Insurgent Life/Afterlife

• In Event: Beyond Empire: Latinidades, Borders, and the Unmaking of US Exceptionalism

Abstract

“Insurgent Life/Afterlife” examines the place of the freeway in the creation and maintenance of the egalitarian communities represented in Latinx art and literature including “Freeway 280” by Lorna Dee Cervantes (1981), Hector Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier (1998), and Betsabeé Romero’s sculpture titled “Signals of a Long Road Together” (2019). In these and other instances, habitation and occupation of the freeway constitutes an important world-making action. Romero’s installation, for example, quite literally inscribes the tires with gilded engravings of the fleeing migrant family atop the freeway. The pattern of golden migrants on the tire is interspersed with gilded flowers, suggesting that these tires do not function as a critique of free trade as much as they serve as representations of its promise. After all, it is the gilded figure that stands apart from the opaque, black rubber of the tire as if to suggest exuberance and pleasure despite the bleak routes of transnational migration. Together these works provide a more robust view of revolution by showcasing the promises of various representations of progressive Latinx social movements by focusing on the language of revolutionary exuberance. Indeed, the repeated use of metaphors of the ludic found in these works directly links the revolutionary body to the potential afterlife of revolutions. Thus, these works represent how joyous claims to space are critical both to unmaking the extant state, as well as to replacing it with a more equitable society, and they represent how a new political system might be conceived.

Author

• Sharada Balachandran, University of Maryland-College Park