Dipti Desai is a Professor of Art and Art Education in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University where she teaches courses on socially engaged art practices and its politics, critical pedagogy, and artistic activism as radical research. Her praxis-based pedagogy requires students to engage directly with communities and public spaces to envision and enact art activist projects. She is the author of four books and numerous articles on the intersection between art, social justice, and pedagogy.

Photo by Marlène Ramírez-Cancio Stephen Duncombe is a Professor of Media and Culture in the Gallatin and Steinhardt Schools of New York University, where he teaches the history and politics of media and culture. He is the author and editor of ten books on the intersection of culture and politics, and the cofounder of The Center for Artistic Activism, a training and research organization dedicated to helping activists create more like artists and artists strategize more like activists.

“Masks and Interfaces/Caras y mascaras” by Gloria Anzaldúa

The border is commonly understood as a demarcation between nations, with borders drawn and redrawn based on who is in power. However, borders are not simply physical lines on maps that separate nations, they also shape how we understand our identity, culture, and world. Growing up on the US–Mexico border, Gloria Anzaldúa learned that the border was a conflictive, contradictory, and contested space that allowed her to see multiple realities and ideas simultaneously. For historically marginalized people, art is a form of illumination because of the epistemic violence perpetrated by the dominant culture that deliberately renders certain groups of people and their culture invisible. Anzaldúa proclaims that making art for women of color is a way to assert their agency, shape their identity, and challenge their invisibility in our society. “Art is a sneak attack while the giant sleeps, a sleight of hands when the giant is awake, moving so quick they can do their deed before the giant swats them. Our survival,” she concludes, “depends on being creative.” The borderland is an epistemology, or way of knowing and being, that allows us to envision and create new possibilities of living together.

An introduction

Masks and Interfaces/Caras y máscaras. Among Chicanas/méxicanas, haciendo caras, “making faces,” means to put on a face, express feelings by distorting the face—frowning, grimacing, looking sad, glum or disapproving. For me, haciendo caras has the added connotation of making gestos subversivos, political subversive gestures, the piercing look that questions or challenges, the look that says, “Don’t walk all over me,” the one that says, “Get out of my face.” “Face” is the surface of the body that is the most noticeably inscribed by social structures, marked with instructions on how to be mujer, macho, working class, Chicana. As mestizas—biologically and/or culturally mixed—we have different surfaces for each aspect of identity, each inscribed by a particular subculture. We are “written” all over, or should I say, carved and tattooed with the sharp needles of experience.

The world knows us by our faces, the most naked, most vulnerable, exposed and significant topography of the body. When our caras do not live up to the “image” that the family or community wants us to wear and when we rebel against the engraving of our bodies, we experience ostracism, alienation, isolation and shame. Since white Anglo-Americans’ racist ideology cannot take in our faces, it, too, covers them up, “blanks” them out of its reality. To become less vulnerable to all these oppressors, we have had to ‘‘change” faces, hemos tenido que cambiar caras “como el cambio de color en el camaleón—cuando los peligros son muchos y las opciones son pocas.” Some of us are forced to acquire the ability, like a chameleon, to change color when the dangers are many and the options few. Some of us who already “wear many changes/inside of our skin” (Audre Lorde) have been forced to adopt a face that would pass.

The masks, las máscaras, we are compelled to wear, drive a wedge between our intersubjective personhood and the persona we present to the world. “Over my mask/is your mask of me.” (Mitsuye Yamada) These masking roles exact a toll. “My mask is control/concealment/endurance/my mask is escape/from my/self.” (Mitsuye Yamada) “We are all bleeding, rubbed raw behind our masks.” After years of wearing masks we may become just a series of roles, the constellated self limping along with its broken limbs. In sewing terms, “interfacing” means sewing a piece of material between two pieces of fabric to provide support and stability to the collar, cuff, yoke. Between the masks we’ve internalized, one on top of another, are our interfaces. The masks are already steeped with self-hatred and other internalized oppressions. However, it is the place—the interface—between the masks that provide the space from which we can thrust out and crack the masks.

In this anthology and in our daily lives, we women of color strip off the máscaras others have imposed on us, see through the disguises we hide behind and drop our personas so that we may become subjects in our own discourses. We rip out the stitches, expose the multi-layered “inner faces,” attempting to confront and oust the internalized oppression embedded in them, and remake anew both inner and outer faces. We begin to displace the white and colored male typographers and become, ourselves, typographers, printing our own words on the surfaces, the plates, of our bodies. We begin to acquire the agency of making our own caras. “Making faces” is my metaphor for constructing one’s identity. “[U]sted es el modeador de su carne tanto como el de su alma. You are the shaper of your flesh as well as of your soul. According to the ancient nahuas, one was put on earth to create one’s “face” (body) and “heart” (soul). To them, the soul was a speaker of words and the body a doer of deeds. Soul and body, words and actions are embodied in Moyocoyani, one of the names of the Creator in the Aztec framework, “the one who invents himself/herself . . . the Builder Kachina himself/herself.” In our self-reflectivity and in our active participation with the issues that confront us, whether it be through writing, front-line activism, or individual self-development, we are also uncovering the inter-faces, the very spaces and places where our multiple-surfaced, colored, racially gendered bodies intersect and interconnect.

