02-09-17 Christina Ibarra Convocation

“Beyond the Wall: The Border as Spectacle and Performance” In this talk Cristina will be talking about her life while growing up on the border, how her identity was formed by this third space that straddles two cultures and yet remains by-and-large outside of both the American and Mexican mainstream. Her childhood playgrounds were her father’s junkyards, or yonkes, on both sides of the US/Mexico border. Transforming mismatched truck carcasses and metal parts into dollhouses or pirate ships gave her more than scraped knees and dusty jeans. She also experienced how her makeshift toys could convert a sick vehicle into a functional road warrior. In other words, it gave her something even more valuable — the power of metaphor, the aesthetics of recycling, and the will to dream. In short, a language of my own, that would lead me to filmmaking. She was constantly searching for ways to come home, looking for meaning in her culture clashed memories. Since then she learned to embrace this yonke approach in all of her work – recycling, blending and modifying meaning and cultural symbols associated with both Mexico and the United States. Because that’s her identity; She is Spanglish, most comfortable on the border, mixing up Spanish and English, melodrama and realism, tradition and assimilation, narrative and documentary, to create her own vehicle of culture. As her work evolves, she continue to use both humor and drama, and to reference “high” culture and “low,” She combine the dramatic, documentary and spectacle, in order to examine culture through a new lens.