Genders 28 1998
Las Comadres:
Copyright ©1998 Genders.
A Feminist Collective Negotiates a New Paradigm for
Women at the U.S./Mexico Border
By JO-ANNE BERELOWITZ

In the Spring of 1988 a group of women in the contiguous border cities of San Diego and Tijuana established a collective to which they later gave the name Las Comadres.1 For three years they met at venues on both sides of the border, exploring its complexity from the perspectives of race, class, ethnicity, and gender. In September, 1990, at the Centro Cultural de la Raza2 in San Diego their efforts culminated in a performance and installation that embodied their ideas and attracted national attention - including invitations to perform at art spaces both in and beyond San Diego.3 However, their moment of public success coincided with the intensification of dissension among members. Feeling unable to work together productively, these invitations were, for the most part, declined. One year later, after a series of meetings at which bitter feelings were expressed, they agreed to disband.

These are the bare bones of a history that the following pages will unfold. In recounting that history, I have several agendas. First, to bring to wider awareness and to honor the efforts of a little-known group of women artists and activists whose field of operation (the San Diego/Tijuana border region) lies outside the mainstream of hegemonic art discourse. Secondly, to foreground the region as the locus for the production of a powerful, socially-committed art that has received scant attention beyond the arena of its immediate visual impact.4 But my paper is not only about Las Comadres and their operations within an ethnically diverse and politically charged population. It is also about the difficulties encountered by all groups that attempt to translate utopian theory into practice and the near impossibility of sustaining a collective made up of highly individualized, articulate, and creative people. In other words, it is about the problems, challenges, and theoretical dilemmas that confronted a heterogeneous group of talented women in their efforts to constitute community. These challenges included: avoiding the pitfalls of essentialist thinking; negotiating the tension between collectivism and individualism; anxiety and conflict about lesbian desire; the growing awareness that struggles against gender inequity also involve struggles against race, class, and cultural hierarchies between and among women. In short, the experience imploded each woman's sense of her identity so that she found herself negotiating and renegotiating her subject position in a process that, while liberatory, was also profoundly painful.

My final objective is to examine the most significant cultural production of Las Comadres - an installation and performance which they staged at the Centro Cultural de la Raza in San Diego in 1990, titled Border Boda, or Border Wedding. This production - and indeed, the entire enterprise of Las Comadres - was highly significant in that it posed a number of difficult questions: How does Woman write herself into history? How does she find a place within, or alongside, a master narrative in which the protagonists are always male? How can women tell their story? How, to borrow Jean Franco's wonderful phrase, can they become "plotting women,"5 strategically positioned within the historical narrative? The production at the Centro addressed these questions with differing degrees of success which I attempt to articulate, all the while, however, sustaining awareness that success or failure is perhaps of lesser significance than the fact that the women had the courage to ask the questions and to stage them.

In recounting their enterprise, I am profoundly indebted to all the members of the collective who so generously gave me their time and shared their experiences with me. As an academic scholar researching this little-known chapter of feminist art and activism in San Diego - to which I am a recent arrival - I am acutely aware that I stand outside the moment, passions, and energies that were the driving force of Comadres (although I, too, am an immigrant to the United States and a border crosser). But I am also aware that this history and my engagement with it has affected me as, indeed, does all work pursued with heartfelt intensity. As I worked on this project, I wondered how I, who have never participated in a collective, would have fared in such a group. What would have been my reactions, contributions, and disruptions? What would I - an educated, white, liberal, heterosexual, agnostic, Jewish woman from South Africa have discovered about my privilege and my guilt? What would the other women have thought of me? How might the experience have changed me? How willing am I to engage in local political struggles? What are my investments in the current status quo, and what sacrifices would I be prepared to make so that other women might share my privileges?

To my surprise and consternation these questions quickly became practical rather than academic when, immediately after completing a first draft of this paper, I sent copies to all the women I had interviewed. Their responses spanned a range from enthusiasm to fury. In addition, I knew that they were critiquing, discussing, and dissecting my writing which was now the vehicle for their reconnection as well as a reminder of the joys and sorrows, the ideals and disillusionments of their disbanded collective project. I became defensive, anxious, self-doubtful, ill, caught in an uncomfortable impasse between my desire for acceptance and my sense of academic rigor. Indeed, like the Comadres during their brief but intense tenure together, I found myself negotiating and renegotiating my own subject position in a process that was acutely stressful as, wishing to learn from the experience, I opened myself to hearing from Comadres who were particularly angry with me. I was told, "You are a woman, writing as a feminist. You must connect your work with us!"6 Additionally, I was chastised for "writing like a man" - positioning myself outside the passions, engagements, and difficulties of feminist self-empowerment, and for exercising a "cold, analytical judgment." The comments stung. And so I set out to rewrite the tale as a woman still struggling with her own border crossings.

