ABOUT THE WORK

La Tortillera was developed by Xandra Ibarra as a live performance in 2004 when she performed under the alias of La Chica Boom. The performance was later archived for camera in 2014. In Spictacle II: La Tortillera, Ibarra takes on her own racial bondage to hot sauce, tacos, and demographic panic in “Tortillera.” She dances a 60’s border corrida as a camp version of a Mexican housewife, makes tacos with her panties, and “spreads her seed” onto tacos with her “Tapatio cock.”

On Censorship: 

“On February 13, San Antonio’s Department of Arts & Culture removed Xandra Ibarra’s Spictacle II: La Tortillera, 2014, from the opening of a group exhibition at the Centro de Artes. The four-minute video, deemed “obscene” by the city, presents the artist in character La Chica Boom as she performs one of her “spictacles”—Ibarra’s coinage for “camp spectacles of Mexican and Mexican-American myths that render the colonial gaze laughable.” The decision to remove the work has been criticized by artists, supporters, and groups including the National Coalition Against Censorship.”

-Artforum

READ: Petition, Support Letters, Press links & Timeline of Censorship Case pertaining to this video work in San Antonio, Texas here