‘Cruising Utopia’ with rafa esparza’s Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser (2022)
The crew that collaborated with rafa esparza during the Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser performance at Art Basel Miami, 2022. Left to right, Víctor Barragán, Guadalupe Rosales, Karla Ekatherine Canseco, and Gabriela Ruiz standing in front of the cyborg lowrider. Photo by Fabian Guerrero.
“The anticipatory illumination of certain objects
is a kind of potentiality that is open, indeterminate,
like the affective contours of hope itself.”
José Esteban Muñoz,
Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
—
During the afternoon of November 30, 2022 outside of the Miami Beach Convention Center, I witnessed a ceremonious ticket hand-off that, although a micro gesture, felt immensely significant: Los Angeles artist Gabriela Ruiz placed a ticket on the cupped hands of fellow Angeleno artist Cauleen Smith ever so gently. The ticket, which was designed by Mexico City-born, New York-based fashion iconoclast and artist Víctor Barragán (See image 1), would give Smith access to ride Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser, a repurposed and retrofitted coin operated pony ride that had shape-shifted into a futuristic cyborg lowrider bike (See image 2). The excess number of spokes were gold-plated and matched some other details of this kinetic sculpture: the four sets of feet—eight in total that simulate movement, as if swimming, dancing or flying—were also golden, as were the chrome plated sleeves of the artist behind Corpo RanfLA. Los Angeles multidisciplinary artist rafa esparza wore them while extending his arms to grab the outer parts of the front wheel’s hub. The lower half, in turn, was inside the lowrider bike’s body (See image 3). Other golden details included upward-swept handlebars, a chain-link wheel, and vanity side mirrors. The other dominant colors were the bright green and blue used to paint the cast of the bottom half with the aforementioned four sets of flying golden feet attached, resembling some ancestral, mythic creature.
Image 1: Roll of tickets to ride Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser at Art Basel Miami 2022. Photo by Fabian Guerrero.
Image 2: Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser outside of Miami Beach Convention Center during Art Basel Miami 2022. Photo by Fabian Guerrero.
Image 3: Closeup of Corpo RafLA: Terra Cruiser performance, Art Basel Miami 2022. Photo by Fabian Guerrero.
In case it is still not clear, dear reader, esparza was in the entrails of this sculpture and would serve as Smith’s guide on their journey. Corpo RanfLA had landed in Miami Beach, Florida only a few hours before, hailing from some mythic-futuristic place--that we just might as well call East Los Angeles, California or Elysian Park—and was stationed outside Art Basel Miami Beach, one of the premier global art fairs where, as we all know, the main goal is to sell art. Art Basel is also known for its parties that draw celebrities, but other public engagement initiatives include conversations with artists, guided tours, educational opportunities for kids, and performances such as Corpo RanfLA, the reason I had flown to Miami last November.
With Ruiz’s assistance and another of esparza’s key collaborators on the project, fellow Angeleno and multidisciplinary artist Karla Ekatherine Canseco, Smith mounted Corpo RanfLA. She was then asked to put on a set of wireless headphones through which she heard esparza’s voice, who, in a quiet almost whispering tone, recounted Corpo RanfLA’s story: where they came from and what the point of their joint mission would be. In short, Corpo RanfLA had come back to the present from three hundred years in the future where they were part of the PLT/PLG (Para La Tierra / Para La Gente) collective comprising revolutionary scientists, robotic engineers, cholxs, lowriders, environmental organizers whose varying degrees of expertise would innovate technology to heal the earth. Like all the other riders that afternoon, Smith had a previous connection to esparza. She was now part of the lowrider cyborg’s communal enterprise: helping this shapeshifter safeguard the earth’s scarce natural resources, particularly maíz (corn). For spectators, the only way they were able to apprehend the importance of this joint venture was via the performative ritual before them: the mounting, intent listening, dismount, and activation of the kinetic half human, half machine sculpture while Dr. Dre’s “Let Me Ride” played through some speakers on the exterior grounds of the convention center, with its food and coffee trucks and scarce tables and chairs. The ritual went beyond the gesture of a simplistic “ride me” (or almost child-like) experience, which was made evident for some of us when Smith’s gentle touch caressed esparza’s bareback. But even if some missed this micro gesture, we all witnessed the care with which her legs hugged the cyborg body while sitting atop the souped-up velvety bike seat, a position that lasted as much as the recording, over a minute in length (see image 4). Following the dismount, Smith received a kernel of corn and sent Corpo RanfLA on their way (i.e. with the help of esparza’s assistants, she activated the kinetic sculpture), but she first had to whisper the password into Ruiz’s ear, which she, as the other riders, heard in the last bit of the recording. And the kernel Smith and the other riders received was the seed that they/we had to plant given Corpo RanfLA’s limitations for digging.
