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Everything about borders can be both asserted and just as quickly denied. A border lays down certainty where there is none, converts the arbitrary into the absolute, the possible into the proprietary. A landscape, riven, gives rise to nations and naming and peoples who are because they are not the other, differences usually fiercely asserted and maintained because their pretext is so liminal, so arbitrary, so uncertain. Ramiro Puerta and Guillermo Verdecchia's Crucero/Crossroads (1994) makes use of national and international borders (U.S./Mexico, U.S./Canada, U.S./Latin America) to investigate how the liminality and the plurality evoked by these borders confounds secure formulations of identity, of genres and of interpretations or truths.
Crucero begins with a sequence in which the narrator, recounting a visit to his curandero/healer, remembers passing out as his curandero says -- "the border is ..." This sequence is answered by one at the film's end in which the curandero completes the sentence, telling him: "the border, the border is you." In between, filmmaker Puerta and performance artist and writer Verdecchia explore how one inhabits or embodies the ambiguous identities elicited by various borders, Puerta documenting Verdecchia's narrativized performance of his multiple personifications and identifications.
In the film, Verdecchia is a Latino and a Canadian who has lived most comfortably in Paris. He shifts languages (Spanish, English and French), accents, and affects as he brushes his teeth, walks down the street, irons his clothes, has a coffee, goes to a club and performs any number of everyday activities. These shifts are dictated by the actor's movement back and forth between two different personae -- his own, Guillermo Verdecchia, and that of Fecundo Morales Segundo, a man who wears a bolero and identifies himself as a pachuco. In his own embodiment, Guillermo is confused about his identity, about where he fits in. He has strange physical maladies that doctors cannot diagnose and for which he sees both a therapist and a curandero. Guillermo remembers with pain and embarrassment the contortions his grade school teacher Miss Wiseman went through on the first day of class when she tried to pronounce his name as we see a reenactment of the event.
Fecundo has a completely different approach to these issues. As he sashays down the street, speaking directly to the camera that moves in front, beside and behind him, he says in accented English "When I moved here, people would say to me "Sorry? What's the name." I would tell them "Fec un do/Fecundo" They would say "Wow, that's a new one. Mind if I call you Fac?" "No, not at all--Mind if I call you shithead?" Fecundo is a mover and a shaker. He wants to move out of the barrio because it is going to the dogs -- yuppies are moving in, renovating and making a lot of noise. Because Latinos are a hot commodity, he talks to a Saxon developer about starting a third world theme park in a toxic waste dump because "you people love that kind of shit." His theme park will undersell travel agents who are making lots of money selling package tours to Brazilian slums.
The film's interplay between Guillermo and Fecundo differentiates between different embodiments and experiences of identity. Guillermo suffers, there is no place for him in his multiple and liminal identities. In his dreams, his healer tells him "the border is you!" Fecundo's `back at you' affect, his assumption of an amalgam of Latino signifiers (the Pachuco identity, the bolero, etc), and his aggressive reverse stereotyping constitute a resistance, an appropriation of saxonical stereotyping. He inhabits anglo projections in a definitive charismatic identity, while the `real' Guillermo seems diffident and diffuse. While neither Verdecchia or Fecundo are presented as correct, real or whole, in the contrast between them the film considers questions of border identities in the context of various media, stereotypes, histories and nationalities. Alternately witty and haunting, Crucero traces the `I' crossed by the vexing paradoxes of borders.
For more information regarding these articles and/or to submit an article yourself,
please contact Ethan van Thillo at sdlff@sdlatinofilm.com
San Diego Latino Film Festival,
c/o Media Arts Center San Diego,
2039 29th Street,
San Diego, CA 92104TEL: 619.230.1938, FAX: 619.234.9722,
sdlff@sdlatinofilm.com, www.sdlatinofilm.com
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