Is the Chair a Chair? by Sheila Rocha

                Our discussion of signifiers and language as it rests in the “creation unconscious” (Baily) is complicated and worthy of discourse via other views that respond to the repressed.  Of course, Baily is writing from the Laccanian view of signifiers based in language. 

Augusto Boal also investigated this idea of signification but not as that which is rooted in language but rather as it is rooted in the human body, pre-language but with distinct modalities through which the power of physical image discloses the unconscious and conscious.  As a theater practitioner, Boal formed the process of what he referred to as “image theater”, one component of a much larger epistemology of liberatory theater that addressed the power of the human image to represent the essence of the notion, the internalized or suppressed idea that lodges within the human body.  It says nothing, but says everything as a language, perhaps even more invincible than the mere limitations of the language of signification.  That the chair is a chair is dependent upon the signifier.  That the chair is a hat may be an amplification by the image of one who wears the chair as a hat. The action defines the meaning in contrast to the “signifier having its meaning through other signifiers” (Baily).  The action alone defines the image, defines the moment.   

                Great stuff to ruminate upon on so many levels.

         Let me mention briefly another observation based on the Viego article.  

         The discussion of Latino is precarious to say the least based on the essence of not so much of what it signifies as much as where it originates which may determine, in part, the value of its signification.  Latino is not a culture, an ethnicity, a race (which is purely born of the imperial imaginary), rather it is a dead language.  A root base from which Italian, French and Spanish erupted.  It’s mark in world history is contrived and therefore another tool of the master to further negate and eradicate indigenism since the word is frequently used to further the conceptualization of a raza cosmica.  It whitens nations of people who are fundamentally (not completely, for there are Europeans living in throughout the America’s who are, indeed, of a Spanish origination) Indian.  The data, the demographics all demonstrate that the so-called latino, even unto him/herself, is Native.  Imperial representation of the Indigenous is being successfully used to methodically continue historical erasure of our presence. 

                The 2010 census results are not yet available, however, in 2000, the data shows that the third largest Indigenous population in the United States alone, following the Cherokee (730,000)  and the Navajo (300,000) were so-called Latin American Indians, just under 200,000.  This is a conservative estimate, because of documentation issues…imagine the real numbers and what those numbers will represent in the forthcoming census.  Add to that the biological composition of all Mexicans/Chicanos alone who are at least 80% indigenous (many in denial of course) and one must ask, so what is a Latino other than the imposed semiotic label used by the powers that be to make us, the future of America more palatable?