It’s a complicated border war. On the surface, it’s a war between
boom boxes and iPods; between tequila and…more expensive
tequila. But deep inside, it’s a much nastier war between those
who remember and those who forget.
—El Mad Mex
1. Ode to the Mission
These poetic postcards are my homage to the hood that has hosted and nurtured my madness for almost 15 years.
The Mission has been the stage for my art, my love, my friendships, and my escapades into forbidden territories, both on the streets and inside my psyche. It’s my personal laboratory for permanent existential reinvention.
Here, I have written and performed, danced on fire and ice, loved my jaína, cried inconsolably, gotten drunk out of my mind and flesh, laughed, debated, demonstrated, escaped eviction and despair, confronted the cops and the demons of gentrification.
Primer misterio: How come the Mission is sunnier and warmer than the rest of the city? Is it a Latino thang? Is it the heat generated by 700 taquerías? Is it true that we have more sex in this part of the city? What is the source of this chemical, social, sexual, political, and artistic stimulus? What draws people here?
Are we seduced by the promise of bohemia in a country of restricted imagination, in an era of constrained freedoms? Are we seeking freedom of the imagination, attracted by the mythical possibility of reinventing ourselves overnight? Of exercising all the selves and identities we wish to become without having to confront conformity every step of the way? Sí? No? Maybe? Or are we part of the ongoing wave of international exiles escaping failed revolutions and interventionist wars from San Salvador to Baghdad? Are we part of the wave of sexual and artistic misfits escaping orthodoxy in our distant homelands, or are we merely taking a ghetto cruise?
2. The 24th Street corridor
The infamous 24th Street corridor, el corazón de la Misión, poster barrio loco de Califas Norte, has become the most visited Latino strip in the whole pinche country. Why? This polycultural faultline epitomize America’s main intercultural wrestling match, la borderización vs. the global project, Round 3: Will the U.S. become a Third World country or will it remain a delusional world power? Here, the First World wrestles with the Third down the street, while all continents converge in the corner trying to make sense out of their sweaty proximity: norte, sur, este, aquel…
Digital snapshots: Old world cantina stands between an art space and a designer boutique. A community center, defending the rights of la gente, is framed by an old-fashioned beauty parlor and an ice cream shop that would make John Waters salivate. Catholicism fights for believers and space with New Age shops and Santería, while fringe Evangelical churches breed a new generation of Latino Intifada.
Ommmm, shalom, jihad, mocos, amen…alleluia!
Here, Central American restaurants feed starving white artists and refugees from wars sponsored by the U.S., and when you sit at a local bar you just don’t know if the vato drinking next to you is a Norteño or a Sureño, an X-Salvadoran rebel or a Guatemalan soldier, an unpublished novelist or a Mormon psycho. And you really don’t care. We are all others within this intercultural poltergeist.
3. Hipsters vs. locals
The first paradox we encounter in Planet Mission is a border conflict between the so-called “locals” and the “art hipsters,” two gross generalizations because, stricto sensu, the locals aren’t that local and the hipsters aren’t that hip.
The author en la calle Clarion. Photos: Tania Fuentes
The main complaint of the locals is that the hipsters don’t really “live”in the Mission, ontologically speaking; that they are here temporarily only to have a vicarious experience of bohemian locura and cultural otherness. They are perceived as obnoxious tourists crashing the hood ’cause it’s closer than San Miguel de Allende or Oaxaca, cheaper than Santa Fe or Venice Beach, and less dangerous than Tijuana.
And after a few Grey Goose martinis, the hipsters also complain. They complain about the homeboys’ machismo and their primitive tattoos, about the homegirls’ rowdiness and long black nails, and moan that everything closes so early in the mecca of hipsterism.
It’s a complicated border war. On the surface, it’s a war between boom boxes and iPods, between tequila and more expensive tequila. But deep inside, it’s a much nastier war between those who remember and those who forget.
The gaze of the homeboys is heavy and defiant, true. But the gaze of the hipsters is vacant. So what is more offensive? The cultural boldness of working class Latinos or the existential indifference of the Anglos? Hard to tell.
Do the hipsters and the locals ever meet? Occasionally…during a one-night stand (and mostly the queers), ’cause, according to hipsterologist Claire Light, “21st-century heteros aren’t mating outside their sociocultural group.”
For me, the unresolved question is: Am I a hipster or a local? Can I be both? Please? Can I inhabit both psyches and wear both identities?