My guide in this endeavor was Trinh T. Minh-ha whose beautiful essay "Cotton and Iron"7 remained open on my desk throughout this writing, serving both as model and caveat. Trinh begins this essay with a Nigerian poem: Tale, told, to be told..../Are you truthful? The poem, with its question about truthfulness, serves as a prelude to her discussion of storytelling. The tale teller, she writes, must speak to the tale, rather than about it, for

'speaking about' only partakes in
the conservation of systems of
binary opposition (subject/object;
I/It; We/They) on which
territorialized knowledge
depends....plac[ing] a semantic
distance between oneself and the
work....secur[ing] for the speaker
a position of mastery.8

It was precisely this "position of mastery" that I would now seek to avoid by acknowledging that a story is always a "form of mediation" whose telling is "adaptive," that "[t] ruth is both a construct and beyond it" and therefore always lies somewhere else, but that a "balance is played out as the narrator interrogates the truthfulness of the tale and provides multiple answers." I would strive to become Trinh's idea of a "mediator-storyteller . . . through whom truth is summoned to unwind itself to the audience [and who] is at once a creator, a delighter and a teacher." I would not seek closure for my tale but would rather offer it as an "ongoing passage to an elsewhere," a work-in-progress whose destination I do not know.

Again and again, as I struggled with this tale, I reflected that its subject was as much truth and its elsewheres as it was Las Comadres, for all of us - the protagonists as well as I (their confessor/mediator/storyteller) - were engaged in a struggle for truth. Their representations to me were based on memories - which can only be partial, always subject to distortion and revision, and in no wise the terra firma of hard data. My task was to sift through these, honoring the passions of each speaker, while realizing that personal filters always create their own sediments and that I was as subject to this problematic as everyone else. However, apart from a few slides, a video tape, some artwork, and a couple of reviews, the personal remembrances of the protagonists and my own interest in them are the only resources from which to construct a history of Las Comadres. Making a personal mantra of Trinh's question: Tale, told, to be told . . . /Are you truthful? and wanting very much both to be truthful and to tell "a fine story," I embarked on what follows.

In reconstructing the beginnings of Las Comadres it is necessary to look at an antecedent collective to which many of its members had belonged and which had a profound impact on them - the Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (otherwise known as "BAW/TAF"). The Border Arts Workshop was founded in San Diego in 1984 as a multicultural, interdisciplinary group of artists, scholars, and cultural activists. Their goal was to deconstruct and redefine the border as a zone of transformation, an interstitial space of negotiation and fluid interchange rather than a rigid line signifying separateness. Accordingly, they set out to complicate monolithic, unitary notions of identity and statehood. For example, in place of the more traditional approach that maintained Anglo, Chicano, and Tijuanese as distinct and separate categories, they proposed a polymorphous, polyglot, hybrid, and binational "border subject" - a new type of subject, postmodern and postnational - a result of the confluence of the many different realities peculiar to this porous border zone. Additionally, their agenda was to bring the border - the margin - into representation, to bring it from an invisible peripheralism into the spotlit center by demonstrating that the issues that conventionally inflect the border - racism, nationalism, anti-immigrant fervor - are central to this society. Indeed, they argued that in a deep ontological sense the border lies within us all as the limiting barrier to the attainment of an unbounded humanity.9

BAW/TAF was a utopian project. But like all utopian projects, it failed to live up to its high ideals. One of the most problematical issues that beset it was gender inequity, for BAW/TAF was, fundamentally, a male group. Of its seven founding members (Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Michael Schnorr, David Avalos, Isaac Artenstein, Victor Ochoa, Jude Eberhardt, and Sara Jo Berman) only the last two were women. Although those two were gifted artists, it is arguable that their marriages to key male members (Artenstein and Gómez-Peña) were primary factors in their admittance. Throughout BAW/TAF's history, women entered the collective primarily via relationships with dominant males. By 1988 the women in BAW/TAF had become angry:10 at their marginalization, at their perceived exploitation by male members, and at BAW/TAF's failure to address gender and sexuality as borders requiring renegotiation. That spring, they mobilized to form a new group, a collective constituted by and for women. They would later give themselves the name Las Comadres, a word whose meanings include "friend," "midwife," "godmother," and "gossip."

