Pushing Border Art’s Borders - session #6

Chelo González Amezcua and Lisa Alvarado: two ways of inhabiting Nepantla
Luis R Hdez

This paper explores the confluences between two Texan artists from different backgrounds and generations to show how they’re part of a new mestiza consciousness, a way of acting and thinking the borders imagined by Gloria Anzaldúa. The artists are: Chelo González Amezcua (Piedras Negras, Coahuila, 1903-Del Rio, Texas, 1975), who distilled her experiences in the border city of Del Rio, Texas, and in the surroundings of the Rio Grande into ballpoint drawings on cardboard, and Lisa Alvarado (San Antonio, Texas, 1982), a painter and musician who explores the intersections between abstraction, music, and the textile traditions of the Americas.

This work confronts the personal processes and mythologies of both artists against the grain of strategies such as

• Autohistorias
• the disruption of the categories that separate the cultures in which they participate,
• the connection of everyday life with the political, the sacred and the aesthetic.

These are some of the tactics that Gloria Anzaldúa enunciates as ways of inhabiting the transitional space that she calls Nepantla, a state in which “bouts of dissociation of identity, identity breakdowns and buildups” are experienced.

With these elements, this paper shows how the new mestiza’s consciousness, set by people who inhabit the Nepantla state, compels their viewers to question hegemonic narratives and representations about the borderlands and, ultimately, invites us to dissolve thinking in polarities.