Remex

REMEX presents the first comprehensive examination of artistic responses and contributions to an era defined by the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994-2008). Marshaling over a decade's worth of archival research, interviews, and participant observation in Mexico City and the Mexico-US borderlands, Amy Sara Carroll considers individual and collective art practices, recasting NAFTA as the most fantastical inter-American allegory of the turn of the millennium. Carroll organizes her interpretations of performance, installation, documentary film, built environment, and body, conceptual, and Internet art around three key coordinates--City, Woman, and Border. She links the rise of 1990s Mexico City art in the global market to the period's consolidation of Mexico-US border art as a genre. She then interrupts this transnational art history with a sustained analysis of chilanga and Chicana artists' remapping of the figure of Mexico as Woman.

A tour de force that depicts a feedback loop of art and public policy--what Carroll terms the "allegorical performative"--REMEX adds context to the long-term effects of the post-1968 intersection of D.F. performance and conceptualism, centralizes women artists' embodied critiques of national and global master narratives, and tracks post-1984 border art's "undocumentation" of racialized and sexualized reconfigurations of North American labor pools. The book's featured artwork becomes the lens through which Carroll rereads a range of events and phenomenon from California's Proposition 187 to Zapatismo, US immigration policy, 9/11 (1973/2001), femicide in Ciudad Juarez, and Mexico's war on drugs.