The women who became Comadres were all, in one way or another, affiliated with the artworld: as artists, curators, writers, performers, video artists, teachers, and students. Membership was informal, with a core of about eighteen and a dozen or so additional women drifting in and out during the collective's life span. Hungry for community, they held together in love and sisterhood for a brief golden moment,11 a moment of imagined community when members defined their goals against the outside, the Other. The Other was patriarchy, class, race, and masculinist careerism in the artworld. However, soon it appeared to some that the enemy lay as much within as without, and members even accused one another of racism.12 Additionally, there were other differences that proved hugely divisive: class differences, different levels of education, different attitudes toward nationalism, ethnic identity, and universalism. Later, as the group attained some measure of success in the artworld, individual members were perceived to be careerist, self-serving, and exploitative of their colleagues. For example, the group had adopted a position that was ideologically opposed to the ego-and-star-track nature of the artworld. They agreed that their identity was to be collective and that no single individuals were to emerge as star performers. However, when Mancillas and Susholtz represented the group at multicultural conferences their names received prominent billing while the other members who were not present remained anonymous. The anonymous remainder greatly resented this, arguing that their colleagues had enhanced their careers from having so foregrounded themselves while they remained in the obscurity that comes from anonymity. Like the Border Arts Workshop, Las Comadres foundered on the shoals of its utopian ideals, brought - by the harsh reality of internal conflict - to acknowledge its imbrication in the structures of the larger society; brought, sadly, to knowledge that efforts to bridge difference had resulted in demarcating it more sharply.

Their initial agenda, established at their founding in 1988 was to constitute a study group, focusing on feminism, multiculturalism, and border issues. They read Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, Donna Harraway, Trinh Minh-ha, and papers written by fellow members. Additionally, they looked at one another's work, offering feedback and support, for all, in one way or another, felt professionally isolated. The intent of the group was to overcome isolation and constitute community - and to do so in a way that would both honor and represent the complexity and diversity of this border region. As with the Border Arts Workshop, they wanted to promote a multinational, multicultural border "subject." To this they added the goal of foregrounding issues peculiar to women living in the border zone.

In many ways, the group embodied the ethnic diversity of the region, for it included Anglos, Chicanas, Mexicanas, and other Latinas. Within these categories, members' backgrounds were mixed, tracing ancestry that was, variously, Sicilian, German, Irish, Indian, Danish, Hungarian, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. In addition to ethnic differences, there were class differences, with members ranging from British aristocratic to Chicano working class. In terms of education, the range was equally great, spanning (at one extreme) a tenured professor at Amherst College to (at the other) a woman whose education had ended with high school.

In spite (or perhaps because) of these differences, there was, initially, a powerful connection among the women, several of whom have characterized the first year of their affiliation as "idyllic." Meetings, held monthly, were both in San Diego and Tijuana, in private homes and in art galleries. As a former member Emily Hicks commented:

Initially we had a wonderful time,
especially when we met in Tijuana.
We'd sit out on the grass and have
picnics and talk, and it was heaven.
It was what everyone wanted the
group to be. We didn't care about
shows and careers. It was just women
together, talking and sharing.

At this point, as former member Marguerite Waller has noted, they constituted an "affinity group," drawn together by their sense of exclusion from the hegemonic (malestream) culture, still in the "'nice nice' phase of multicultural feminist interaction."13 All experienced the excitement of encountering the ethnic "other" and of learning about new worlds. As a former member commented:

Women in the group wanted to find
Out what is Spanish, what is
Mexican, what is Chicana, what is
Anglo. There was a curiosity about
how the other side lives.14

There was, in addition, a genuine desire to know and connect with "the other side" and to construct a utopian community based on the theoretical readings that they had adopted as their ideology and blueprint. They wanted to achieve what Anzaldúa (in many ways the collective's muse) described as a "New Consciousness," a new race of cosmic inclusivity made up of mestizas - mutable hybrid progenies with "a rich gene pool," the result of "racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollinization." This was to constitute the new "consciousness of the Borderlands," and feminists would be its vanguard. But Anzaldúa warned that this ideal would be hugely difficult to attain, confronting the mestiza with "an inner war," "a struggle of borders," "a cultural collision," for

. . . commonly held beliefs of the
white culture attack commonly held
beliefs of the Mexican culture, and
both attack commonly held beliefs of
the indigenous culture.
Subconsciously, we see an attack on
ourselves and our beliefs as a
threat and we attempt to block with
a counterstance.15

The difficulties Anzaldúa predicted soon became manifest and, over time, insurmountable. While the Comadres absorbed the theory and felt richer for it, inevitably idealism encountered the harsh reality of practical living and could not be sustained.

