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Fragments from "Borderscape 2000"
From "The Chicano State Department Chronicles"
'Guillermo Gòmez-Peña
Guillermo Gòmez-Peña
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'Roberto Sifuentes
Roberto Sifuentes
EDITOR'S NOTE Documents from the Chicano State Department Archives are made available under the 1999 Freedom of Information Initiative. However, any material deemed sensitive and/or classified has been deleted by department censors prior to public access; these missing texts are indicated by a notation in the document (MISSING).
Additionally, on-line censors may have altered or deleted contents of e-mail at the time of transmission. I am extremely sorry. I hope you learn to read between the lines.
The first version of these files was originally published by Artspace books in late '96 under the title "Friendly Cannibals." This version is substantially more descriptive and accurate.
1
Dear Vampira 99, la unica, la primigenia
I'm having an identity crisis in front of my lowrider 'Chevy 69' laptop – the worst in months. I'm listening to the last album of Jesus and Mary Chain, scratch & mixed with classical rancheras; and all my calavera candles are lit. 45 at least. I'm down, loca … In fact, I'm just about to delete myself from the Infobanco del Chicano State Department Interneta (CSDI), and please, this time, don't be so naive as to ask me CENSORED?
I'm sending you these last e-mails without any clear purpose estetico-politico, and I don't expect you to answer all of them. (You probably have to take care of other ethno-cyborgs in crisis). You'll see that they, too (my e-mails not the ethnocyborgs, matizo), suffer from a serious crisis of literary identity. I ask myself #3 and I ask you (or whoever YOU may be at this point in time):
Are these texts fragments of some cyber-cholo sci-fi poem in search of form, or pieces of an elliptic love letter? (It's impossible – & illegal – to be "direct" nowadays…) Are they excerpts from some performance script in-progress, or are they parts of a highly classified document that CENSORED?
For the moment, all I can tell you is that some of their content may be illegal. But I don't care anymore. Me vale. In fact, by the time you download them, they might very well have been censored, edited, or slightly altered. Since no one believes in objectivity or integrity nowadays, there is a slight possibility that CENSORED. Besides I would hate to fall in the trap of a master narrative CENSORED but I would love to fall back in your arms … yes, I know that's impossible, vampira.
3
It's 1999 in AmeriKKKa – "Ham-e-rrica," according to my nephew (Generation MEX rockero, El Ricardiaco), "the nation of techno-hatred and unnecessary disputes." He read somewhere that "Cyberspace is dead." As one MIT cybermilitia leader declared in 1997, "No longer a privileged, white-free zone, nor the virtual shopping mall it was supposed to become – it looks too much like the outside world now." Which means it is now entirely controlled by the CSDI. Meaning, it's brown, culti-multi, proletarian & rowdy, & its lingua franca, agarrate mujer, es colloquial Spanglish, masticado asi bien cybersabrossso http://caliente/100% hornyficado/CENSORED
me muero,
sin ti me muero,
sigo muriendo-me lenta-mente
mi mente lenta/osahana
ante la triste pantalla de mi Mac 947-HPX.
CENSORED my neon coffin … instalado "aqui"(whatever this means) en el ciberespacio estatal y el anonimato literario pregunto-te: Is it possible to die in cyberspace o de plano alucino?
Could you attend my funeral? Would you?
Do you still remember the touch and temperature of my copper skin?
Remember pre-digital communication, jainita?
Las caricias ambidiestras, los besos en el esfinter, bolero dance, asi, bien pegaditos, rum & coke, for granted laughter, black leather y …
CENSORED.
Tu piel, lo nuestro, lo intrinsically ours? 4
Tepoztecardiente,
To give you some political background, in case you don't have access to the other Neta memory files: We, aca en el norte, have entered a postdemocratic era: We now live in a world without theory; sin estructuras ni contenido. The nation/state is purely a metaficcion nostalgica; the borders & climate fluctuate as I write. It's the end of the world – and the word – as we know it. Cambio. NAFTA was a blast, loca, a trinational pachanga which ended up in a trilingual brawl. Now everyone is hung over and no one remembers exactly what happened. Cambio. Que que sucedio exactamente?
The Salinas clan is in jail with Darryl Gates (ex-chief of the LAPD), Garcia Abrego (capo of the Gulf Cartel) and the Arellano brethren (from the Tijuana cartel). Cambio.
