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

Beyond the Pink Tide

AMERICAN STUDIES NOW: CRITICAL HISTORIES OF THE PRESENT

Edited by Lisa Duggan and Curtis Marez

Much of the most exciting contemporary work in American Studies refuses the distinction between politics and culture, focusing on historical cultures of power and protest, on the one hand, or the political meanings and consequences of cultural practices, on the other. American Studies Now offers concise, accessible, authoritative, e-first books on significant political debates, personalities, and popular cultural phenomena quickly, while such teachable moments are at the forefront of public consciousness.

1. We Demand: The University and Student Protests, by Roderick A. Ferguson

2. The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit, by Scott Kurashige

3. Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, by Jack Halberstam

4. Boycott! The Academy and Justice for Palestine, by Sunaina Maira

5. Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism, by Shelley Streeby

6. Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century, by Barbara Ransby

7. Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas, by Macarena Gómez-Barris

Beyond the Pink Tide

Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas

Macarena Gómez-Barris

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2018 by Macarena Gómez-Barris

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gómez-Barris, Macarena, 1970– author.

Title: Beyond the pink tide : art and political undercurrents in the Americas / Macarena Gómez-Barris.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018015079 (print) | LCCN 2018018323 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520969063 (epub and ePDF) | ISBN 9780520296664 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520296671 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Arts—Political aspects—Latin America—20th century. | Social movements—Latin America—20th century. | Latin America—Politics and government—20th century.

Classification: LCC NX650.P6 (ebook) | LCC NX650.P6 G66 2018 (print) | DDC 700.98—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018015079

Manufactured in the United States of America

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For Jack

CONTENTS

Overview

Preface

Introduction

Beyond the Pink Tide

1. Sounds Radical

Ana Tijoux, Student Protests, and Palestinian Solidarity

2. How Cuir Is Queer Recognition?

A Manifesto from the Sexual Underground

3. Art in the Shadow of Border Capitalism

Migration, Militarism, and Trans-Feminist Critique

4. An Archive of Starlight

Remapping Patagonia through Indigenous Memories

Conclusion

Rogue Waves

Acknowledgments

Notes

Glossary

Selected Bibliography

OVERVIEW

INTRODUCTION

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

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

CHAPTER 1. SOUNDS RADICAL

What imaginations of solidarity exceed the container of the nation-state? This chapter focuses on the interventions of Ana Tijoux whose music based in the African diaspora and South-South exchanges has become the backdrop for social movements in the Americas, including student anti-debt mobilizations and Indigenous land struggles.

Ana Tijoux•Mapuche Land Struggles•Decolonization•Palestinian Occupation and Resistance•Diaspora•Student Movements

CHAPTER 2. HOW CUIR IS QUEER RECOGNITION?

What spaces and voices challenge the heteronormative violence of nation-state politics? This chapter considers the difference "cuir makes to theorizing LGBTI recognition politics, beginning with Pedro Lemebel’s classic manifesto, Hablo por mi diferencia."

LGBTI Politics•Queer Theory•Cuir•Pedro Lemebel•Sex Alternatives•Trans Representations•A Fantastic Woman

CHAPTER 3. ART IN THE SHADOW OF BORDER CAPITALISM

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

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

CHAPTER 4. AN ARCHIVE OF STARLIGHT

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

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

CONCLUSION

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

Global South•Antonio Gramsci•Future•Southern Theory

PREFACE

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

In contrast to these strong-arm tactics, I witnessed how on the ground, eco-feminist, transgender, anarchist, artist, youth, and Indigenous activists worked collaboratively to denounce state violence. A series of actions called out President Rafael Correa’s cover-up of the real story, which was the Ecuadoran state’s alliance with extractive corporations. In the face of Manuela’s shocking beating by police and her subsequent arrest and imprisonment, I found my hope in the Pink Tide, or the turn to progressive governments in Latin America over the past twenty years, quickly dissipating.

Like many, I wrongly assumed that progressive governments coming to power on radical-sounding platforms would cement social and economic change. Put into power by coalitional movements, Pink Tide states had mobilized the language and symbols of decolonization to garner support. But in the space of a few short years, new progressive states sometimes deployed the same authoritarian methods as their predecessors, and they continued policies that perpetuated social and economic inequalities and reinforced the class, color, sex and gender order.

