Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture—Michelle Habell-Pallán. NY: NYUP, 2005.
Review by Ralph E. Rodriguez, Brown University
As the title of Michelle Habell-Pallán’s book suggests, she is interested in “the travels of Chicana and Latina popular culture.” The reader would be mistaken, however, to infer that this is a study of the circulation of culture. While Habell-Pallán is, in part, interested in audiences’ reactions to and consumption of Latina/o (principally Chicana/o) cultural forms, she draws on the “polyvalence” of travel and its etymological connections to travail, invoking travel in its now mostly obsolete meanings: “to work extremely hard” and “to harass, to torment, to trouble, to toil” (4). Thus, the cultural performers Habell-Pallán examines all engage in critiques of social injustice or perhaps one might say critiques of travel/travail. In so doing, the artists examined rely heavily on humor and irony to destabilize racism, sexism, and homophobia. Indeed, Loca Motion is a book committed to finding the resistive elements of Latina/o cultural performers, specifically the Latina/o performance artists Marisela Norte, Luis Alfaro, Marga Gomez, El Vez, Jim Mendiola, and a few Chicana punkeras. As Habell-Pallán readily notes, Loca Motion is neither a comprehensive nor definitive analysis of Latina/o popular culture, but it is “the first step in a recovery process” (13). Habell-Pallán is, as she correctly maintains, putting “a thus far neglected history of Chicana and Latina alternative culture on the map” (13). In this regard, Habell-Pallán importantly assembles a cast of Latina/o pop culture performers whose work is here first given an extended, book-length treatment.
Doing the ambitious recovery and historical work Habell-Pallán does in Loca Motion is a difficult task indeed, for it requires simultaneously working on a number of critical fronts. Habell-Pallán, that is, has to set out the tenets of what or whom she includes in her history, critically analyze the assembled performances and performers, contextualize the historical period of the performances, and offer some necessary biographical information on each of the performers, whom to readers outside of the field may be quite unfamiliar. Habell-Pallán pulls these tasks off with aplomb. What helps unify the study in addition to the concepts of travel and humor is Habell-Pallán’s focus on a punk sensibility and Do-It-Yourself (D.I.Y.) aesthetic that is a constitutive feature of all of the performances she examines and that corresponds well, she argues, to rasquachismo, a Chicana/o cultural practice of “making do” with the objects at hand. (I encourage the interested reader to seek out Tomás Ybarra-Frausto’s work on this subject.)
In Habell-Pallán’s discussion of the spoken-word artist Marisela Norte, the reader sees how this punk sensibility underwrites Norte’s critiques of poverty and sexism and how she helps listeners imagine a world otherwise. Luis Alfaro Alfaro’s “memory plays,” argues Habell-Pallán, cast a critical eye on the gendering and racializing of Chicana/o subjects, disrupting the homophobia and patriarchy that have run all too rampant in many Chicana/o communities. An analysis of Marga Gomez’s comedic performances and an extended interview with the artist shed light on the stultifying practices of authenticity politics and the residual effects of cultural nationalism. Moreover, a pedagogical impetus to educate viewers about homophobia underwrites Gomez’s performances, as she teasingly pulls her audience into examinations of Latina lesbianism. Habell-Pallán’s chapter on Chicana/o punk brings Jim Mendiola’s film Pretty Vacant (1996) to the fore and offers an interesting re-visioning of punk history, showing how the often over-looked L.A. Chicana/o punk scene contributes to this musical and political movement. The chapter on the now prolific performance artist Robert Lopez (aka El Vez) teases out the nuances of his works’ social critiques, especially his pieces that examine immigrant bashing and the militarization of the US-Mexico border. In addition, due attention is paid to examining the gender-bending and camp aspects of El Vez’s wonderful performances. The epilogue’s analysis of the Latino Theater Group (LTG) based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada will certainly be one of Loca Motion’s most exciting and innovative contributions to the field of Latina/o popular culture, for it analyzes the experiences of Latina/os living in Canada, a heretofore little studied community. The epilogue tells an interesting story about the immigration, political, social, and identity experiences of Latina/os in Canada. As with the other performance artists in her study, Habell-Pallán examines the LTG’s work with an eye toward social critique and a fight for social justice. In short, Loca Motion’s body chapters offer a compelling narrative about Latina/o popular culture and social change. Moreover, Habell-Pallán is careful not to assume that writing/performing social critique is equivalent to or even necessarily leads to social change. As she reminds us on numerous occasions, these critiques do, however, open up a space for imagining a world of social equality. I would assert that this imagining the world otherwise is a valuable first step in effecting change. I admire Habell-Pallan’s distinction between writing or performing social critique and actual material change because too often analyses of popular cultural undermine themselves by getting lost in their own celebration of the popular. Habell-Pallán avoids that misstep.
