Other presidents of African descent in America.

A lot it is going to be said this week about Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King as important precedents that made possible the election the first African American president of the United States. However there are other important historical figures that should be remembered as well. One of them is Vicente Guerrero (1781-1831) who was the first president in North America of African decent. He was one of the leading revolutionary generals of the Mexican War of Independence against Spain. His African roots came mostly from his father Pedro who was in the almost Afro-Mexican profession of mule driver in Tixtla. He became the second president of Mexico in 1829 fighting against Iturbide and other conservatives who wanted a constitutional monarchy that would favor the wealthy landowners through continued exploitation of the poor. He defended a democracy of all clases and races and abolished slavery. He was betrayed and executed by Vice-president Anastasio Bustamante in 1831. There is a state named in his honor. He was the grandfather of the important general, intellectual and writer Vicente Riva Palacio. 

We should also remember Alexandre Pétion (1770-1818) who was the first president of Haiti and one of its founding fathers. He was born in Port-au-Prince to a Haitian mother and a wealthy French white father. He was educated at the Millitary Academy in Paris and returned to Saint-Domingue to take part in the expulsion of the British from Saint-Domingue. Championing the ideals of democracy he became president of Haiti in 1806. He gave sanctuary to Simón Bolívar in 1815 and provided him with infantry and support. He died of yellow fever in 1818.

Mestizo, No te Entiendo, El Camino, Trabantimino & Others.

• "De español e india, produce mestizo" (Of a Spanish man and an Amerindian woman, a Mestizo is produced).
  
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• "De tente en el aire y mulato, sale no te entiendo" (From stand-on-the-air man and a Mulatto, an I-do-not-understand-you is obtained).
  
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• “De troka y Chevy sale El Camino” (From a pick-up truck and a Chevy is begotten an El Camino).
  
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• “De El Camino y Trabant produce Trabantimino” (Of an El Camino and a Trabant, a Trabantamino is produced).
  

Sexual contact among Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans occurred in the Americas as early as the sixteenth century and in most cases not out of love. From it, mixed people were born. Spaniards tried to develop a complex hierarchic taxonomic system called “castas” to organize their colonial social structure to favor themselves. Mestizos, Mulattos, and others mixed among themselves, combining and recombining and thus creating new multiracial categories that became hard to distinguish and understand. Such was the “No te entiendo” (which literally means “I do not understand you”) that was the result of a “Tente en el aire” (hold in the air) and Mulatto. The “Tente en el aire” was the combination of “Calpamulato” and “Cambujo.” “Calpamulato” came from “Zambaigo” and “Lobo.” “Zambaigo” was produced from Spanish and Chinese, etc. Paintings were commissioned to illustrate and explain the scheme.

In a no less absurd racial system in Anglo America, all these categories are now labeled as “Hispanic.” Spaniards started these classifications to distinguish themselves and now are lumped together and mistaken with “Brown” people of indigenous ancestry and “Black” people of African descent. There are other labels for people of Asian and African descent, but people of other European origin are labeled as “White” or “Caucasian” without any ethnic or geographic questioning of their American belonging. There is a category called “Other” for people of unidentifiable race (mixed). More often than not, mixed people have to define themselves in pure terms according to what they resemble most or who rejects them further. Anybody that has crossed an immigration checkpoint knows that for the U.S. Border Patrol, the more European you look, the more “American” you might be. Is “American” the result of the physical and cultural encounters in the New World or its puritan denial?

“How do you turn a Trabant into a sports car? Put sneakers in the trunk!”¹

Liz Cohen, like so many of us, is trying to figure and reconfigure how to construct herself and what she does. However, she does it with amazing versatility and ability. She documented the transgender community between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans in Panama City. Her skill as a photographer, knowledge of Photoshop, and experience with a personal trainer were useful in transforming herself from a geeky intellectual into a sexy lowrider model. This same model happens to also be the mechanic who has been customizing a mutating Trabant that transforms into an El Camino through hydraulic pumps. She has been so adamant about learning and doing the mechanics herself that the project has had the time to mature slowly, like any good lowrider or bottle of wine.