Image 4: Cauleen Smith riding Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser, Art Basel Miami 2022. Photo by Fabian Guerrero.
This gesture, this flipping of the script if you will, is key for me in making sense of esparza’s piece, but may also apply to his work in general. Whereas in customary cyborg fashion the human’s abilities are enhanced by the mechanical or cybernetic characteristics of the cyborg, in Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser, the cyborg’s abilities are enhanced by the human(s) who aid in doing their part to plant seeds for the future. That is, esparza’s powers are enhanced when he shape-shifted into a lowrider cyborg bike, but the human(s) atop the cyborg and their role in activating it and, more importantly, planting seeds, assert that human hands are irreplaceable. This understanding of human labor, including the hardships suffered by racialized bodies, is consistent in esparza’s artistic work. Mechanical and technological advances are important, as long as fellow human beings are right/riding alongside such advances. This coming together, this forging of human, mechanical, and technological powers for the betterment of our future were made manifest for the rider—and their importance in this venture—with the “Me & You” beautiful, gangster lettering on Corpo RanfLA’s rear end that Mario Ayala and Alfonso González Jr. had stylized. Again, in case it’s not clear, this “Me & You” could only be viewed from the rider’s vantage point and made clear for the rider of this melding into one human-machine futuristic powerhouse, and that they/we were an essential part of the enterprise. As I watched from the queue, then from the vantage point as a rider, and lastly, from sidelines while other fellow riders activated the lowrider cyborg, I kept thinking that Corpo RanfLA is “a doing of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1).
Image 5: Gabriela Ruiz riding Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser, Art Basel Miami 2022. Photo by Fabian Guerrero.
Image 6: Karla Ekatherine Canseco Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser, Art Basel Miami 2022. Photo by Fabian Guerrero.
As I previously alluded, I was on the queue to ride—with—the cyborg, right behind Smith, and spent most of the time in line conversing with her, our first-time meeting in person. Given my proximity to her own participatory experience in the performance, Smith became a sort of portal in my describing the performative aspects of Corpo RanfLA while I waited in line that November afternoon. Among some of the things we talked about was Smith’s teaching at The California Institute of the Arts, where Canseco had been her student—she was beaming with pride for her former student who played an integral part in the building of Corpo RanfLA. We also briefly chatted about her recent move to UCLA, as well as the time she spent teaching at The University of Texas at Austin, my institutional affiliation. But more than anything we talked about our respective relationship to esparza and how we were feeling about the performance piece and our role in it. We were two of the dozen or so riders that rode Corpo RanfLA that afternoon, right behind or in front of me were other artists and art critics associated with Los Angeles: Carmen Argote, Janelle Zara, Marcel Monroy, and American Artist, among others; the aforementioned Ruiz and Canseco were invited to be the first and second riders respectively (see images 5 and 6). Without a doubt, it was a very Los Angeles crowd and vibe, and this was deliberate; as a temporary Los Angeles resident, I was feeling like an insider/outsider. The spectators (and of course, also the active participants of the performance) had already been cued to this Chicanx Los Angeles assemblage of symbols, beginning with the title of the piece; that is, the last two letters in ranfLA that are purposely capitalized. But also, the word ranfla itself is a particularly pachuco slang term for car and, in certain SoCal communities, it is simply understood to mean lowrider. The group of riders/performance participants who esparza and his team had gathered were brown and black, and mostly queer folk from the Los Angeles area. Again, all of this was very intentional as esparza wrote for an Instagram post:
This artwork was not open for the public to ride; instead I chose the riders we invited to consider riding on my back which activated and brought the piece to full circle. It was important to prioritize this community of folks in a venue that inherently by its mere function of selling art makes it inaccessible to them.
