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Performing excess: the politics of identity in La Chica Boom

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Performing excess: the politics of identity in La Chica Boom

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Performing Excess: The Politics of Identity in La Chica Boom

by

Ana Cristina Briz

_________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
CURATORIAL PRACTICES AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

May 2019

Copyright 2019 Ana C. Briz
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTION 1

II. DOMINATRIX OF THE BARRIO 9

III. TORILLERA 29

IV. F*CK MY LIFE 38

X. CONCLUSION 44

APPENDIX WITH FIGURES 48

BIBLIOGRAPHY 54
1
I. INTRODUCTION

When we think of who we are, we usually think of a unified subject. In the
present. An inimitable entity…We are not what we think we are, but rather a
compilation of texts. A compilation of histories, past, present, and future, always,
always shifting, adding, subtracting, gaining.
1

— Felix Gonzalez-Torres, letter to Robert Vifian

[T]he undisturbed dream of ego mastery, wholeness, and completeness [is]
precisely what provides racist discourse with one of its most generative internal
principles: the undivided, obscenely full and complete ethnic-racialized subject,
transparent to itself and to others.
2

— Antonio Viego, Dead Subjects:
Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies

In 1990, the University of California, Los Angeles’ Wight Art Gallery mounted Chicano
Art: Resistance and Affirmation 1965-1985 (CARA), after seven years of planning and disputes
with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) over the politicization of the word
Chicano, the exhibition’s seemingly socio-political agenda, artists’ political identity as
Chicana/os and how that was an intricate part of the art they produced, and other concerns with
language that made reviewers and funders uncomfortable.
3
As Gustavo Guerra writes in his
essay “Identity, Aesthetics, and Objects,” regarding the NEH’s refusal to provide funding

1
Felix Gonzalez-Torres to Robert Vifian, New York, December 3, 1994, in Felix Gonzalez-Torres, ed. Julie Ault
(Göttingen: Steidl Dangin, 2006), 170.
2
Antonio Viego, Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies (Durham: Duke University Press,
2007), 6.
3
Chicano derives from the Nahuatl pronunciation of Mexicano and often refers to people of Mexican descent born
in the United States. Those that identify with the term typically do so because they embrace the label’s association
with a politics of liberation and civil justice as demonstrated through the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, or El
Movimiento, of the mid-1960s.
2
support for the exhibition, the NEH’s inability to comprehend the Chicanx artists’ nuanced
expression of their lived experiences through their art, but more so through the submitted written
proposal, was actualized in the curatorial team’s failure to secure a grant the first two times they
applied.
4
According to Guerra, this process of approval or disapproval “reflected an
institutionalized defense mechanism unable to engage with the alterity of an other that was
bound to be either misunderstood or understood as too excessive, or too cluttered.”
5
The nearly
180 artists in the exhibition, such as Carlos Almaraz, the members of Asco, and Judy Baca, were
subject to this understanding (or misunderstanding) of their work and their embodied selves—too
excessive, too political, too brown.
This is just one example of the ways in which a cultural understanding of otherness such
as this, as excessive or overly marked with identifiers, insidiously seeps into legal and extralegal
contexts. Guerra’s examination of institutionalized perspectives of minoritarian identities as
excessive demonstrates one of the many forms in which the discourse surrounding identity has
real-life ramifications.
This paper concerns itself with situations such as this, wherein Latinx or Chicanx artists
are subject to notions of fixity as part of a larger colonial discourse. Fixity, as postcolonial
theorist Homi Bhabha writes in “The Other Question…,” is a paradoxical mode of
representation: it is both an ideological construction of otherness, connoting rigidity and an
unchanging core or essence, while also asserting a sense of disorder and degeneracy.
6
For
Bhabha, the colonial stereotype is fueled by “the force of ambivalence” thus producing a

4
Throughout this paper, I will be utilizing the term Chicanx as a gender-neutral or gender-inclusionary version of
the original Chicana/o term when necessary. This is generally the accepted term used to include anyone who does
not or wishes not to fit into the binary of a/o. Nevertheless, there are still female or male identified people that can
and should use Chicana or Chicano to be identified if they want to be gender exclusive and specific. The same
gender-inclusionary sentiment applies to the usage of Latinx in this paper.
5
Gustavo Guerra, “Identity, Aesthetics, Objects,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 40, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 73.
6
Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question…” in The Politics of Theory, ed. Francis Barker (London: University of
Essex, 1983), 18; this article is a revision of a paper given at the Sociology of Literature Conference, Essex
University, 1982, first published in Barker’s anthology in 1983.
3
predictability and probabilistic truth that for the stereotype “must always be in excess of what
can be empirically proved or logically construed.”
7
Paralleling what happened to the Chicanx
artists in the CARA exhibition, their “Chicano” identity—perceived as overtly political and anti-
Anglo-American—was deemed excessive when processed by the systems of empiricism and
logic through their grant proposal, something that the colonial mindset could not easily
comprehend.
This notion of complete, fixed, or essential—and, in the case of people identified as non-
normative, stereotyped—identities must be considered fundamentally problematic as it has been
used to denounce entire groups of people, with a particular emphasis on brown and black,
colonized bodies, while also failing to recognize the impossibility of a fully coherent identity. As
deconstruction would have it, the fully coherent Cartesian subject (a self that can identify
themselves without consideration for their body or the external world) is dismantled as the
body/subject becomes increasingly fragmented and recontextualized as never fully determined,
ultimately amplifying the ways in which being occurs through a process of identification that is
relational. This process is always already occurring and does not ever end in the production of a
sense of being that is fixed or fully coherent. Peggy Phelan compellingly articulated this double
failure:
Identity cannot… reside in the name you can say or the body you can see…
Identity emerges in the failure of the body to express being fully and the failure of
the signifier to convey meaning exactly. Identity is perceptible only through a
relation to an other—which is to say, it is a form of both resisting and claiming
the other, declaring the boundary where the self diverges from and merges with
the other. In that declaration of identity and identification, there is always loss, the

7
Ibid., 19.
4
loss of not-being the other and yet remaining dependent on that other for self-
seeing, self-being.
8

This failure of the body to reveal fully the identity of the person, the inability to identify
something and call it by its name and for it its meaning to be exact, as forever complete and
unchanging, speaks to the impossibility of there ever being a fixed construction of the self and of
otherness. This impossibility should dispel any notion of a self that is overly marked with
identifiers and thus rendered excessive—yet that is often not afforded for the colonized body as
demonstrated by the CARA exhibition’s previous grant denials.
One instance, and the topic of this paper, that reflects this double failure as well as the
ramifications of this perceived excess is seen in the work of performance artist Xandra Ibarra,
particularly in her series of live performance entitled spictacles (2002-2012), in which, under the
alias La Chica Boom, she engaged in exaggerated representations of her racial, ethnic, cultural,
and sexual identities via neo-burlesque strategies in order to interrogate and undermine her
audience’s Mexiphobic gaze.
9
Mexiphobia, coined by writer Jack López Estavillo, is an anti-
Mexican sentiment that speaks to the “unreasonable and irrational fears” people engage in when
dealing with Mexico, its people, or people of Mexican descent.
10
Focusing on the live
performance and burlesque aspect of her spictacles, I will closely analyze three of her spictacles,
Dominatrix of the Barrio (2002), Tortillera (2004), and her final spictacle F*ck My Life (FML)
(2012 and 2013), in which Ibarra reveals the backstory and ultimate failure of La Chica Boom,
juxtaposing her melancholic story of failure with that of Lupe Vélez, the 1920s-30s Mexican
Hollywood actress who is both an icon and urban legend due to her regrettable suicide. I will

8
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 13.
9
While Ibarra has dated her spictacles under this ten-year period, she actually continued to perform neo-burlesque
under the name La Chica Boom until 2015-6. This is apparent in my first and second case study where I,
respectively, analyze a performance of Dominatrix of the Barrio from 2014 and a performance of Tortillera from
2013.
10
Jack López Estavillo, “Pathos, Bathos, and Mexiphobia,” The Massachusetts Review 37, no. 3 (Autumn 1996):
359.
5
discuss audience response and, in particular, audience members’ general inability to engage
critically with consumption of Ibarra’s racialized sexual performances, ultimately rendering her
decade-long project a failure. This failure, she states, left her in a state of “self-impoverishment
and racial melancholia.”
11
Ibarra has written about being stuck with the fictions structuring
Mexican/Chicana subjectivity, unable to “escape being seen as Latina bombshell-clown-whore
on stage (and life).”
12

Invoking the work of Alicia Arrizón, Amelia Jones, Diana Taylor, Antonio Viego, and
others, this paper examines failure—both the failure to recognize identity as relational and
Ibarra’s failed, decolonial performances—while addressing the impact of failure and its
damaging effects on Ibarra and her artistic practice. Rather than foregrounding how failure can
be thought of as a productive counternarrative, I wish to focus on Ibarra’s lived experience and
caution others, particularly queer scholars, against adopting the approach of rethinking (and
rewriting) exhausting and debilitating failure as “queer failure.” In “Queer Art / Queer Failure,”
Tina Takemoto questions, “[h]ow can we hold on to the utopian dimensions of queer possibility
and failure without forgetting or acquiescing to the devaluation, marginalization, and exclusion
of queer individuals in modern life?”
13
Here, she urges scholars who embrace queer futurity such
as Jack J. Halberstam and the followers of José Esteban Muñoz to continue to consider the
“bleaker side of queer failure” which includes reminding ourselves that queerness often comes
along with loss, social injury, and grief.
Maintaining this acknowledgement of queer loss, social injury, and grief in regard to
failure, I argue that, due to essentializing projects such as the attribution of essences to bodies of
color and their iconographies, as well as rigid forms of identity politics where differences are

11
Xandra Ibarra, “Stuck With You,” SPEAK, In Dance, 2012, available at: http://xandraibarra.com//wp-
content/uploads/2012/10/Indance.pdf; accessed May 14, 2018.
12
Ibid.
13
Tina Takemoto, “Queer Art / Queer Failure,” Art Journal 75, no. 1 (2016): 87.
6
viewed as fixed and finite, Ibarra’s performance of racial and sexual abjection and the failure she
experienced were not only exacerbated but inevitable. Key to this understanding is the theory
and framework of intersectionality as articulated by Kimberlé Crenshaw, where it is understood
that all aspects of identity are mutually constitutive and take place simultaneously.
14
As per
Alpesh Kantilal Patel’s writing on Ibarra’s spictacles, Ibarra expands the list of identity markers
from gender, race/ethnicity, and class to “include faith, sexuality as well as nationality and
citizenship,” reaching towards a more nuanced understanding of the multiplicity present in
identification.
15
Through the analysis of Ibarra’s work, I wish to push forward a model of
identification that foregrounds lived experience and deals with difference through its relation to
power. This allows me ultimately to call for a model that accommodates an infinite number of
identifications, which is more accurate in relation to the ways we experience our being within the
world. While almost any relational and performative act risks the possibility of failure, it is
Ibarra’s sexualized performance as a queer woman of color that raises the stakes in that her
relation to state-sanctioned power is different from that of those who may have more privilege
within the same structures.
Audience members exacerbate this experience of loss and failure in relation to Ibarra’s
spictacles, I argue, because of their inability to recognize that the body/self is defined and
experienced through its relation to others.
16
Without first recognizing that we are constituted
through our relationality, we cannot begin to make any determinations of our own (or other’s)
subjectivities. I seek to make clear, through an analysis of Ibarra’s works, that the self is
embodied, performative, and intersubjective; I argue that it is through this understanding that