The issue that first pulled them out of the realm of the theoretical and into the practical was a right-wing populist campaign called "Light Up the Border," organized by a coalition of citizens in the San Diego region who were concerned about the influx of undocumented Mexican workers from south of the border. Its leader, Roger Hedgecock, was a former mayor of San Diego who had left electoral politics after being convicted of a felony for illegal campaign practices and subsequently became the host of a local radio talk show.16 His campaign, begun in the fall of 1989 and continuing through the summer of 1990, mobilized anti-immigrant border citizens to meet on the third Thursday of each month at a predetermined point on the border to line up their cars at dusk and illuminate the no-man's land between Mexico and the U.S. Their intent was to discourage undocumented workers from traversing this terrain under cover of night and thereby entering the U.S. undetected. Additionally, they wished to alert the U.S. federal government that the border needs more lights and more efficient patrolling. Their goals, in other words, were to make the border less porous and to harden its impregnability. These ran directly counter to the Comadres' own agenda of creating a new trans-border culture of cross-pollinization and non-dualism.

Until this point, the group's activities had been purely in the private domain. Now, for the first time in the spring of 1990 the decision was taken to enter the public domain. The shift was dramatic - from the security of privately-owned spaces to the agonistic, highly charged arena of border politics where they would be aligned with other left wing forces such as the Border Arts Workshop, the Union del Barrio, and hundreds of other sympathetic artists and activists against militant right wing groups like the WarBoys, The Holy Church of the White Fighting Machine of the Cross, the Ku Klux Klan and their sympathizers. It was at this point that a decision was taken to give the group a name. Their entry into the public arena was, in a sense, their baptism.

While several of the Comadres - especially those whose histories included political activism - were eager to join with pro-immigrant forces, there were also Comadres who resisted this call to activism, feeling that it exceeded the original agenda that had brought the group together, and they remained apart from the protest. Those who participated hired a plane to fly above the parked cars, pulling a banner that read "1000 Points of Fear - Another Berlin Wall?" The reference, clearly, was to current events in Eastern Europe, with an analogy drawn between the border fence and the Berlin Wall. The banner drew the attention of the media who wrote of it and of the courage of a women's collective in entering the tension-fraught arena of border politics. The Comadres were talked about on local radio stations, appeared on the local TV news, and one of their members, Aida Mancillas, was interviewed on National Public Radio. The attention was exhilarating, giving the women a sense that their point of view was being heard, that they were making a difference, and that they were intervening in history. At the same time, however, they felt frustrated at being unable to control the media's representation of them, at the way that the media edited and cut their viewpoints, trimming them into digestible soundbites to the point of misrepresentation. Nonetheless, the experience gave them a sense of empowerment, a sense that working collectively was much more effective than working alone, and they felt inspired to do more.

Comadre Margueritte Waller has written about the collective's participation in the demonstrations as a watershed that "catalyzed significant internal changes." On the positive side, the group realized its potential power; on the negative, "historical and political divisions"17 began to be more openly articulated.

I was made acutely aware of these divisions when I interviewed the Comadres, all of whom spoke with great frankness into my microphone about their often troubling experiences within the collective over its three year life span. It became clear that the Anglo and Latina women held divergent ideas about difference and group identity. For example, as Hicks commented:

The Anglo women needed to find a
deep inner core that united them
with Chicanas and wanted acceptance
by and of them. Chicanas wanted to
find a deep inner difference to
explain their lack of power and
thereby gain the strength to go on
and prove to themselves that they
could do what Anglos did.