Dipti Desai is a Professor of Art and Art Education in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University where she teaches courses on socially engaged art practices and its politics, critical pedagogy, and artistic activism as radical research. Her praxis-based pedagogy requires students to engage directly with communities and public spaces to envision and enact art activist projects. She is the author of four books and numerous articles on the intersection between art, social justice, and pedagogy.

Photo by Marlène Ramírez-Cancio Stephen Duncombe is a Professor of Media and Culture in the Gallatin and Steinhardt Schools of New York University, where he teaches the history and politics of media and culture. He is the author and editor of ten books on the intersection of culture and politics, and the cofounder of The Center for Artistic Activism, a training and research organization dedicated to helping activists create more like artists and artists strategize more like activists.

“Masks and Interfaces/Caras y mascaras” by Gloria Anzaldúa

The border is commonly understood as a demarcation between nations, with borders drawn and redrawn based on who is in power. However, borders are not simply physical lines on maps that separate nations, they also shape how we understand our identity, culture, and world. Growing up on the US–Mexico border, Gloria Anzaldúa learned that the border was a conflictive, contradictory, and contested space that allowed her to see multiple realities and ideas simultaneously. For historically marginalized people, art is a form of illumination because of the epistemic violence perpetrated by the dominant culture that deliberately renders certain groups of people and their culture invisible. Anzaldúa proclaims that making art for women of color is a way to assert their agency, shape their identity, and challenge their invisibility in our society. “Art is a sneak attack while the giant sleeps, a sleight of hands when the giant is awake, moving so quick they can do their deed before the giant swats them. Our survival,” she concludes, “depends on being creative.” The borderland is an epistemology, or way of knowing and being, that allows us to envision and create new possibilities of living together.

An introduction

Masks and Interfaces/Caras y máscaras. Among Chicanas/méxicanas, haciendo caras, “making faces,” means to put on a face, express feelings by distorting the face—frowning, grimacing, looking sad, glum or disapproving. For me, haciendo caras has the added connotation of making gestos subversivos, political subversive gestures, the piercing look that questions or challenges, the look that says, “Don’t walk all over me,” the one that says, “Get out of my face.” “Face” is the surface of the body that is the most noticeably inscribed by social structures, marked with instructions on how to be mujer, macho, working class, Chicana. As mestizas—biologically and/or culturally mixed—we have different surfaces for each aspect of identity, each inscribed by a particular subculture. We are “written” all over, or should I say, carved and tattooed with the sharp needles of experience.

The world knows us by our faces, the most naked, most vulnerable, exposed and significant topography of the body. When our caras do not live up to the “image” that the family or community wants us to wear and when we rebel against the engraving of our bodies, we experience ostracism, alienation, isolation and shame. Since white Anglo-Americans’ racist ideology cannot take in our faces, it, too, covers them up, “blanks” them out of its reality. To become less vulnerable to all these oppressors, we have had to ‘‘change” faces, hemos tenido que cambiar caras “como el cambio de color en el camaleón—cuando los peligros son muchos y las opciones son pocas.” Some of us are forced to acquire the ability, like a chameleon, to change color when the dangers are many and the options few. Some of us who already “wear many changes/inside of our skin” (Audre Lorde) have been forced to adopt a face that would pass.

The masks, las máscaras, we are compelled to wear, drive a wedge between our intersubjective personhood and the persona we present to the world. “Over my mask/is your mask of me.” (Mitsuye Yamada) These masking roles exact a toll. “My mask is control/concealment/endurance/my mask is escape/from my/self.” (Mitsuye Yamada) “We are all bleeding, rubbed raw behind our masks.” After years of wearing masks we may become just a series of roles, the constellated self limping along with its broken limbs. In sewing terms, “interfacing” means sewing a piece of material between two pieces of fabric to provide support and stability to the collar, cuff, yoke. Between the masks we’ve internalized, one on top of another, are our interfaces. The masks are already steeped with self-hatred and other internalized oppressions. However, it is the place—the interface—between the masks that provide the space from which we can thrust out and crack the masks.

In this anthology and in our daily lives, we women of color strip off the máscaras others have imposed on us, see through the disguises we hide behind and drop our personas so that we may become subjects in our own discourses. We rip out the stitches, expose the multi-layered “inner faces,” attempting to confront and oust the internalized oppression embedded in them, and remake anew both inner and outer faces. We begin to displace the white and colored male typographers and become, ourselves, typographers, printing our own words on the surfaces, the plates, of our bodies. We begin to acquire the agency of making our own caras. “Making faces” is my metaphor for constructing one’s identity. “[U]sted es el modeador de su carne tanto como el de su alma. You are the shaper of your flesh as well as of your soul. According to the ancient nahuas, one was put on earth to create one’s “face” (body) and “heart” (soul). To them, the soul was a speaker of words and the body a doer of deeds. Soul and body, words and actions are embodied in Moyocoyani, one of the names of the Creator in the Aztec framework, “the one who invents himself/herself . . . the Builder Kachina himself/herself.” In our self-reflectivity and in our active participation with the issues that confront us, whether it be through writing, front-line activism, or individual self-development, we are also uncovering the inter-faces, the very spaces and places where our multiple-surfaced, colored, racially gendered bodies intersect and interconnect.