14
See Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women
of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1241-1299.
15
Alpesh Kantilal Patel, “La Chica Boom’s Failed, Decolonial Spictacles,” e-misférica 11, no. 1 (2014),
http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/emisferica-111-decolonial-gesture/patel
16
Here I am utilizing Amelia Jones’ concept of the body/self as a term to signify all “apparent racial, sexual, gender,
class, and other apparent or unconscious identifications,” Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 13.
7
Ibarra’s spictacles and their effects can most productively be analyzed. As Amelia Jones writes
about body art, the practice opens the embodied artist/subject to the other, while also opening the
embodied other to the artist—they take each other’s places by projecting onto one another, “each
taking its place there as a subject while simultaneously authorizing the other as subject.”
17
This
“radical interdependence with the other” is highlighted in Ibarra’s performance and its
subsequent failure. By not critically engaging with Ibarra’s performances, audience members
generally failed to recognize and authorize Ibarra as a subject, thus fracturing the once radically
interdependent relationship. It is primarily this failure to recognize the interdependent
relationship between artist/subject and spectator/other that motivated Ibarra to quit burlesque all
together.
18

Through the rejection of her spictacles, Ibarra left not only La Chica Boom behind, but
also the community of burlesque performers of color that she so passionately sought to foster.
Ibarra is both a performance artist as well as a community organizer, producing and directing
“Kaleidoscope, An Annual National People of Color Cabaret” in Seattle and San Francisco from
2007 to 2010. Kaleidoscope was the first national event dedicated to cabaret and neo-burlesque
performers of color in the United States (Figure 1). After four years of organizing and
fundraising to produce the annual event, Ibarra burned out, letting go of the project she was
previously so proud of and committed to.
19
For the final iteration of the event, in 2010 she
partnered with the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender to organize
an educational symposium entitled “Race Reveal: Racialized Tropes, Queer Performance,
Political Possibilities,” which explored the historical links among minstrelsy, burlesque, and

17
Ibid., 106.
18
In a personal conversation with the author, Ibarra disclosed her dissatisfied feelings with the burlesque community
after many years of attempting to organize. Personal conversation between author and artist, July 19, 2018.
19
Ibid.
8
white supremacy in performance.
20
For Ibarra, it is clear that her activism is not only part of her
performance and pedagogical practice but also her everyday life.
21
Her artistic practice and
activism are not separate facets of herself that happen in turn or can be hierarchized in
importance, but rather are overlapping and inform one another in infinite ways. Throughout this
essay, I will explore how aspects of queer sociality and community organizing affect Ibarra’s
performance by considering how her work and its reception by the public are inextricably linked.

20
For more information about the symposium see Alisa Bierra’s summary of the event in Faultlines, UCB’s Center
for Race and Gender’s semester newsletter from Fall 2010: https://www.crg.berkeley.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2017/07/FALL2010_FINAL.pdf
21
Ibarra has been organizing with queer, Latinx, and of color folk since the age of sixteen. See Xandra Ibarra,
“Interview with La Chica Boom,” interview by Marta Martinez, From the Archives: Worse Than Queer, Art
Practical, August 14, 2013, https://www.artpractical.com/issue/from_the_archives_worse_than_queer/; the interview
was first published online on Art Practical’s website on April 11, 2011 and later was included in this issue.
9
II. DOMINATRIX OF THE BARRIO
Born and raised in the borderland of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, Xandra
Ibarra is currently an Oakland-based performance artist and community organizer who integrates
live performance with video, photography, and objects, while joining activist impulses with her
art practice. Throughout multiple works, Ibarra engages in neo-burlesque performance practices
by utilizing material symbols, in particular movement (striptease, bump-and-grind, tassel
twirling, tortilla-making, ejaculating) and costuming (wigs, gloves, nipple tassels, strap-ons,
lucha libre masks), in order to communicate to her audiences a sexualized spectacle that is
simultaneously racialized, classed, and queer.
The term neo-burlesque refers to the revival of burlesque, the theatricalized and excessive
erotic performance, since the 1990s. Burlesque as a sexual spectacle evolved at the beginning of
the twentieth-century in the United States, foregrounding striptease and forgoing the complex
theatrical narratives from the previous era. As performance scholar Maggie M. Werner writes, in
the late 1860s “[w]omen broke social mores not only by dancing in front of audiences but also
by playing male roles,” though this gender inversion quickly was replaced at the turn of the
century with “a type of ‘drag’ in which women exaggerated femininity and centralized erotic
displays.”
22
Generally, neo-burlesque is characterized by its camping-up of retro styles
particularly in regard to the style pioneered by showgirls in the 1950s, an integration of a wider
range of performance styles from modern dance to performance art, and its feminist potential in
the reclaiming of female sexuality. While Ibarra does rely on the symbolic codes articulated
within heteronormative patriarchal definitions of sexualized femininity, the sexualization present
in her work is met with hyperbolized modes of racialization that problematize and test the

22
Maggie M. Werner, “Deploying Delivery as Critical Method: Neo-Burlesque’s Embodied Rhetoric,” Rhetoric
Review 36, no. 1 (2017): 48.
10
borders inscribed in her own body and coloniality, compulsory whiteness and heteronormativity,
and Mexicanidad.
In “Baring Identities: Queer Women of Color in Neo-Burlesque,” Marta Martinez
questions the ability of neo-burlesque to be a productive form of feminist critique as burlesque
has “historically been a white-dominated form of entertainment that encourages heterosexist
practices” while also aiding in the perpetuation of minstrelsy, asking, “what is transgressive
about performances by queer women of color?”
23
Borrowing Martinez’s language in regard to
queer women of color in neo-burlesque, I argue Ibarra is defying “simplistic reiterations of visual
tropes” by folding her “political awareness and social criticism into layers of rhinestones, glitter,
and glamour.”
24
Through Ibarra’s performance of excess as La Chica Boom, the transgressive
potential is in the act of redefining fixed, ideological constructions while they are being
simultaneously presented, performed, and dismantled. Additionally, it is through Ibarra’s
organizing efforts with Kaleidoscope that this transgression is amplified. Realizing that the neo-
burlesque community needed to reform in order to critically think through issues on minstrelsy
and the representation of race within the genre of burlesque, Ibarra founded Kaleidoscope and
was able to use burlesque as a platform for organizing that encouraged not only audience
members to think critically about the ways they consumed burlesque but also the performers
themselves, which was the primary reason Ibarra begun to organize. Ibarra states:
I wanted us to really critically think about what we were watching onstage and
how we were consuming and performing certain images. I also wanted performers
to start thinking critically about ourselves and how complex it is to perform camp
when you're a person of color. Because no matter what you're doing, you cannot
escape certain historical representations and narratives about yourself…Ever since

23
Marta Martinez, “Baring Identities: Queer Women of Color in Neo-Burlesque,” Sightlines (2011): 186-209.
24
Ibid., 191.
11
I started doing Kaleidoscope and opening my mouth about minstrelsy and race
representation, people have been like, “Oh, there’s a show just for people of color.
Why?”… And when they read the mission and how the discussions included
making pasties and talking about feminist white supremacy in burlesque, they
began to talk…I think Kaleidoscope did produce a lot of conversations about race,
sexuality, and performance. Not only for people of color, but for white women in
particular, which is important since race is always, always ignored within
burlesque.
25

As a community organizer, Ibarra locates herself within immigrant, anti-rape, and prison
abolitionist movements. Since 2003, she has worked with INCITE!, a national network of radical
feminists of color who organize to end state violence. Aspects of queer community of color
organizing and activism have most notably shown up in her most recent work The Hook
Up/Displacement/Barhopping/Drama Tour from 2017, which won the Queer | Art | Prize the
following year. Calling it a “live community performance,” Ibarra led a group of strangers and
friends on a bar crawl tour to five former queer Latinx and lesbian bars/nightclubs in San
Francisco.
26
For the past two decades, low-income and of-color communities have been pushed
out of San Francisco, gentrification replacing many queer convivial spaces in favor of more
affluent establishments that exclude low-income queers of color. In The Hook Up, Ibarra led the
group to the former sites where Esta Noche (1979 - 2014), La India Bonita (late 1970s - 1996),
Amelia’s (1978 - 1991), The Lexington (1997 - 2015), and Osento (1979 - 2008) all stood.
Throughout, the group created altars, wrote messages, and imprinted their bodies and kisses onto
the walls where the beloved queer venues were located. Their street celebration was juxtaposed
by projected 1990s footage of queer Latinxs and lesbians in these former spaces, queering a

25
Ibarra, “Interview with La Chica Boom.”
26
Xandra Ibarra, The Hook Up/Displacement/Barhopping/Drama Tour, artist’s website, available at:
http://www.xandraibarra.com/the-makeoutdisplacementbarhoppingdrama-tour/; accessed November 10, 2018.
12
linear and normative understanding of time by layering these various events. Rather than
privileging the perceived linearity of time, Ibarra’s project obfuscates it, foregrounding instead
the queer time of queer sociality. This gestures towards Elizabeth Freeman’s use of queer
temporality, which challenges “chrononormativity,” where our notions of life within time have
been dictated into a specific pattern or trajectory that serves the interests of heteronormative
structures of power.
27
The Hook Up comes together to perfectly join all aspects of Ibarra’s
practice: community and street organizing, critiquing the regimes of late capitalist
heteronormative patriarchy, encouraging self-reflexivity and social change, and utilizing the
exaggeratedly identified body to serve and enact these aforementioned purposes.
In 2002, Ibarra began a series of live performances entitled spictacles under the alias La
Chica Boom.
28
Ibarra wrote and performed hundreds of spictacles during the ten-year project,
where she engaged in hyperreal representations of her racial, ethnic, cultural, and sexual/gender
as well as class identifications via neo-burlesque.
29
The term spictacle—which combines “spic”
(a slur for a Latinx person, derived from Hispanic) and “spectacle”—is intentionally provocative
and speaks to the challenges the series both performs and exposes by combining an ethnic slur
based on the same stereotypes and iconographies Ibarra utilizes and the spectacle that is to be
performed and witnessed. It is a spectacle of excess (un spectacle excessif), as Roland Barthes
writes in his essay “The World of Wrestling,” where the public “attunes itself to the spectacular
nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema.”
30
I propose that the excess in

