Officials in a Texas city earlier this month removed “Spictacle II: La Tortillera,” Oakland artist Xandra Ibarra’s video satirizing Mexican gender stereotypes, from display in a city-owned gallery due to content deemed “obscene,” prompting cries of censorship nationally.
The video was removed from XicanX: New Visions hours before the group exhibition curated by Dos Mestizx opened Feb. 13 at Centro de Artes in San Antonio. A city spokesperson in a statement called the video “obscene material” that flaunts community standards. First Amendment advocates call its removal a violation of constitutional free speech protections, and a petition by the show’s curators to restore the artwork so far boasts more than 1,000 signatures.
Ibarra, an established performance artist, originally developed “La Tortillera” as a live performance through her La Chica Boom persona. In the four-minute video from 2014, she dances in Mexican housewife garb to Eddie Dimas’ “El Mosquito” before removing her panties to reveal a Tapatio bottle strapped to her pelvis. Tasseled pasties cover Ibarra’s nipples as she pretends to ejaculate hot sauce onto the thongs and tortillas. The strap-on Tapatio bottle is a sculpture Ibarra created with the intention of ridiculing the fear of racial contagion or demographic change.
“If I can’t cum on my tacos, neither can you,” Ibarra said in a statement to KQED. “What I mean to say is that this is not about me, the state wants to silence urgent political movements and cultural issues that deal with race, sex, sexuality, incarceration, immigration, and war. We need to answer back even when it’s something as tame as the censorship of me cumming on tacos.”
Ibarra, a professor at California College of the Arts who’s shown at local institutions including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is originally from the El Paso-Juarez border region. She is also a longtime community organizer active with INCITE!, a national organization devoted to addressing violence against women of color. Ibarra created the hyper-sexualized, hyper-racialized La Chica Boom persona in the 2000s for a performance series she calls “spictacles,” aiming in part to humorously complicate and pervert Mexican iconography.
