Immigration, Undocumented Workers, Simulacra, and the Ghosts of Jean Baudrillard, Jorge Luis Borges, and Rene Magritte

As I have been recently outed as a flaming pomo--an out and out cultural studies maven--in the international press, and as I am, as well, a card-carrying theory-doused 80s critic bathed in the flames of Foucault, Derrida, Irigaray, Sarduy, and Baudrillard, it makes total sense for me to foreground this April 2007 clipping from the San Diego Union-Tribune, featuring a photo by the Associated Press's Stefano Paltera. Paltera's lens captures a moment from Yolanda Araujo's performance art, a thrilling and innovative piece of street theatre that washes the taste of Guillermo Gómez-Peña from your synapses even as it challenges the politics of early 21st-century neo-fascism in the United States. The photo and the political act are, at once, instances of something I am beginning to call eyegiene. More on this neologism/concept (the child of Borges, Magritte, Varo, Oppenheim, Pynchon, Los Bros. Hernandez, Man Ray, and Sarduy) to come.