Designed in the ’50s and produced until 1991, the Trabant is a boxy little East German car that despite its smoky two-stroke engine was fast, compact, light, durable, and even had room for four adults and luggage. Inspired by the Soviet Sputnik, the name Trabant means “fellow traveler” (satellite) in German. It was the Iron Curtain answer to the VW Beetle, the “people’s car,” and on Time magazine’s list of fifty worst cars of all time. Imported by Liz into the United States, this car, like any surviving savvy immigrant, has had to develop the most sophisticated strategies to adapt and blend in while being able to reconfigure itself and simultaneously stay true to its origins. And so it converts into that most “American” of cars, the Chevrolet El Camino. When I use the connotation of “America,” I speak of the one from most of the continent, the one of the mix and the hybrid as opposed to the pure and the simple relocation.

Like its predecessor and rival, the Ford Ranchero, the El Camino (meaning “the road” in Spanish) is an odd concoction between a pick-up truck and a big car (in car parlance a “coupe utility”). Paradoxically the car sold in Mexico as the Chevrolet Conquistador. In order for Liz’s car to transform into an El Camino, one of the pumps extends the wheel base to that of an El Camino and the back of the Trabant to the length of the bed of an El Camino. Needless to say, the car has also been souped up with thirteen-seven wheels and chromed knock- off rims. One pump lifts and locks the rear, and another one hops to the front. The cabin houses the switches that change the vehicle and also make it dance in celebration. The proper paint job and upholstery are in the works. As a work in progress, the car reveals the bondo and primer used in the reconstruction but more interestingly the Duroplast. This Eastern European material is made from different fibers, such as cotton and occasionally paper with some kind of plastic resin. It is similar to fiberglass but since it could be made in a press similar to shaping steel, it was more suitable for volume car production.

Certainly this car is not a trailer queen or a mere art world commodity; it will cruise the boulevard and is expected to participate in car shows. Even though the project was originally funded by a Creative Capital Foundation grant and has been considered art since it’s beginning, Liz wants it to compete and participate in the lowrider car scene. She is already combining these two worlds, curating a radical mod car show at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art parallel to an exhibition of car-related art, in which the Trabantimino is included. Lowriders are on the fringe of custom cars, which happen to be on the fringe of car culture in general. Nevertheless, they have established their traditions and can be dogmatic in their particular set of values. They revere the Chevy, and it is uncertain to what extent they will accept the conversion of a Trabant into one.

Salvador “Chava” Muñoz created the first transformer pick-up truck, originally called “Wicked Bed.” A new competition category called “radical bed dancing” had to be established for the unique movements and particular cubist deconstruction of this vehicle. Chava’s customizing was so extreme that at one point it had no real competition. This ended up killing the category and the lowrider pick-up movement. The Nissan truck ended up exiled as an art piece called “Alien Toy.” Liz Cohen is resuscitating the movement and the use of hydraulics to transform a pick-up into an art piece and lowrider. She uses them in a different and particular way, creating a transformation that is not just formal or abstract but iconic and in the self. She is able to change an object smoothly back and fort between different political, social, cultural, and aesthetic systems. This car is not a celebration of triumphant, gas-guzzling, excessive, baroque capitalism or an apology of the Spartan and stoic sacrifices demanded by communism to liberate the oppressed masses. It is a negotiation and perhaps a dialectic synthesis of both, not to even mention the transgression of stereotypical gender and ethnic constructions and boundaries that have never fit her well as a Jewish, Colombian, San Franciscan art student, Phoenix suburban girl, beautiful lowrider model, rough mechanic, photo geek, and whatever else she decides to be.

As Tiger Woods wins more tournaments than anybody else and Barak Obama is a hopeful presidential candidate, it might be time to reconsider the U.S. obsession with Manichean, purist, racial definitions and to reconsider the idea of what “American” means.² In this sense, the Trabantimino is neither a car nor an art piece but a vehicle that helps us to rethink who we are, where we came from, and more importantly what we want to be.

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1. East German joke.

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2. White racists embraced the “one-drop rule” (any trace of sub-Saharan ancestry was enough to make you Black) to keep the white race “pure” as some African Americans now do it as a form of pride.

A Virtual Magic Reality.

“A Virtual Magic Reality,” Scale, vol 1, UCSD, San Diego, 2004.

In the time of Don Quixote, books were a very dangerous form of entertainment and communication. In fact, reading chivalry literature made him loose his mind. When I was a kid my mother did not want me to watch television and read comic books. She considered them a form of alienating popular culture. Some years later my father was particularly annoyed by the noise of rock & roll. As a composer and player of Latin American folk music he found these electric sounds repetitive and unpleasant for the most part and the lyrics in English incomprehensible. He condemned this form of cultural imperialism and tried his best to instigate in me a love and understanding of Latin American culture, music and history. His friend, the singer Victor Jara, was assassinated in the Santiago stadium in Chile in 1973 after being forced to play the guitar with his fingers chopped by soldiers during the military coup that destroyed Chilean democracy with CIA backing. I explained to my dad that The Clash wrote a song about that.

