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Oscar Zeta Acosta

Denise Chávez

Maria Irene Fornes

Tony Labat

Ana Mendieta

Great Lives from History: Latinos

Coco Fusco

by Joseph Dewey

American artist, actor, and writer

In a career defined by both provocative performance pieces and probing nonfiction about herself and her postcolonial generation of Latino women, Fusco emerged as one of the most insightful commentators on contemporary Latino identity, political and cultural integrity, and sexual and gender issues.

Areas of achievement: Art; acting; theater

Early Life

The childhood of Coco Fusco (FEWS-koh) reflected the pressures of biculturalism. While her mother was pregnant, her father was deported from Cuba shortly after the political upheavals of late 1959 brought Fidel Castro to power. The Fusco family immigrated to New York City, where Coco was born. During Fusco’s childhood, her status as an American citizen gave her family security, and dozens of her relatives, fleeing the communist Castro regime, entered the United States legally through her family. Their presence shaped her perception of both Cuban and American traditions and the inevitable collisions of biculturalism, specifically language, religion, and cultural differences.

A voracious reader, Fusco excelled in school. She attended Brown University and, in 1982, completed a dual major, magna cum laude, in literature and society and semiotics, a discipline that investigates the meaning and structures of language. She went on to earn a master’s degree in modern thought and literature at Stanford University. Nearly twenty years later, she completed a doctorate in visual culture from London’s Middlesex University.

Life’s Work

From 1985, when Fusco graduated from Stanford, to 1995, when she accepted her first teaching position (in the Visual Arts Department at Philadelphia’s Temple University), Fusco executed performance pieces, installation art projects, and video productions largely in the New York City area that established her as a cutting-edge theorist in the implications of Latino identity. In 1991, she first worked with Mexican performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña—the two collaborated on what would become Fusco’s breakthrough piece. In 1992, disturbed by the implications of the international celebration of the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas, Fusco and Gómez-Peña mounted a controversial performance piece, Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit Spain, initially for the Columbus Plaza in Madrid. In the piece, the two artists spent three days in a single 10-foot by 12-foot elaborate gold cage portraying indigenous natives from a fictitious Caribbean island supposedly just discovered by European explorers. Without breaking character, the two artists, dressed in primitive costuming, danced and posed for pictures (for money from the audience), interacted with “guards,” all the while speaking in a made-up language. The piece exposed the hypocrisy of colonialism, the pernicious stereotypes of native cultures, and European assumption of superiority to native civilizations that, centuries earlier, they had encountered and routinely destroyed. Fusco’s piece toured Europe and America for two years.

Over the next decade, Fusco mounted other performance pieces, most notably for the Whitney Museum of American Art; biennials in Sydney, Australia, and Shanghai, China; and the London International Theatre Festival. In 1998, she accepted a faculty position at Columbia University. At that time, Fusco was involved in one of her more provocative pieces, titled Stuff, commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. In it, Fusco used the metaphor of cannibalism and the stereotypes that link Latino women to cooking to critique how Latin indigenous cultures had been consumed by whites, in the process making ethnic identity at best difficult, at worst ironic. In 2006, Fusco staged A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America. Framed against the American involvement in multiple wars in the Middle East, the piece draws on military imagery (Fusco played a military interrogator, dressed in fatigues) and the writings of Virginia Woolf to suggest empowering women involved not only their interrogating cultural assumptions but also in their serving in the military to protect the democracy that makes such interrogations possible.

Increasingly, Fusco turned toward the possibilities of video production, her commissioned work premiered in venues such as the Rotterdam (2001) and Berlin (2003) international film festivals. Although her multimedia performance pieces, installation productions, street performances, and video works secured her reputation in the international art culture, their appeal was limited—but through more than a decade of publications, Fusco engaged a much wider audience. Her essays have appeared in The Village Voice, Art in America, and Ms. She has published several collections of nonfiction, most notably The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001) and the Critics Choice Award-winning English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995).

In 2003, Fusco was awarded a $75,000 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, presented by the California School of the Arts, which annually recognizes creative artists who transform a medium. In 2008, Fusco accepted an appointment to the School of Art, Media, and Technology at the prestigious Parsons, the New School for Design, in New York City.

Significance

Emerging in the era of popular multiculturalism, Fusco reimagined the potential of theater and the visual arts to provoke difficult questions about the integrity of cultural and ethnic identities against the pressure to homogenize such identities within the larger (Anglo) community. Her work, passionate and prickly, reminded her generation of Latinos that the concept of Latino identity itself was hardly hegemonic (she describes herself as a Yoruba-Taino-Catalan-Sephardic-Neapolitan-Cuban-American) and that artists of color, particularly women, needed to define border identity as part of the celebration of the diversity of postcolonial American culture.

Further Reading

1 

Allatson, Paul. “Coco Fusco, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and ‘American’ Cannibal Reveries.” In Latino Dreams: Transcultural Traffic and the U.S. National Imaginary. New York: Rodopi Press, 2002. Sets Fusco’s groundbreaking visual narratives within her generation of Latino writers and the particular pressures of minority artists asserting ethnic and gender identity within a larger, dominant culture.

2 

Fusco, Coco. English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas. New York: New Press, 1995. This collection of seminal essays not only provides meditations on gender and ethnic identity but also offers probing commentary on the influence of other performance artists and on Fusco’s own pieces.

3 

Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ed. The Visual Culture Reader. New York: Routledge, 1998. Essays by visual artists (among them Fusco) that provide a helpful introduction to the interdisciplinary field of the visual arts, particularly the redefinition of museum, the responsibility of the interactive audience, and the reach of cutting-edge technologies in this art form. Illustrated.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Dewey, Joseph. "Coco Fusco." Great Lives from History: Latinos, edited by Carmen Tafolla & Martha P. Cotera, Salem Press, 2012. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLL_10013240025701001.
APA 7th
Dewey, J. (2012). Coco Fusco. In C. Tafolla & M. P. Cotera (Eds.), Great Lives from History: Latinos. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Dewey, Joseph. "Coco Fusco." Edited by Carmen Tafolla & Martha P. Cotera. Great Lives from History: Latinos. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2012. Accessed October 22, 2025. online.salempress.com.