ABSTRACT
Curators, journalists, editors, academics, and others engaged in public debate used the notion of the hybrid as the interpretative axis for various border aesthetics of Mexico and the United States in the late twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Today, the exhaustion of this hybrid approach has become evident. To critically review hybridity—such as it has been applied to border visual and oral arts—we must revisit both its origins and later development in order to understand the concept’s current crisis and transfiguration. Hybridity is being substituted by another model, which we might describe as a type of border garbology: a discourse no longer focused on the exaltation or cataloguing of the mixtures or crosses of imaginaries, materialities, and identities, but on the management of the waste and ruins of others. This garbological turn, however, maintains key components of hybridity. It is therefore essential to analyze both hybridity and garbology in their succession and coextension within an epistemological context that allows us to understand that its (de)activation responds to the new trends in global heterology in relation to contact zones between cultures governed by asymmetric power relations.