In other words, the Anglo women (who came out of liberal rationalist backgrounds, oriented toward a politics of consensus) longed for a unity that transcends difference. This approach, while well-intentioned, leads to trouble, for the desire for a community predicated on unity and wholeness engages in a logic of identity that denies and represses difference. Furthermore, it assumes that a "core" essence connects women, that each subject possesses an inherent identity and can understand and be "present" for another as she (assumes) that she can be for herself.18 Such an approach, depending as it does on idealism (conceiving "being" and "truth" as beyond time and change) denies the political. As Chantal Mouffe has pointed out, such a denial can lead only to impotence - "the impotence which characterizes liberal thought when it finds itself confronted with a multiplication of different forms of demands for identity."19 And indeed, ultimately the pressure felt by some members to establish a unifying identity proved unbearable - as different women intimated to me when they acknowledged that interaction within the group became extraordinarily difficult, but that outside the group they enjoyed intense, satisfying relationships with one another. As one woman said: "Individually, we really liked each other; but as a group we became a monster."

Longing for unity was by no means peculiar to the Anglo members, for, as the history of the women's movement reveals, feminist groups have been marked, generally, by a desire for closeness and mutual identification. However, while an ideal of inter-ethnic unity may have been more characteristic of the Anglos than of the Latinas (many of whom were veterans of political struggle, bearing the burden of histories marked by daily encounters with issues of ethnicity, identity, and difference),20 it is equally true that some of the Latinas longed for unity between and among themselves, a unity predicated on an imagined Latina essence, as the following account, told to me by one of the Chicanas, reveals:

I became uncomfortable with some of
the white women. . . I felt really
burdened by my experience and wanted
to share my feelings with other
Latinas and so I asked for a meeting
with just the Latinas. But that also
turned out to be very difficult for
me. One Mexican woman said: "What
makes you think that I am going to
have more of an affinity with you
than with another white woman in the
group?" And I realized that she had
a point. I guess that if you are a
dominant within the dominant sector
of your society, then you are not
going to understand what racism is.
I realized that it was necessary to
throw out essentialism, and that we
all had completely different takes
on things.

I heard many stories like this, stories that spoke of frustrated longing for unity and closeness, followed by the ineluctable recognition that identity is not fixed but, rather, subject to constant negotiation and renegotiation within changing sets of historically diverse experiences.

In theory all were familiar with this concept of fluid identity, for Anzaldúa had described it as the mestiza's condition: marked by "psychic restlessness," being "in a state of perpetual transition" analogous to "floundering in uncharted seas," a "swamping of . . . psychological borders," and the ability to "shift out of habitual formations" by developing "a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity."21 But theory is so much easier to read than to implement, its poetry intoxicating and difficult to effect in the harsh light of sober reality, and the women found themselves caught in a space of frustration marked, on the one hand, by longing for unity and, on the other, by desire to negotiate difference.

Together with the issue of race, class and privilege became matters for heated discussion. In the words of a former member:

There was a great deal of talk about
privilege: who had it and who
didn't. It was difficult for some
people to acknowledge that they had
it when they certainly didn't feel
that they did. Didn't, in some
cases, even have jobs, and so what
was all this talk of privilege
about?

Privilege is, of course, a relational term, as is the analogical concept, power. As stated earlier, there were wide disparities among the women in terms of class backgrounds, levels of education, and careers. But, in fact, no one woman occupied a consistent position of privilege across all of these axes. As Waller put it:

There was not one woman in the group
who felt adequate in her career,
that she was fully accomplished,
respected, and recognized for what
she was. Everybody felt hungry.

Inter-ethnic differences were only exacerbated by the revelation that white, educated Comadres in seemingly secure, high-level jobs, felt powerless and unhappy in their careers. It was difficult for women who felt far removed from that kind of prominence and privilege to empathize with women who seemed to have it all and yet wouldn't concede that they did. It was equally difficult for the women who "seemed to have it all" to experience such resentment and to feel that their expressions of pain and struggle were unheard.

The longing for and frustration about community was made more complicated by the fact that some of the women were going through crises in their personal lives. Eager for support from their Comadres, they articulated personal issues in group meetings, which other members resented, preferring to keep the collective as a reading, work-sharing group, not one that focused on psychological process. Here, too, differences emerged between Latinas and Anglos. As Ovejero commented:

White women tend to be more
outspoken about personal issues,
whereas Latinas tend to be more
private. For Latinas there are
strong memories of keeping things to
yourself. It seemed to me that
[bringing up] personal problems and
personal trauma in the context of
the group ended up destroying us.