27
Elizabeth Freeman, “Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography,” Social Text 23, no. 3-4 (Fall-Winter 2005): 57-68.
28
Ibarra’s first performance as La Chica Boom took place at a small theater in downtown Seattle called The Jewel
Box Theater. She retells the story of this performance to Francesca Austin-Ochoa in a 2010 interview published in
the online magazine Aorta: Radical Arts Magazine, which is no longer directly available online; the interview,
however, can be accessed through Ibarra’s website: http://xandraibarra.com//wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Aorta-
Tear-Sheet.pdf.
29
In the sense that Ibarra has blended what is considered a real-life identity and what is a fictional representation so
seamlessly that a distinction is not made by many that are familiar with her. As defined by Jean Baudrillard,
hyperreality goes further than blending the real with the symbol that represents it; it involves creating a symbol or
set of signifiers that represent something that does not actually exist, like La Chica Boom.
30
Roland Barthes, “The World of Wrestling,” in Mythologies (New York: Noonday Press, 1972), 13.
13
Ibarra’s spictacles is not in the grandiloquence of the theater or the props, but rather in her
performed identifications, which are defined by excess. Her body/self is exaggeratedly marked
with identifiers, deemed too sexual, too brown, too queer. Thus, her body/self exists outside of
the constraining binaries constructed through Western metaphysical thought—as Phelan writes,
one being marked with value, and the other being unmarked—exaggerating a range of markings
to explode the containability of these “marked” terms, which ultimately bursts the stereotyped
categories of identity. In Ibarra’s spictacles, La Chica Boom functions as both Ibarra’s burlesque
persona as well as the embodiment of identifications marked by excess, which she emphasizes
and critiques through the use of stereotypes of Mexican and Chicanx iconography derived from
essentializing notions of Mexicanidad.
In Dominatrix of the Barrio (2002), for example, Ibarra crosses over the attributes of
lucha libre, the term used to describe the unique genre of professional wrestling in Mexico where
wrestlers wear masks to evoke images of heroes/villains or other archetypes (which is the
persona a luchador takes on during the performance), as well as the matador, which derives from
the Spanish term matador de toros (killer of bulls) and is reserved for the final bullfighter/torero
who does not ride on horseback and kills the bull on foot, with the BDSM dominatrix, presented
here as the powerfully erotic and sexually forward Latina. She explodes the stereotypes
associated with the iconographies from these various roles by forcing a number of them to
coexist in exaggerated forms, effectively highlighting the absurdity in their use as empirical
proof of Mexicanidad. Thus, Ibarra performs La Chica Boom as a lucha libre dominatrix
donning a bedazzled luchadora mask as a fetish/gimp mask, a matador’s red cape, nipple
pasties, a black bedazzled corset with matching crotch cover, blue satin gloves, a full-body mesh
suit, and black heels.
14
Dominatrix of the Barrio was one of Ibarra’s very first spictacles, dating to 2002, and
was performed and reperformed continuously throughout her time as La Chica Boom. A favorite
amongst audiences, she performed Dominatrix of the Barrio in several venues ranging from
museums and theaters, to gay bars and nightclubs, to even academic conferences. While I do not
fully explore the ways in which different venues affect the reception of her work, it should be
noted that the performance vacillated between being contextualized as performance art in a
museum to an erotic skit in a burlesque show, yet continuously it was considered a form of live
performance that was entertaining.
When Ibarra moved to San Francisco from Seattle in 2009, the neo-burlesque community
was growing. For many years, Ibarra was part of Red Hots Burlesque (RHB), a troupe founded
by Dottie Lux, which is San Francisco’s longest running weekly burlesque show.
31
While some
of the venues Ibarra performed in with RHB were historically queer spaces that sometimes
welcomed women of color—such as El Rio, a leather Brazilian gay bar, and The Stud, a gay bar
where women have been active patrons since its founding in 1966—others were arguably much
more white and heteronormative such as the Supperclub, a $10 million nightclub that hosted
burlesque, drag shows, aerial performances, and literally served dinner in their many beds.
32
In a
personal conversation with Ibarra, she opened up about how much she disliked performing for
the suit-and-tie (also known as FiDi or Financial District types) audiences there yet continued to
do so in order to pay the bills and sustain an artistic practice.
33

The performance I focus on here took place at the Brava Theater Center in San Francisco
on July 26, 2014 for a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) In Community public program

31
In 2016, The Stud became a co-op with Dottie Lux as one of its members. For more information on how the bar
maintained its locale in the face of the sky-rocketing price of rent, see Peter Lawrence Kane, “How The Stud Was
Saved,” SF Weekly, February 15, 2017, available online at: http://www.sfweekly.com/culture/feature-culture/how-
the-stud-was-saved/; accessed November 27, 2018.
32
Ellen Fort, “After 10 Years, SOMA's Supperclub Gets Kicked Out of Bed,” Eater San Francisco, January 14,
2015, available online at: https://sf.eater.com/2015/1/14/7547987/supperclub-san-francisco-closing; accessed
November 27, 2018.
33
Personal conversation between author and artist, July 19, 2018.
15
entitled “Mujeres Divinas Y Poderosas (Divine and Powerful Women)” that collaborated with
El/La Para TransLatinas, a non-profit organization that provides legal, fiscal, educational, health,
and other services to transgender Latinas in the Bay Area.
34
Ibarra led a cabaret workshop for
members of El/La Para TransLatinas with artist DavEnd and subsequently performed Dominatrix
of the Barrio for the program.
35
Since I have never seen Ibarra perform a live spictacle, I am
relying on documentary photographs and videos.
36

As the performance begins, Ibarra’s red cape is draped over her shoulders and tied around
her neck. The removal and disposal of the cape draws from a combination of luchador, matador,
and burlesque poses and techniques, every movement being delivered with measured
determination (Figure 2). Swaying her hips, she shows the audience her back, revealing to them
the hidden riding crop that she then pulls out and whips in the air. She continues by threatening
spectators with it, first pointing into the crowd to single someone out and then “spanking” the air.
The audience howls. Anticipation heightens. Rather than relying on the traditional game of
striptease as part of the burlesque act, Ibarra channels her experience as a dominatrix, imbuing
La Chica Boom with this persona. The riding crop, used to encourage a horse to go forward or
sideways, is not meant to be a tool of punishment such as a whip or lash, yet it is often read as
such from its usage in BDSM practices. In the context of the performance, the riding crop layers
on the dominatrix/matador meaning when it is revealed that the covered mass at the center of the

34
YBCA In Community was a program spearheaded by Raquel Gutiérrez at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
(YBCA) that connected low-income, ethnically diverse, and underserved community members, neighborhood
organizations, and individual artists around collaborative art-making projects to address the unique needs and
cultural traditions of three distinct Bay Area neighborhoods—SOMA, the Mission & Excelsior Districts, and West
Oakland. Since Gutiérrez’s departure from YBCA in 2015, their community outreach program has now been
rebranded as YBCA Civic Engagement with a different mission statement.
35
Ibarra has performed Dominatrix of the Barrio for YBCA audiences before, the earliest performance dating back
to August 14, 2009. She performed it for “Crash Cabarets: Where Queers Collide,” a YBCA Summer Festival
program, as part of Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory’s month-long residency at YBCA. While the act remains nearly
the same in 2014 as in 2009, there are some differences in costume. For a description of the performance, see
Martinez, “Baring Identities,” 186-209.
36
The video I reference for my analysis was kindly provided by Christa Cesario, Community Organizing Manager
at the YBCA.
16
stage is a small, multicolored piñata shaped like a donkey. Sporting a leather blindfold and
harness, the donkey-shaped piñata is at once a surrogate for the sub (submissive person) that the
dominatrix will dominate, the horse that would be beckoned with the crop, and the bull that is to
be defeated by the matador. For the dominatrix, the crop is nothing more than a tool of the trade,
but for the matador, the crop takes on a new meaning as it represents a beating stick meant to
effectively crack open the piñata and dispel its insides.
Rather than a horse or a bull, then, the dominatrix is faced with a donkey, referencing a
specific kind of sexualized spectacle that draws tourists into Mexico. Known as a “donkey
show,” it is an urban legend situated in tourist cities throughout Mexico in which a woman
engages in bestiality with a donkey for a live audience. While there is no record as to whether
this practice openly exists in Mexico, the donkey show is likely much more about the United
States’ perverse projections onto Mexico and its inhabitants than about the actual sexual
spectacle—another example of the rampant Mexiphobia present in mainstream Anglo-American
pop culture.
37
The addition of the donkey-shaped piñata effectively moves forward the already
multilayered and coded performance by further complicating the understanding of the associated
iconography through visual content that is deeply saturated with cultural and political overtones.
Martinez states how in Ibarra’s juxtaposition of images, there is a reveal of “the impurity of all
the categories her ensemble references.”
38
To that point, while the reference to donkey shows is
more obvious here, the idea of the donkey being a zonkey (also referred to as a Tijuana Zebra, it
is a donkey that has been painted to look like a zebra and is typically used as a tourist attraction)
with its tissue-paper stripes suggests that Ibarra is blending two urban legends/tourist fantasies

37
Gustavo Arellano, former publisher and editor of Orange County’s OC Weekly, reiterates this sentiment and cites
moments in U.S. pop culture where donkey shows have been mentioned. According to Arellano, a pivotal point was
in 1980 when porn star Linda Lovelace published her memoir Ordeal and in it claimed her “then-husband was going
to force her to get ‘fucked by a donkey in Juarez, Mexico.’” See Gustavo Arellano, “¡Ask A Mexican: Are Donkey
Shows Really A Thing in Mexico?” OC Weekly, October 16, 2014, available online at: https://ocweekly.com/ask-a-
mexican-are-donkey-shows-really-a-thing-in-mexico-6432071/; accessed January 20, 2019.
38
Martinez, “Baring Identities,” 197.
17
into one. Thus, reading the piñata as a zonkey allows for the possibility of a reading located in
fantasy and artifice rather than one entrenched in the narrative of the sexualized donkey show.
For the purposes of this paper, I will proceed in calling the piñata a z/donkey to gesture towards
the possibility of multilayered meanings.
As Ibarra proceeds with the act, it is very clear the z/donkey is here to be dominated.
Whipping her riding crop once more, she circles around the piñata as if it is her client while
pointing at it. Suddenly, she turns to the audience in disapproval, wagging her finger in the air
(Figure 3). As a viewer, you tend to rely on every cue Ibarra gives you in order to understand the
narrative as it begins to unfold. In keeping with the traditions of burlesque, performers of neo-
burlesque usually remain silent during their act, instead relying on body language and
pantomime to communicate their intentions. With gritted teeth and a furled lip, she begins to
stretch excessively, preparing for what we expected all along: a spanking. Using the riding crop,
Ibarra hits the piñata, small pieces of tissue-paper flying off with each lash. Whenever she pulls
back from a blow, she turns to the audience and sways her hips—her teeth still gritted, and her
lip still furled. When the spanking proves to not be enough, she kneels down to speak with her
z/donkey “client,” gesturing in absolute shock and rejection of what is seemingly being requested
of her.
At this point the conversation (and sexual tension) is not only between the z/donkey and
its dominatrix but between her and the spectators as well. Performance scholar Jacki Willson
points out that a key component of neo-burlesque’s subversive potential lies on the presence of
irony and the performer’s direct address of the audience with “a wink, a nudge and a ‘knowing’
18
smile.”
39
After listening to the piñata once more, Ibarra thus turns to the audience, shrugs, and
signals that she will do it for the money anyway—y se persigna.
40

Centerstage, she slowly peels away her long, satin glove, revealing a white, latex glove
underneath. Turning her attention back to her client, Ibarra lifts the z/donkey’s tissue tail, slowly
nodding at the audience as if to say, “Watch this.” Spectators by now have caught on to what will
be happening (and they love it—cheering and clapping loudly). Inserting two fingers into her
mouth at first, she then proceeds to briefly finger the z/donkey, thrusting seductively inside its
rear. Lifting her hand up in triumph as the crowd goes wild, she signals the addition of a third
finger, which she then licks and inserts into the z/donkey, thrusting still. But that’s not all—
lifting her hand once more, she begins to count up to four fingers, stopping to shake her head,
and signaling five. Pretending to spit all over her closed fist, she then swings her arm into
position (those familiar with the genre will note that the flexing biceps are a perfect lucha pose)
and gives the z/donkey a final fisting. For her finishing move, and here I mean that in the context
of both wrestling and sex, Ibarra twists her hand inside the z/donkey to grab a fistful of the
hidden candy—tossing the candy-ejaculate into the crowd with a big smile. Ibarra’s smile
somehow signals the Dominatrix of the Barrio performance is over since it dispels the character
of the once grimacing dominatrix, and yet, as she takes centerstage and people begin to clap, she
returns to the luchadora persona, grunting as she flexes for the crowd. This tough demeanor is
immediately replaced again by the former more playful persona of the burlesque performer when
she turns around and lifts her ass up and down with her hands, peering over her shoulder with
another smile. As she exits the stage, Ibarra waves and blows a kiss into the crowd, completing a
perfect cabaret exit.

