Abstract

This article takes a renewed look at Chicana political performance and urban intervention art in Latin America. Art-in-action has been a particularly fertile tradition in Latin America ever since the sixties, and more recently it has inspired a large number of performing artists working within a feminist and/or queer perspective. Here we would like to introduce the work of Chicano artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his band of performers, « La Pocha Nostra », and also that of the Bolivian collective « Mujeres Creando », both pairing exposure of gender oppression to a post-colonial perspective and to the themes of territory, frontier, and identitary loyalty and dissidence. Their visual video-permormance work springs from the captations documenting their actions and performances, and also from video objects in the domain of the poetic field, or in that of hybridation of fiction and documentary reality. They take shape in the particular context of the American continent, which is one of imperial dominance, migratory situations, and skin-colour based stratifications, but also of processes of sovereignty and autonomy-creation by indigenous people, of democratic changes and revolutionary movements, and of cultural experiences and experiments of the border and of a being-creole