Skeletons keep appearing in key sites throughout Mexamerica. La migra y la DEA were the spinal cord of the whole operation. Cambio.
You knew. Deep inside we all knew. Cambio.
Exiled in Bosnia along with ex-colleague Helmut "sin fronteras" Kohl, Billy Clinton spends his lonely hours playing "Stand By Me" on the tenor sax. Cambio.
Patricio Buchanan (Remember that pinche orate/car salesman/sideshow impresario gone hard-right televangelista?) is now a happy dictator-in-exile somewhere in Johannesburg or Mississippi. Chases his young black servants around the garden (By the way, Blacks in South Africa, like their contemporaries in the Bronx, South Central Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, have gained control of their cities, but this matter belongs to another chronicle).
Aayyyyy!! This unbearable pain in my testicles CENSORED.
Another day without you, 397 dias sin que me muerdas la carne, carajo! Sin que me claves tus colmillos en el pecho … y encima, my inability to write simple things CENSORED
An ad suddenly appears on the screen:
QUERIDO CIUDADANO TRANSFRONTERIZO:
YOUR GLOBAL DESIRES ARE OUR IMMEDIATE NEEDS, & VICE VERSA. PLEASE CHOOSE FROM THE FOLLOWING MENU:
IBM … INS … VHS … SDL … PRI … NBC … PMS … DHL … LWH … RIP … PBS …
6
Today, I'm tired of ex/changing identities in the net. In the past eight hours, I've been a man, a woman and a s/he. I've been black, Asian, Mixteco, German and a multi-hybrid replicant. I've been 10 years old, 20, 42 & 65. I've spoken 7 broken languages. I need a break real bad. I just want to be myself for a few minutes.
11La desmodernidad lo abarca todo:
untranslatable loneliness,
cultural emptiness,
political vertigo,
sexual despair,
postcolonial S&M
synthetic pleasures,
multicentric aesthetics
unclassifiable weather … IN LOUPE Por lo tanto vampira, the night is clearly the place to be, sin fronteras ni contornos, a safe place for techno-warfare & unlimited entertainment. At night, I love you much, much more, especially when my life's in danger and my tongue, my cobra tongue, mi lengua poluta, disoluta, is out of control, como ahorita.
… at night, the militias roam the streets of my city, a city without limits or a name, without a recognizable government, city council, or police department; without churches or cafes; without architectural coherence or a sense of self.
… no loca, I'm not talking about Los Angeles or Dallas. I'm talking about myself, my inner city, la megalopolis de mi conciencia. "Here," words like "alternative," "peripheral," and "marginal" lost their meaning and moral weight long ago. (SHIT! I ACCIDENTALLY DELETED A PARAGRAPH!)
17
CENSORED but all we have left is sex; either cyber-sexo without a body; o sea anonimo, sin facciones, sin identidad("sin" en ingles equals pecado remember?); sexo robotico without emotional or biological repercussions; o bien, el sexo deportivo, aerobico, intrascendente, doloroso, extremo, impersonal, y sin proposito alguno, en la calle bajo la niebla o en la misma morgue. And the more anonymous, detached, and weird, the better CENSORED so death as a high spiritual goal is temporarily unattainable. Death is already kitsch, cultura popular, trivia redundante, puro mainstream. But then, from a purely psychological perspective I see no other way out of here. Me captas, corazon? Por lo tanto, si me quieres ayudar(eef-yuh-guant-too-jelp-mee), borrame! borrame!! Turn on the camera and shoot me!!
18
In the past 10 minutes I've deleted more than half of the texts (the best parts), so when you re-read this document (if you can retrieve it of course), it will appear to be incomplete. But after all, aren't we all incomplete and fragmented anyway? Aren't we all just mere residues of what we once were? drafts of what we thought one day we would be? Vampira, excuse my post-Mexican rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrromanticism pero siento la imperiosa necesidad de NDLVLFVL; DCM M LLL LLDLD; LL; LLLWUUGHBHDCB''WEO0JK N VS; MMKDKJJDCDN Al,mm A(ODOPmclkco kviubkllllhdgg MMMMMMMM MMMMMMMe muero.
Jaina, donde andas? En que mapa? En que frecuencia?
Are you lost in the cyberbarrio? ARE YOU?
Were you? Are you somewhere inside this 3-D chat room? Where exactly?
Behind the leopard-skin sofa where the cyborg-chola is masturbating? Is she fronting for you this time?
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