I'd like to start off by saying that I've been a longtime fan of El Vez’s subversive Chicano punk performance, style and lyrics. I even cited him in a previous blog entry. Although his popularity has remained largely outside of the mainstream, his ingenious blending of a mainstream popular musical aesthetic (a la Elvis) with a politically conscious Chicano subjectivity has made El Vez a hot topic among Chicana/o academic circles.
I’ve seen El Vez twice in Austin, Texas for his “Snow Way José” and “El Vez for Prez” concerts a few years back. Both were at the Continental Club in Austin, TX - a very small, intimate venue - and both put forth a politically resistant message. For example, during his "El Vez for Prez" concert (during the very heated political climate when Kerry was running for president against G.W. Bush), El Vez had a very political anti-imperialistic, pro-immigration statement. At the beginning of the concert, he ran a slideshow displaying a distinct critique of the Bush administration's war in Iraq and anti-immigration policies. Several (white) people, expecting a non-political farce (The Mexican Elvis) were obviously offended by his politics and walked out of the venue before the performance even started. This just left room for us Chicanos to move closer to the front! :)
This time around, however, I felt like I was watching a very different performance. I walked into First Avenue here in Minneapolis with a small group of other Chicanas/os, mostly graduate students, staff and employees of the University of Minnesota who I strongly urged to attend the concert with me. Automatically, we felt like ethnic “others” among a huge sea of white faces that made up an unexpectedly large audience.
Then started what I thought to be the next act before El Vez - Los Straightjackets, a group of white men from Tennessee dressed up with Mexican wrestler masks, and speaking bad Spanish with a white accent to the crowd (basically playing “dress-up” and using Mexican identity as a gimmick). Offensive, to say the least. I figured I'd down a few beers to endure this garbage until the real show began. You couldn't imagine my disappointment when I realized that El Vez was using them as his band. *Why, El Vez? Whyyyy?!*
A member of Los Straightjackets (in his very bad Spanish) introduces El Vez, who runs on stage in his form-fitting Santa suit. Then the same band member introduces the Elvettes, El Vez’s “sexy señoritas" (typical perpetuation of the "hot Latina" stereotype). El Vez always has his “Elvettes” at his shows, but this time they were hypersexualized and objectified in their tiny Christmas dresses (there was even a mock sexual harassment skit involving a member of Los Straightjackets). What made it worse was that this performance of sexuality was done for a white male gaze - by white men for a white male audience members.
I also felt that El Vez was performing “differently." His usual political banter between songs was kept to a minimum...nearly non-existent. It was though he was aware of the fact that he was performing "ethnic buffoonery" for a majority white audience. He didn’t seem to have the same enthusiasm that he has in the past. Songs were familiar such as, "Mamacita, Donde esta Santa Claus" and "En El Barrio," but the performance seemed forced and unfamiliar from those I had come to know and love. Was it the fact that he was in Minneapolis that caused such a change in his performance? Would I have felt the same way had I seen his performance in Austin? I was confused; disappointed.
Adding to my discomfort was the fact that I was surrounded by white audience members who laughed at El Vez's satire for a wholly different reason that I laughed. These were supposed to be "inside" jokes, I felt. They weren't laughing with El Vez, but at him, at us. In this context, his satire, his fake Mexican accent, everything became unbearable. I actually cried - like a kid who found out there was no Santa. Being that I had brought a whole group of politically conscious Chicanas/os to see the performance (and who were each disappointed/offended), I felt it was my responsibility to share this with El Vez. Since he knows me from various shows and through internet correspondence, I went to the backstage area and asked for him.
“Tell him, Lucha Dora from Texas is here,” I said. Immediately he appears with his usual smile and charismatic charm. Happy and surprised to see me in Minneapolis, he greets me with a hug. I tell him that I am now assistant professor at the U of M and that I brought a critical mass of Chicanas/os who live here and who were in the audience. I then proceeded to explain to him how we felt about the performance as Chicanas/os watching our identity being performed for a majority white, mainstream audience. We were sincere and respectful in our constructive criticism.