Nowadays there is concern among mothers and politicians about video games. The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology¹ has published studies showing the relation between playing violent video games and the increase of aggressive behavior. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold enjoyed playing the Shoot-‘em-up video game Doom before murdering 13, wounding 23 and turning the guns on themselves in Columbine Colorado. The Los Angeles Times published very strange conspiracy theories that blamed anarchist activism in the WTO meeting in Seattle on the Grand Theft Auto game series published by Rock Star. This sounds particularly absurd considering the purpose of the game is to make money without any sort of moral concerns.

There is a video game where you are not the one that creates a blood bath but where your journey begins as the sole survivor of a terrible one. “…You must find four pieces of evidence to bring justice to the memory of your small village.” The illusion of power exerted in the usual fantasy of mass murder without consequences of most video games is substituted with the power of symbolic redemption by reconstructing the erased memory of a real massacre. In 1981 soldiers slaughtered 800 people including 100 children in El Mozote, El Salvador. They thought they got the whole town, but they missed one person: Rufina Amaya. This sole survivor was able to tell the story. She broadcasted what happened through the clandestine radio station Radio Venceremos. In 1932 a mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros representing the tragic continental history was whitewashed in Los Angeles. The game takes its name from the title of his art piece: Tropical America. It explores the causes and effects of the erasure of history.

“Reality is more real in black and white²”
Octavio Paz

The game is actually an animated graphic novel, a new version of a codex, a mural or a comic book. It does not have the common photo realistic look with more than 16 million colors and imperceptible pixilation of new game consoles and newer PC games. It is black and white and its style resembles and relates more to the prints of José Guadalupe Posada and the woodcuts of the Taller de la Gráfica Popular and to other artists like Goya, Daumier, John Heartfield or Barbara Kruger who have favored black and white graphics in order to have an easy to reproduce and direct impact. It extends the long tradition of political graphic work conceived for a wider audience into the Internet and the 21st century. It understands technology not as an end in itself or as a fetish but simply as a tool to effectively tell history or a story.

If according to Yogi Berra “the future is not what it used to be” neither is the past. New technology allows us to reconstruct it (or both) in a non-linear way. Like the Julio Cortazar novel Rayuela the story (or stories) can happen in different ways. You can go to different places and historical periods through different routes depending on your actions. You can go from the battles of Bolivar to the single-crop economy of Cuba, from the myth of El Dorado to the poems of Sor Juana de la Cruz, from Fray Bartolomé de las Casas to Radio Venceremos. History and myth collide constructing one Latin America and an animated and politicized form of “magic realism” where Zapatista angels, dancing gods, animals, pirates, runaway slaves and the like tell truthful stories owing as much to Gabriel Garcia Marquez as to Eduardo Galeano. The interdisciplinary nonlinear qualities of Tropical America are not just a postmodern troupe but reflect the baroque way of thinking of the birthplace of contemporary cross-cultural life. This point of view is quite different if not opposite to the one given in computer games such as Sid Meier Colonization where you play a Viceroy and develop a form of colonization subjecting nature, Indians, African slaves, rival colonial powers and eventually revolting against paying taxes to your even more exploiting King. In another game called Tropico you play the leader of a small and poor Caribbean island with little resources where you have to develop some sort of political and economical model negotiating between capitalists, workers, the church, the military, the intellectuals, the Americans and the Russians having to compromise and make complicated moral decisions.

The dead people of El Mozote have finally been given a proper burial in cyberspace. This is as symbolic and in that sense as real as an entombment in a graveyard. By being remembered, the murders did not happened in vain and the victims might finally rest in peace. Worst than losing your land, your wealth and natural resources and the product of your labor is to not even exist in people’s minds. Taking these people into account gives them extra life (beyond the video game sense). To achieve this while wasting your time gaming is an accomplishment in reality.

1. http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp784772.html

Tropical America can be played at http://www.tropicalamerica.com. It is a project of OnRamp Arts and was written by Juán Davis and directed by him and Jessica Irish. It was illustrated by Artemio Rodriguez and developed in collaboration with Los Angeles artists, teachers, writers and high school students. It won the U.N. World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) award for best E-Entertainment.