39
Jacki Willson, The Happy Stripper: Pleasures and Politics of the New Burlesque (London and New York: Tauis
Press, 2008), 172.
40
Meaning she makes the sign of the cross (señal de la cruz), but there is no single word that encompasses this
action verb in English.
19
Throughout the performance, Lalo Guerrero’s “Los Chucos Suaves” plays, a pachuco
song that tells the story of the changing times from mainstream white American culture and
dance (swing, jitterbug) to a Latinx/Chicanx culture and dance (rumba, guaracha). As the title
suggests, this change is tied to the influential style and coolness of los chucos suaves, or the cool
pachucos, in places like El Paso and Los Angeles.
41
Pachucos are often stereotyped as Mexican
American gang members that wear zoot suits and ride lowriders, however, a more accurate
description would be to describe them as part of as a subculture of the 1940s and ‘50s. Pachuco
culture is not monolith and a lot of attributes such as dress and dialect varied between El Paso
and Los Angeles.
42
In “Pachucos: Not Just Mexican-American Males or Juvenile Delinquents,”
Gerardo Licón retells some of the history of pachuco culture in the United States, stating in
conclusion, “[p]achuco culture is often represented by a definition that omits its complexities.
Pachucos did not wear a uniform. The zoot suits they wore were not identical… Participants of
pachuco culture were not just male, youth, Mexican American, or juvenile delinquents. Pachuco
culture is not static.”
43

In the 1950s, Guerrero’s lyrics often addressed social and political issues, particularly
regarding the significance of Mexican American culture.
44
This socio-political subtext is likely
missed in the performance by most American audience members (even Spanish-speaking Latinxs
and Chicanxs who know of Guerrero’s music), as about a minute into the performance/song,
there is a musical breakdown and by the time the next verse starts, Ibarra has moved onto
spanking and fingering the z/donkey, causing an uproar that leaves the rest of the lyrics

41
For more information on pachuco culture and style with a particular emphasis on Los Angeles and the 1943 Zoot
Suit Riots, see Tastemakers & Earthshakers: Notes from Los Angeles Youth Culture, 1943 – 2016, an exhibition
organized by the Vincent Price Art Museum that was on view from October 15, 2016 to February 25, 2017; the
museum partnered with KCET, a non-profit news organization, on a series of articles that were published online at:
https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/projects/tastemakers-earthshakers; accessed December 10, 2018.
42
Gerardo Licón, “Pachucos: Not Just Mexican-American Males or Juvenile Delinquents,” KCET, February 8,
2017, https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/the-history-of-pachuco-culture; accessed December 10, 2018.
43
Ibid.
44
NEA National Heritage Fellowships, Eduardo “Lalo” Guerrero Bio, available online at:
https://www.arts.gov/honors/heritage/fellows/eduardo-lalo-guerrero; accessed November 24, 2018.
20
incomprehensible. Aside from audience members’ probable inability to fully hear or comprehend
the words to Guerrero’s song, their possible unfamiliarity with not only Guerrero, and what his
music represents and means to Mexican Americans and Chicanx people, but also their general
unfamiliarity with Mexicanidad is one of the many reasons why audience members do not
engage with Dominatrix of the Barrio beyond surface readings of what could be considered
visually apparent from Ibarra’s body (i.e., gender and ethnicity).
From Ibarra’s experience, she senses that generally white audience members see an
attractive woman on stage doing something out of the norm in burlesque by way of cultural,
racial, and ethnic symbols that represent Mexicanidad and think of it as entertaining, sexy, and/or
disgusting—yet sometimes the symbols meant to represent the specificity of Mexicanidad may
be distorted into an “undifferentiated mass” of Latinx performance.
45
This misattribution or
disregard for the specificity of Mexicanidad is emblematic of viewers’ unfamiliarity with
Chicanx iconography, queer Latinidad (but more specifically queer Mexicanidad which presents
itself very differently from other presentations of queerness in the United States), and/or
racialized gender, which is symptomatic of a larger problem. The reasons for this lack of
specificity are twofold: as Martinez writes on early burlesque, the practice “openly critiqued
politics, class, and even gender, commonly featuring women in drag” and yet “it remained
uncritical of the attitudes toward people of color held by white spectators, who were the primary
audiences of these shows.”
46
Not only is this true of the performers at the time such as in the case
of Lydia Thompson, English dancer and sex symbol of the Victorian era, who is notably
accompanied by a character in blackface named Friday in promotional photos for her first U.S.
tour in 1868, but also of the commentators, historians, and scholars working on writing about the

45
Ibarra, “Interview with La Chica Boom.”
46
Martinez, “Baring Identities,” 189.
21
empowering, feminist qualities of burlesque.
47
So while early forms of burlesque were
characterized by their humor, satire, and political commentary, they mainly focused on critiquing
class and gender inequality, failing to take into account other various identity markers such as
race, ethnicity, nationality, citizenship, faith, and sexuality. Neo-burlesque performers attempt to
apprehend this by interjecting highly intersectional, socio-political commentary into their acts,
though that work is mainly left to queer women of color who often times do not receive as much
attention as their white counterparts and are subsequently billed less often.
48
This racially hostile
environment is what has prompted Ibarra and other queer women of color to organize and
community build, founding, in 2007, the Kaleidoscope festival in Seattle and Brown Girls
Burlesque (BGB), a troupe based out of New York that was founded by Miss Aurora BoobRealis
and Maya Haynes-Warren. The apparent difficulty to integrate queer women of color’s practices
into mainstream, white neo-burlesque shows continues to discourage the acknowledgement of
the specificity of cultural, racial, or ethnic symbols as nonwhite performers and their acts tend to
be lumped together and categorized as other. In the end, we are left with a history that is racist
and a present that continues to exoticize and use difference as defined through the body (and not
its specificity to culture among a vast variety of identifications) to statically define the Other.
Though her performances of excess, Ibarra set out to challenge willful misreadings of the
specificity, complexity, and heterogeneity of Mexicanidad but was instead faced with a
decolonial failure.
49
This failure to decolonize and be engaged with critically by her audiences

47
Of those commentators, historian Robert C. Allen, who wrote Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American
Culture (1991) which is one of the most comprehensive surveys of burlesque, and performance scholar Jacki
Willson, who wrote The Happy Stripper: Pleasures and Politics of the New Burlesque (2008) and is cited earlier in
this paper, have repeatedly ignored the blatant racism in the field. Ibid.
48
In a personal conversation with neo-burlesque performer RedBone, who is now the emcee of Red Hots
Burlesque’s weekly show in San Francisco, she spoke to me about the responsibility hosts or emcees have in
promoting more queer performers of color. Even as queer woman of color herself, RedBone admits she does not
search for new talent, often allowing for more well-known, white performers to be routinely hired for the weekly
show. Personal communication between performer and author, July 25, 2018.
49
Patel, in the essay I cite earlier, coined the term “decolonial failure” in relation to Ibarra’s spictacles; Patel, “La
Chica Boom’s Failed, Decolonial Spictacles.”
22
occurred for various reasons (some more apparently inevitable than others), with the most
directly impactful, while also most uncontrollable, being in regard to audience members’
relationship with the works as well as with Ibarra. Writing about Two Undiscovered Amerindians
Visit… (1992-3), her reverse-ethnographic performance with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Coco
Fusco states that when viewers are faced with unexpected encounters and forced to undergo their
own process of reflection, their “defense mechanisms are less likely to operate with their normal
efficiency; caught off guard, their beliefs are more likely to rise to the surface.”
50
These beliefs,
with the possibility of them being sexist, homophobic, and Mexiphobic in the case of both
Gómez-Peña/Fusco and Ibarra, are likely to be misinformed. Not only are viewers foreseeably
ignorant of a number of key aspects in relation to the Dominatrix of the Barrio performance such
as Ibarra and her personal background, the motives going into the performance, and the
iconography being constantly referenced, they are also likely not able to deconstruct the layers of
complexity Ibarra effectively adds to her spictacles by conflating various symbols and references
without at least first being primed to do so. In the case of Ibarra’s spictacles, this performance of
excess does not easily reveal itself to viewers without them having at first an access point where
they hold previous knowledge.
However, prior knowledge should not be a prerequisite to understanding Ibarra’s
Dominatrix of the Barrio as a performance that lies between fact and fiction, as a performance
that should be engaged with thoughtfully. If we are to believe that this palimpsest of culturally-
specific symbolism is too obscure or complex for the typical audience member to comprehend,
insofar as that is someone who attends burlesque shows regularly and is familiar with the
practice, then how would it ever be possible for the performance to undermine the Mexiphobic
gaze? Is this decolonial act then only reserved for a knowing audience who is aware of the

50
Coco Fusco, “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” TDR 38, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 148.
23
implications of the performance and their role within it? In an interview conducted by Emmaly
Wiederholt after Ibarra’s F*ck My Life (FML) performance, she asks Ibarra if she would change
her work if she performed in places such as Utah—under the presumption that people who live in
Utah would generally not be very sympathetic to openly expressed homosexuality or aspects of
Mexican culture. Ibarra’s response was that she would not change the work at all, particularly
when she does not have any evidence that Utah is less sympathetic to queer Mexicanidad. She
states:
However, I do have evidence that California has a serious case of Mexiphobia.
Utah citizens were not responsible for the lynching of over 100 Mexicans during
the California Gold Rush; Utah was not responsible for gathering thousands of
servicemen and citizens in a planned attack of young Chicano and Black zuit-
suiters [artist’s spelling]; Utah was not responsible for segregating Mexican
children into separate public school systems; and it was not responsible for prop
187 (Save Our State (from Mexicans) Initiative), Secure Communities Initiative,
and finally Utah did not deny basic labor protections to domestic workers for
years. Let’s be clear, California is not utopia for queer or straight
Chicanos/Mexicans/Mexican-Americans.
51

Ibarra raises an important point that in 2019 could not be more pertinent. The image of
California or other like-minded “progressive states” being queer utopias is a complete
misrepresentation of the discriminatory and dangerous reality faced by queer members of low-
income communities of color in these areas and all over the United States.
52
In part, at fault for

