Stranger in a Strange Land
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Stranger in a Strange Land (A Remix) continues ongoing research, writing, workshops, and creative production related to a sci-fi rock opera performed by high school students in Crystal City, Texas (1976). The play, which took its title from Robert Heinlein’s novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), drew upon a wide range of direct and indirect influences, including: a 1970 civil rights report outlining the adverse socio-economic circumstances faced by Mexican Americans (Stranger in One’s Land), the book Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth was based on, George Orwell’s allegorical novel Animal Farm (1945), and Crystal City’s history as a detention site where people of Japanese, German, and Italian descent were interned during WWII. Most prominently, the play mixed and remixed the songs and stage personas of David Bowie. As such, the rock opera signals a complex citational practice whereby one story is told through many others.
A key component of the play is its dystopic landscape ruined by nuclear war, which directly connects to Crystal City’s history of large-scale farming and the associated pesticide industry. From the1950s until the 1980s crop dusting companies operated out of the local airport, which was eventually ruled a Superfund Site by the Environmental Protection Agency resulting in the removal of massive amounts of contaminated soil. This project thinks through the play in order to investigate notions about the production of private property, environmental racism, Chicanx sci-fi dystopias, and Aztlán imaginaries. This project’s various publications, workshops, moving images, performances, research installations, and sculptural works engage ficto-critical narratives in order to question the connections between history, geography, politics, and aesthetics.
Below is documentation of this project’s initial materializations made for Collective Presence at DiverseWorks in Houston, TX.
Stranger in a Strange Land: The Book (2019-ongoing) is a continuous research publication project featuring critical essays, an EPA report, a Commission on Civil Rights Report, an image/text project using the photographs of Russell Lee, a brief history of Spinach agribusiness in South Texas, stock newspaper photographs of crop dusting, and a sci-fi rock opera libretto.
The Oppressed Hallucinate: A Mixtape of Poetics (2019-ongoing) features elements from Chicano Moratorium: A Question of Freedom (dr. Tom Myrdahl), found photographs, Alambrista (dir. Robert M. Young), digital map of South Texas featuring Spanish and Indigenous locations, a paper map of Zavala County, classroom lecture (Carlos Munoz Jr.), a sci-fi rock opera libretto, quotes by André Lepecki, Laura Pérez, and María Lugones, with additional sound and music composed by Josh Rios, Matt Joynt, and Anthony Romero. Works on paper imagine a Chicanx experimental avant-garde noise band who may have provided sound and music for the student-organized sci-fi rock opera, Stranger in a Strange Land (1976). Found photographs are paired with selections from the play's libretto.
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Stranger in a Strange Land (A Remix) continues ongoing research, writing, workshops, and creative production related to a sci-fi rock opera performed by high school students in Crystal City, Texas (1976). The play, which took its title from Robert Heinlein’s novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), drew upon a wide range of direct and indirect influences, including: a 1970 civil rights report outlining the adverse socio-economic circumstances faced by Mexican Americans (Stranger in One’s Land), the book Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth was based on, George Orwell’s allegorical novel Animal Farm (1945), and Crystal City’s history as a detention site where people of Japanese, German, and Italian descent were interned during WWII. Most prominently, the play mixed and remixed the songs and stage personas of David Bowie. As such, the rock opera signals a complex citational practice whereby one story is told through many others.
A key component of the play is its dystopic landscape ruined by nuclear war, which directly connects to Crystal City’s history of large-scale farming and the associated pesticide industry. From the1950s until the 1980s crop dusting companies operated out of the local airport, which was eventually ruled a Superfund Site by the Environmental Protection Agency resulting in the removal of massive amounts of contaminated soil. This project thinks through the play in order to investigate notions about the production of private property, environmental racism, Chicanx sci-fi dystopias, and Aztlán imaginaries. This project’s various publications, workshops, moving images, performances, research installations, and sculptural works engage ficto-critical narratives in order to question the connections between history, geography, politics, and aesthetics.
Below is documentation of this project’s initial materializations made for Collective Presence at DiverseWorks in Houston, TX.
Stranger in a Strange Land: The Book (2019-ongoing) is a continuous research publication project featuring critical essays, an EPA report, a Commission on Civil Rights Report, an image/text project using the photographs of Russell Lee, a brief history of Spinach agribusiness in South Texas, stock newspaper photographs of crop dusting, and a sci-fi rock opera libretto.
What the Map Cuts, the Story Cuts Across
(2019-ongoing) features sculpturally staged research on the aerial pesticide
industry, the production of private property in the Rio Grande Valley, the film
The Man Who Fell to Earth, and Spinach farming in South Texas.
The Politics of Collage (2019-ongoing) is a hands-on workshop designed to give participants an opportunity to create mixed-media collages related to land politics and postcolonial science fiction. A short presentation is given about Stranger in a Strange Land, a 1976 sci-fi rock opera created and produced by Chicanx high school students in Crystal City, Texas. Working under the direction of playwright Gregg Barrios, and influenced by the music of David Bowie, the students’ play addressed a wide variety of topics, including CIA mind control, alien contact, political assassination, and the post-apocalyptic landscape. Following the presentation, participants are invited to create an assortment of collages related to the themes explored in Stranger in a Strange Land, and to make work in the form of futuristic landscapes and sci-fi costume design. Works on paper are speculative costumes for the student sci-fi opera.