As we did this, a group of white fans began to harass us, thinking that we were "stealing" El Vez’s time with them (not knowing that I called him out personally). They begin yelling things at us like, “Boo-hoo, cry me a river” and “Why don’t you go write a book about it?” We asked them to give us our time to speak with him and it got even more hostile. When someone in the group asked him to do something about the blatant harassment against us, El Vez refused to defend us and instead said that they were only "having fun." This simply added insult to injury. His consolation was a visit to the U of M in the spring. When the mob began getting physical with us (shoving our backs) and knowing that El Vez didn't have our back, we decided to leave to avoid things getting ugly. As we walked away, someone yelled, “Wetbacks!" (Yes, "wetbacks.") ---> NOTE CORRECTION OF INFORMATION AT END OF BLOG.
We were surprised but we weren’t shocked. We walked away with a clear message: this space was not “ours” but “theirs” even at a concert of a "subversive" Chicano performer. The irony is that the same person who would yell, "wetback," would turn around and show their admiration for El Vez. I guess when we’re smiling and entertaining and not a threat, we’re acceptable. But when we get in the way of them and what they want, we’re undesirable “wetbacks.” Good thing El Vez didn't sing one of his most popular songs (and my favorite) "Immigration Time."
We were bummed, to say the least, and ended up drowning our sorrows at our favorite local spot, Pancho Villa, where we downed some margaritas and partook in some good ole Spanish karaoke. Although PV helped take away the sting that night, I woke up the next day feeling sad; disillusioned.
I reflected on the conversation my friend Karla and I had during the concert (and that got us "shushed" several times by nearby white audience members whom I threatened to "punch in the face"...but that's another story). El Vez's performance forced us to ask ourselves about the politics of Chicano performance. When does Chicano performance stop being subversive? How do we as Chicanas/os negotiate our resistant politics within a white mainstream institution. And it resonated with my current job in a Chicano Studies department at a predominantly white research one institution. What does it mean to teach Chicano Studies to privileged white students? Am I teaching resistance or am I perpetuating cultural appropriation? Questions I think El Vez and I both need to ask ourselves.
***CORRECTION***
It was brought to my attention by a friend in attendance that the "wetback" comment was made to three members of our original group AFTER they had separated from the larger group. This was outside of the venue on the way to their vehicle. My misunderstanding came from someone telling me, "They called us wetbacks," and thinking they had addressed our entire group. My apologies for the inaccuracy.
great blog. your questions remind me of spike lee's _bamboozled_.
ReplyDeleteand, there was a guillermo gomez-pen~a show at jumps-tart theatre a few years back, a couple white audience members were laughing and taking photos (photos were not allowed) of the intentionally hyper-stereotypical scenes.
gomez-pen~a always tries to get people to think. some just laugh derisively. but he expects this, and sometimes incorporates their ignorance into the show. a profe probably can't do that, but el vez should.
kip
This is really disturbing and I'm very sorry that you had to go through it.
ReplyDeleteWhat a huge disappointment that must have been.
In response to some of the questions you raise, I think it is possible to subvert from within the system, but I would imagine that it becomes very confusing over time as you try to keep track of how much you are actually subverting the system, and how your participation is in fact actually subverting you in return.
Relationships being always reciprocal to at least some degree.
El Vez at his best has always been walking a very fine line between parody and exploitation, and that's what makes what he does effective when it is effective, but it can clearly also be problematic in situations like the one you describe here.
But a lot of what you're talking about seems problematic to me under any circumstances that I can imagine, and even more so in the context of a mainly white, male audience like the one that seems to have been present that night.
Still, for what it's worth, reading people is incredibly difficult when they are in large groups. One on one you can tell a lot of things about the person you're interacting with, but the more people you are performing for, the more confusing all of those various signals become.
I'm sure you've run into this same problem standing in front of a classroom full of students before.
When your job is to get people 'going' and to grab and hold their attention, you quickly find out just what difficult work that actually is, and there is a kind of desperation involved that can make you do and say some really stupid things in the heat of the moment.
Now I'm not bringing this up to defend El Vez or his show necessarily, but just to point out that it's entirely possible that he thought he was doing his show the same way he would have done it for a predominantly Chican@ audience, but the context not only made it all seem different to the viewer, it actually made the way he did what he did different too.
In it's most basic form his show is almost beyond a doubt the same wherever he goes. The amount of time and effort that goes into putting together a complex stage show of the sort you describe here makes it very unlikely that he would have entirely different shows for different audiences, so other than adding or dropping a song here and there, the show you saw is probably the one he does everywhere.
But that doesn't mean he puts the same 'spin' on everything in every circumstance, and I get the sense from reading your account that he was doing what he felt he had to do in order to make this particular performance 'work', and that that pushed the whole thing over the line into something that probably did more harm than good.