Image 7: The crew that collaborated with rafa esparza during the Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser performance at Art Basel Miami, 2022. Left to right, Víctor Barragán, Guadalupe Rosales, Karla Ekatherine Canseco, and Gabriela Ruiz standing in front of the cyborg lowrider. Photo by Fabian Guerrero.
Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser was commissioned by Los Angeles Times’s Image Magazine for Art Basel, part of the Meridians section curated by Magalí Arriola, and in collaboration with esparza’s gallery, Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles / Mexico City). The material and institutional backing undoubtedly made possible esparza’s latest performance/art piece. But as it is often the case with the artist, members of his brown queer artistic community were part of the creative process of Corpo RanfLA. To bring this piece to fruition, esparza spun an affective web bringing in the knowledge, expertise, and friendship of the aforementioned Ruiz, Canseco, Barragán, González, and Ayala, but also the queer Texas-based Fabian Guerrero, and the multidisciplinary Los Angeles artist Guadalupe Rosales, well-known for her Veteranas and Rucas archive project. All of them played a pivotal part in the piece’s creation, activation, and/or documentation (See image 7). Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser and esparza’s community and family, both biological and chosen, had already made a public appearance via a suite of essays and images published in Image that served to first reveal the project days before it would be activated in Miami Beach. One of these entries, a photo essay by the editors of Image with photography by legendary photographer Estevan Oriol could be read as a pre-performance for the Miami Beach activation: the Mexican fashion designer and artist Bárbara Sánchez-Kane outfitted esparza in a breathtaking sculptural white genderqueer dress, as he wore one of the golden chrome arm sleeves from the Miami Beach performance. A few members from his tight knit queer, brown artistic Los Angeles community also wore striking genderqueer and at times, post-apocalyptic punk outfits by Sánchez-Kane: Rosales, Canseco, and Timo Fahler. Other members of esparza’s chosen family also joined, Ruiz, Paulina Lara, Anita Herrera, Maria Maea, and Franc Fernández, as well as his bio sister and parents. All were stunningly captured by Oriol’s lens in Elysian Park, alongside a brown lowrider car on loan from Michael Romero.
Conceptually Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser is the result of esparza’s ongoing explorations on gay cruising, Los Angeles lowrider culture, anthropomorphism, racialized and otherwise minoritized bodies, legacies of systemic colonial and capitalist oppressive forces, and how all of these intersect. Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser was the second instance in which esparza transformed himself into a lowrider, the first time was in 2018 when he embodied a queer version of the infamous Gypsy Rose lowrider. And perhaps the reader has already noted from this essay’s title that I am borrowing from the late queer performance theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, the epigraph, quotes, and general ideas. But whereas Muñoz’s cruising denotes movement through the different temporal nodes of thought and queer art and performances and how these intersect, esparza’s cruising is very much rooted not only in/on the body across temporalities, but also across different spaces, particularly those within the Los Angeles urban and brown space. As esparza himself wrote for the Los Angeles Time’s Image magazine: “When I think about my art practice, I like to think of it as a practice that’s cartographical, in the sense that it’s charted—like how I experienced growing up in Los Angeles as a brown, queer first-generation person coming from a working-class family. All those intersections are very important”. In other words, there is a particular Los Angeles cartography that is being mapped out here and to which we are invited to cruise as either participants or spectators. In very specific ways, as can already be noted, esparza uses his own body to bring forth—embody—two localized meanings of the term cruising, the lowrider cruising popularized by the Los Angeles Latinx car subcultures and the gay cruising, particularly drawing from his own experiences of cruising in Elysian Park in the city. Just as in the earlier iteration of Corpo Ranfla from 2018, a transformation which Fabián Guerrero documented—in addition to a photoshoot of esparza’s queer embodiment of the lowrider car Gypsy Rose in Elysian Park—the artist was intent on troubling not only these concepts of cruising, but the spaces too. For the earlier instantiation of Corpo Ranfla, Ayala spray painted esparza’s body in bright pink fashion as the infamous lowrider car from the 1960s. But instead of painting the burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose that adorned the hood of the original, esparza had Ayala depict the legendary Cyclona (aka Robert Legorreta) on his front torso and a homoerotic encounter between two brown cholos on his back. In addition to the infamous roses painted on the sides of esparza’s outer arms and legs, hair and nails by Tanya Meléndez (aka Nena Soul Fly) and a “Brown Persuasion” car club plaque were the perfect compliments to activate Corpo Ranfla (2018), first in a photoshoot by Guerrero in Elysian Park (See image 8), and then a live performance at the Mayan Theater with Sebastián Hernández. Of the latest iteration, esparza has written: “I wanted to tease some of those conflicting feelings that I had with lowrider car culture,” which has traditionally been straight, and masculine dominated, as well as muddling the already complex history of Elysian Park, which not only has a police academy shooting range, but a complicated history of displacement of brown, black, and poor folks.
