Mexicali BiennialMexicali Biennial
This is not a homage. A Mini-Epic Tale of Alien Assault: Yízus the man and the Kiosko Boys by Alejandro Espinoza is a conversation and virtual walk through both current and vanished sites featured in the narrative journey of the novel Yízus the Man y los Kiosko Boys, with the aim of creating a memory-based map where literary fiction intersects with the recent history of the city of Calexico. This will be based on the reading and presentation of excerpts from the novel, which recounts encounters and missed connections with characters and locations that were part of the life of its author, the recently deceased writer, translator, and musician Juan Di Bella, during the years he clandestinely crossed the border to work in the San Diego State University library.
Drawing from the classic structure of the “hero’s journey” found in The Odyssey and later in James Joyce’s Ulysses, in his novel, Di Bella fashioned himself as an autofictional character who lived out these everyday adventures “on the other side.” After crossing the border—a threshold between two realities—he would enter a world both hyperreal and fantastical. Like Odysseus or Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, Di Bella’s narrative is populated by ghostly figures of the city: the homeless, junkies, street workers—figures who are both present and absent in a borderland reality whose history disperses like dust in the wind.
This is not a homage. A Mini-Epic Tale of Alien Assault: Yízus the man and the Kiosko Boys is a Haunting Present event, a PARA/normal Borders program at Arista 1701 in Mexicali, B.C.
Haunting Present programs curated by Rosela del Bosque, Adrián Pereda Vidal, and Luis G. Hernández for the MexiCali Biennial.