Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production explores how Latino artists, performers, and religious subjects utilize the abject as a contestatory position to challenge a neoliberal multicultural understanding of Latino identity. Alvarado explores the failures of latinidad as an identifier and an intellectual project, positioning the abject as a means to create challenging, novel, and productive ways of rethinking Latino identity. Alvarado “grapple[s] with Latino performative strategies and the political possibilities they illuminate as well as the limits of a recourse to assimilationist appeals for respectability” (3). The ultimate goal of this engagement is to explore different strategies for articulating Latino subjectivity, embodiment, and intelligibility.
Across four chapters, Alvarado moves from the performances of Ana Mendieta, Asco, and Nao Bustamante, to the popular television series Ugly Betty, and concludes with a fascinating analysis of Latino Mormon testimony. Throughout each chapter she gestures toward the potential each subject has to create “other possible arrangements of politicized collectivity” (16). Her theoretical framework skillfully and convincingly weaves together Immanuel Kant's articulation of aesthetics, Julia Kristeva's abject, and José Esteban Muñoz's not-yet-here queerness.
The first chapter, “Other Desires: Ana Mendieta's Abject Imaginings,” considers the performance and documentation of Mendieta's earlier performances. Alvarado analyzes how Mendieta's “purposeful embodiment and deployment of abjection” (55) challenge the liberatory visibility that is often connected to an aesthetics of respectability. Alvarado considers not only Mendieta's overtly abject works, including Rape Scene (1973), but also Mendieta's curatorial work for the Dialectics show at A.I.R Gallery.
The aptly named second chapter, “Phantom Assholes: Asco's Affective Vortex,” explores the work of Asco, a loose collective of Chicano performers who created works in southern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Alvarado considers how Asco's performances move away from discursive wholeness, both in the group's public performative interventions and in the ever-shifting composition of their group.
Chapter 3, “Of Betties Decorous and Abject: Ugly Betty’s America la fea and Nao Bustamante's America la bella,” moves to an analysis of the hit television series Ugly Betty and the performances of Nao Bustamante, particularly her appearance on the reality television show Work of Art: The Next Great Artist. While her analysis of Ugly Betty presents a close reading of the series, Alvarado engages in a fascinating and revelatory analysis of Nao Bustamante's refusal to engage with the intelligibility required of Kantian traditions of aesthetics that frame contemporary art criticism, as well as the premise of the reality television genre.
The culminating chapter, “Arriving at Apostasy: Performative Testimonies of Ambivalent Belonging,” presents a captivating analysis of how Latino Mormons embrace an abject Lamanite identity to challenge both the racialized hierarchies of the Mormon church and contemporary immigration policy in the United States. Following Alvarado, Latino Mormons have successfully pressured the church to support their immigrant members, so much so that “they build an allegiance, through abjection, with those most dejected in the dominant political imaginary: the undocumented poor” (156–57).
One notable strength of Abject Performances is Alvarado's analysis of the failures of latinidad, especially her critiques of redemptive identity and Chicano nationalism. Furthermore, she deftly connects the generative potential of the abject across a variety of artistic practices and cultural products. She creates an archive that “not only illustrates the broad performative cultural texts that help us think about abjection across different sites but also decenters the organization of Latino studies focussed on a particular US national coast, border, or national grouping and resists offering a teleological progress narrative” (17).
The major weakness of Alvarado's work is that, while she repeatedly invokes the “world-making possibilities of the aesthetics of abjection” (63), she does not articulate how these new collectives come to be, nor how they could be organized. In the conclusion, Alvarado acknowledges this fact, stating, “I have not offered concrete paths that might amend the policy-oriented social movements with specific mandates and regulations. This is not my way” (166). However, Alvarado's theoretical engagement with latinidad and abjection seems incomplete without, at the very least, a suggestion of what these “world-making possibilities” might be.
Abject Performances presents a dynamic, fascinating, and novel approach to understanding the role of abjection in contestatory articulations of Latino identity. From the esoteric to the popular, the sacred to the profane, Alvarado weaves together a narrative that convincingly positions the abject as an entirely distinct way of producing latinidad through diverse cultural products.