Image 8: For Corpo Ranfla (2018) rafa esparza was transformed into a lowrider by Mario Ayala, inspired by the classic Gypsy Rose car. Photo by Fabian Guerrero.
Aesthetically, Corpo RanfLA’s troubling of space and time corresponds to the conceptual ideas the piece emits: it is queer, it is brown, it is about working-class modes of leisure and the beautification of everyday objects—from the coin operated pony rides outside of supermarkets to lowrider car subculture. Without a doubt, there is a rasquache feel in the aesthetics of the kinetic sculpture and the performance, but I would like to suggest that Christina Sharpe’s notion of “beauty is a method” can also be useful for apprehending esparza’s Corpo RanfLA, and his work in general. In “Beauty is a Method,” Sharpe writes how black aesthetics were a quotidian practice, a way in which a very specific notion of black beauty was cultivated in the domestic space through her mother’s doings. But it’s also about the knowledge Sharpe has gleaned from this to make the present more livable, and maybe even ponder possible new ways of being. Her essay begins thus: “I’ve been revisiting what beauty as a method might mean or do: what it might break open, rupture, make possible and impossible. How we might carry beauty’s knowledge with us and make new worlds.” Sharpe is specifically discussing black aesthetics, but I cannot help thinking about esparza’s work, particularly considering the consistent ways in which he uses non-traditional art materials and ideas and transforms them into art objects and experiences where everyday beauty is enhanced, from lowrider subculture practices to his work with adobe. The temporal window to the actual manufacturing of Corpo RanfLA can offer us a glimpse into this idea.
While building the kinetic sculpture esparza and Canseco, who is the main collaborator for this segment of the piece, moved their center of operations from esparza’s studio to his garage since the studio was not equipped for the needed voltage. Thus, working on a lowrider bike in an East L.A. garage brought a level of domesticity and Los Angeles urban brown aesthetics that the two, during those six weeks or so of working almost every day, might have not foreseen. As Canseco recounts, the neighbors were curious, they stopped by, they recognized the idea of two ‘dudes’ working on their vehicle in the garage, but simultaneously misrecognized as it was a lowrider bike with flying feet and a half-human torso from a cast, all very queer. Coupled with this playfulness, a bonding that took place between esparza and Canseco, a relationship that grew as they welded, casted, painted, talked, and shared ideas and space. Corpo RanfLA is thus imbued with the energy of both artists, particularly esparza’s due to the ways in which his body and feet were cast for him to be able to occupy the entrails of the kinetic sculpture for the durational performance, which lasted over three hours that afternoon in Miami Beach. In her piece for Image Canseco reflects on the transference of energy between the human and the non-human materials, but also on the ways in which an ancestral past and mythmaking has the potential for informing future myths. She writes:
If we made a myth for this sculpture—this creature that rafa is making—what has it inherited from rafa? What are the imprints that rafa left on it? What has it learned from him? And what does it know beyond him? We’ve been looking at different images of Aztec and Mayan references, these pre-Columbian, ceramic works. The thing we’re making doesn’t look that different from those things. There’s kind of a lingering memory that’s here and that’s also beyond us, beyond time, that’s being captured in this piece.
