Introduction

This chapter maps out the intersections of performance art, decolonial theory, and border politics in the works of Guillermo Gómez-Peña, La Pocha Nostra , Coco Fusco, Violeta Luna, and Roberto Sifuentes. Positioning the U.S.- México border as both a geopolitical reality and a symbolic terrain, the chapter describes the project and the ways in which transcultural performance operates as a form of epistemic disobedience, an embodied resistance to coloniality, nationalism, and the biopolitical management of life. Drawing from theorists such as Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Roger Bartra, Homi Bhabha, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, and Gloria Anzaldúa, this work lays the groundwork for the conceptualization of performance as a decolonial praxis that transforms the body into a site of ritual, knowledge production, and insurgent imagination. Foregrounding Bartra's notion of the artificial savage, the introduction shows that Artificial Savages in a Transcultural Landscape reclaims the colonial figure of otherness as a performative strategy of critique and creative reconfiguration. Through analyses of key performances, including Border Brujo, The Couple in the Cage, A Field Guide for Female Interrogators, NK603: Action for Performer & e-Maíz, and The Cruci-Fiction Project, the text explores the ways in which border artists employ hybridity, psychomagical ritual, and transcultural aesthetics to expose the ongoing legacies of empire and envision plural, post-national futures. Ultimately, this introduction to Artificial Savages in a Transcultural Landscape situates performance art at the front lines of global struggle, revealing how bodies, languages, and rituals can become laboratories for decolonial transformation amid the necropolitics of the modern border regime.