51
Xandra Ibarra, “An Interview with Seth Eisen and Xandra Ibarra,” interview by Emmaly Wiederholt, Stance on
Dance, September 24, 2012, available online at: http://stanceondance.com/2012/09/24/an-interview-with-seth-eisen-
and-xandra-ibarra/; accessed November 10, 2018.
52
According to research done by the Advancement Project California, a civil rights organization looking to end
racial disparity (referring to unequal treatment on the basis of race) throughout California, people of color residing
in areas known to have liberal social and economic policies are most negatively impacted by key issues like crime
24
the lack of public institutions and policies that address racial inequity among other things is the
state of our identity politics and coalition formations in which certain aspects of identification are
foregrounded and separated in a single determinant model of identity that leaves us with
narratives that are exclusionary—one being the Bay Area as a progressive, queer haven, which
disregards the lived experience of often low-income, people of color. This is important in regard
to Ibarra’s performance practice as she has been part of and has worked with these very
communities since the beginning of her adult life. Thinking of California as an already-
progressive-enough state affects the reception of her work as it instills in viewers (and anyone
who subsequently engages with Ibarra’s work post-performance) the idea that they are saved
from participating in any discriminatory ideologies. In addition, following the belief that in order
to be received better by diverse audiences Ibarra should be less specific and less excessive
promotes the same sensibilities present in the NEH’s rejection of funding for the CARA
exhibition.
Central to the success of neo-burlesque is the implication of the spectator in the sexual
spectacle, yet such a transgression is proven to be impossible for Ibarra as she remains radically
othered by way of her brown body and performed identities. As Fusco argues in relation to her
experience with Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit…, the construction of ethnic Otherness is
“essentially performative and located in the body.”
53
Performances such as Two Undiscovered
Amerindians Visit… and Dominatrix of the Barrio reveal the inclination of viewers, spectators,
and people in general to think of identity as visually apparent and identifiable. But, as Phelan
reminds us, identities are not exclusively constructed through our bodies or our names or

and justice, economic opportunity, education, health care access, and housing. The Bay Area is responsible for the
most dramatic gaps with Marin ranking first out of all 56 counties, followed closely by Alameda and San Francisco
as fourth and fifth respectively. Advancement Project California, RACE COUNTS, racecounts.org, 2017.
53
Ibid., 149.
25
anything else that can be seen or heard. Identities are constructed through our relationality and
difference, which is not always necessarily visually apparent.
Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit… and Dominatrix of the Barrio share central
similarities, in particular how viewers question or reflect on the work in terms of authenticity and
fact or fiction. In the case of Gómez-Peña and Fusco, they were often questioned regarding their
“authenticity” as supposed natives of the fictional island of Guatinau by those who were
skeptical of their performance as a real-life ethnographic display. Many focused on the color of
their skin, complaining they were too light-skinned, and for it to be really believable Gómez-
Peña and Fusco needed to be “really dark.”
54
Viewers’ doubts reveal and reinforce the notion
that the body can communicate clearly a person’s “authentic” identity. Additionally, fixations on
Gómez-Peña and Fusco’s skin reifies stereotypes about the “noble savage” that above all are
clearly anti-black.
55
Fusco notes that stereotypes have been analyzed relentlessly for decades but,
as her experiences suggests, there is a deep-rooted investment in them that will not allow for
stereotypes to disappear. She states, “[t]he constant concern about our ‘realness’ revealed a need
for reassurance that a ‘true primitive’ did exist…and that s/he be visually identifiable.”
56

When Ibarra performed as La Chica Boom, she received similar criticism regarding the
“authenticity” of her Mexican-ness. In an email thread with Patel, Ibarra expresses her awareness
of how her spictacles might reinscribe the same stereotypes she attempts to dismantle. In one
occasion, a viewer responded to her performance by commenting directly to her: “I can’t believe
you are Mexican…but then again your J-Lo ass gives it away.”
57
According to Ibarra, her “ass
seems to function as an identifying racial/sexual marker for colonial onlookers.”
58
In cases such

54
Ibid., 162.
55
One may think here of this in relation to the 19
th
century narrative of “The White Man’s Burden” and how through
colonialization the white man sought to eradicate blackness.
56
Fusco, “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” 153.
57
Patel, “La Chica Boom’s Failed, Decolonial Spictacles.”
58
Ibid.
26
as these, audience members subsequently assume dominant roles, imposing a colonizing gaze
when faced with the alterity of someone unlike them. As Diana Taylor writes on colonialist
discourse in regard to the drama of discovery and the display of native bodies, “[t]he native is the
show; the civilized observer is the privileged spectator. The objectified, ‘primitive’ body exists,
isolated and removed.”
59
Here, there is no radical interdependence with the other, no
intersubjectivity, only a Master-Slave dialectic.
While expectations for engagement are never explicitly stated by Ibarra or the marketing
done during her time as La Chica Boom, even in the case of there being a knowing-viewer in the
audience who is familiar with Ibarra, her practice, and her motive, viewers will still take up the
colonizing role as a spectator if they are not keenly aware of their intersubjectivity and their
interdependent relationship with Ibarra. Ironically enough, in Ibarra’s performance of
Dominatrix of the Barrio, she is the one apparently meant to be in control as she plays the role of
the dominatrix, yet her sexual power is (as her own gestures convey) completely unrealized.
Rather than the spectator being the one who arrives to a vulnerable position as they sink into a
sexual fantasy, they either remain in power or access newfound power, viewing Ibarra as
performing in a donkey show. Even ensuring a level of representation and visibility within a
convivial space would not stop this power dynamic from occurring, though such a strategy may
mitigate failure for some time before it ultimately became apparent that sustainability cannot be
afforded in this type of decolonial project without first explicitly challenging the way audiences
view identity formation. To quote Christina León, in the end, Ibarra’s spictacles were “an
endurance performance that could no longer be endured.”
60

59
Diana Taylor, “A Savage Performance: Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco’s ‘Couple in the Cage’,” TDR 42,
no. 2 (Summer 1998): 163.
60
Christina A. León, “Forms of Opacity: Roaches, Blood, and Being Stuck in Xandra Ibarra’s Corpus,”
ASAP/Journal 2, no. 2 (May 2017): 373.
27
Close attention to Ibarra’s work allows me to assert that the type of feminine “drag” as
described by Werner and Martinez is not just the exaggeration of femininity (and certainly not
only done through gender inversion in a binary sense) but also an allegorical reveal of a hidden
socio-political meaning that goes beyond gender and sexuality as isolated aspects of identity.
Through the exaggeration/drag of femininity, what is revealed can be patriarchal standards for
femininity and sexuality—all of which read and are experienced in particular ways in relation to
the perceived race/ethnic/class identifications of the body in question. In the case of La Chica
Boom, then, the allegory rests in the exaggerated ethnic and cultural markers she utilizes—
piñatas, lucha libre masks, Chicanx music to name a few from Dominatrix of the Barrio—and
the capacity of these markers to symbolize or evoke Mexican/Chicanx identities, which is likely
why Ibarra calls her performances ethnic drag. Ibarra has stated that it is through this
performance of ethnic drag, by camping and queering Mexican and Chicanx iconography, that
La Chica Boom communicates her identification.
61

Returning to Barthes’ writing on the grandiloquence of theater and wrestling, the use of
basic signs like props and gestures all come together to create “a complicated set of signs meant
to make the public understand”
62
that “nothing exists except in the absolute, there is no symbol,
no allusion, everything is presented exhaustively.”
63
For Barthes, that is the beauty of
wrestling—it is an excessive spectacle that proposes a perfect understanding of things like
Nature, Good, and Evil. While Ibarra’s spictacles are the opposite as they present an excessive
spectacle that complicates perfect understandings of Mexicanidad among other things, the
spictacles also function under the same sign system, utilizing basic signs to question, call

61
Xandra Ibarra, “This is What a Lesbian Looks Like: Xandra Ibarra aka La Chica Boom,” interview by Rachel
Shatto, Curve Magazine, May 17, 2011, available online at: http://www.curvemag.com/Curve-Magazine/Web-
Articles-2011/This-is-What-a-Lesbian-Looks-Like-Xandra-Ibarra-aka-La-Chica-Boom/; accessed November 10,
2018.
62
Barthes, Mythologies, 14.
63
Ibid., 23.
28
attention to, and (re)create meaning. But most notably, unlike the wrestlers whose purpose is to
be entirely transparent, La Chica Boom’s “highly choreographed form of (camp and burlesque)
ethnic drag,” to return to the words of León, was never meant to be taken as an ideal reality.
64

Far from it, Ibarra’s ethnic drag was very much intended as a decolonial project with a challenge
to undermine these exact notions of transparent identities.
To viewers, Ibarra’s La Chica Boom was all surface—there was nothing more to know
about her that they did not already know from what they saw. Similarly, to Gómez-Peña and
Fusco’s experience as the couple in a cage, Ibarra’s identity seemed to be communicated and
understood through her body and chosen signifiers no matter the level of artifice or how absurd
their use as empirical proof of Mexicanidad was. Regarding Gómez-Peña and Fusco’s
performance, Taylor states, that there was “no more interiority to their performance of the
stereotype than in the stereotype itself and nothing to know, it seemed, that was not readily
available to the viewing eye.”
65

64
León, “Forms of Opacity,” 371.
65
Taylor, “A Savage Performance,” 164.
29
III. TORTILLERA
In 2013, Brown Girls Burlesque (BGB) presented their first BGB ALL-STARS Show,
“She's A-Shake-A-Ning!,” featuring performers Jeez Louez, Sophie Sucre, Essence Revealed,
jazabel jade, Josephine Belle, Chicava HoneyChild, and La Chica Boom. Their three-city tour,
which had stops in Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and New York City, aimed to give burlesque
performers of color from all over the United States a platform by joining them all on one stage.
BGB is based on the understanding that the performers are not only self-identified women of
color but are also engaging in similar discourses surrounding race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality,
which is actively integrated into their neo-burlesque practices. As Chicava HoneyChild, current
leader of BGB since 2008, states, “women of color is self-defined, so it’s not about what you
might visibly see in the determination of their color and ethnicity, it’s about how she sees
herself.”
66
By foregrounding self-identification, BGB radically differs in terms of collective
formation from other troupes around the United States. For example, Red Hots Burlesque
(RHB), another troupe that Ibarra has been a part of, states their mission is to be inclusive, so
spectators can expect “drag, comedy, striptease, sideshow, circus from folks of every gender,
size, race, performance style and country… You will never see the same show twice!”
67
While
claiming to be inclusive, RHB is actually foregrounding the burlesque show as a spectacle of
entertainment instead of the diversity of the performers and the discourses they are engaging in.
Throughout the BGB tour, Ibarra performed her Tortillera (2004) spictacle, a
performance that plays on the term tortillera, meaning a woman who makes tortillas, and the
derogatory Mexican slang for a lesbian. This double valiance continues the already present

66
evilolive3000, “BROWN GIRLS BURLESQUE the BGB All-Stars Tour,” YouTube video, 4:16, March 29, 2013,
https://youtu.be/exHy2wzJNLE; accessed January 29, 2019.
67
“About the Red Hots,” Red Hots Burlesque, accessed January 29, 2019, http://redhotsburlesque.com/about-the-
red-hots/.
30
theme of complicating and bursting Mexican terminology and iconography. For my analysis, I
will focus on the New York performance that took place at Joe’s Pub on March 23, 2013.
68

