San Antonio Art Center Censors ‘Obscene’ Xandra Ibarra Video

Xandra Ibarra, a performance artist from Oakland, California, created a live piece in 2014 titled “La Tortillera,” in which her intent was to satirize Mexican gender stereotypes through her alter-ego, La Chica Boom, a waitress. But apparently her satire was too strong for the Texas city of San Antonio, which suddenly removed a four-minute video based on “La Tortillera”just hours before an exhibit featuring the video opened on February 13. “Ibarra created the hyper-sexualized, hyper-racialized La Chica Boom persona in the 2000s for a performance series she calls ‘spictacles,’” accoirding tp KQED radio in San Francisco, “aiming in part to humorously complicate and pervert Mexican iconography.” The video was supposed to feature in the exhibit “XicanX: New Visions,” at San Antonio’s city-owned Centro De Artes. But Department of Arts and Culture Director Debbie Racca-Sittre said that she ordered the video removed at the last minute, due to “explicit sexual content.” The video depicts the artist first in a waitress uniform, then stripping to a green corset, with black tasseled pasties covering her nipples. After she places a tortilla on a table and creates a “taco” out of a pair of panties emblazoned with a Mexican flag, she reveals that she is wearing a bottle of hot sauce as a strap-on dildo.  The video concludes as she simulates masturbation until the bottle “ejaculates” hot sauce onto the taco. “If I can't cum on my tacos, neither can you,” Ibarra told KQED. “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.” The short video remains viewable via Vimeo.  Though City Attorney Segovia ruled that the video could be removed as “obscene content,” earlier this week a subcommittee of San Antonio’s Arts Commission voted at a public hearing that the work’s artistic merits should supersede any concerns of “obscenity.” But the full Arts Commission, followed by the San Antonio City Council, must now also vote to reinstate the video to the exhibit, a process that could take at least until April 6.  “XicanX: New Visions” runs through June 28, and whether the Xandra Ibarra video will be part of the works on display remains unclear. Photo by La Chica Boom Vimeo Video Capture