Traumatic Social Memories and Visual Practices of Representation: A Case Study of Performances by Chicano Artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña

The Mexican-American war in the mid 19th century ended with a devastating outcome: the borderline between Mexico and the USA was moved further south. As a consequence, the Mexican nation state lost half of its geographical territory and Mexicans living in its northern parts unexpectedly lost their Mexican citizenship. By this process, minority groups in the US referred to as Mexican Americans and Chicanas/os were disconnected from their families and distant relatives on the Mexican side of the border, have been treated as second class US citizens, and are up until today subjects within US society of several kinds of ethnic and racial discriminations. Since the rise of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, social traumatic experiences of a redrawn line on the map representing a new US-Mexico border have been described with verbal expressions such as ‘the border felt as a scar that never heals’ and ‘we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us’. These experiences have also been articulated in visual art by Mexican Americans and Chicanas/os. Memories of the geopolitical process and its contemporary sociocultural consequences are dealt with in various ways and in various kinds of art medias. This paper presents a case study of visual practices of representation in performance art by Chicano artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña.