ABOUT THE WORKLa 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 attorney, 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
(2004) (2014)Single Channel Video, Sound, Color, 4:04 minutes
City of San Antonio Attorney removed video claiming it violated Texas State Statutes prompting a national debate about arts and censorship
La Chica Boom’s Failed Decolonial Spictacles by Alpesh Patel – E-misferica 11.1 Decolonial Gesture, 2014
Queerness, Race and Digital Art in Dismantling The Patriarchy Bit by Bit: Art, Feminism, and Digital Technology, by Judith k. Brodsky, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022