The Unbaptized Earth: Ana Mendieta and the Performance of Exile

Exile is a potent word appearing repeatedly in discussions of the earthworks and performances of Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta (1948-1985). It has been used to explain Mendieta's artistic inspiration, to categorize her work, to define her identity, to describe her location, to suggest her nationality, and to substitute for her home. This project looks more closely at exile in an attempt to understand the complexity of its meanings in relation to Mendieta's life and work. It describes exile as a historical fact of her biography but also envisions it (1) as a discursive position from which to engage issues of nationality, race, and gender, and (2) as a performative identity through which to stage artworks, the liminality and undecidability of which are disruptive to the artificial coherence of such categories. Mendieta's exile came to define her identity, both for herself and for critics. Her exilic identity was particular to the period of the '60s; unlike later exiles (i.e. those of the 1980 Mariel boatlift), she did not experience the socialism of the Castro regime firsthand, and therefore supported Castro or, more emphatically, Cuba as a victim of First World (predominantly U.S.) aggression. Though white, her experiences of racism made her identify herself as non-white; she affiliated herself with native peoples and saw a parallel between their tragic experiences of colonialism and the Third World's experience of neo-colonialism. This project takes up her engagement with stories/histories of such peoples and the ways in which the stories' meanings are inflected by her discursive position of exile, the ways in which she reinscribes them with the politics of nation and color. It also looks at her performances, which bring together earth and body in sites marked by nation, colonialism, and feelings of home. It suggests that in these performances she stages travel as a liminal category that is subversive of the stability, fixity, and coherence of the nation-space, and of the earth as a feminine entity. Finally, it claims that her notion of an "unbaptized earth" is a metaphor for an earth that exists prior to discursive and ideological inscription.