Core response: Spanglish Net. Sponsored by Telcel America

According to the website www.liveart.org, on December 24th, 2000, “The Virtual Barrio @ The Other Frontier (or the Chicano interneta)” was posted as a text in the motherboard of the website. Although it has been almost twenty years since that publication, several elements of the manifesto are still prevalent. However, there are may anachronistic elements in Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s manifesto, on art, technology development and the remapping of a UScentric virtual space. One of the main arguments of the “techno-illiteracy” identified in Mexicans and Latinx is greatly related to ongoing access to technologies and telephone/internet connectivity. This might not be applicable to the date since one of the World’s wealthiest individuals has almost single-handedly provided internet access to Mexico and a large part of Latin America. On top of that, even in those mountain-range locations that were not wired by Telcel/Telmex’s network, the government allotted aerial spectrum to Indigenous Community Telecommunications to create an indigenous radio frequency to communicate, which they then transformed to be used in order to extend to internet and telephone coverage through satellite technologies. 

Adding on that, recent studies show that connectivity is no longer an argument that could be used. The latest study on Internet usage in Mexico (Asociación de Inernet.mx, July 31, 2019) shows an increase of 4.3% in users over 6 years old, reaching over 82 million users in the country (out of the 126 million inhabitants). Then, why do we feel some criterion still apply? Is it because there is no attempt to set forward the de-colonial project through cyberspace and into the digital world? Or because the politicized cartography of the “Spanglish” net was not aware of the traits that modernity had brought upon the modernized high technologies? Or is this needed separation embedded in the resistance of inclusion, embracing the “otherness” and fore-fronting it through the “multi-centric, theoretical understanding of the cultural, political and aesthetic possibilities of new technologies” that Gómez-Peña includes in his manifesto. On top of that, it is interesting to see how the cultural myth poetical ant performative imaginary persists, transferred through some of the most prominent artists in the country. Francisco Toledo’s recent passing embodies the political, poetical and metaphysical traits of a Mexican artist, who without high technologies, was imaginative and sentimentalist, passionate and irrational, who vividly materialized that realm of technological underdevelopment and cultural and spiritual superiority in the material world. 

I am afraid to say that all that he represented might have become extinct after his passing, or perhaps it cannot be encoded and translated into the digital world. Which leads me to question, is it still feasible to “Spanglishize the net” today under the propositions of Gómez-Perña’s manifesto?