The creation of something new, a new myth, made with the love, labor, and knowledge that’s ancestral. As I have been writing, this reminds me of both Sharpe’s “new worlds” and Muñoz’s “queer utopia” but is also very specifically located in the present and future of the brown, queer, and urban landscape of Los Angeles.
—
Notes
¹ I would like to thank the photographer Fabián Guerrero for his permission to use the photographs used in this essay.
² A note on pronoun use: I will use esparza’s preferred pronouns, he/him/his when referring to him, but will use they/them—my call and am responsible for it—when referring to the lowrider cyborg as I read Corpo RanfLA as gender fluid. The whole performance and piece are not only very brown, but very queer.
³ In English, For the Land / For the People.
⁴ In my current book-length manuscript, Binding Intimacies in Queer Latinx Performance and Visual Art, among other things, I examine this idea of the racialized laboring body in esparza’s artistic work, particularly as it relates to his adobe art practice.
⁵ From rafa esparza’s Instagram’s post on December 3, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/CluXdFbPfpj/ accessed December 8, 2022.
⁶ There are a total of six essays, each one written by either esparza or five collaborators with images taken by either Star Montana or Estevan Oriol. There are some reprints of some photographs taken by Fabian Guerrero. https://www.latimes.com/projects/ArtBaselMiami/ Accessed January 3, 2023. The December 2022 print edition of Image features one of these photos taken by Oriol in Elysian Park.
⁷ rafa esparza, “How rafa esparza transformed himself into a lowrider cyborg for Art Basel Miami,” https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/image/story/2022-11-29/rafa-esparza-becomes-a-lowrider-cyborg-for-art-basel-miami.
⁸ In “The paint must hit from all angles on the lowrider cyborg. Enter Mario Ayala” Mario Ayala recounts how it was to airbrush esparza in 2018 and convert him into a human version of the infamous Gypsy Rose lowrider. https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/image/story/2022-11-29/mario-ayala-rafa-esparza-on-the-art-of-cars-art-basel-miami. Accessed December 27, 2022.
⁹ This performance was part of multidisciplinary variety theatrical spectacle Variedades curated by Marcus Kuiland-Nazario and presented as part of Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA on January 18, 2018.
¹⁰ rafa esparza, “How rafa esparza transformed himself into a lowrider cyborg for Art Basel Miami,” https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/image/story/2022-11-29/rafa-esparza-becomes-a-lowrider-cyborg-for-art-basel-miami.
¹¹ Sharpe, Christina. “Beauty is a Method.” https://www.e-flux.com/journal/105/303916/beauty-is-a-method/ (accessed January 3, 2023).
¹² From a brief conversation with Canseco. Mexico City, January 11, 2023.
¹³ Canseco, Karla Ekatherine, “The cyborg is an extension of self. What myths has this creature inherited from rafa?” https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/image/story/2022-11-29/karla-ekatherine-canseco-creates-work-with-rafa-esparza-art-basel-miami. Accessed January 10, 2023.
¹⁴ Canseco, Karla Ekatherine, “The cyborg is an extension of self. What myths has this creature inherited from rafa?” https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/image/story/2022-11-29/karla-ekatherine-canseco-creates-work-with-rafa-esparza-art-basel-miami. Accessed January 10, 2023.
Laura G. Gutiérrez is a researcher and writer of Latinx and Mexican performance and visual culture. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and is the author of Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage (U Texas P, 2010). She has also published essays and book chapters on topics such as Latinx performance, border art, Mexican video art, and Mexican political cabaret. During the fall of 2022 she was a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and is currently a UT Provost’s Authors Fellow (2022-23). These two fellowships have allowed her time away from the classroom to work on her monograph tentatively entitled Binding Intimacies in Contemporary Queer Latinx Performance and Visual Art, which includes an analysis of rafa esparza’s work as well as that of other contemporary Latinx artists.