Imagining Gringostroika: Disrupting Whiteness on the Border

This paper emerges from the conclusion of my recently drafted book manuscript. In the book, I examine “whiteness on the border” as a discursive and ideological system that deploys representations of Mexico, Mexicans, and... [ view full abstract ]

This paper emerges from the conclusion of my recently drafted book manuscript. In the book, I examine “whiteness on the border” as a discursive and ideological system that deploys representations of Mexico, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans to fashion whiteness and Americanness, or more aptly whiteness as Americaness. In this paper, I draw upon Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s concept of Gringostroika as an intellectual, rhetorical, and political for disrupting everyday maneuvers of white supremacy. Gómez-Peña coined the term and began to map the concept during the early 1990s, which he saw as a moment of crisis and possibility. Through “gringostroika” Gómez-Peña imagined an alternative possibility to the rising ethnonationalism and the New World Order. By joining perestroika to Gringo, the common term for American whites, Gómez-Peña gave name to a breakdown of brown-white binary thinking. I contend that “whiteness on the border” exists as a racial hegemony (Gramsci, Hall) that is manifested across what Rancière would call “the distribution of the sensible.”


Gringostroika is a critical intervention against whiteness on the border both because it names the linkages between racial and national projects and because it imagines their dissolution, gesturing toward a new future. This paper examines three discursive maneuvers that work towards Gringostroika. First, I explore Gómez-Peña’s performance texts to illustrate how they “reanimate” and undermine tropes of the Mexican Other (Nericcio). Second, I turn to Anzaldúa’s poem “We Call Them Greasers” to explore how the white gaze can be turned against itself. Finally, I explore the politics and poetics of San Francisco Giants’ pitcher Sergio Romo’s 2012 World Series Championship celebration. While walking the street during the parade, Romo wore a shirt that simply stated “I just look illegal.” Against the historical context of anti-immigrant and anti-Latina/o legislation sweeping the nation, I contend that Romo’s act explicitly called attention to the enthymetic nature of whiteness (Jackson). His shirt required readers to acknowledge the conflation of Latinidad with foreignness and criminality while whiteness remains associated with innocence and Americanness. Placing the strategies of Gómez-Peña, Anzaldúa, and Romo in conversation, this paper maps different ways of disrupting whiteness and imagining Gringostroika.