Abstract
On 16 April 2009, renowned environmental and political “performer” Alberto de Jesús (“Tito Kayak”) flew to Trinidad with three other representatives of the Hostosian National Independence Movement (MINH) to carry the message of independence for Puerto Rico to the Summit of the Americas. Scheduled to begin on the following day, the Summit featured the first meeting of President Barack Obama with other “American” heads of state. The Puerto Ricans carried banners and print literature for distribution, but they found their plane halted on the tarmac of Piarco Airport and surrounded by heavily armed security forces. The agents entered the plane, arrested and handcuffed Tito Kayak, led him to a holding cell, and returned him to Puerto Rico, after confiscating all visual-print materials carried by the four MINH representatives. Democratic Trinidad-Tobago – where visas are not required of US citizens – decided to enforce its borders and deny entrance to “certain” US (Puerto Rican) citizens in order not to blemish the red-carpeted world stage created for the new US leader.
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Notes
See Antonio Benítez-Rojo, La isla que se repite: El Caribe y la perspectiva posmoderna (Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte, 1989 ). Quotes that appear in the text are taken from
Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, 2nd edn, trans. James E. Maraniss ( Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1996 ).
See Herbert Blau, “The Dubious Spectacle of Collective Identity,” in The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976–2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002) ch. 9: 137–56.
Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum -Atlantic Performance ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1996 ), 211–17.
See L. Fiet, “Una nota al calce y la política actual,” Claridad (20–26 March 2008): 24–5. Jorge Díaz, Javier Maldonado, Deymirie Hernández and Dora Irizarry are active members of Papel Machete.
For example, see Notes from Nowhere, ed., We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism (London and New York: Verso, 2003) for international points of reference and comparison.
See Nelson Rivera, El Maestro: una pieza basada en discursos de Pedro Albizu Campos in Nelson Rivera, Sucio Difícil: Piezas para el teatro ( San Juan and Santo Domingo,: Isla Negra, 2005 ), 114–40.; L. Fiet, “Reflexiones I: El Maestro,” Claridad (23–29 June 2005): 26–7; and “El regreso de El Maestro,” Claridad (7–13 September 2006 ): 25.
See L. Fiet, “ZCuântas obras de Albizu necesitamos?,” Claridad (19–25 May 2007): 26.
René Marqués, La muerte no entrarâ en palacio, in Teatro, vol. I, 5th edn ( Río Piedras, PR: Editorial Cultural, 1986 ): 200.
The same can be said of the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, and much of the rest of the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America. See Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism and Pedagogy ( New York and London: Routledge, 2005 ), 187.
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© 2011 Lowell Fiet
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Fiet, L. (2011). New Tropicalism: Performance on the Shifting Borders of Caribbean Disappearance. In: Rivera-Servera, R.H., Young, H. (eds) Performance in the Borderlands. Performance Interventions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230294554_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230294554_14
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