José Torres-Tama is an award-wining multidisciplinary artist, and he received a prestigious MAP Fund Grant for his "Taco Truck Theater / Teatro Sin Fronteras" ensemble performance on wheels, which challenges the anti-immigrant hysteria. "This Taco Truck Kills Fascists" is the project’s documentary that won Best Louisiana Feature at the 2018 New Orleans Film Festival. "Aliens, Immigrants, & Other Evildoers” is “a sci-fi Latino noir” solo that exposes the rise in hate crimes against Latin American immigrants in a country that dehumanizes them while exploiting their labor. Northwestern University Press will publish the full “Aliens” script in the anthology titled “Encuentro: Latinx Performances for the New American Theater” due in May 2019. Vanderbilt, Duke, Cornell and others have presented his solos, and international presenters include Roehampton University in London, Bluecoat Arts Centre in Liverpool, and Centre for Performance Research in Wales. From 2006 to 2011, he contributed commentaries to NPR’s Latino USA, and exposed the human rights violations Latin American immigrant workers faced in post-Katrina New Orleans. (Top blog photo from “ALIENS” by Craig Morse, and bottom image by Ben Thompson.) www.torrestama.com

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

ALIENS ARE COMING Lecture at TULANE University's Freeman Auditorium 7PM - FREE

After a national four-city tour of the ALIENS, IMMIGRANTS & OTHER EVILDOERS performance piece, I am back in New Orleans to present a multimedia lecture called ALIENS ARE COMING: Fears of a Brown Invasion & the Vilification of Latino Immigrants in the USA. This lecture is the accompanying program to the ALIENS performance piece, and it is informed by the research I have conducted over the past three years on the rise in hate crimes against Latino immigrants.

ALIENS ARE COMING TULANE, FRIDAY, MAY 13 Freeman Auditorium:
Latino immigrants in the United States are no longer living la vida loca of Ricky Martin’s 1990s popular anthem, and I find myself longing for those days when we were supposedly ushering in a new Latino boom. ALIENS ARE COMING explores the widespread hysteria, driven by political zealots, concerning “illegal aliens”. Right-wing conservatives and Tea Party Candidates (is there a difference?) have divisively stoked the fires of xenophobia to a mad frenzy, and they have inspired hideous hate crimes against Latinos—whether they are rightful citizens, legal residents, or undocumented workers.

They have employed fear mongering against Latinos across the United States, and the word “immigrant” itself has become synonymous with criminals and terrorists. In ALIENS ARE COMING, I comment on the current vilification of Latino immigrants as a strategic cultural practice not uncommon to a country that has engaged in the accepted genocide of American Natives, the enslavement of Africans, the demonization of Muslim culture, and the imprisonment of more than one-tenth of its current population while proudly calling itself the capital of the free world.

This is a heady and humorous performance analysis of a brief history of abuse of power in the U.S.A., and I will open the program with an excerpt from the ALIENS performance piece. In addition, I will present a collage of the best hits of "illegal aliens" 2010 campaign ads produced by the pushers of fear. You know who they are.

ALIENS ARE COMING will be presented at the Tulane University Freeman Auditorium inside the Woldenberg Art Center (Drill Road and Newcomb Circle) on Friday, May 13 at 7pm.

http://www.tulane.edu/~newcomb/lectures.html

The lecture is FREE and open to the public. The program will serve as the opening event for a photography exhibition called The History of the Future/La Historia del Futuro at the Newcomb Gallery, which brings together the photographic collaborations of Michael Berman and Julian Cardona. Their fine art images document the people and the landscape of the U.S./Mexico border region. www.newcombartgallery.tulane.edu

My lecture presentation at TULANE has been made possible with support from Tulane University’s Interdisciplinary Committee for Art and Visual Culture (ICAVC), Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies, and Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

CONGRESS OF DAY LABORERS MAY FIRST MARCH:
Also, I will explore the contributions of Latino immigrants to the reconstruction of post-Katrina New Orleans. This glaring fact of the reconstruction remains conspicuously absent from most of the mainstream post-Katrina media narratives. This August, it will be six years since the reconstruction, and the remaining Latino immigrant workers and their families, who have reconstructed this city with their sweat and blood, are a persecuted people. They are being targeted and deported in greater numbers. Their labor has been exploited by an ungrateful city, and it is becoming harder for many to live in the Big Easy,

“The city that care forgot” has never officially cared to acknowledge the contributions made by the thousands of Latino immigrants who have been invaluable to our recovery. It is the greatest untold story of the post-Katrina rebuilding, and I continuously repeat it because it is one of the most egregious omissions of our recent history. Official governmental and cultural institutions remain suspiciously silent about the abuses many immigrants have suffered during the reconstruction. Thousands of private businesses and local homeowners, the many galleries/museums and cultural arts organizations, and the general public have all benefited from their arduous labor.

Some day soon, it will be recognized for what is: one of the greatest perpetrations of extensive labor abuse in the history of this country, which has an insatiable appetite for labor exploitation. As much as it breaks my heart, the exploitation of labor should come as no surprise in the port City of New Orleans, which was once built by the slave labor of an African people. Since the storm, the new slaves of color have been the brown Mestizo Latino immigrants, and they transformed "chocolate city" into an enchilada village, rebuilding a destroyed metropolis that would not be where it is today without their labor.

Latino immigrant workers were responsible for bringing the Big Easy back from the dead with a committed work ethic of epic proportions. Like a locusts of reconstruction angels, they descended upon the fragile pueblo, and restored the engines of the viable tourist industry by salvaging the many flooded hotels before they were condemned. They put up roof after roof on house after house that allowed residents to return home. They refurbished the now majestic Superdome, and it has become the most iconic symbol of our progress with the New Orleans Saints football team reigning as the 2010 Super Bowl Champions.

In last year's epic BP oil spill disaster, it was Latino laborers who did the heavy cleaning on the soiled Louisiana shoreline. This entire Gulf Coast state and its people have benefited tremendously from the Latino immigrant labor force, yet they are now fighting to remain. The RIGHT TO REMAIN was the prevailing theme of the recent May 1 demonstration by el Congreso de Jornaleros/The Congress of Day Laborers. They took to the streets of downtown New Orleans to proclaim their human rights and ended their march at City Hall. The series of new images here are from that march.

Make art that matters,

José Torres-Tama
ArteFuturo Productions
2426 Saint Claude Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70117
www.torrestama.com
504.232.2968

http://elbigeasyamigoblogger.blogspot.com

NEW ORLEANS FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR
OGDEN MUSEUM ART BOOK available at
http://www.torrestama.com/ogdenbook/index.html

No comments:

Post a Comment