Xandra Ibarra
(Photo : Youtube/TLC)

The four minute performance art video of Xandra Ibarra was censored by a city attorney in San Antonio according to a published article in BeLatina.

Art is a form of an allegory that expresses different things. It is used to send a strong message most intricately and metaphorically. However, there are still many who oppose and censore some arts because of how it is portrayed.

Ever since the great Philosopher Plato discoursed about imitative art there have been many different art museums that highly devoted to the moral and ethical debate of art curating. For the artists, they questioned what is the purpose of art if it is censored.

Gediminas Urbonas said in a statement during an interview with Peter Sizikes that art teaches a person how to disrupt to create a new public space. Moreover, Urbonas is the co-editor of "Public Space: Lost and Found?" and the current director of the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology.

Urbonas also said: "The point of art is not scaling up answers, but to tackle painful questions, to provoke and mobilize humanity to find the answers themselves, or to create a space of possibility where the truth can be found." 

As mentioned earlier, art is used to convey and send a strong message. This could be about political tensions, realities in life, problems in society, and many more. An abstract of the problem around us that led a person to critically think about what is the main message of the produced piece of art.

However, for the City Attorney in San Antonio, Andy Segovia, along with the City's Department of Art and Culture, this belief is not entirely true. Both decided to censor the video art performance of Xandra Ibarra that lasted for four minutes. 

Xandra Ibarra, who is also known as La Chika Boom, is a well-known queer Latina performer. Her art video titled "Spectacle II: La Tortillera" was censored in San Antonio, Texas. It was later on removed from Xican X: New Visions just hours before the art exhibition started on Feb. 13 at Centro de Artes in San Antonio.

In her four-minute video, La Chika Boom dances in a typical Mexican housewife garb to Eddie Dimas who is known as "El Mosquito" before she removed her panties to reveal a bottle of Tapatio that is strapped to her pelvis. This was described as very obscene and was sadi as one of the reasons why the art video needs to be censored and removed.

In an interview with the Latina artist, she said: "If I can't cum on my tacos, neither can you. What I mean to say is that this is not about me, the state wants to silence urgent political movements and cultural issues that deal with race, sex, sexuality, incarceration, immigration, and war. We need to answer back even when it's something as tame as the censorship of me cumming on tacos."

Xandra Ibarra is only a Latina artist but is also a current professor at California College of Arts. She is originally from the El Paso-Juarez, one of the border cities between America and Mexico. Ibarra explained that her four-minute video was an attempt to inhabit her sexed spichood and to hyperbolize her supposed differences in discovering different forms of pleasures of queers. She added: "The censorship assumes that race, sex, and sexuality are not part of critically and radically thinking about aesthetics." 

In a statement released by the head of San Antonio Department of Arts and Culture, Debbie Racca-Sittre, regarding the removal of Ibarra's art video she said that they consulted the city attorney before they removed the art video and she also said that the city has the responsibility to make art accessible to general public regardless of their residency and age.