In the first step of any recovery project one has to take bold and broad steps to demarcate a trail for future scholars to follow. In other words, one lays out a general map of the terrain to get a field started and subsequent studies give the map greater detail. Indeed, as one of Habell-Pallán’s endnotes indicates, she herself has already begun to expand her interesting chapter on Chicana punk into a new book project tentatively entitled Punk Saints and Other Urban Goddesses. In the intervening years since Habell-Pallan’s conception of her book and her sharing of excerpts of it at conferences, other scholars have begun to make a more detailed map of Latina/o popular culture, and I suspect Loca Motion will inspire even more work in the area. Along with a handful of other scholars (Rosalinda Fregoso, Chon Noriega, Steve Loza, Frances Negrón-Mutaner, Charles Tatum, José David Saldívar, and David Román to name a few), Habell-Pallán has been at the forefront of writing about Chicana/o and Latina/o popular culture and is a seasoned expert in the field. Though scholars interested in teaching about Latina/o popular culture may be tempted to go to the essay versions of the chapters that have already appeared in print, I would encourage them to use the book, for it extends the analyses offered in the previously published essays and the cumulative analytical effect of reading the book in its entirety gives one a more complete sense of Latina/o popular culture than any one essay is capable of doing. Loca Motion is a welcome and necessary contribution to the field and will interest scholars working on popular culture, gender studies, feminism, Latina/o studies, and the broader study of the Americas.
Ralph E. Rodriguez: Loca Motion
Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture—Michelle Habell-Pallán. NY: NYUP, 2005.
Review by Ralph E. Rodriguez, Brown University
As the title of Michelle Habell-Pallán’s book suggests, she is interested in “the travels of Chicana and Latina popular culture.” The reader would be mistaken, however, to infer that this is a study of the circulation of culture. While Habell-Pallán is, in part, interested in audiences’ reactions to and consumption of Latina/o (principally Chicana/o) cultural forms, she draws on the “polyvalence” of travel and its etymological connections to travail, invoking travel in its now mostly obsolete meanings: “to work extremely hard” and “to harass, to torment, to trouble, to toil” (4). Thus, the cultural performers Habell-Pallán examines all engage in critiques of social injustice or perhaps one might say critiques of travel/travail. In so doing, the artists examined rely heavily on humor and irony to destabilize racism, sexism, and homophobia. Indeed, Loca Motion is a book committed to finding the resistive elements of Latina/o cultural performers, specifically the Latina/o performance artists Marisela Norte, Luis Alfaro, Marga Gomez, El Vez, Jim Mendiola, and a few Chicana punkeras. As Habell-Pallán readily notes, Loca Motion is neither a comprehensive nor definitive analysis of Latina/o popular culture, but it is “the first step in a recovery process” (13). Habell-Pallán is, as she correctly maintains, putting “a thus far neglected history of Chicana and Latina alternative culture on the map” (13). In this regard, Habell-Pallán importantly assembles a cast of Latina/o pop culture performers whose work is here first given an extended, book-length treatment.
Doing the ambitious recovery and historical work Habell-Pallán does in Loca Motion is a difficult task indeed, for it requires simultaneously working on a number of critical fronts. Habell-Pallán, that is, has to set out the tenets of what or whom she includes in her history, critically analyze the assembled performances and performers, contextualize the historical period of the performances, and offer some necessary biographical information on each of the performers, whom to readers outside of the field may be quite unfamiliar. Habell-Pallán pulls these tasks off with aplomb. What helps unify the study in addition to the concepts of travel and humor is Habell-Pallán’s focus on a punk sensibility and Do-It-Yourself (D.I.Y.) aesthetic that is a constitutive feature of all of the performances she examines and that corresponds well, she argues, to rasquachismo, a Chicana/o cultural practice of “making do” with the objects at hand. (I encourage the interested reader to seek out Tomás Ybarra-Frausto’s work on this subject.)
