where voice and agency begin to manifest. These are the ruptures in the status quo, where possibilities emerge through “deviance” from the norm. And once lived, they can never be forgotten.

Transgeneridad and The Question of Social Transformation

Theatre critic Sergio Rommel has described the work of Mujeres en Ritual as fitting within “the frame of hybrid and trans-genre traditions.”38 Writing specifically of Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders, he has argued that “the transgression of borders in multiple ways (transgeneridad) is not only the central theme of the play, but at the same time the most effective vehicle for reassigning meaning to all the elements and signs of the performance . . . the same phrases contain an additional charge [double meaning] that in some way alludes to the theatre of protest . . . theatre-dance, anglo-latina . . . Spanish-English . . . sexual diversity (heterosexuality-homosexuality-bisexuality) . . . geographic borders. Like this, successively, other frontiers are deviated or transgressed throughout the performance.”39 Rommel's 2008 analysis led us to understand and articulate the work of Mujeres en Ritual in a new way—as transgenero performance.

In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler asks, “Is the symbolic eligible for social intervention?”40 Yet this is precisely what artists do: performance and cultural production work to intervene in the symbolic, by working in the imaginary and subconscious realms, and creating alternative identifications. Even Butler asserts that “Fantasy structures relationality, and it comes into play in the stylization of embodiment itself.”41 As one might ask about the efficacy of symbolic interventions with regard to gender, the same could be asked of the “Leyenda Negra” and the real-life conditions of Tijuana. Is social intervention possible? “What operates at the level of cultural fantasy,” Butler writes, “is not finally dissociable from the ways in which material life is organized.”42

Fronteras Desviadas is one of these interventions, or in Butler’s words, “moments where the binary system of gender is disputed and challenged, where the coherence of the categories are put into question, and where the very social life of gender turns out to be malleable and transformable.”43 Transgenero performance opens spaces for symbolic intervention, not only in the binary of gender, but also the binary of the Tijuana vice/American virtue. Like gender, and the “Leyenda Negra” of Tijuana, the United States’ image of itself as “the greatest country in the world” is reinforced by its own “incessant and panicked” repetition, in the way that Butler describes heterosexuality: “That [it] is always in the act of elaborating itself is evidence that it is perpetually at risk, that it ‘knows’ its own possibility of becoming undone.”44 Trangeneridad, then, enters into the political field “by not only making us question what is real, and what has to be, but by showing us how contemporary notions of reality can be questioned, and new modes of reality instituted.”45

If we can imagine—moreover, embody—these new modes of reality, and envision how they might be instituted, perhaps we could transform the conditions that exist for women, and woman-identified people, at the most frequently crossed border in the world.