Dressed as a cantina worker, Ibarra steps on stage to the tune of “El Mosquito” by Los
Mex Pistols Del Norte, an early 2000s punk rock band based out of Eugene, Oregon that mixes
mariachi, norteño, surf, and torero music. Their name is an assemblage of 1970s English punk
rock royalty, the Sex Pistols, and del norte, an added moniker used by groups in their names to
describe their affiliation to musica norteña, a genre related to polka and corridos that originates
from the northern region of Mexico by way of German migrant workers and local Mexican
musicians.
69
Torero music, as one can imagine, refers to the genre of music that accompanies a
torero during his match with the bull; it is anthemic, instrumental music meant to choreograph
and underscore their encounter. By utilizing music that is emblematic of bullfighting, La Chica
Boom’s entrance is turned into a high-energy invitation to cheer and clap. “El Mosquito” brings
forward this unique mixture of genres, further complicating the ways one may stereotypically
think of categorizing and labeling music originating from Mexico. Additionally, this odd
agglomeration of genres camps and reveals the “impurity” of their various labels; for example,
musica norteña is thought of as emblematic of Northern Mexico and Southwestern states such as
Texas, yet it derives from a mix of influences.
In Tortillera, Ibarra dons a green, full-skirted dress that has been bedazzled and covered
with rhinestones as customary of burlesque, so that with each move and twirl the sparkles reflect
off the stage lights. Her skirt is complimented by a red apron that is tied around her waist and has
a red and white gingham fabric atop, representing the colors of the Mexican flag while also
giving the illusion that La Chica Boom is as domesticated as a 1950s white, American
housewife. Ibarra’s long, wavy black hair is swept to one side, gathered into a voluminous

68
The footage was kindly provided by Ibarra.
69
Popular norteño artists that utilize del norte in their name include Los Tigres del Norte, Los Huracanes del Norte,
and Los Rieleros del Norte.
31
cascade that balances the two large, red roses topping her head. Unlike in Dominatrix of the
Barrio, here viewers fully see Ibarra’s face and so her makeup, too, is sparkly and over the top—
her lips, red and glittery, are overlined and her eyebrows are drawn much higher than usual,
connoting a striking appearance that is both at once sexy and alarming.
Ibarra begins her act with a vivacious smile, pulling out a glittery fabric rectangle from
under her arm that she first shows to the audience and then begins to unfold, each unfolding
becoming a moment to strike a seductive pose before finally placing it atop a small, round table.
Choreographing each action to the rhythm of the music, she sweeps the tabletop clean with her
hand like a waitress would, but as she presents the clean table to the audience, her once vivacious
smile is replaced by a grimace, but only momentarily. Soon after, she returns to her formerly
effervescent character and begins to trot around the table in a dance where she holds her center
with one hand and lifts the other to the height of her head, the angularity of it reading like a
Mexican version of J. Howard Miller’s We Can Do It! wartime poster depicting Rosie the
Riveter’s flexing biceps. Ibarra’s Tortillera dance shares similarities with the traditional Spanish
dance called La Jota, where a couple will jump and dance with their arms up. Additionally, jota
in Mexican slang translates to lesbian, so by complicating the understanding of this Spanish
dance with her own sexual orientation, Ibarra is queering the dance as she then performs without
a male partner.
Continuing with her performance, Ibarra suddenly stops dancing and returns to work,
pulling a small corn tortilla out of her apron which she then begins to flip back and forth between
her hands, going through the same motions as a tortillera would. However, she is not smiling
anymore—she is grimacing again, exhausted and fed up with the routine of making tortillas by
hand (Figure 4). Angrily, she slaps the tortilla down on the table, and immediately her smile
returns. Through this humorous and campy performance of the tortillera, Ibarra is challenging
32
audience members’ expectations of not only the ways burlesque performers should act
(enthusiastic, lighthearted, and sultry) but also underscoring the domestic roles prescribed to
Mexican women. She continues dancing until she has to repeat the process of making another
tortilla. This attention to humor and camp is important in Ibarra’s spictacles, particularly
Tortillera, and relies heavily on the viewers’ ability to read the comedic (as well as the critical!)
into the performance.
Now, halfway through the performance, she begins her striptease. Feigning confusion,
Ibarra struggles to pull a pair of red panties from under her dress—this gesture is both hilarious
and exciting as the promise of nudity draws near. Spectators shout “woo” as she places them
inside one of her tortillas, kissing and sucking the tips of her fingers to convey how delicious the
panty-taco is. Ibarra then removes a second green pair, but before placing them on the second
tortilla, she smells them and with disgusted surprise, se persigna once again. This representation
of religion in Tortillera and Dominatrix of the Barrio as one of the cultural markers that signifies
Mexicanidad effectively communicates how European influences such as Catholicism, due to
colonialism, are just a part of Mexicanidad as anything else. Coupled by the use of torero music
and la jota dance, the addition of Spanish culture and influence complicates any superficial
reading of Mexicanidad, while also highlighting the ever-present fact that Ibarra navigates the
world through a brown, colonized body.
After removing two pairs of undergarments, Ibarra has yet to reveal any flesh. At last, in
a sultry and provocative manner, she removes her apron and spins it around, teasing the audience
while they wait for more. As the music comes to a finish, she gives the audience her back,
peering over her shoulder with a smile before ripping the dress open and tossing it aside.
Spectators cheer and clap, and as someone begins to jeer at her, she raises her hand and voice,
commanding, “Shut up!” This elicits laughter from the spectators that grows as the background
33
music for the second portion of the act comes on: 2001: A Space Odyssey’s theme song.
70
The
use of this well-known song camps up the already campy performance by blending what could
be considered high culture (Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, now viewed as a classic) with low
culture (burlesque and the performance to follow).
Theatrically, Ibarra stands at the center of the stage, her arms spread open and her back
still turned and completely bare save for a couple of black straps that define her torso and upper
thighs. At the sound of the trumpet, she dramatically turns, her lips furled as she paces around as
if on the prowl. Choreographed to the bass drums, she rapidly twirls her nipple tassels for the
audience, drawing cheers and claps. Now visible, she is wearing a shelf bra that exposes her
breasts, which are adorned with nipple tassels, as well as a smaller, black (and sparkly) apron,
that she proceeds to untie and hold above her crotch area, bouncing the fabric up and down as the
music heightens. Forcefully, she throws the apron aside, revealing to the audience her Tapatío
hot sauce cock.
Strapped on, she bounces the Tapatío cock to the sound of the drums, her facial
expressions communicating a powerful sex appeal. Now, to the sound of audience members’
cheers and laughs, Ibarra uncaps the bottle, tosses the small cap towards the audience, and begins
to “ejaculate” all over the panty-tacos by stroking the bottle as hot sauce pours out. The
performance is glorious as it is accompanied by horns and trumpets (and audience claps); and
Ibarra’s poses highlight the grandeur, smiling for the camera as photos are being snapped with
her arm behind her head or leaving her mouth agape as she attempts to seduce viewers with her
sexual act. As previously seen in her performance, this character full of sexual power and
intimidation is dispelled as she begins to hysterically jerk at the bottle with both hands,
continuously camping up the once seriously sexual performance into a more humorous act. In the

70
The song was remade in 1968 by Alex North for the film’s soundtrack. The original score was composed by
Richard Strauss in 1896 and was titled “Also sprach Zarathustra, no. 30” or Thus Spoke Zarathustra, inspired by
Nietzsche’s novel of the same name.
34
end, she wipes the tip of her Tapatío cock, grabs a taco in each hand, and approaches the
audience with a final smile, posing for them with her arms raised high. She then bows her head,
sets the tacos down, and licks the palm of her hand before exiting.
71

Léon states that Ibarra’s performances of camped up, ethnic drag provided for many “the
textured play with power, pain, and pleasure that camp so often affords, while also decentering
the gay white masculinity it so often seems to serve.”
72
But rather than viewing the spictacles as
camp, white audience members “often responded to them as an invitation to jeer and sling racist
and sexualized slurs to the artist” during or after the performances.
73
Ibarra’s efforts for her
spictacles to achieve a form of decolonialization through their camp, by exposing the absurdity
and colonial prejudice of stereotypes, instead yielded unproductive results. As Léon argues, the
spictacles are considered failures “to the extent that they opened up rather than dismantled the
audience’s complicity with the hyperbolic racism of her spictacles.”
74

Thus, the failure in the spictacles rests in the inability of audience members to read her
strategic use of camp as an aesthetic sensibility that reappropriates or reperforms aspects of
dominant culture in an excessive and/or artificial way. Ibarra states, it “fails because it is read
and embodied as reality by my (white) audiences.”
75
I would add that, while white audience
members may likely be the main perpetrators of this sensibility, all audiences alike, regardless of
race or ethnicity, are able to and often do reiterate and enact colonialist rhetoric. The inability to
engage critically with the works rests outside of the viewer’s personal race or ethnicity; it has
much more to do with the ways in which viewers engage with minoritarian art than with the
viewers’ own identities. In order for audience members to recognize the performance and

71
In previous performances of Tortillera, Ibarra has actually bitten into the tortillas. This form of consumption as
part of her practice is what has inspired Iván Ramos to write on Ibarra’s “gustatory aesthetics.” See Iván A. Ramos,
“Spic(y) Appropriations: The Gustatory Aesthetics of Xandra Ibarra (aka La Chica Boom),” ARARA: Art and
Architecture of the Americas 12 (2016): 1-18.
72
Léon, “Forms of Opacity,” 369.
73
Ibid.
74
Ibid., 371.
75
Ibarra, “An Interview with Seth Eisen and Xandra Ibarra.”
35
enactment of camp as camp they should first be able to engage with minoritarian art outside of
monolithic readings that revolve around ethnic representation. This would require not only an
intersectional understanding of identity as well as an understanding that being is relational and
interdependent, but also an acknowledgement of the theatricality of performing the self and all
its identifications.
General inability to recognize camp as camp (and not reality) when performed by a
brown, queer, femme body is perhaps one of the most shocking aspects of Ibarra’s failed,
decolonial spictacles. “Camp,” as noted by Susan Sontag in her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp’,”
“sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’
To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role.”
76
The
iconography Ibarra utilizes and the signifiers she exaggerates are not Mexican, they are
“Mexican,” insofar as Mexicanidad cannot be statically defined. By placing ethnic-racialized
identities and their stereotypes in quotation marks, Ibarra effectively highlights how being is as-
playing-a-role through her performances of ethnic and racial camp.
In “RACIAL CAMP in The Producers and Bamboozled,” Susan Gubar writes how
performances of racial camp reveal that less conscious performances of race “off stage are just as
scripted as more contrived performances on stage,” substantially multiplying “until reification
unmasks their ludicrous artifice as well as their weird staying power.”
77
Here we might want to
return to the words of Fusco in regard to the deep-rooted investment in stereotypes and question
how (or why) when the artifice and fictitiousness of racial categories is highlighted or illustrated
through camp, the theatricality of the performance is internalized by viewers as either not real
enough or as actual reality. By forgoing an understanding of camp as camp, viewers

