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Crack in the World

Pedazos: Acrylic on canvas by Liliana Wilson Grez

Latina writers and artists at

MACLA and Villa Montalvo

By Ann Elliott Sherman

Nepantla. In-between. Neither/nor. Twilight. Borderlands/La Frontera. Transition. Moving from the familiar through the unknown to a new understanding. The Forest of No Return. Sometimes we enter this "uncertain terrain" known as nepantla willingly, sometimes it is thrust upon us by abrupt shifts in the fabric of our lives.

Anyone who's ever navigated what Chicana Tejana lesbian poet and writer Gloria Anzaldúa calls "the crack in the world" knows that the process of reconstructing a new life, a new identity is difficult, often painful but necessary to one's survival and growth.

"A lot of nepantla involves not only learning how to access different kinds of knowledge--feelings, experiences, images in between or alongside consensual reality--but to create your own meaning, or conocimiento," Anzaldúa explains. "The ideas are not new. ... But I put it in this different context, gave the experience a name with words from my own culture. Nepantla is a whole philosophy. It can apply not only to women artists of color or women in general. The process is just more pronounced for those who do creative work. The artist is already set apart."

The beauty of Anzaldúa's reinterpretation of the pre-Columbian concept of nepantla is its broad applicability, not only on the personal level, but to the new mestizaje, or hybrid state, that is today's American multicultural society. Jaime Alvarado, director of MACLA's Center for Latino Arts in San Jose, and Lori Wood, director of Villa Montalvo's Artist Residency Program, recognized this quality when they set out to discover whether their two very different arts organizations could collaborate on a truly equal basis.

"It's a hot topic right now," Alvarado says. "Artistic collaboration between traditional, mainstream, big-budget institutions and alternative organizations based within communities of color ... typically serves the program needs of the larger organization and is disconnected from the day-to-day life of the alternatives' constituencies. ... Lori and I decided we had to try and see if two radically different communities can work together in a respectful fashion."

The result is the Entre Américas: El Taller Nepantla project, a dynamic, international cultural exchange that has brought together five Latina artists and writers from Mexico and the U.S. for a month-long, interdisciplinary residency at Villa Montalvo. The workshop will culminate in an exhibit of the resulting work opening this Friday.

"Because of the collaborative nature of the project," Wood says, "it was really important to us to get a group of artists that could work well together. The visual artists have inspired the writers, and vice versa."

Anzaldúa, whose writings on nepantla motivated the project, has been leading the women toward their collaborative goals. Isabel Juárez Espinosa, a playwright from San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, who publishes work both in Spanish and her native Tzeltal, is the group's other wordsmith, always ready to break the ice with a good story.

A trio of visual artists working in the figurative mode make up the rest of the group. Santa Barraza, who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, creates richly symbolic work layered with meaning, encoded with cultural and personal history.

Mexico City resident Cristina Luna is a visual poet of the connections between the natural world and the internal journey through nepantla, painting spirit figures that seem equal parts earth, wind and water.

The inhabitants of Liliana Wilson Grez's borderlands are bathed in a dusky half-light still cloaked in moon shadow. They occupy a strangely familiar, spare landscape where, in Barraza's words, things seem to be popping out of the horizon line.

Luna and Grez have found the nepantla paradigm's notion of developing la facultad, the ability to see beyond the surface, to be especially valuable. "It makes me feel mystical," Luna says. "I play with this space."

For Espinosa, coming to the upper-class solitude of Villa Montalvo from her literacy work in the barrio in San Cristóbal placed her squarely in nepantla even before she began consciously to explore the concept with the other artists. Through Montalvo translator Caitlin Hazard, Espinosa noted, "To have the theme of being part of a marginalized, indigenous culture become a key part of the work makes me feel as though my work has been reborn in a new light."

Barraza has seen her work change, too. "I usually use what were standard symbols in the Aztec codices. Now I've incorporated my own symbols. There, at the top, that's a Brahma bull--I'm from Kingsville, Texas, where the breed was developed."

As part of the project, Barraza worked with homeless kids, teaching them to create iconographic paintings in the retablo form.

"The retablo originated in Europe, came to the Americas via the Spanish, and was later spread by the missionaries and priests teaching Christianity," Barraza explains. "The mestizo took that form and translated it into something very personal. They would visually document a miracle and write below the image when that event occurred. That, I think, was their way of maintaining the codices, which had a band of hieroglyphic images that would pinpoint where the moon and stars were in the cosmos the day the event in the central panel happened. I think it was a way of resisting assimilation and staying connected with pre-Columbian spirituality and thought. I want the kids to know they have a rich culture, who they are, what formats are traditionally theirs."

As Anzaldúa views it, a lot of the collaborative process involves "taking these insights, these experiences, these images back to the community. A lot of us here are very concerned about the younger kids ... and the youth, because they're getting their culture secondhand. ... If we start with the kids, we wouldn't be in this mess, with racial confusion and division, all this struggle over identity and labels."

When artists succeed in presenting a new way to see the world by making the familiar strange and placing it in a different context, Anzaldúa writes, the work is a catalyst triggering a change in consciousness. This feeds the community, whose response provides feedback to the artist and her spirit, enabling her to return to her work energized.

Working through the unknown is difficult, as everyone involved in El Taller Nepantla readily allows. As much as those who seek refuge in reactionary campaigns would like to deny it, the future belongs to those who can not merely tolerate contradiction, cultural differences and ambiguity, but use them to forge what Anzaldúa terms a new mestiza consciousness one that transcends the "us" vs. "them" mentality and bridges different worlds. The collaboration goes on.

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The Entre Américas: El Taller Nepantla exhibit opens Friday (Nov. 3) and runs through Dec. 2 at the San José Center for Latino Arts, 510 S. First St., San Jose (408/998-2783). The public also is invited to bring offerings for a community altar in honor of deceased loved ones, 7-10pm, on Nov. 3. A Día de los Muertos ceremony will be held from midnight to sunrise.


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