At the same time, I observed that local communities, artists, Indigenous organizers, and eco-feminists and queer/trans activists embodied alternatives to colonial and modern authoritarianisms in the Americas. Whether through youth radio programs, vibrant exchanges on the street, meetings in people’s houses, coalition marches, or experimental performances in small theaters, artistic and political undercurrents provided alternatives to the increasing violence of the neoliberal and extractive economy. By strengthening these undercurrents, activists in Ecuador deepened the prospects for social transformation.

Within the undercurrents of the Pink Tide, submerged perspectives live in the undercurrents of the dominant politics of the nation-state.² It was through these worlds that I deepened my understanding of the importance of political affect in relation to the potential for lasting social transformation, a point that feminist and queer scholars have long illustrated. I experienced firsthand the creative and active process of social change that felt like forward momentum. Rather than naive, such work was cognizant of the depth of structural injustice and did not instill hope in top-down political machines. Even when repressed by the government, social life reemerged to show how its undercurrents offer alternatives to the dominant global order.

First in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and then globally, the slogan of the World Social Forum, Another world is possible, has since 2001 inspired social movements, advocacy groups, activists, and artists to counter the devastating effects of globalization. These movements have often been led by queer, trans, Indigenous, and Black activists with direct experience of liberal democracy and its repression. Though I do not focus on the Forum per se, Beyond the Pink Tide does address the modes of thinking, being, listening, and shaping that emerge from below, showing how other worlds are indeed possible and interlinked in vital ways. These artistic and political imaginaries work from translocal spaces, or what Sonia Alvarez and Claudia de Lima Costa and their coeditors refer to as translocalidades.³ Translocalities is defined by a hemispheric politics based on feminist knowledge production that emerges in spaces of Black and Brown solidarity and in the transits of the South, North, and Caribbean middle spaces of the Américas, or the cross-current flows of political activity. The concept of translocalities comes directly from dissident spaces of solidarity, where social interaction and embodied knowledge transfers are immensely valued.

This book registers exhaustion with the politics of accommodation and the limits of liberalism. This is not to say that new progressive states cannot make dramatic social change, such as that promised by Mexican president-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). It is to say, however, that global extractive corporate and right-wing interests will do everything in their power to obstruct genuine social and economic transformation. By considering the undercurrents, and the watery dissolution of nation-state boundaries and principles in acts of solidarity, I ask, can we flow away from the authoritarian politics of the nation-state and past the sea swells of the capitalist economy? Working at the intersections of social action and creative praxis allows us to think, feel, desire, and enact politics together, beyond the Pink Tide.

•    •    •

All English translations from Spanish are mine unless otherwise noted.

Introduction

Beyond the Pink Tide

ART AND POLITICAL UNDERCURRENTS IN THE AMERICAS

Un oceanografo me enseño que la actividad de pensar se parece al oceano. Las leyes del pensamiento son las mismas del agua que siempre esta dispuesto a amoldarse a todo.*

Patricio Guzmán, The Pearl Button (2014)

This book cautions against our overinvestment in any one model of political change and shows the limitations of liberal democracy. It offers what the Brazilian theorist and educator Paulo Freire called critical hope by reaching beyond the crashing ebbs and flows of national elections and political defeat to instead perceive how art and social movements fundamentally remake the world. It asks us to perceive the profound desires and critical expressions of social justice in the Americas; it also pushes us to move beyond the limitations of area studies to learn from the rich and living archive of social movements, political experiences, and expressive arts in the hemisphere and beyond. Reflecting on recent documentaries, music, performances, and exhibitions, I show how these modes of doing politics experiment to give primacy to emergent worlds. Taking cues from artists, musicians, and activists helps us organize new forms otherwise according to innovative and embodied models of change, rather than defaulting to well-oiled political machines.

By using the metaphor beyond the Pink Tide, I refer to getting past the recent disappointing experience with progressive states in Latin America. Rather than slide into a state of political despair, we might recognize and bolster the already existing practices and the continual nonlinear movement toward sustainable and equitable futures, practices that represent an ocean of radical potential.¹ As I show throughout the Americas, artists and activists often reinvent politics by reaching deeper into historical and structural inequalities and by imagining beyond the traditional affairs of the state. Creating non-normative worlds of political being, these efforts queer (cuir) the nation.

As José Quiroga proposes for the Americas, All politics is, or should be, queer politics, just as all forms of artistic expression should aim to queer the public sphere. Somewhere between the dilution of homosexualities and its specificities lies the future of inclusive forms of social action.² Following Quiroga’s