76
Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1966), 520, iBooks; first eBook edition was published in 2013; essay originally published as “Notes on
‘Camp’,” The Partisan Review 34, no. 4 (Fall 1964): 515-30.
77
Susan Gubar, “RACIAL CAMP in The Producers and Bamboozled,” Film Quarterly 60, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 26.
36
subsequently reinforce a belief in the racist stereotypes being performed. As Taylor states
regarding Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit…, “[t]he degree to which some of the viewers
continued to disavow the marked theatricality of the performance attested to how deeply invested
they were in maintaining the colonial fantasy.”
78
This disavowal of the theatrical, which flaunts,
in the words of Taylor, its artifice, its constructedness—essentially its camp—is similarly seen in
the reception of Ibarra’s spictacles.
79

The perceived reification of debilitating stereotypes, as mentioned previously, is often
blamed on performers of racial camp as it is thought that through their performances of excess or
camp, they are seemingly reinscribing the same stereotypes they challenge. Gubar goes on to
write that practitioners of racial camp “thumb their noses at any serious positing of racial or
sexual, ethnic or national difference,” which can be understood as a dismissal of any attempt to
statically define the self through constant difference (as opposed to relationality).
80
To those who
perform racial camp, it is meant to deflate the importance of what has been so magnified in terms
of identity politics. Yet, as Ibarra’s campy performance of Tortillera proves, it also
simultaneously inflates its importance, deflating and inflating until it bursts—the colonialist
fantasy and its reliance on the stereotype as a form of defining the other explodes once Ibarra
forces a number of these stereotypes to coexist together in exaggerated forms.
Camp, when enacted by Ibarra, turns into a strategic response to debilitating Mexiphobia
and homophobia and, as the late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz argues, camp is a “measured
response to the forced evacuation from dominant culture that the minority subject experiences,”
meaning camp is being utilized—perhaps even weaponized—by queer artists of color as a

78
Taylor, “A Savage Performance,” 168.
79
Taylor defines theatricality as “the aesthetic, political, and perspectival structures within which the characters are
positioned and perform their prescribed roles…It’s more about artistic framing or political bracketing than about
political agency…theatricality (like theatre) flaunts its artifice, its constructedness.” Ibid., 161.
80
Gubar, “RACIAL CAMP,” 36.
37
response to being systematically excluded from discussions of contemporary art.
81
Muñoz goes
on to state that it is a strategy that can “do positive identity-and community-affirming work.”
82

Despite Ibarra’s attempts to seek this through her exaggerated performances of excess and of
camp, her conflations of excess were met with resistance and misunderstanding. In describing
“the drama that is staged” in Screen Test #2 (1965) by Andy Warhol, Ronald Tavel, and Mario
Montez, Muñoz states that he sees Montez and Tavel (who is off-screen) “performing a kind of
excess that is rich with agency.”
83
He further notes that this excess is “something that we can
preliminarily describe as camp.”
84
To this point, camp is defined by its excess, which can be
performed by or perceived in objects or people. As we know, camp flaunts its theatricality,
artifice, and constructedness. Camp is, as Sontag appropriately states, “life as theater.”
85
But
Ibarra’s camp—despite how well-crafted and performed it was in terms of its use of putting
stereotypes in quotes, exaggerating the artifice, and presenting its excess—often failed to be
recognized as such.
This failure seems to question whether camp can be considered camp when performed by
a brown, queer, femme body “outside of its usual cultural parameters,” as Muñoz has pointed
out.
86
But as Ibarra’s spictacles prove, regardless of the failure she experienced, camp can be
understood as a strategy of representation, of accomplishing important cultural critique, and most
importantly of enacting positive identity and community affirming work. For these reasons,
Ibarra’s performance begs to be recognized as camp. Camp is a deeply socio-political aesthetic
category and, when it is not mobilized as such, it renders itself obsolete.

81
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 128.
82
Ibid.
83
José Esteban Muñoz, “WISE LATINAS,” Criticism 56, no. 2 (2014): 258.
84
Ibid.
85
Muñoz would argue that camp is a performative move insofar as it derives from a mode of performativity. I,
however, argue camp is much more about theatricality than performativity. Diana Taylor distinguishes theatricality
and performativity compellingly in her essay “A Savage Performance,” cited earlier. Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’,”
520, iBooks.
86
Muñoz, Disidentifications, 120.
38
IV. F*CK MY LIFE
Discontent with her decolonial project, Ibarra staged the death of her burlesque persona
La Chica Boom with a theatrical performance entitled F*ck My Life (FML) (2012-3). In 2012,
after completing a summer-long artist residency at CounterPULSE in San Francisco, she
performed FML for eight nights in September over the course of two weeks. Under the direction
of Evan Johnson, San Francisco-based director and playwright, Ibarra performed before
audiences a 30-minute rendition of her most famous spictacles which included Tortillera,
Dominatrix of the Barrio, and Virgensota Jota (2006), concluding with a new performance as la
cucarachica—a term coined by Ibarra that combines the Spanish word for cockroach with la
chica, invoking the same ethnic-gendered baggage La Chica Boom carries. A year later, on July
14, 2013, Ibarra reperformed FML at The Wild Project, a theater and visual arts venue, for the
Fresh Fruit Festival, a New York City Department of Cultural Affairs funded summer arts
festival that celebrates and supports LGBTQ+ artists (Figure 5).
In a review of FML’s New York performance, Ángeles Donoso Macaya writes the
performance begins with a voiceover of an enthusiastic announcer who welcomes spectators to
the show.
87
The announcer’s tone of voice immediately pinpoints spectators to neo-burlesque,
stating:
Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the best show in the city […] no, the best
show in the universe! We got tits and ass […] It’s the real thing […] the hot
tamale, the spitfire, a south of the border delight! A spicy bean dip! She’s the

87
My analysis of FML is based off Donoso Macaya’s review as well as Patel’s essay, cited throughout. Since the
review is in Spanish, any translations of Donoso Macaya’s direct text are done by me. Ángeles Donoso Macaya,
“Fuck My Life (FML) por Xandra Ibarra,” e-misférica 11, no. 1 (2014),
http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/emisferica-111-decolonial-gesture/donoso.
39
most likely to end up on Star Trek… if Mexicans were to exist in the future! Her
favorite UNO card is… the green card! […]
88

Ibarra enters the stage in her Tortillera costume, effervescent as always, ready to perform
her spictacle. But before she begins, she addresses the audience in Spanish as if they were going
through the social niceties of a polite conversation: “¡Hola!” “Sííí muy bieeen,” “Jajajaaa,
síííí.”
89
But it is a one-sided conversation crafted by Ibarra that allows her to take charge in
shaping and positioning her audience members’ relationship with her. This relationship, as
exposed in FML, is one marked by their incompatibility, the burden of ethnic-racialized
representation, and the emotional toll that her performances as La Chica Boom have had on
her.
90
The unpleasantness of this relationship is suddenly expressed in Ibarra’s face as her smile
turns into a frozen grimace. She asks, “Who ordered tacos? I bet you did, pervert,” in reference
to her panty-tacos.
91

The set where she stands is a fabrication of a bathroom with black and white checkered
tiles, a sink, a bathtub, and toilet that has been fashioned into an altar for Lupe Vélez, the 1920s-
30s Mexican Hollywood actress who purportedly died with her head in the toilet after
committing suicide via a Seconal overdose. Vélez, one among many important references made
in FML, was known as “The Mexican Spitfire” or “The Hot Pepper” of Hollywood for her
leading roles in The Gaucho (1927), Lady of the Pavements (1928), and Wolf Song (1929). Not
only was she an actress, she was also a vedette (main, female dancer) in cabaret, closely linking
Ibarra’s practice of neo-burlesque with hers. In 1931, Dolores del Río, the first Mexican actress
to cross over to attain major Hollywood success and who was born to a wealthy, ruling class
family, turned down a role in The Broken Wing because she “refused to be depicted as a

88
Ibid.
89
Ibid.
90
Xandra Ibarra, F*ck My Life (FML), artist’s website, available at: http://www.xandraibarra.com/fml/; accessed
February 6, 2019.
91
Donoso Macaya, “Fuck My Life (FML) por Xandra Ibarra.”
40
‘cantinera’ (bartender).”
92
Vélez accepted the role instead. For years to come, del Río landed
roles where her white privilege favored her, whereas Vélez was stereotyped as a wild woman
with an even wilder suicide story. For these reasons, Ibarra feels a strong kinship with the latter
actress, writing in a blog post alongside a black-and-white photo of the actress and herself
(Figure 6), split down the middle to align each half of their face, “[a]lthough we do not fit
together but rather side by side, our independent existences interrupt time. You, a symptom of
the future, me, a symptom of the past.”
93

The relationship between La Chica Boom, Ibarra, and Vélez complicates normative time
structures, making the past the present as well as the present the past. This complication is
additionally heightened in FML by her reperformance of the spictacles in a way that marks them
as already in the past due to the difference in set and premise. Close analysis of Ibarra’s work
allows me to estimate that her practice is richly informed by such queer temporality per Freeman
theorization, and it should be analyzed and received as such, yet often discourse surrounding her
work is entrenched in the reception of her ethnic-racialized identities. Ibarra states, “the
hyperraciality of my work trumps the accompanied performance of hypersexuality/gender
because, to them [viewers], the performance of race erases all signs of gender and sexuality. In
fact, the performance of race exists in a vaccum [sic] to most of my audiences, separate from the
state, separate from gender, sexuality, and themselves. I become something other,
violently fragmented.”
94

With FML, Ibarra seeks to make clear how viewers are inextricably linked to the
performance of not just La Chica Boom but also of her self in everyday life, ultimately revealing

92
Alicia Arrizón, Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 34-
36.
93
Xandra Ibarra, artist’s Tumblr, available at: http://www.naftaputa.tumblr.com/post/70030284147/lupe-after-
throwing-a-extravagant-virgen-de; accessed September 27, 2018.
94
Xandra Ibarra, “Blog Salon #3 ‘Stuck with This’ by Xandra Ibarra,” The Off Center, December 6, 2012,
http://theoffcenter.org/2012/12/06/blog-salon-3-stuck-with-this-by-xandra-ibarra/; accessed July 19, 2018.
41
the ways in which this relationship failed her throughout her project. Her motive, she states, was
to “portray the colonial gaze as a damaging social structure.”
95
In order to implicate her viewers
further into the performance, she strategically embeds speakers into the audience, playing a
voiceover that draws on the racist, sexist, and homophobic reactions she has experienced
throughout her career as La Chica Boom. Some of the recordings played commented and
conveyed as much: “What the fuck?” / “Do the sombrero dance!” / “I am not drunk enough for
this” / “I can’t believe I paid to see this shit” / “¡Ay mamacita, mamacita!” / “Is this performance
art?” / “When do you think this show is going to be over? I don’t know, what time is it?” / “This
is not queer, nothing about this is queer, I am so confused.”
96

By confronting her viewers with these pre-recorded reactions, Ibarra attempts to re-
produce the racist ethos present in her previous performances while encouraging viewers to
rethink their relationship to her body/self and the ways their participation contributes to this same
ethos. As Donoso Macaya states, “el cinismo de estos comentarios en off nos lleva a asumir una
postura más crítica sobre nuestro rol como espectadores y consumidores” (the cynicism of this
commentary through voiceover brings us to assume a more critical position regarding our roles
as spectators and consumers).
97
Although such was the intent, FML similarly failed to
satisfactorily engage viewers in a critically self-reflexive way. Within the recorded comments,
audience members continued to jeer, their live responses becoming “derisive and commingled
with recorded ones; there was no simple recuperation of failure,” Patel states.
98