Ruth Wallen agreed that the articulation of personal issues was fractious:

Our collapse was caused by conflict
over personal issues. We never had a
clear idea of process. We never had
a clear sense of how much personal
material it was appropriate to deal
with in the group.

llingness (or unwillingness) to speak of
ssues only accentuated more sharply the
different approaches that Latinas and Anglos had
already manifested toward speaking in a mixed
cultural group. As arts activist Charleen Touchette
points out:

Latina women, while usually highly
expressive verbally in Spanish with
one another, will often remain
silent when English is spoken in a
group, even if they are proficient
in the language. Many
Spanish-speaking people, whose
language is highly formal, are
accustomed to elaborate verbal
conventions that carefully define
the parameters of interpersonal
communication to show respect to the
person addressed. Thus, they are
sometimes offended by the informal,
direct way that people talk to each
other in English.22

This observation was corroborated by one of the Comadres:

The Anglo women talked all the time.
They really dominated and the
Latinas didn't. They sat back and
were polite.

Later, interpersonal conflict became so acute that some members wanted to bring in a therapist to mediate among them. A group of women located a Chicana psychotherapist willing to work with the collective, but the intervention never occurred - for several reasons: the Latinas, already inclined to reticence in personal matters, were either ambivalent or negative about the proposal; and there was no agreement as to what mediation should be about, nor between whom.

And so the problems simmered and, over time, even intensified. But for a brief moment they were set aside in the interests of a project that the women agreed, collectively, to undertake. In the spring of 1990, shortly after their experience with "Light Up the Border," Mancillas was invited by the Centro Cultural de la Raza to curate an exhibition. She asked her Comadres if they would like to take this opportunity to make a collective visual statement that would fully embody and communicate their goals in a context where they would not be distorted by the editorializing of the media. They seized the opportunity. The result was an installation titled La Vecindad/The Neighborhood, and a seventy minute performance piece called Border Boda/Border Wedding, staged at the Centro in September, 1990.

The endeavor was, in many ways, the group's highpoint. Hugely successful in terms of its public reception, it poised the collective on the brink of name-recognition-stardom in the artworld. But the pressure of production only hastened the group's collapse, further sensitizing participants to the myriad problems that had already become manifest. Although their project at the Centro entailed a number of different aspects - artworks as well as a performance - I will focus here primarily on the performance, for its goals were hugely ambitious, number of complex theoretical positions which I shall unpack in the course of describing it.

The performance was divided into two parts, corresponding to two different cultural spheres: public and private. This opposition and contrast conforms to what Gayatri Spivak has recognized as "a certain program. . . implicit in all, and explicit in some, feminist activity"23 in which the assumed diametrical opposition between private and public is deconstructed and displaced. Here the private sphere was represented by that quintessential heart of the domestic: a kitchen, rendered exquisitely inviting . Its walls were painted a deep [Figure 1 The Kitchen, Border Boda] turquoise, and on them were hung paintings whose subject matter and style reflected the region. The room's centerpiece was a kitchen table in the form of a huge bilingual cookbook on table legs - a metaphor of nourishment from mixture. On its pages were inscribed family recipes - a chronicle of women's nurturance. Behind it against the blue wall was a kitchen cupboard that also functioned as an altar . [Figure 2 Kitchen Cupboard, Border Boda]The doors of its uppermost register were opened to reveal a blood-red space on which were xeroxed images of faces of women from Oaxaca. Its open lower register, scumble-painted blue and white, contained bits of shattered mirror and barbed wire - visual metaphors for fragmented identities and the border. The central register held candles, a cross, and various offerings. From each side was suspended a huge pendulous breast-like sack, which gave it an anthropomorphic quality. It was intended to function as a metaphor for a border woman and for a border home and to evoke the pain and human cost of border living. On an adjacent wall was a kitchen shelf with images of historical border types painted on plates. Thus, traditional kitchen props and decor became resonant with issues of the border.

The principal drama of the performance occurred in this space of domesticity, nurturance, and beauty. Here a young Chicana, on the eve of her wedding to a Gringo, spoke and reminisced with her grandmother and aunt, both of whom were deeply conflicted about her impending marriage. The grandmother told stories about their family, while the aunt (referred to in the play as tía) prepared fruit, sugar cane, and cinnamon for a hot drink to be served to the audience at the close of the performance. The aunt, having elected not to speak on the U.S. side, was mute, her vocalism restricted to four traditional border songs sung in Spanish. At one point the bride-to-be asked plaintively, "What happened to Mama?" During the course of the performance it was revealed that her mother was raped and murdered by an Anglo landgrabber - personal family tragedy that, by synecdoche, stood for a version of U.S.-Mexico history.

