Xandra Ibarra

Xandra Ibarra (born 1979), who has sometimes worked under the alias of La Chica Boom, is an American performance artist, activist, and educator. Ibarra works across video, sculpture and performance. She is based in Oakland, California.

About Born in 1979 in El Paso/Juarez, on the border between Mexico and the United States, She performed in musical theatre in early adulthood, and learned burlesque from Sheu Sheu Le'Haure, a local performer. Around the same time Ibarra was active with the national anti-violence groups Incite! and CARA (Communities Against Rape and Abuse). She previously worked as a lecturer at San Francisco State University in the Ethnic Studies department. Ibarra has been an activist in the prison abolition movement and community organizing for the anti-rape movement.

Work

Performances

Spictacles series (2002–2012) Ibarra performed "spictacles" under the moniker of La Chica Boom from 2002 until 2012. Spictacles, a term coined by Ibarra, "mixed and repurpose traditional Mexican iconography alongside racist tropes within the erotic and sensual vocabulary of burlesque." One example of such a performance is La Tortillera, exhibited starting in 2004. Tortillera in this instance, is being used as both a descriptor for someone who makes tortillas, and also as the derogatory Spanish slang term for "lesbian". The performance consists of Ibarra in "traditional" colorful Mexican tortillera dress. Although she singles out the Mexican housewife stereotype, this is also the attire that high end or 'authentic' Mexican restaurants require of women who stand in panoptical view of their customers, assuring the tortilla's faux homemade authenticity. As the performance progresses, Ibarra sheds more and more items of clothing, in the tradition of burlesque, until she dons nothing but her pasties and a Tapatío bottle attached to a strap-on, which she then uses to cum on the tortilla before consuming it." The City funds the art space, Centro de Artes, and it spurred the debate on the role of public support within the arts and freedom of speech. She juxtaposes the rumored death of Lupe Vélez with the life of La Chica Boom "to illuminate how performing racially perverse material often fails because it is read and embodied as reality by (white) audiences". Through this performance, Ibarra uses nudity and the sonic quality of laughter to explore the "vexed relation racialized subjects have to not only one's own skin, but also one's own entanglements and knots (skeins) with whiteness and white womanhood." Performance studies scholar Juana María Rodriguez examines the video to argue that "feminism also needs to be about imagining a sexual politics that does not require the abandonment of fun and pleasure." She captures the symbolic process of shedding the skin of a cockroach by laying next to costumes of her former persona La Chica Boom. She relates the image of the cockroach to "Latinidad and spichood" where despite the efforts of exploring a new self or "new skin", she is still "stuck" with "Latinidad and spichood".

In academic publications Ibarra has attracted the attention of various scholars of performance, gender, and race. Juana María Rodríguez, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley writes about Ibarra's performance and the erotics of the Mexico–United States border in her book Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings and in her essay "Viscous Pleasures and Unruly Feminisms" in GLQ.

Amber Jamilla Musser's Sexual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (2018) book includes a chapter about Ibarra's collaboration with performance artist Amber Hawk Swanson, "Untitled Fucking" (2013).

Leticia Alvarado's Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production (2018) features Ibarra's performance work "Skins/Less Here" (2015) on the cover and in the conclusion.

Ivan Ramos, a Professor at the University of Maryland writes about La Chica Boom's performances ' Tortillera and Untitled Fucking. Ramos discusses Ibarra's incorporation of the symbolic Tapatio bottle across many of her performances and discusses how this calls attention to the history of denigration of Mexicans, carried out through the harsh criticisms of the spiciness of Mexican cuisine. Ramos writes about the ways La Chica Boom appropriates and plays with the stereotypes of Mexicans as unsanitary, obnoxiously flavorful, and over sexualized, in order to dismantle them. The author connects Ibarra to the Chicana/o art collective founded in the 1960s, Asco.