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Dora Arreola is the founder and artistic director of Mujeres en Ritual Danza-Teatro and currently an Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University of South Florida. Arreola has more than twenty years of professional experience as a theater director, choreographer and performer. She has taught, directed and performed in México, United States, Nicaragua, Canada, Poland and India. She was a participant at Grotowski’s Workcenter in Pontedera, Italy (1987-89), and holds a MFA in Directing from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Arreola has received grants and commissions from the Ford Foundation, Cultural Contact, National Performance Network (NPN), and more.
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[1] With special thanks to Andrea Assaf for assistance with translation and contributions to the English version of this essay.
[2] Maribel Álvarez, “The Border is . . .” (Guest lecture presented in New WORLD Theater's “Knowledge for Power” series, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts, July 2006).
[3] The term “feminicide” here refers to the over 900 unprosecuted cases of female homicide in Juárez, Mexico, which has come to be understood as a gender-based genocide of women. Although there are precedents for the use of the term “femicide” in English dating back to 1801, Mexican anthropologist and feminist Marcela Lagarde coined the term feminicidio in 2004, to include “the impunity with which these crimes are typically treated in Latin America.”
[4] Maquiladoras are factories or manufacturing operations, generally unregulated and owned by multinational corporations, in so-called “Free Trade” zones in México, which were created in 1994 by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). As of 2012, it's estimated that more than 3000 maquiladoras line the US-México border, with 937 located in the state of Baja California; estimates range from 560-800 in greater Tijuana.
[5] Virginie Magnat, in Grotowski, Women, and Contemporary Performance: Meetings with Remarkable Women, discusses my work in the lineage of Grotowski: “Arreola, who [has] chosen to research [her] own cultural heritage, provide[s] non-European role models for this younger generation of women . . . in the post Grotowski era . . . creative research influenced by his legacy will mostly likely expand in unforeseen directions well beyond its European lineage . . . the modalities of such expansion are already operational in women’s current creative research, precisely because the latter focuses on performance processes open to change and transformation . . . these artists support an alternative performance paradigm in which cultural, traditional and ritual practices significantly contribute.”(New York: Routledge, 2014), 165.
[6] Thomas Richards, At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions (New York: Routledge, 1995).
[7] Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 273-275.
[8] Sergio RommelAlfonsoGuzmánis a theatre scholar and President of CAESA, the Council for the Accreditation of Higher Education in the Arts, México (at the time of printing), as well as a former Dean of the School of the Arts, Universidad Autónoma de Baja California(UABC), Mexicali. This is a translation of Rommel's Texto maroma y representación: escritos sobre teatro (Mexicali: UABC, 2008), which I will later return to for further discussion.
[9] The creation of Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders was supported by Contacto Cultural (US-México Foundation for Culture), which allowed Andrea Assaf to be an artist-in-residence with Mujeres en Ritual Danza Teatro in 2004.
[10] The June 2004 tour, organized by the Environmental Health Coalition, a leader in the environmental justice movement based in National City, California, included the communities of Colonia Chilpancingo, Colonia Murua and Nueva Esperanza, adjacent to Tijuana's largest Maquiladora industrial complex. www.environmentalhealth.org.
[11] Humberto Félix Berumen, Tijuana la horrible: Entre la historia y el mito (Tijuana: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 2003). Quote translated by Dora Arreola and Andrea Assaf.
[12] José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers Of Color And The Performance Of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999), 187.
[13] We did talk with some sex workers in the Zona Norte, and invited them to participate in interviews for the project; however, even when they expressed initial interest or enthusiasm, they did not show up for the interviews. Our assessment is that the conditions of their work are so dangerous, that they either were not allowed or dared not risk participating. Pimps and owners are the sector of this economy that no one talks about, and research is virtually non-existent.
[14] Assaf was fascinated by the Mexican expression “el otro lado” as slang for the United States; she was interested in exploring the multiple meanings of “the other side” and “crossing” in both cultures, with reference to the border, gender, and death.
[15] “Border issues incl. Maclovio Rojas press accounts,” 2002, http://www.sjcite.info/maclovio.html (accessed 5 April 2014).
[16] Story Circles here refers to the community-based methodology developed by the Free Southern Theatre and Junebug Productions.
[17] Tijuana-based poet Laura Jáuregui assisted Assaf with the translations.
[18] Andrea Assaf, “Soy mujer cuando” (#1), Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders (unpublished script, 2005).
[19] I am currently developing a performance based on the Dance of the Deer, which is traditionally performed by men only. I first performed this work as a solo, “Yo, Rumores Silencio” based on Telares (o el olvido) by Fabiola Ruiz, at the Grotowski Institute in 2009, and am developing it into full-length ensemble work.
[20] Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la solidad (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989).
[21] Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 5th edition 2006), 147.
[22] As described in a review by Inés Izquierdo Miller, “Una funcion impactante,” La Prensa: El Diario de los Nicaraguenses (Managua, Nicaragua: Septemer 28, 2006).
[23] This phrase, literally, means “count how much/many, and become aware!” In its original marketing context, this slogan suggests that if you count how much money you save at Calimax, you'll always want to shop there. However, in the context of the performance, our intention was to signify the consumption of women's body parts, while suggesting that if one were to count how many women were being exploited and murdered, in Tijuana and Juarez for example, there would be no choice but to be conscious of the urgency of the political situation.
[24] Translation: “And now, let us receive with strong applause, the belle [celebrating her 15th birthday]! She, today, has arrived to the age of promises and illusions. She has left behind being a child, to be a woman. She celebrates her 15th spring. We present her to society . . . And to the Maquiladoras!” (Assaf, unpublished script, 2005).
[25] Ibid.
[26] Translation: “We await her with open arms!” (Ibid.)
[27] For a video clip of Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders, visit https://vimeo.com/channels/doraarreola.
[28] Andrea Assaf, “Que hay en el otro lado?” (#1), Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders (unpublished script, 2005).
[29] Rosa Linda Fregoso, meXicana encounters: The making of Social Identities on the Borderlands (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003).
[30] Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders, 24 and 108.
[31] Judith Butler, “The Question of Social Transformation,” Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 229.
[32] Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders, 82.
[33] Butler, “The Question of Social Transformation,” 229-30.
[34] Kanchuka Dharmisiri, “What is on the Other Side?,”The Organization of
Graduate Students in Comparative Literature (OGSCL) Newsletter, Fall 2005, 6.
[35] Ibid.
[36]Inés Izquierdo Miller, “Una función impactante,” La Prensa: El Diario de los Nicaragüenses (Managua, Nicaragua: La Prensa, September 28, 2006). Translation by Dora Arreola.
[37] Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, “Entering the Lives of Others: Theory in the Flesh,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 2nd edition(New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1983), 23.
[38] Sergio Rommel Alfonso Guzmán, Texto maroma y representación: escritos sobre teatro (Mexicali: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2008). Quotes translated by Dora Arreola and Andrea Assaf.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Butler, “The Question of Social Transformation,” 213.
[41] Ibid., 217. Emphasis mine.
[42] Ibid., 214.
[43] Ibid., 216.
[44] Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” in Diana Fuss, ed., Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories(London: Routledge, 1991), 23.
[45] Butler, “The Question of Social Transformation,”217.
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The Journal of American Drama and Theatre
Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2014)

Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson
Advisory Editor: David Savran
Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve

Guest Editor: Cheryl Black
(University of Missouri)

With the ATDS Editorial Board:
Noreen C. Barnes (Virginia Commonwealth University), Nicole Berkin (CUNY Graduate Center), Johan Callens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Jonathan Chambers (Bowling Green State University), Dorothy Chansky (Texas Tech University), James Fisher (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), Anne Fletcher (Southern Illinois University), Felicia Londré (University of Missouri-Kansas City), Kim Marra (University of Iowa ), Judith A. Sebesta (The College for All Texans Foundation), Jonathan Shandell (Arcadia University), LaRonika Thomas (University of Maryland), Harvey Young (Northwestern University)

Managing Editor: Ugoran Prasad
Editorial Assistant: Andrew Goldberg
Circulation Manager: Janet Werther

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director