In Habell-Pallán’s discussion of the spoken-word artist Marisela Norte, the reader sees how this punk sensibility underwrites Norte’s critiques of poverty and sexism and how she helps listeners imagine a world otherwise. Luis Alfaro Alfaro’s “memory plays,” argues Habell-Pallán, cast a critical eye on the gendering and racializing of Chicana/o subjects, disrupting the homophobia and patriarchy that have run all too rampant in many Chicana/o communities. An analysis of Marga Gomez’s comedic performances and an extended interview with the artist shed light on the stultifying practices of authenticity politics and the residual effects of cultural nationalism. Moreover, a pedagogical impetus to educate viewers about homophobia underwrites Gomez’s performances, as she teasingly pulls her audience into examinations of Latina lesbianism. Habell-Pallán’s chapter on Chicana/o punk brings Jim Mendiola’s film Pretty Vacant (1996) to the fore and offers an interesting re-visioning of punk history, showing how the often over-looked L.A. Chicana/o punk scene contributes to this musical and political movement. The chapter on the now prolific performance artist Robert Lopez (aka El Vez) teases out the nuances of his works’ social critiques, especially his pieces that examine immigrant bashing and the militarization of the US-Mexico border. In addition, due attention is paid to examining the gender-bending and camp aspects of El Vez’s wonderful performances. The epilogue’s analysis of the Latino Theater Group (LTG) based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada will certainly be one of Loca Motion’s most exciting and innovative contributions to the field of Latina/o popular culture, for it analyzes the experiences of Latina/os living in Canada, a heretofore little studied community. The epilogue tells an interesting story about the immigration, political, social, and identity experiences of Latina/os in Canada. As with the other performance artists in her study, Habell-Pallán examines the LTG’s work with an eye toward social critique and a fight for social justice. In short, Loca Motion’s body chapters offer a compelling narrative about Latina/o popular culture and social change. Moreover, Habell-Pallán is careful not to assume that writing/performing social critique is equivalent to or even necessarily leads to social change. As she reminds us on numerous occasions, these critiques do, however, open up a space for imagining a world of social equality. I would assert that this imagining the world otherwise is a valuable first step in effecting change. I admire Habell-Pallan’s distinction between writing or performing social critique and actual material change because too often analyses of popular cultural undermine themselves by getting lost in their own celebration of the popular. Habell-Pallán avoids that misstep.
In the first step of any recovery project one has to take bold and broad steps to demarcate a trail for future scholars to follow. In other words, one lays out a general map of the terrain to get a field started and subsequent studies give the map greater detail. Indeed, as one of Habell-Pallán’s endnotes indicates, she herself has already begun to expand her interesting chapter on Chicana punk into a new book project tentatively entitled Punk Saints and Other Urban Goddesses. In the intervening years since Habell-Pallan’s conception of her book and her sharing of excerpts of it at conferences, other scholars have begun to make a more detailed map of Latina/o popular culture, and I suspect Loca Motion will inspire even more work in the area. Along with a handful of other scholars (Rosalinda Fregoso, Chon Noriega, Steve Loza, Frances Negrón-Mutaner, Charles Tatum, José David Saldívar, and David Román to name a few), Habell-Pallán has been at the forefront of writing about Chicana/o and Latina/o popular culture and is a seasoned expert in the field. Though scholars interested in teaching about Latina/o popular culture may be tempted to go to the essay versions of the chapters that have already appeared in print, I would encourage them to use the book, for it extends the analyses offered in the previously published essays and the cumulative analytical effect of reading the book in its entirety gives one a more complete sense of Latina/o popular culture than any one essay is capable of doing. Loca Motion is a welcome and necessary contribution to the field and will interest scholars working on popular culture, gender studies, feminism, Latina/o studies, and the broader study of the Americas.