There is a cumbia band in Mexico City who call themselves Los Extraños. Their name translates as "the strangers," but on the covers of their two US albums, 1999’s Los Extraños and the just-released Sigueme (both on EMI Latin), the band play with its other implications: "the foreigners," "the aliens."
The cover of Los Extraños was their Mexican version of Battlestar Galactica, with all seven members dressed in futuristic silver suits as they beamed down to Earth in the galactial glow of a UFO landing light. On the more cartoonish Sigueme, anti-gravity gets the best of them and they’re shown floating in spacesuits next to their Los Extraños rocketship. The ship bears the same logo that appears on the CD itself and that takes the place of the "o" in "Extraños": the doe-eyed face of a National Inquirer extraterrestrial (they also replace the tilde over the "n" with a miniature Saturn).
A retro space-alien video-game voice introduces the songs of Sigueme, but the music doesn’t match the alien packaging. Although they once teamed up with beat freaks Titan to do a cumbia warp of Carol King’s ’70s hit "Corazón," Los Extraños keep it way down to earth on Sigueme, playing romantic mid-tempo cumbias that beg for forgiveness and swoon after angelic hearts and lost loves.
In Mexico City, Los Extraños’ space shtick might go down as just cumbia kitsch, and their alien get-ups as nothing more than an easy marketing gimmick. But in the US — a country that has so often made "Mexican" and "illegal alien" seem self-evident synonyms — the coupling of the band’s alien role playing with their innocuous cumbias could easily be read as a form of social commentary: aliens make normal, everyday music, aliens find and lose love like everyone else, aliens are human too. Monterrey hip-hoppers Control Machete made a similar point back in 1997 in their US-targeted song "Humans Mexicanos," where they reminded anti-immigrant advocates that — contrary to highway signs that warn motorists of Mexican families sprinting across lanes like deer — it is possible to be both Mexican and human.
Joseph Nevins’s new book Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the Illegal Alien and the Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (Routledge) analyzes the Clinton administration’s 1994 "Operation Gatekeeper" initiative, which further militarized the border between Tijuana and San Diego in an attempt to seal it off. Nevins dates the conflation of "Mexican" and "alien" that Los Extraños are wrapped up in back to the turn of the 20th century, when US politicians began looking to distinguish us from them across a line that had then existed for only five decades. And he reminds us that alienspeak is not merely metaphorical — in 1903, immigration authorities began to fumigate Mexican immigrants at checkpoints.
Operation Gatekeeper turned the border into a war zone — more agents, longer fences, taller walls, and bigger budgets to bankroll the development of new surveillance technologies. It’s the same alien specter that, with renewed post–September 11 justification, George W. Bush raised recently when he visited the El Paso-Juárez border and declared that it wasn’t "smart" or "modern" enough. Bush called for a "biometric" ID system that would use digital fingerprinting and retina scans to allow frequent crossers quicker passage. "We want to use our technology to make sure that we weed out those who we don’t want in our country," he said of the $11 billion he was allocating for increased border security, "the terrorists, the coyotes, the smugglers, those who prey on innocent life."
What Bush missed is precisely what Nevins pinpoints: the link between the production of aliens and the policing of them. The more you look for aliens, the more aliens there are. The more fences you build, the more they will be cut. The more technology you develop, the more that technology can be used against you.
Rubén Ortiz Torres, a Mexico City/Los Angeles visual artist, plays with this idea in "Alien Toy," a 1997 video that is included in a new show of US-Mexico border art up at the Sweeney Art Gallery in Riverside. Torres takes a bed-dancing Chicano low-rider pick-up, paints it in Border Patrol green-and-white, and transforms it into what now looks like an alien spacecraft. What was once the cruising vehicle of border enforcement is now the "unidentified cruising object" itself. Los Extraños play the alien; "Alien Toy" shows how the alien can play. With the flip of a hydraulics switch, the sci-fi border gets inverted. Now it’s border-patrol agents and government officials who float through space, and now it’s they who must prove that they too are human.
