The genealogy of Mexican performance art must be read through its intimate relation to politics, colonial memory and cultural resistance. As Galindo Carbonell demonstrates, the performance scene in Mexico cannot be reduced to mere aesthetic experimentation but is instead a strategic arena of activism in which the body becomes both weapon and testimony (Galindo Carbonell, 2021). The historical layers that structure Mexican collective identity—Spanish colonisation and the Mexican Revolution—generate entrenched gendered stereotypes: the pelado, the pachuco, the soldadera, the Virgen of Guadalupe. These figures, often promoted by nationalist discourse, continue to shape social imaginaries. Performance artists appropriate, distort and subvert these models, exposing their violent underpinnings. Figures like Lorena Wolffer and Teresa Margolles confront the aesthetics of death and femicide, while Jesusa Rodríguez and Erika Trejo reframe the myth of La Malinche to contest patriarchal historiography. This reworking of inherited archetypes demonstrates that stereotypes are not neutral cultural residues but mechanisms of domination that demand artistic insurgency (Galindo Carbonell, 2021). The thesis situates Mexican performance within transnational genealogies—from European dada and American happenings to feminist and queer interventions—yet insists on its specificity. Mexican performance develops from disenchantment with political institutions and from the urgency of decolonial critique. The body is understood not only as medium but as a site of inscription of race, class and gender; a locus of resistance where normative scripts can be disrupted. Galindo Carbonell’s conceptual framework draws on Cultural Studies, Gender Studies and Decolonial Theory, articulating performance as a transdisciplinary act. Activist collectives such as Polvo de Gallina Negra foreground feminist critique, while postporn performers like Rocío Boliver or Felipe Osornio radicalise corporeal exposure to dismantle heteronormativity. Likewise, the muxe performer Lukas Avendaño embodies indigenous counter-genders, destabilising binary logics imported by colonial modernity. What emerges is an expanded notion of performance as counter-discourse, an embodied practice that challenges both state hegemony and patriarchal violence. The critical force of Mexican performance lies not only in its aesthetic radicalism but in its ability to reimagine social contracts, exposing violence while rehearsing alternative identities. This research thus affirms that contemporary Mexican performance is inseparable from activism: its power resides in making visible, denouncing and resignifying the very stereotypes that constrain life.
Galindo Carbonell, M. D. (2021) Estereotipos, activismo y subversión de género en el performance mexicano. Universidad de Murcia.