FML, per my estimation as well as Ibarra’s and the rest of the scholars cited here, is not a
queer, productive failure. Far from it, the failure to perform a decolonial gesture throughout her
project as La Chica Boom is summarized in FML—ending in her transformation into the

95
Ibarra, “An Interview with Seth Eisen and Xandra Ibarra.”
96
Donoso Macaya, “Fuck My Life (FML) por Xandra Ibarra.”
97
Ibid.
98
Patel, “La Chica Boom's Failed, Decolonial Spictacles.”
42
cockroach. By shedding La Chica Boom’s skin, a skin that has been exaggeratedly marked with
various identifications as explored here, she reveals the skin of a cockroach, the vermin feared
for its ability to infest and outlive almost anything. It is simultaneously a transformation,
meaning a dramatic change in appearance, and a molting insofar as she is shedding skin that will
be replaced by something that is relatively the same. This suggests that la cucarachica was
always her all along—brown, reviled, and full of endurance. Starkly different from her previous
spictacles, she is silent on stage, no music to choreograph her movements to.
99
As Ibarra
performs this molting on stage, she dresses in a giant cockroach headdress/costume that mainly
covers her breasts, leaving the rest of her body exposed for her to rub dirt all over her face and
body, dirtying her skin so as to embody her experience of racial abjection.
La Chica Boom’s transformation into a cucarachica theoretically marked the end of
Ibarra’s time as La Chica Boom. By shedding the exhausted skin of her neo-burlesque persona
(figuratively but also literally by way of striptease), Ibarra meant to come out of the performance
anew—albeit as a cockroach—leaving her failed, decolonial project in the past. However, even
when the spictacles series was over and Ibarra had performed (and reperformed) FML,
essentially marking the end to her burlesque character, she continued to perform spictacles under
the name La Chica Boom, which is why the performances of Dominatrix of the Barrio and
Tortillera that I analyze here are from 2014 and 2013 respectively. In fact, Ibarra’s spictacle
performances as La Chica Boom continued as late as 2016, when she performed for Red Hots
Burlesque on January 22, 2016 and OUTsider Festival on February 17, 2016. Rather than
pretending that the series came to a neat end, it is more productive to highlight the
inconsistencies in the relationship among La Chica Boom, the spictacles, and Ibarra’s neo-

99
In the tradition of burlesque, a song choice defines an act. At the end of FML, Ibarra chooses to forgo background
music. By doing so, she’s is strategically choosing to deconstruct the way neo-burlesque is presented and consumed.
43
burlesque performances as these point towards how this artistic project is intrinsically tied to her
personal life and cannot (and should not) be fully separated.
Patel astutely states that Ibarra’s bracketing of time from 2002 to 2012 for her spictacles
is “more of a convention to package work for art world consumption than a signal of some sort
of clean break towards what might be precariously termed post-decolonial work.”
100
The work of
decolonialization is never done; it is a Sisyphean task, as Patel writes, and so any hope of
actually achieving decolonialization will always fall flat. Ibarra’s intent to undermine and
challenge her viewers’ colonialist gaze, while at times perhaps affecting some viewers in the way
they relate to her, themselves, and Mexicanidad, would generally never succeed fully. Frustrated
and incapable of ridding herself of the disillusion and desperation she experienced, Ibarra closes
out FML with her cries. She exits the stage with her trunk case in hand for, unlike Vélez, she will
need to go on and navigate her life as a cucarachica.

100
Patel, “La Chica Boom's Failed, Decolonial Spictacles.”
44
X. CONCLUSION

The grotesque body…is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never
completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body.
101

— Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World

And yet, one feels compelled to ask: Are not all bodies beautiful and grotesque?
In flux and motion, yet at times morbidly static?...What Bakhtin argued—and
following him, what feminist cultural critics like Mary Russo in The Female
Grotesque (1995) argue—for the "grotesque" body (in all its cosmic, yet partial
and fragmented, gendered, sexualized, racialized, nationalized, and diasporized
forms), we argue…more broadly for corporeality itself.
102

— Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco, “Introduction: Performing Excess”

Ten years prior to publishing The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity, Mary
Russo published an article entitled “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” where she,
influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin’s writing on the carnivalesque and his provoking description of
the “senile, pregnant hag,” theorized the grotesque body through a particularly feminist lens.
Focusing on the idea of the spectacle, Russo writes on how making “a spectacle out of oneself
seemed a specifically feminine danger.”
103
Such a claim may read across as essentializing,
however, she goes on to write, “…in the everyday indicative world, women and their bodies,
certain bodies, in certain public framing, in certain public spaces, are always already

101
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 317.
102
Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco, “Introduction: Performing Excess,” Women & Performance: A
Journal of Feminist Theory 15, no. 2 (2005): 10-11.
103
Mary Russo, “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” in Feminist Studies / Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de
Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 213.
45
transgressive—dangerous, and in danger.”
104
It is certain bodies, when exposed or out in certain
public settings, that are made into spectacles and subsequently face danger while simultaneously
posing as dangerous to the so-called normative. Through various cultural constructions and
differences, bodies are figured and disfigured in violent or dangerous ways. And yet, as Braziel
and LeBesco argue in the epigraph to this conclusion, are not all bodies simultaneously beautiful
and grotesque? Corporeality, with all its “life-and-death-giving processes or movements of
eating, drinking, fucking, defecating, urinating, bleeding, flowing, solidifying, and
expectorating,” is generally grotesque.
105

But bodies or corporality are not the only things that are messy, excessive, and
performative—so is the self, as it is embodied, performative, and intersubjective, its multitudes
of social, historical, political, cultural, linguistic, and religious inscriptions happening
simultaneously and overlapping into an indiscernible palimpsest that is the body/self. As a site of
performative excessiveness, the body/self can be understood as grotesque. Multifaceted and
relational, our body/self changes in relation to the other, leaving us in constant flux as to whether
we are produced as “normative” or “excessive.”
Nonetheless, the tendency to produce, through essentializing readings entrenched in the
binary of the normative vs the excessive, certain bodies and certain selves as excessive—too
much—is a reality faced by most marginalized groups. With respect to non-normative subjects
particularly the queer, colonized brown bodies as explored in this essay, to be produced or
statically defined as “too much” has radically harmful effects when performative excess is seen
as negative. In order to refute this tendency, I propose a rethinking of the ways we generally
think of and engage with identity, pushing forward a model of identification that foregrounds
lived experience and deals with difference through its relation to power—allowing for a plethora

104
Ibid., 217.
105
Braziel and LeBesco, “Introduction: Performing Excess,” 10.
46
of identifies to emerge and remerge as excessive and multiple as possible. Borrowing Braziel and
LeBesco’s language, we must rethink the body/self as an excessive site “situated within
performative matrices of desire, politics, and power” as well as “situate excess as performative
‘production’” in the sense that it is a production that is staged and full of theatricality and artifice
but also economically produced within capitalism.
106

For Ibarra, her experience as La Chica Boom was one marked by this negative excess.
Viewers’ general inabilities to engage critically with her performed excess was not necessarily
due to their normative status as cisgender or white—many of her spectators were often queer
women like Ibarra—but rather their lack of self-reflexivity and criticality came from a lack of
understanding in how the body/self is socially constructed and how desire, politics, and power
relate to the excess Ibarra performed. In an email conversation with Ibarra, she admitted to me
that her experience as being ethnically and racially othered was not just at the hands of white
spectators but as an overall effect of the state of current identity politics.
107
When I prompted her
regarding the title of an essay she published online in which she changed the original title from
“Stuck with You” to “Stuck with This,” she stated, “I changed the name because the first was
before the FML show and the latter was updated with a different ending because it was post the
FML show.. You then This, I suppose because I realized it wasn't just the white audience but
raciality or the ways it's mapped onto my body. That's the thing I am stuck with por vida.”
108

Feeling stuck for life with the way her body is mapped is what Ibarra explored with FML,
yet that project likewise did not produce a feeling of transformative success. Instead, she felt just
as stuck with the fictions structuring her subjectivity on and off stage as she did prior to FML—
though by then she came to find that it was not viewers’ view of her in it of itself, but the way
identity politics surrounding her attempts to statically define her. As León writes on Ibarra’s

106
Ibid., 12.
107
Xandra Ibarra, email to author, July 19, 2018.
108
Ibid.
47
stuckness, Ibarra realized she was stuck “between the desire to be outside of racist and sexist
frames and the desire to contest them from within, both desires hampered by the inability to
eradicate the racist and sexist optics on one’s own.”
109
Following the performance, she continued
working through this stuckness in her later work, particularly in the photographic series Spic
Ecdysis (2014), where she photographs herself lying next to her La Chica Boom costumes
(including her cucarachica costume) to invoke shed skin or even a carcass, and Inventory of
Exhaustion (2016), that features these same costumes as vacuum-sealed artifacts of exhaustion,
acting as a preservation of the self-enclosed identities that La Chica Boom performed.
Since this work, Ibarra has moved on to other projects and performances, the most recent
one being The Hook Up/Displacement/Barhopping/Drama Tour, which was detailed earlier in
this paper. For her acceptance speech for the Queer | Art | Prize, Ibarra stated, “Let’s be messy,
undisciplined, obscene, abject, hypersexual and celebrate our excess and never become
normal...because who the fuck wants that!?”
110
To that point, I propose embracing and
celebrating our excess in whatever form that may take—for us to nurture our multiplicity so that
our identities are never statically defined, never full, but rather always already changing and
moving and in flux. Cheers to that.

109
León, “Forms of Opacity,” 373.
110
Xandra Ibarra, “Prize — QUEER | ART,” Queer | Art, http://www.queer-art.org/prize; accessed February 21,
2019.
48
APPENDIX WITH FIGURES

Figure 1: Promotional material for Kaleidoscope National People of Color Cabaret in Seattle,
WA, 2007; courtesy of Xandra Ibarra
49

Figure 2: Xandra Ibarra as La Chica Boom, Dominatrix of the Barrio, July 26, 2014, for
“Mujeres Divinas Y Poderosas (Divine and Powerful Women)” at Brava Theater Center, San
Francisco, CA; still from video performance documentation; courtesy of Yerba Buena Center for
the Arts

50

Figure 3: Xandra Ibarra as La Chica Boom, Dominatrix of the Barrio, July 26, 2014, for
“Mujeres Divinas Y Poderosas (Divine and Powerful Women)” at Brava Theater Center, San
Francisco, CA; still from video performance documentation; courtesy of Yerba Buena Center for
the Arts

51

Figure 4: Xandra Ibarra as La Chica Boom, Tortillera, March 23, 2013, for Brown Girls
Burlesque’s “She's A-Shake-A-Ning!” tour at Joe's Pub, New York City, NY; still from video
performance documentation; courtesy of Ibarra

52

Figure 5: Xandra Ibarra, F*ck My Life (FML) flyer, 2013; promotional material for the
performance at The Wild Project in New York City, NY
53

Figure 6: Xandra Ibarra, Lupe Velez/Xandra Ibarra/LaChicaboom, 2013; posted on Ibarra’s
Tumblr on December 14, 2013 at 5:13pm

54
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Creator Briz, Ana Cristina (author)

Core Title Performing excess: the politics of identity in La Chica Boom

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere

Publication Date 04/22/2019

Defense Date 04/19/2019

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