This kind of slippage between the personal and the grand sweep of history subtended the performance. In this private, matriarchal, domestic space of oral history and folk narrative, women recounted their marginality with the paradoxical goal of pointing to what Spivak has called "the irreducibility of the margin." In other words, the protagonists told personal stories about women's lives impacted by national and international political conflict. The effect and purpose was to displace the public-private hierarchy and opposition for, as Spivak has noted:

if the fabric of the so-called
public sector is woven of the
so-called private, the definition of
the private is marked by a public
potential, since it is the weave, or
texture, of public activity. The
opposition is thus not merely
reversed; it is displaced.24

The desire to displace, or at least confuse, the traditional opposition between public and private was one of the central purposes of the performance.

Contrasting with the domestic, private, color-bright space of the kitchen was a black and white "media" or "conflict" room which prominently featured a television set and a podium behind which two apparently Anglo journalists interrogated U.S. representations of Mexico, the border, and Chicano culture . Where the kitchen represented the space of [Figure 3 The Media/Conflict Room, Border Boda] women, the media/conflict room was the space of men, of public discourse, of the dissemination of public information; and its ambiance was rendered as hostile. To balance the recipe book-table in the kitchen, the media/conflict room featured an outsize "book of conflict." On its cover were the words: Todo es verdad, todo es mentira, /All is truth, all is lies - a comment on the journalistic enterprise.25 While the Comadres may have wanted to blur the distinction between public and private, scenographically they accentuated it, and for the bulk of the performance these two spaces manifested a kind of apartheid in terms of the ethnic groups that occupied them: the hostile media room as the space of Anglos and cruel oppression; the nurturant kitchen as the space of Mexicanas/Chicanas, love, and suffering. This Manichean bifurcation was very difficult for some of the Anglo women who resented their relegation to the register of the hateful.

Structurally, the performance consisted largely of a series of narratives told by the grandmother. The idea of unfolding the plot via grandmother stories had two sources. The first was Trinh Minh-ha's "Grandma's Story," an essay on women and storytelling which all the Comadres read. Here Trinh presents the oral narratives of senior tribal women as an integral element of social formation and cohesion, for tale-telling is always in the present, necessitating an immediate, vital, interactive communal bond between teller and listener. Unlike written history, storytelling is an art of the body, transmitted from mouth to ear and from heart to heart, establishing a chain and continuum between the generations who pass it on, thereby providing a link between past, present, and future. In many cultures the storyteller is a healer and protectress, for her power in telling stories brings people together and gives them strength. Furthermore, the storyteller is never the authoress of the tale but merely the transmitter of a preexistent structure of meaning which she is morally bound to transfer.

Trinh's essay had a profound impact on the Comadres, and one evening, soon after all had read it, they convened at the home of one of their members to sit around a campfire in her garden and tell stories of their own families, of their ancestors' journeys to the United States and their struggles to establish themselves. In this way they wove personal sagas into the larger fabric of history, interweaving private and public. The evening around the campfire catalyzed their ideas for the forthcoming performance. The concept of structuring it as a series of grandmother tales was born that night.

The telling of personal stories by women falls within the rubric of what Deleuze and Guattari have called "the minor," a form of literature usually from the margins which uses an intense, vernacular form and allows the writer/speaker "the possibility to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility."26 One of the characteristics of a "minor literature" is that it "deterritorializes language," and indeed, the territorialization and deterritorialization of language was one of the sub-themes of the grandmother's discourse. For example, as a Mexican immigrant she spoke a master language (English) in an alien place (San Diego). Additionally, she explained that the tía was unable to speak English, the language of her husband, and that he, in turn, was unable to speak Spanish. They were, however, both able to speak "the language of love," a deterritorialized language that transcends all boundaries. Although she lived in the U.S., the tía never learned to speak English, and she abandoned her husband and children to return to Mexico so that she might speak again. Additionally, we were told that while the tía never spoke north of the border, in Tijuana, by contrast, "she doesn't stop talking." The granddaughter/niece, a Chicana, spoke English but no Spanish and expressed frustration at her inability to speak with her tía. We were also told of a Mexican aunt living in the U.S. who was killed by her Anglo husband for speaking to a laborer in Spanish. (continued)